The Gaming Den

Also, they're doubling down on Cypher's blunder and now your blood pool is also your Willpower AND your hit points. lol what the fuck, why. You'd have to re-concept so much stuff to even try to make that work. Just make up your own new vampire IP at that point. Are they still also trying to make ev...

I remember being really disappointed with advantage from barbarian rage back when 5e was in development. Advantage was pitched to us as a way to limit this shit where it's hard to keep track of all the little situational +1s and +2s. That seemed reasonable. Problem is, shitty TTRPG developers love d...

Stop it the snake doesn't like that

Oh, and also I'm mad about the poison rules. Black widow bites don't generally kill healthy adults. We're taught that they're super deadly because they are very dangerous to children and we learn about them as children . There's a certain kind of person who gets excited talking about the properties ...

I was thinking about source material from the 80s that could justify a whole party. I've got Predator, a couple of Vietnam war movies, The A-Team, and the G.I. Joe cartoons. Predator doesn't really count because it's a slasher movie with Arnold as the Final Girl. Carl Weathers and Jesse Ventura aren...

Definitely interested in seeing where this goes! Back when I was arguing about D&D on the internet, the idea of "The Action Movie Game" always seemed to come up. Because 80s action hero / buddy cop / superspy games seem like a natural thing for RPGs to try to do, but all the popular sy...

I'm surprised they didn't do the thing where every PC has a list of traits - "Hot Temper", "Stubborn", "Religious", "Bath Salts Addiction", that kinda shit - and you get an ace whenever one of your traits comes up. Would also help with the lack of character di...

The ace mechanic isn't great. Everyone wants to be farming aces by making as many checks as possible, which burdens the DM with gatekeeping when the players are allowed to touch the dice. I don't know how this system handles perception-type "Do I see anything" / "Is he lying" che...

As far as I can tell what went wrong was... 1. Square's non-Final-Fantasy team is assigned to work on a sequel to Chrono Trigger. 2. One or a couple of the creative leads go to the suits and fight to be able to develop a new IP instead. They get the greenlight. That's Xenogears. Xenogears is really ...

100%. I love when they're fleeing the Town Guard, and a rando dwarf falls out of an alley and starts running with them for no conceivable reason. He's just the guy who missed the first session.

This game's chargen looks positively frosted with White Wolf DNA, so let's see how it did at fixing some of White Wolf's infamous problems: So Coyote and Crow has 9 stats and they range from 1-5. They have 3 physical abilities, 3 mental abilities, and 3 spiritual abilities. I've got a theory that ev...

Call me if they commit to rewriting the Monster Manual. Preferably with monsters built on the same class+level math as PCs and abilities to actually fulfill their roles in the setting, but *any* kind of consistent design goals or editorial oversight would be an improvement. If all they're doing is R...

I'm on the spectrum myself, if it makes a difference. *shrug*

Rereading old Planescape books and snarky reviews thereof makes me realize how much my teenage self loved anything that had Tony DiTerlizzi's art. I was a huge Planescape fanboy and tried to run it way more than my friends wanted me to. I got way madder than I should have at 3e going way out of its ...

AD&D PHB pg 25, bottom left. It was absolutely a thing, all the old SSI Gold Box video games included it. Hey, so it was! Thanks. So, ok, there was a rule, but the AD&D version was watered down enough that it would almost never come up as a way to lawnmower through mooks. Even if you're lev...

https://dmdavid.com/tag/the-obvious-innovation-in-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-that-no-designer-saw-before/ Ugh. Is there anyone who blogs about a technical topic and has anything interesting or insightful to say? I can't even say "well, TTRPGs have a culty anti-intellectual culture and ther...

According to Google Translate, killCAM in English is killCAM.

Atavism: I like Atavism as a name, especially with the explanation that people in the setting associate it with reverting to a "primitive" state. I actually think you're good on unintentionally stealthing in racist tropes here, because: #1: It's goofy old-timey racism that modern people w...

I think the elephant rifle thing is fine. I mean, Chicago PD has fucking tanks and Chicago is still the default setting for V:tM. I don't know what your mechanics look like, but especially if you want badass mortals to be relevant you could focus on superhuman avoidance rather than superhuman durabi...

Did Golarion make a god responsible for that shit? I preferred the default excuse where it was up to the individual person on an instinctive level, sort of like "deciding" whether to become an undead. Still not Wall of the Faithless bad. I think I just don't like gods in fantasy as anythin...

Oh sure, when I said "blame Tolkien" I was being a bit tongue in cheek. It's not personally his fault that people forget he was a professor of languages (twice) or that that might be an important factor in creating languages. If there were to content themselves with aiming lower (much low...

Lot of really good points here, thanks for this.

I wasn't imagining every race having a special speech pattern or anything. My point was why not just have them all speak the same language since that seems to be what everyone wants to do in practice. I mean, if you wanted to do like a sibilant hissing voice for lizard men or a growly voice for mino...

Errrrrrm...yes, but handle with care. If you are using accents from the real world for monsters, you can't avoid equating the people using those accents with monsters. People make this mistake all the time. I think I'm talking about just dwarves here. (And not gully dwarves, because fuck Dragonlanc...

Dear Abby, I don't like the way languages work in any RPG that isn't set on Earth. Let's look at D&D because that's what everyone copies. Most of the languages are racial things like "Goblin" or "Dwarven" where all goblins speak the same language even if their cultures haven'...