I’d like to start this blog with a shout-out to an old buddy of mine named Chris Mount, for reasons that will become obvious as it proceeds. When I first discovered roleplaying, Chris was the guy who taught me how to play. Without his guidance, I would never have amassed sufficient expertise and experience to [...]
Prophecies and prophetic visions are a staple of just about every game genre (even in Western Campaigns, the Indian Medicine Men might have them).
GMs like using prophecies for a number of reasons:
They impart a sense of wonder to the campaign
They confer the impression of a wider universe around the PCs
They show the players that the [...]
In part one of this 5-part examination, we presented a guest article by Garry Stahl, “The Conundrum Of Alignment”. In Part two, “A Neccessary Evil?”, I discussed the justification for alignment being part of the rules, looked at the historical precedent for oversimplified moral arguements, and concluded that the real problem with alignment was misuse [...]
Garry’s Article, The Conundrum Of Alignment, which appears as part one of this series, raised some excellent points. I agree with many of them, and felt that further discussion – and an alternative point of view – was merited, since I had reached radically different conclusions from much the same foundations. In parts 2 & [...]
Johnn received this article submission for Roleplaying Tips, but it’s not a fit for the e-zine, which tries to be systemless as much as possible. He “didn’t read much of it because 30 years of alignment discussions puts this on my topics blacklist, even for personal reading (smiley).” So he asked me to take a [...]
For a long time, I’ve been dissatisfied with the way some games handle wild, improbable, luck.
D&D, for example, has no luck mechanism per se; only the critical hits subsystem comes close, where if you roll well enough, you score multiple damage, and in the skills subsection, whereby rolling a 20 on a skill check permits [...]
In a previous blog, I discussed converting prices from “…and a 10-Foot Pole” from I.C.E. and mentioned a number of campaign-related issues and background elements from “Fumanor: The Last Deity” that complicated the discussion, which I promised to tell everyone about at another time. Since it’s a good example of how to take a rules [...]
It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices [...]
Part 1 of this blog post listed nine general supplements. Parts 2, 3, and 4 added three planar supplements, four supplements about magic, and four supplements about game settings and gaming environments.
That makes a full twenty-count by my tally. This fifth part is all about honourable mentions: supplements that didn’t make the final list, but [...]
Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty.
After further discussion, this person [...]
