Roleplaying at different scales
I am trying to find ways to keep players engaged at other scales. How do we maintain player agency when the game is about wars. gods or interstellar politics?
Tag: D&D
Rolling Dice and the Myth of the Perfect System
I’ve been thinking about dice rolls, how they work, what they represent, why we can’t agree on what makes a good dice mechanic. Let’s start simple, a Thief picking a lock, one of the oldest skill checks in gaming. If the Thief player rolls less than or equal to their Pick Locks percentage, they pass […]
Time for Annihilating 5e
Wherein I give my thoughts on Tomb of Annihilation (mostly positive) and 5th ed D&D (less so).
Fighting Fantasy and Character Advancement
There are a few issues I often find with rules-light RPGs. Some have easy fixes, others are simply compromises that you have to live with if you want to minimise your mechanics. The one I’m thinking about today is character progression. Watching your character develop as they achieve their goals and survive their failures can […]
Don’t Ditch Race As Class!
I’ve recently realised that I really like Basic D&D’s odd race-as-class system. You know the one, Elves, Dwarves and Halflings are treated the same as choosing to play a Fighter or a Thief, as if being another species was just another job. To put it another way, if you are happy to play a human […]
Ditch the wilderness maps!
I love maps, I really do. I wish I could cover my walls in all sorts of different maps. I could happily cover my sitting room walls in different maps of the world, my bedroom in all the fantasy maps full of endless forests, and my toilet with favourite dungeons. The thing is though, I […]
Three years of fun, sporadic, research.
It’s been about three years since I decided to start running RPGs again. As with many gamers, I stopped when I had kids, and then ten years later I realised how much I missed them. But a lot had changed while I had been away. All the proto-storygames had grown into Fate Core, a landslide […]
Brian’s OSR Overview: Games Defying Categories
I’ve tried to cover all the major facets of the OSR by discussing the Basic level games, the settings and the Swords & Wizardry games, but there are plenty of other OSR books which don’t fit into those categories. Today I’m going to look at some of the most interesting of these oddities. Wolf Packs […]
Brian’s OSR Overview: Settings
(Part 1, Part 2) I was going to write about the various Swords & Wizardry games today but then I had a better idea. Before I burn away all the goodwill my OSR introduction post earned me I want to tell you all about the best bit of the OSR. OSR products are mostly small […]
Brian’s OSR Overview: Basic Games
(Following on from Part 1 yesterday) There are a lot of OSR games, and until you’ve actually read a bunch of them they all look pretty much the same, so I’m going to run through a whole bunch of the more accessible or interesting options and I’ll try to explain why you might chose to […]
Ominosity 