Search results

I don't mean it in the sense of training them to like puzzles. I mean it in the sense of training a neural net response: you give them stimulus and help them understand the response. Specifically, you show them that their actions matter and you create situations where they have to make some...

I am sure I am an outlier and your point is valid- in WOW very few players do the analysis for hit caps, etc, they just look up what someone else did. (I did that myself but that's partly because I see little value in analyzing wow to that level, especially when every little patch modifies the...

Well said; I'd give XP but I'm tapped :erm:. My own game style really changed many years ago when I asked a player what he thought about the game and he said something like "You know, it's kind of boring some times." That's when I moved from a sandbox-ish, "I'll build the world, the players...

If you are talking about a particular instance regarding players who are otherwise engaged it could be the players were tired, just not interested in a puzzle like that, or other similar issues. Assuming it's a more long-standing problem my approach is to "train" the group of players. Coach...

I think the class balancing is a huge change (and a positive one). It's the biggest change I can recall. Making everything go the same direction, calling demons demons, that is more superficial for.

I've played a ton of wow and I've done the research for those aspects of the characters, figured out proper gemming, enchanting, yada, yada. It's a lot to pick through but I never felt it stressed my brain much. There are entire websites devoted to tweaking out that last 0.1 dps on your...

At least it sounds more interesting than the potato :) I'd rather fight random monsters than mess with kitsune's atm machine or our potato...

Traveller: a game system of three decades of promise and zero of delivery :erm: Sorry, couldn't resist. I always loved the system, bought most of the material through 1985 or so. But in the end, I had more fun designing ships and creating characters than actually playing the game. I...

The 'special' at our house, aka tradition, is to watch all three discs of LOTR, the extended version :D Turkey and orc guts, serve it up!

OD&D was all about tables. Nothing was linear which, to be honest, is probably more 'realistic'. My own homebrew system models most things as an 'S' curve: little early progress, lots of mid-progress, tapering off at high ability. The old D&D charts captured that nicely but also meant you were a...

I forgot about those. I hated them...

Probably would go to a home brew system I worked up that tries to model aptitudes and training more real world but is over all, a 'light' rule system.

How's this one look to you? I included the sub-distributions so you can see how I put it together. This is only so scrubbed but I like modeling the different pop groups separately; makes it easier to work in the macro world effects. In this case, it allows for the dominant populations to...

The upper levels should have tapered off more. I was lazy in how I modeled this and left it too flat. I just made a chart for each population group of percent at each level and for the higher levels, I made the numbers small but probably not small enough. Gets hard to keep it all adding up to...

My current campaign is in a Dark Age kind of setting of small petty kingdoms in a partially wasted land. In a typical kingdom there might be 16000 of which 90% live on farms, 10% live in villages and the King’s town. Of the latter, 20% are nobles and warriors (2% of the total population). There...

THAC0 was a pain to explain to new players but it never seemed that much bother once you knew the game. It was nice to dispense with for sure but it seemed all the "random" tables (irregular tables, that is) were more of a real nuisance. Almost impossible to remember so you had to look them up-...

Since you are looking to get the players interested in the town, as a ref I would create hooks along the following lines, hoping the players might bite on one or more of them: A few possible love interests from a cute barmaid to middle and higher ranked folks in town. A 'forbidden' love with...

Honestly, I like 4E's move to more balanced classes. Basically a system that by construction makes sure any given class has about as much complexity and interesting-things-to-do-per-round as any other. I can certainly see why some might dislike that feature or various other 4E elements and I...

I agree; I don’t think you could have dragons on earth without waiving a lot of known physics. You could do that as part of your necessary suspension of disbelief but it’s a stretch. I don't thnk they really know how much quetzalcoatlus weighed but it was around 200 pounds. Maybe vaguely...

Same for me and I'm pretty sure, same for all my players. I'm positive about one of them: he built a cool scale model of part of a castle that we often use when we need a castle (walls, couple wall towers, gatehouse and small keep).