As characters progress and level up, a core process in the D&D play experience, the predefined nature of the mechanical upgrades can often be at odds with the player’s image of the adventurer they thought was their creation.
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?
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 […]
Wherein I give my thoughts on Tomb of Annihilation (mostly positive) and 5th ed D&D (less so).
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]
Ominosity 