The Gaming Den

If Trump only gets 35% of the votes, then he doesn't have a majority. If you don't have a majority of the votes, having the most votes doesn't mean you represent "the will of the people". Letting candidates transfer their delegates to someone else is a good thing, for exactly the same rea...

Unlike the players, people in the world have no idea what happens when they pump mana into a sword while boiling it in basilisk tears. The players don't actually know what happens either, but they are given a cost/output equation to work with. People in the world don't have that, and are actually d...

I've heard random musings that Trump may still run third party if he doesn't get the nomination. I have no idea what the likelihood of this is. Trump will probably only run third party if he finishes 1 or 2 for the nomination and then fails to succeed at the convention. That's possible in any scena...

Mass Combat involves more than one kind of combat that. You have at least two scales to work with: Squad Level and Army Level. Squad level combat is the kind of thing most table-top wargames model. Each side is a small number of squads fighting each other with probably no more than around 100 combat...

One of the problems with randomly generated treasure is that is generates items that should not exist . Particularly, when dealing with combinations of weapon and armor types and abilities, rolling randomly leads to the production of large numbers of items that are so inefficient and inferior compar...

But they are only like old games in terms of aesthetics, not in terms of gameplay. While the games that are making good decisions, like Shadow Warrior and Wolfenstein are basically nothing like the originals. But retro-clones mostly can't copy the aesthetics, because tRPGs have no graphics. The 'ae...

It's a pretty tall order to have tactical, strategic, and political maneuvers in the same game. Yeah, people want to play Mulan and Dynasty Warriors, but at the same time? You're basically making three games and constructing a way to port characters between them. You want to avoid the WoD problem w...

The relative quality and superiority of Eastern versus Western historical forces is largely irrelevant from a game design standpoint, most settings won't be built around representing both capabilities. The important questions in designing an East Asian setting revolve around the capabilities of the ...

I enjoyed most of the first season. It looked like they were going to seriously get into what it'd be like to have to suddenly rely on eating people and all the things that entailed. Then they just didn't. Copy paste that sentiment for each and every potentially interesting direction they could've ...

Which might as well have been five hundred cheerleaders. I mean, read through RotK and tell me when they ever amounted to something useful. The entirety of Chinese history - including eventual fate of Ming - suggests that, once again, numbers by themselves do not mean combat value. Having 500 cheer...

RoTK is set in 200-ish AD, even a highly trained army would be relatively poorly equipped and trained given the limitations of the regime and the technology level. The War of the Roses occurred in the second half of the 15th century, the comparable Chinese force would be the military of the Ming Dyn...

Any world in which doing 'the evulz' transforms directly into 'the powerz' is going to be grimdark as all get out. It is also likely to embark on a downward spiral almost immediately after the key discovery of this process as a series of evil overlords compete with each other to see who can strip-mi...

Proximity to the apocalypse is also useful in that it builds in an excuse for why all sorts of different convoluted plans by immortal factions are coming to a head right now as opposed to being scattered across the next couple of centuries. That is very useful in producing adventure hooks and in pre...

It matters whether the supernatural forces are the Secret Masters of the World, or vulnerable and imperiled. Generally, I think vulnerable and imperiled makes the masquerade much more credible as a concept, especially if the game is set in anything resembling the present day and the supernaturals h...

I challenge this assumption. It exists only because writers are human and have other things to do than to fill every century of their setting's history with events, so if they are stupid they will have millenia of nothing happening, and if they are not stupid, they will have millenia of "shit ...

Seems like people expect 'more' out of an Eastern setting than a 'generic tolkien western fantasy', with societies (and social mechanics) that make sense given the availability of magic/technology and so on while with a western 'generic' setting forgotten realms nobody really thinks about how 'rais...

As far as hunters go, if the hunters have to rely on questionable abilities that don't pass the smell test of modern society easily, then they may be no more credible than the monsters themselves. This works is the monsters are suitably unobtrusive like ghosts or vampires and the powers necessary to...

No, it isn't challenging, it's pretty trivial actually. And that is because historical reality can go take a hike, we're dealing with heroic fantasy here. Samurai and Knights are simply two different full-BaB classes with different fighting styles and different superpowers at high level. Right, bec...

So what I'm looking for is a fully integrated part of the setting. It's great if we have samurai, bushido, and wire-fu, but those elements should be reflected in other parts of the setting, too. In short, the Asia analogue shouldn't be a whole stack of 'alternate rules' - those alternate rules, if ...

Most of the Western public seems to want an East Asian setup that invokes China and Japan, and maybe Korea and the Mongols as well. Exposure to Anime and Wuxia is high, while interest in, say, Southeast Asian fantasy environments is very much lower. People also seem to want East Asian settings to me...

Presumably VtM is the key property. It's core setup: there's a vampire society in the modern day that hides itself from humans, is basically how vampire fiction is done at present. There are tons of vampire novels and TV shows that can easily be glommed onto the Masquerade framework. I wouldn't be s...

I suspect market saturation is a huge part of the problem, and the digital media contributes to this extensively. All new TTRPGs are competing against all old tabletop RPGs. Your average nerd can find a torrent containing every 3.x book or every oWoD book in about ten seconds, and even highly obscur...