Posts Tagged ‘PCs’

The Acceptable Favoritism: 34 ‘Rules’ to make your players’ PCs their favorites

With contributions from Ian Mackinder, Ian Gray, Steven Beekon, Saxon Brenton, & Blair Ramage This article has been sitting around in my to-do stack for a little over three years. I simply never got around to finishing it – until now. I do find myself wondering if the additional experience has given the contributors any [...]

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On The Edge: Implications of the D&DNext Advantage mechanic

Only a short article this week (at least in terms of word count) because there is easily five times as much work beneath the surface! A few weeks ago, I read a really interesting analysis of the mathematics of the D&DNext advantage mechanic by the Online DM. And yet, there was a disconnect between that [...]

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Forging Unexpected Connections: Putting PC Dossiers To Work

Real Life has caught up with me this week, so this won’t be as extensive an article as I was originally intending. But I’m going to do my best to turn that into an asset. This post was also intended to be Campaign Mastery’s entry into this month’s Blog Carnival, which was going to be [...]

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We All Have Our Roles To Play: Personality Archetypes, Part 4

This entry is part 4 in the series We All Have Our Roles

Reintroduction If there is one thing I hate, it’s interrupting a task, especially a creative one, before it’s finished. That includes interrupting a series. At the same time, doing the same thing for week after week can be enough to drive me around the bend, and after a while, I need to take a break [...]

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Directed Plots, Undirected Narrative, and Stuff That Just Happens

There’s been a lot of commentary over the years about different styles of campaign. Most distinguish between Episodic and Serialized campaigns, and many writers seem to assume that those are the only types of campaign there are. This is a position with which I don’t agree; there are more layers and levels within this classification [...]

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It’s Reality, Jim, but not As We Know It: St Barbara

Two of the most important skills that I added to the Hero System when I was writing my House Rules for my Champions campaign were Paranormal Physics and Paranormal Biology. The first explains how powers work using game physics – and therefore can also be used to determine potentials that the character had not thought [...]

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On The Nature Of Flaws

Disclaimer: This article was prompted and inspired by my receipt of a free copy of Player’s Option: Flaws from 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming, but it is largely based on my experience with the Hero System. 4 Winds did not solicit this review and did not recieve notice of the content. /Disclaimer So that we’re all [...]

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Life & Death in RPG Blog Carnival Wrap-Up

March 2011′s RPG Blog Carnival covered Life and Death in RPG. Full XP to everyone who participated with insightful and inspirational articles, and thanks for your contributions. Readers, you are in for a treat as you have many articles to choose from this month. I encourage you to read through them and make life and [...]

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Life, Death, and Life Renewed – March 2011 Blog Carnival

I’ve put the “Reinventing Pulp” series on hold for a week in order to do a short article for this month’s Blog Carnival, which is all about life and death in RPGs. The series will return next week. One of the problems with a campaign that spans multiple game systems is that there are parts [...]

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We All Have Our Roles To Play: Personality Archetypes, Part 3

This entry is part 3 in the series We All Have Our Roles

The Premise Archetypes for RPGs are usually defined either by the psychology of the character or the abilities of the character, but other classifications systems are possible. These can yield a different perspective, which can be invaluable. This series’ approach is based not so much on what the characters could do as a team, but [...]

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