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General Articles About Rules
- See also the “Plunging Into Game Physics” series on the Metagame page.
- See also the “One Player Is Enough” series on the Game Mastering page.

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- A Campaign Mastery 750th-post Celebration includes advice from a host of GMs on just about every subject as the climax of the party (and some from stragglers in the comments). So I’m listing it at the start of each page, as well as a handful of places where specific content warrants inclusion.
- Google Groans: Misplacing the Rules – Google’s failure to serve as a game resource, the poor indexing of RPG rules & supplements, and using a desktop search as a solution.
- The Foundation Of Averages: Psychohistory and RPG Rules – I look at the process of extrapolating from rules systems to the larger worlds and nations that they describe using elementary statistical analysis.
- A Game For All People: The Perfect DnD Recipe – I respond to the announcement of D&DNext by extending a previous article (Top-Down Plug-in Game Design: The Perfect Recipe?) to outline how I would create a Universal D&D game system – in other words, what I would like to see in D&DNext when it came out.
- GM’s Toolbox: Running The Game Part Three: Rules and Combat – Part of the GM’s Toolbox series by Michael Beck with contributions by Da’Vane and the occasional comment drop-in from Johnn. The series is aimed at both beginners and more experienced GMs and strives to articulate all the things that you will need tools and techniques for in order to successfully run a campaign. This article details a subject that many GMs and players seem to obsess about – the rules.
- Exceeding the Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats – D&D 3.0 introduced the concept of Feats. I look behind the curtain at the gears and cogs of the Feat concept and rules subsystem and how they affect the game. There are some additional perspectives in the comments.
- Who Got Poker In My RPG? – Poker is a card game that had a real boom a couple of years ago. Johnn offers some ideas on how to include the game within your campaigns.
- Round Pegs In A Square Wheel: Reinventing Roulette for RPGs – Human nature doesn’t change. I examine human vices and foibles and how to use them to reinforce the genre of a game, then consider how to reinvent gambling, taking roulette as an example, for different genres.
- A Rational Intuition – The differences between instinct and intelligence, and how different game systems handle the former.
- On The Edge: Implications of the D&DNext Advantage mechanic – I respond to an article by The Online DM by considering the consequences of the results that he generated. There’s lots of tables and mathematical analysis, and more than 15 implications identified. If you don’t want to know how to conduct such an analysis, you can skip down to the interpretation, but be warned: I have no idea of how relevant these results are to the still-in-development/playtest system. One of the few posts at Campaign Mastery that is topical more than evergreen in nature.
- The compounded interruption of basic services – Worsening computer problems inspired me to write this article about the impacts of failure in essential services. In addition to the impact on Campaign Mastery and my other activities, the article looks at 3 RPG-relevant applications – rules breakdowns, technological breakdowns and societal breakdrowns as plot ideas.
- Ask The GMs: The Passage Of Substantial Time – How can you have substantial time take place in between adventures, with characters aging and eventually being replaced due to old age / death? I begin by analyzing the theoretical underpinnings and implications of this type of campaign, then move into practical considerations of the difficulties that will be faced in creating and running a “Discontinuous Campaign”. Topics touched on include delivery of campaign backstory, technological advances, The evolution of Language, Development of Infrastructure, Social Advances, Attempted Player Rorting, Metagame issues, the Impact of the Campaign Concept on characters, and The need for rules to cover Aging, R&D and Manufacturing, and Investments. There are a lot of similarity between running a Discontinuous Campaign and running a Time Travel campaign – though this is certainly one of the more prosaic and yet unusual forms of ‘Time Travel’.
- Writing to the limits of longevity – As GMs, we have to do a lot of writing. Every minute spent writing more than is needed is time wasted forever. Therefore, it makes sense to adjust the way you write to match the longevity that you need that writing to posess. I divide time into three general categories – short-term, medium-term, and long-term/forever (including rules) – analyze the differences and potential problems (with as many real examples as I could sneak in), and then offer practical advice on how best to write for that degree of longevity. Even experienced writers usually find something of value in this article, because there are some mistakes that we all make, learn from, forget, and then make again.
- The Blind Enforcer: The Reflex Application Of Rules – The speed of events in the computer world mandate that rules be codified and violations detected, and acted upon, automatically. Yet, human behavior does not readily boil down to neat straight lines, and that opens the door to rules being enforced when they shouldn’t, or not being applied when they should. Human Error is an inherent part of the system. I use these thoughts to re-examine the question of how much dominion the GM should have over the rules and update a previous article, Blat! Zot! Pow! The Rules Of Genre In RPGs, which examined these issues from a genre-and-campaign perspective.
- Prodigious Performances Provided In Due Course – There are thousands of feats in print and on the net. Some of these will stack improperly, others will have broken mechanics, still others will simply not fit the campaign. This article describes the approval process that I developed and insisted on implementing within my Fumanor campaign to weed out the intolerable and flag the unsatisfactory for revision if and when there was time. Actually, in most cases, the changes that needed to be made (if any) were so obvious that I could make them at the same time as rejecting the original and accepting the modified version.
- The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs – I presage this article with a drop-in editorial concerning what has become known as the Lindt Cafe Seige. I suspect that the huge number of likes this article got on social media at the time had more to do with that editorial than with the content. That content: Practical advice on how to roleplay characters of different Intelligence levels, both PCs and NPCs. The categories discussed are Low Intelligence, Very Low Intelligence, and Very High Intelligence. It is assumed that characters with “Normal” Intelligence require no modification in playing style to represent that intelligence. Readers who find this interesting and/or useful should also check out the two-part article on Charisma linked to in the opening paragraphs, which also (in part 2) demonstrates how to build general perceptions of a race or class into a social structure through house rules.
- Pieces of Ordinary Randomness: Random Techniques Of Chance – I should probably have called this “useful things to know about dice”. The first part could also be called “probability and die rolling for dummies” but it contains a number of tricks that have proven useful over and over again, some of which – like “The Middle Third” and “Average Blows To Death” – that you won’t find anywhere else. I also show how to roll practical things like AM/PM, Hour of the day, Time Of Day by season, Season, Month Of The Year, Month of the year with a seasonal bias, Month of the Season, Minutes of the hour, seconds of the minute, Latitude and Longitude, Day Of The Week, Day Of The Month (I offer multiple techniques), Temperature, Weather, and still more. That’s followed by techniques for rolling impractical numbers of dice like 394d10, and then some techniques for quickly totalling die rolls. I round out the article by reviewing all the exotic dice sizes that were then available, and what they might be good for. There have been a lot more added to that list in the subsequent years!
- The Gradated Diminishing Of Reality – Travel in FRPG – The players want to get to the interesting stuff, the GM wants them to feel what the world around the PCs is like, to immerse them in its colors and textures, and to make them feel like their characters are part of that world and not simply passing through. Over time, a series of level-based compromises has evolved (this article is specifically about D&D / Pathfinder and similar level-based games) in which both sides get some of what they want – and in which the GM gets compensated for giving in to the players, whether they realize that or not.
- Stealth Narrative – Imputed info in your game – This builds on the techniques described in the Secrets Of Stylish Narrative series to further compress, compact, and polish narrative by sneaking it into other parts of the game. There are considerable side-benefits that result. One small section discusses perception / spot checks and when it’s least-disruptive to the game to request them.
- Ask The GMs: The Great Handouts Question – is “How much should there be?” if you’re wondering. This article defines a range of standards for handouts that are to be distributed pre-campaign, ranging from “The Tolerable Minimum” to “An Extreme Excess”. In the subsequent section, I describe a magic item and accompanying plotline, the “Tome Of Past Destinies,” that seemed to work very well. After some more general notes, I then describe (far more succinctly) the practices for pre-game, in-game, and post-game that I employ and best practice for delivering such background information.
- The villainous pair named Maxima and Minima are devotees of a radically-extreme televangelist, and are described in Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima. Their powers are designed to be complimentary and Force Multipliers (a Combat / Military concept) for each other, a potent demonstration of what can be done in the Hero System with only a little deep thought about the design – so much so that many GMs wouldn’t hesitate to house-rule them out of existence. I briefly mention the Roman Catholic Church of this game world and it’s leader, Gregorovich II. St Barbara and Blackwing are explicitly involved in the backstory of the first (and so far only) encounter with the duo. There are suggestions for adapting the concepts and design techniques to D&D / Pathfinder and other genres such as Cyberpunk through magic items and rewards.
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Learning Game Rules
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- Taming The Time Bandits: Some time-saving combat techniques – In Johnn’s review of the Chronology iPad app, he identified three major problems that he felt were responsible for the slow pace of combat resolution in his Riddleport campaign, but offered no solutions. In this response I offer the techniques that I use to solve the problems of 1) Not knowing the spells and supernatural abilities of the monsters in the encounter; 2) Being unfamiliar with the specialized combat subrules that applied to this particular battle; and 3) Being unable to identify which Mini went with which PC, which Mini went with which monster, and who was attacking who. There are some more great solutions in the comments, especially to the last of those three questions, and some great discussion of the first problem and my solutions.
- Part 1 of the Basics For Beginners series, Beginnings, details what you really need before you start, with exercises to help you develop it if you don’t have it. Re-reading it, I was struck by how down-to-earth the advice was on Roleplaying NPCs (it’s harder than roleplaying a PC), Rules Knowledge, Materials requirements, How often you play, how long a game session will be, game complexity & continuity, explaining the fantastic in-game, setting aside time for research and self-improvement, resources and how to accumulate them, and giving yourself permission to fail. One example needs to be excerpted and echoed: Don’t try to make your dream campaign your first campaign.
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The “Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs” series
This five-part series looks at why it can be so hard for GMs to invest themselves in learning game rules, and my solutions to the problem. There was supposed to be a part 6 to this series but I was so drained by the debate in the comments section that I never got around to writing it. I think I still have the notes, though, so maybe one day…
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- Part One, the Series Introduction, analyzes the problem of GMs learning game systems in detail.
- Part Two, Getting Enthusiastic About Rules, points out a common mistake in the approach that most GMs take, to wit, reading the rule books cover-to-cover (or trying to).
- In Part Three, Student, Tutor Thyself, I explain a system that I use to teach myself the basic rules of a new game in about 18 one-hour sessions.
- Part Four, The Quality Of Rules, considers the question of “realism” within an RPG and derives a principle for reverse-engineering the existing rules of a game to discover the underlying principles and design philosophies, enabling flaws in the rules to be exposed and providing a consistent standard by which to assess house rules.
- And Part Five offers a new concept, Rules Touchstones, as key entranceways through which to learn a rules system, and discusses the first of these, the Combat System.
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Actual House Rules
I thought about subdividing these by rules subject, but remembered some of my own advice in time. Changing a game rule is like a child with a jar of jam – the stickyness seems to spread in every direction. Change a rule about magic and you might end up needing to rewire the initiative system, or the damage-handling system, or the skills system…
- See also the “Portals To Celestial Morphology” series in the Magic section of the Campaign Creation page.
- The “Plunging Into Game Physics” series contains a number of actual house rules from my campaigns as examples, and why they were implemented. Refer to the Metagame page.
- See also the “Focussing On Alignment” series on the Characters page.

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- Shadow Levels: A way to roleplay the acquisition of Prestige Classes in D&D 3.x – The title is self-explanatory. This should have been my first published credit, but it was mistakenly accredited to my then partner at Campaign Mastery, Johnn. But I’m still proud that it was considered worth publishing by an outside party, and I still employ this system in my games.
- Go Hard Or Go Home: Graceful Character Aging – How I now simulate Aging in my campaigns, some of the approaches I’ve used to handle character aging in the past, and why those weren’t successful.
- Broadening Magical Horizons: Some Feats from Fumanor and Shards Of Divinity – 27 Original feats from my D&D campaigns are offered in four categories: Reducing Metamagics, Enchantment Metamagics, General Metamagics, and General Magic-related Feats. These of course are just the tip of the iceberg, one day I’ll pull out another bunch of them.
- “Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?”: A New idea for handling “wild luck” in D&D – I come up with a new idea for using luck in an RPG, especially in D&D.
- A Slippery Slope: Level Adjustments Under The Microscope – One of the most contentious articles I’ve ever written looks at Level Adjustments in D&D 3.x. I offer my way of doing them, which is definitely NOT canonical – because the canon is firing confetti, in my opinion. You may not agree with my interpretations and the way I house rule the treatment of level adjustments. Or they might be exactly what you need to make sense of a confusing part of the rules. I’m fine with both.
- Let’s Have A Good Clean Fight… – A discussion of the expanded EL-CR chart that I created and how I use it to ensure that opponent power levels match those of the PCs in my D&D encounters.
- Ask The GMs: How to set up a fun fishing mini game – Johnn considers some environmental and procedural aspects of fishing in response to the specific question posed, dealing with the roleplaying aspects of the question. I put on my rules-creation hat and consider the bigger question of how to represent contests and competitions within an RPG on the way to developing a complete mini-game. The rules of that game are available as a PDF at the end of the article. And there are some fun left-of-field ideas in the comment at the end.
- “How Hard Can It Be?” – Skill Checks under the microscope – I examine the fundamental concepts that underpin skill checks and “difficulty targets” using D&D 3.x as an example and find multiple answers depending on your assumptions – and expose flaws in the 3.x mechanic along the way. Despite my making a mistake in the article (check the comments) I stand by the conclusions. This is something that is important for every GM to understand regardless of which game system they are using.
- Life, Death, and Life Renewed – March 2011 Blog Carnival – My first contribution to the March 2011 Blog Carnival considers proposals to restore some legacy rules, and the question of whether or not Elves can be Resurrected, and extrapolates to consider the impact of changing rules systems mid-campaign, and then (unexpectedly) to considering the Resurrect spell as a plot point within a campaign and a campaign background.
- On The Nature Of Flaws – I review Player Option: Flaws from 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming, and find it inspirational but incomplete, then set about addressing the holes that I found. The subject: how do you integrate the concept of racial or character flaws into game systems that don’t have them?
- Experience for the ordinary person – I cast an analytic eye over the question of how ordinary people (NPCs) gain experience and expertise in the course of a game. While primarily intended for D&D / Pathfinder, the results should be more broadly applicable, though YMMV when it comes to any specific game system. Don’t miss the extended (and extensive) discussion in the comments.
- The Nth Level Of Abstraction – GMs abstract things to varying degrees all the time. This article attempts to put some systematic analysis into the how, when, and why of abstraction, and the consequences. In the comments, I discuss ways of expressing the different levels of abstraction within maps. This is one of those ‘deep’ articles that needs to be read two or three times to get the full benefit.
- Draco Inadequatus: Beefing Up 3.x Dragons – I discuss the inadequacies of Dragons in 3.x when Epic Levels are involved and offer a custom redevelopment of the Monsters to beef them up. A lively discussion in the comments leads to an unrelated article about House Rules.
- May the camels of 1,000 fleas – wait, that’s not right: Improving Curses in 3.x – I reinvent the rules for Curses in 3.x/Pathfinder to add to its roleplaying potential, then offer 60 Curses to fire the imagination.
- Superhero combat on steroids – pt 1 of 2: Taking the initiative with the Hero System – I look at some variant rules to speed up Combat in the Hero System by incorporating something similar to the 3.x Initiative mechanic and discover numerous secondary benefits to doing so.
- Superhero combat on steroids – pt 2 of 2: Moving with a purpose – In part 2 of my article on speeding up combat in the Hero System, I consider some of the knock-on effects on other rules to the changes mooted in part 1.
- By The Seat Of Your Pants: Using Ad-hoc statistics – There are always situations that the official rules don’t cover. This article offers a guideline that can help solve them – while adding color to the game world.
- I Got A Plot Device and I know how to use it: Bluffing in the Hero System – Bluffing is one of those things that the Hero System does exceedingly poorly. I set out to rectify that with some specific rules for the game system.
- The Envelope Is Ticking: Insanity In RPGs – Three rules to enable a PC to realistically ‘suffer’ from a form of insanity in an RPG, and six examples of applying those simple techniques. Also available in french at L’Enveloppe fait tic-tac : la folie dans le JdR. One of the most popular articles at Campaign Mastery, at least one twitter account promotes it regularly even though it was first published almost 5 years ago.
- Brick By Brick: Base Rules Made Easy – I had spent years trying to formulate a simple and flexible set of base construction rules, seeing idea after idea crumble into inefficient ruin. Then this idea seemed to come out of nowhere; I now recognize that it was inspired by the way I design and write blog articles. Designed for the Hero System, but with a section on converting it to other systems, and flexible enough to be a success in any of them. I’m particularly proud of these rules.
- House Rules – For Pulp (and other RPGs) – This article lists (and offers as a freebie download) the house rules that my co-GM and I have developed for our Pulp campaign, the first in a series of four on the subject. I then discuss the meanings and implications of some of the rules, and the broader principle from which they were derived (which apply to every campaign.
- A strong wind blows: Environmental effects for RPGs – This is the second of four articles containing the House Rules in use within the Pulp campaign that I co-GM. This is all about cold weather and wind-chill and their very dangerous effects, bringing together research from a number of sources. The rules are available as a free download from the site. These rules can be adapted to any campaign. I recommend anyone reading this article to also read the unexpected follow-up, Stormy Weather – making unpleasant conditions player-palatable about how to use weather in-game as something other than a boring-but-deadly background element.
- ‘I Can Do That’ – Everyman Skills For Pulp – After (briefly) explaining the skills system within Hero Games’ Champions Fifth Edition, I look at the everyman skills that we give the PCs (and NPCs) in our Pulp Campaign, provide some additional rules relating to their use, then expand on the concept of Everyman Skills to adapt the principle to other game systems, like D&D/Pathfinder.
- On the binding of Wounds – Everyday Healing For Pulp – After describing the normal Hero System damage rules, I run through all the reasons why they don’t work as well for Pulp and similar “Normal” genres, then propose variations that might solve those problems but that don’t completely satisfy. That’s all set-up for presenting the Medical Intervention rules, which do solve the problem, and some explanation. The rest of the article looks at applying those rules to other game systems, in particular D&D / Pathfinder.
- The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You – Dec 2014 Blog Carnival – I take a look at the effects of being surprises in the real world and discover that most game mechanics get it wrong to a greater or lesser extent – then put together some alternatives for consideration. There’s some discussion of the issue and the proposals in the comments, but most of them are pingbacks or announcements of other posts in the Blog Carnival (this post was the anchor for the month).
- Incredible Truth and Improbable Stories: Oratory in an RPG – Australia’s Prime Minister at the time this article was written had a massive credibility problem. He could say the sea was wet and not be believed by anyone but the most extreme right wing of Australian Politics. After describing how things reached this point (and providing some appropriate context), contemplation of the situation leads me into a review of how oratory works in most RPGs, and why it’s not quite good enough. I then identify five factors that dictate how well a speech is going to be recieved, and offer three different methods of increasing complexity for integrating the results into a game’s mechanics.
- Pt 1: The Sales Pitch of the “Some Arcane Assembly Required” series is all about my convincing myself that spell components were worth the trouble. Most GMs immediate response to the article briefing would be, “Why Bother”? In answer to that question, I provide five answers to the question, but don’t find any of them initially convincing, especially in light of the “Eschew Material Component” Metamagic Feat. An in-depth analysis of the mundane, non-magical item, “The Spell Component Pouch” unlocks the puzzle and leaves no doubt – every D&D / Pathfinder campaign either needs a house rule eliminating spell components as a factor of concern, or it needs a House Rule eliminating or revising this item. With it in its current form, it is impossible for Spell Components to be taken seriously. Since this analysis also finds conceptual issues with the item big enough to drive a Mystic Mountain through, I’m forced to advise the latter. So that’s what the article does. I look at mutliple ways of revising the concept, find multiple consequences of value to a campaign that result, some of which mandate the rating system for rarity, and that leaves me (and most readers who followed along) convinced of the answer to that initial question. Next, I revise and review the rarity scales and propose rules to implement them into a campaign and make them relevant (which also unleashes all those side-benefits discussed earlier). Finally, I offer three solutions to the bookkeeping tedium that makes most GMs ask “Who Cares” in the first place – then postcript that with some extra tantalizing applications.
- Pt 2: Sourcing Parts of the “Some Arcane Assembly Required” Series takes my revised version of the draft scale from part 1 and looks at populating it. Along the way, it asks the extremely profound question, “How Industrialized Is Adventuring In Your Game World?”; so innocuous but it has the potential to tear a poorly-visualized campaign world apart. After an overview of some of the consequences, I provide a concrete example from the Fumanor campaign, providing some background information that I don’t think has appeared anywhere else. I then throw in some possible social consequences to making spell components important in the manner under discussion before returning to the question of populating the different categories, providing five ways in which any given item might be relevant to a spell. I then bring up another of those thorny implications raised by the principles under discussion – “Can You Make Your Own Ad-Hoc Divine Focus?” – in a sidebar, but make no serious attempt to resolve it. I look at frauds and huxters and how they would react to spell components being important (i.e. more plot ideas to derive from the concept), consider components that have to undergo some sort of process before they can be employed, consider innately magical components and magic institutions as components (more plot ideas), the impact of cosmology on the question of rarity, and other exotic qualities that rare spell components might possess. There are massive worldbuilding, social, economic, and cultural implications that derive from some of these ideas.
- Disease and Despair – the healing-resistant nightmare – I start this fantasy-oriented nightmare scenario by looking at the historical impact of disease, and then the ramifications of the existence of the low-level D&D Spell, “Cure Disease”. Those show that from this factor alone, the historical accuracy of fantasy games would be severely impacted, infusing social changes from the reformation and population dynamics closer to those of the 19th or early 20th centuries. With that, and a quick review of the Black Death and its impact, I briefly discuss an article I wrote for Roleplaying Tips, Putting The Fear Back Into Disease (still available, I just checked), all as foundation for what follows: What would happen if a Cure Disease-resistant disease arose? To call the results dystopian is like calling The Great Wall Of China a “backyard fence”. Ironically, I also explain that if the GM has adopted the “Putting The Fear Back” approach, the impact would be minimal! I then look at how to integrate this social disintegration – and the responsibility for fixing things – can integrate with an existing campaign, before showing that having the disease also be Heal-resistant is actually less disruptive than the alternative!
- A Helping Handout – Hungry from Ravenous Roleplaying complained that his players were glancing at his handouts and then setting them aside, and that consequently, his effort invested in creating them was being wasted. He then linked to an article at Gnome Stew by Phil Veccione which promised to alleviate the problem. Having seen the “three second glance” myself, I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Phil’s article, and while it was good, I thought it didn’t go far enough. Phil identified 4 ways handouts could be used to increase their utility; I added 9 to that list in this article, and a tenth if you include maps, including how-to information.
- Part 9 of the Basics For Beginners series discusses Rewards With Intent. This is one of the longer and more complex articles in the series. In fact, I would find it difficult to defend against an allegation of forgetting who it was supposed to be aimed at. Fortunately, if that was the case (I don’t recall), I discovered the problem before it was too late to do something about it. I start by making the bold statement that thinking of rewards as having no meaning beyond powering up PCs and being either dreaded or reveled in when they threaten the campaign has probably destroyed just as many campaigns as giving away too much in rewards. After justifying that assertion, I move on to listing four purposes for rewards; later in the article, I will argue that the fourth is by far the most important. I then break rewards into 15 categories, and how to value each of them; along the way, I offer the occasional bit of specific advice. The categories of Secrets, Reputations, and Enemies get special attention. There are lots of adventure plot hooks offered. After the fifteen, I describe an unresolved debate over the entitlement of PCs to rewards. I then discuss an expanded version of the rewards system described in Objective-Oriented Experience Points, which was itself an expansion of principles spelt out in another article. After describing the basic premises of the system, I offer two variations on the approach, and then propose an entirely new system that is simpler and hence better-suited to use by Beginners. I then walk back through the two basic mistakes that GMs make, time and again – too much and too little reward – and describe a third situation, the Dirty Snowball, just as deadly to campaigns, before offering a method of breaking that cycle by changing what magic items can do, within limits. I also point out that the presence of identify as written in the standard rules will completely destroy this solution, and recommend that readers adopt one of the solutions to the problems posed by this spell in Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot as a House Rule if they are going to employ this approach. I then sum up the article into eight bullet points that I want to be the takeaways from the article.
- Tales From The Front Line: Critical Absences – an unresolved question – Should characters whose player is absent be subjected to the risks-and-rewards of criticals, regardless of what the game rules say? This article explores the question and finds it extraordinarily difficult to resolve, with valid arguments on both sides. What’s at stake here can be permanent losses of friendships, so the question deserves to be taken seriously.
- What Empowers A Curse and other dangerous questions – For the September 2015 Blog Carnival, I ask “What empowers a Curse” in D&D / Pathfinder and find that the answer has some profound implications, potentially touching on everything from Cosmology to why Gods need congregations. Although I talk down the value of a curse sub-system within the game mechanics, I’ve actually found it necessary to craft one for an as-yet-unpublished (Jan 2019) series of articles.
- Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs – I start by looking at the logic (some might say, ‘Illogic’) of bus timetables and why any given bus is almost always early or late. I then use the phenomenon of passangers getting on or off the bus to create a means of getting rid of monty haulism once and for all, and the distribution of game rewards like wealth and treasure, and (finally) consider a hypothetical way of letting PCs benefit from good character design without coming to totally dominate combat. That last is more of a thought experiment, not yet ready to be seriously advocated.
- Oddities Of Values: Recalculating the price of valuables – This article starts off talking about currency conversions and getting a ‘feel’ for the price of things in a pulp campaign using modern currency values. It then defines a pair of new “units of currency”, NTDs and Ms – “NTD”s is “Nineteen Thirties US Dollars” and “M”s are “Modern US $”. These are necessary because many of the values that we have recorded are from different time periods – our main sourcebook only goes up to 2005, for example, and there’s been significant changes since then. We then turn to the pressing question that sparked the discussion – How big is a LOT of money, say, M100 million? In Pulp Campaign currency? In large bills? (The answer is, 122 lb and the size of a large suitcase). I then look at the same value in Gold, which works out to 16.6 TONS of gold; and diamonds (7.7 lb of 1-carat diamonds, or a stack 3 inches by three inches and 2 1/4 feet tall. Unfortunately, by now, most readers seemed to have decided that there was no value in the article for them because they hand-waved encumbrance in their campaigns. This is shortsighted – even ignoring the encumbrance issue, don’t you want to know how many rubies can fit in that pot? But it was at this point that the article took a turn to the left, relative to where I had expected it to go, by looking at the rarity of larger gemstones, game treasure tables (especially those in D&D / Pathfinder), and how to value them. I also look at Collectable Coins, other Collectables, Art, and Land, then devise a fast and simple universal system for deriving valuations for these things for any game system, regardless of genre or commodity. Along the way, I look at three die rolling methods for generating rare high values and routine middle-to-low values. There’s also a discussion of how to use the system as a tool for delivering campaign background information in an interesting way. So those who tuned out early missed out on a LOT of meat.
- Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again starts by studying the theoretical foundations of Skills Systems, identifying two different types (bottom up, with lots of specific skills and narrow definitions, and top-down which has few skills and applies them liberally), and determining that a lot of GM problems and GM-player conflicts stem from using the wrong approach with a specific system type. I then find that the D&D / Pathfinder skills system (as of version 3.x) can best be described as “confused” in this respect, and offer three solutions: A bottom-up solution, A top-down solution, and a flexible compromise. I also describe (too briefly, to be honest) the skills system in use in my Superhero campaign.
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The “This Means WAR!” series
This series provides a complete game subsystem for refereeing a War in an RPG – up close to the PCs. This wa intended to be a four-part series but it was split into six for practical reasons.
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- Parts One and Two deal with the fundamental concepts and prep work needed to make War a practical option within an RPG.
- Parts Three and Four describe how to use those fundamental concepts in play.
- Part 5 describes how to integrate PC-scale one-on-one combat with a war; and
- Part 6 concludes the series with miscellaneous notes on how to implement unusual abilities and exotic armaments within the system. Principally intended for D&D 3.x/Pathfinder, but adaptable to any game system. Part of the Blog Carnival for March 2009.
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The “All Wounds Are Not Alike” series
The “All Wounds Are Not Alike” series asks ‘What are “Hit Points” ‘? I have encountered many different definitions, and each – carried to its logical conclusion – is best exemplified by a different set of house/variant rules for Damage and Healing. Each part of this series examines one answer in detail, from game theory through to implementation and consequences for game play. I didn’t actually gather them as a series at the time because I wanted them to stand alone – you wouldn’t need one article to understand/use the next in the series. That lasted until the third part, which simply grew and grew.
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- All Wounds Are Not Alike – Part 1: Alternative Damage rules for 3.x – defines Hit Points as “a numeric index of the gap between healthy and helpless”. The results are great for bringing a High-Fantasy game back to earth, grounding it in realism. Don’t skip the comments for some perspective on the possible pitfalls.
- All Wounds Are Not Alike Part 2: Bone-breaking damage for 3.x – The second definition that I consider for the concept of “Hit Points” is “An index of soft-tissue damage” which requires a rules extension to deal with broken bones. The results are interesting, to say the least, and offer lots of potential for new magic items, for differentiating between Paladin laying-on of hands and clerical magic, and for reinventing selected monsters with a slightly tweaked flavor. This option strikes a balance between high- and low-fantasy.
- All wounds are not alike, part 3a: The Healing Imperative (Now Updated!) – An unmistakably high-fantasy approach, and the first variant offered that I actually use in one of my campaigns. Instead of making the differential between different wound types a function of the character’s total hit point capacity, it distinguishes types of injury by the amount of damage inflicted in a single blow, with thresholds based on the efficacy of Healing Spells. More variants and some really interesting discussion in the comments, which were unusually voluminous for this post – but read them in conjunction with the second half of the article, which was simply too big to finish in time.
- All wounds are not alike, part 3b: The Healing Imperative (cont) – I finish the unfinished variation – with five sub-variants for users to contemplate. There’s some clarification in the comments.
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Other Alternative Healing & Combat Rules
A friend of mine held “Holy Drip-Bottles” and “Hit Point Banks” in utter contempt with a passion – but blamed the rules, not the players who took advantage of them. This topic was something that I frequently debated with him (whether I wanted to or not). Healing & Damage rules wrestle with fundamental concepts built into the game rules and have a huge impact on the look-and-feel of a game system.
- See also the “This Means WAR!” series, above.

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- Evil GM Tricks For Over-Resting PCs – Do your players stop to rest as soon as they run low on power for the game-day – even if that’s just five minutes after their adventuring day starts? Johnn excerpts some material from his Faster Combat course to offer some solutions to the problem. I offer a refinement in the comments.
- Too Much Life for The Living: March 2011 Blog Carnival – My second contribution to the March 2011 Blog Carnival asks is Healing is too easy in D&D, which leads to proposing an alternative combat system for 3.x / Pathfinder Based on concepts within the TORG game system. It was quite well received. There are additional suggestions and clarifications in the comments. If you want to make your combats more life-and-death dramatic, this might be worth your time. See also the “All Wounds Are Not Alike” series above.
- On the binding of Wounds – Everyday Healing For Pulp – After describing the normal Hero System damage rules, I run through all the reasons why they don’t work as well for Pulp and similar “Normal” genres, then propose variations that might solve those problems but that don’t completely satisfy. That’s all set-up for presenting the Medical Intervention rules, which do solve the problem, and some explanation. The rest of the article looks at applying those rules to other game systems, in particular D&D / Pathfinder.
- Tales from the front line: The Initiative Conflict – In my 3.x campaigns, a dispute arose over the meaning of Initiative scores. I was mapping initiative values over the round, and one of my players wanted initiative outcomes to be instantaneous. I still disagree with his interpretation – it means there’s virtually no difference between an “Instant” and a “1 round” casting time, for example – but once I figured out why he was so adamant, I was able to compromise my view of ‘reality’ to produce more player fun, and hence more fun for both of us. And his interpretation was, admittedly, a lot less work.
- A Stack Of Surprises: Blog Carnival November 2015 – After introducing the month’s Blog Carnival (it was once again Campaign Mastery’s turn to host), listing all the things that could be written about under the heading of “Suprise” and “The Unexpected”, I turn to analyzing the sticky question of “Should Surprise Stack?” – or it’s more intrinsically comprehensible alterntative form, “Do multiple surprises compound?” in both D&D / Pathfinder and the Hero System. This article does NOT follow the usual Campaign Mastery pattern, with practical application first, then generalizing and theory afterwards. As usual, when pushed too hard, I find that all three game systems’ rules have a hole that may need to be patched with a House Rule. There’s a lot of logical analysis of combat mechanics and principles, and both alternative answers are given a thorough going over before avoiding a definitive general conclusion. Instead, this is shown as one issue that each GM and each campaign could and perhaps should handle differently. The impact of genre on that choice is also discussed.
- Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs – I start by looking at the logic (some might say, ‘Illogic’) of bus timetables and why any given bus is almost always early or late. I then use the phenomenon of passangers getting on or off the bus to create a means of getting rid of monty haulism once and for all, and the distribution of game rewards like wealth and treasure, and (finally) consider a hypothetical way of letting PCs benefit from good character design without coming to totally dominate combat. That last is more of a thought experiment, not yet ready to be seriously advocated.
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The “Cinematic Combat” series
The term “Cinematic Combat” has many different meanings, all closely related, but misuse has lent it a negative association in the minds of some GMs – a reputation that isn’t deserved. This series isn’t so much about “why” cinematic combat might be a better choice, though that gets touched on along the way; it’s a series on how, for just about any game system.
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- Part 1 – Attack Mechanics looks at when cinematic combat might be beneficial, identifies 9 general components common to just about every combat system (though some might not exist in specific systems, eg D&D has no hit location system in the core rules), then boils them down into three: attack & hit resolution, damage, and arbitration. That leaves about 2/3 of the article to shrink the first of these into something that needs 1/10th the time and attention as full game mechanics would by reducing everything to a single d20 roll.
- Part 2 – Damage Mechanics deals with the second of the three ‘blended elements’ of combat. It’s far more challenging to abstract the damage part of the combat mechanic – there are generally a lot more options for any abstract system to take into account – but it’s no less rewarding. The system that I explain in this article sounds complicated because it has to factor in all those different possible mechanics, but the net effect is to take mechanics that take X time and shrink them to 10-20% of that time requirement by replacing everything with a d10 or d12 roll (if the game mechanics have critical hits). The slower and more complicated the original mechanics, the greater the savings. Near the end of the article, I point out that it’s possible to go even further and eliminate the damage roll entirely – but I then explain why that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
- Part 3 – The Absence Of Mechanics then looks at the potential for doing away with combat mechanics altogether. I start, once again, by looking at the “why” and “why not” of the proposal, then the how – and then, an even simpler how, which is the one that I normally use. The article wraps up by acknowleding a site milestone, 1,000,000 page views.
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Solving Rule Problems
- Rules problems are usually solved with a House Rule – the “Plunging Into Game Physics” series on the Metagame page describes how to use a Game Physics as a guideline to their construction and consequences in Pt 2: Strange Mechanics.

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- Ask The GMs: Going Beyond The Rules – How do you extrapolate from existing rules to cover new situations?
- Ask The GMs: When players make themselves immune, remember that “Resistance Is Futile” – How do you handle PCs that seem to be immune to magic?
- A potpourri of quick solutions: Eight Lifeboats for GM Emergencies – There are times when everything seems to go wrong for the GM, and he needs help. When you’re in an emergency and the ship is sinking, you need a lifeboat. Here are eight to choose from.
- Boxed In: A problem-solving frame of reference for players & GMs alike – Using a box as a metaphor for problems you may encounter at the game table can reveal surprising solutions. This article shows you how to apply the concept as a problem-solving tool. I provide an original political D&D/Pathfinder adventure (and a variation) as ane example. And discuss some possible relationships between the concepts of Life and Death.
- By The Seat Of Your Pants: Using Ad-hoc statistics – There are always situations that the official rules don’t cover. This article offers a guideline that can help solve them – while adding color to the game world.
- The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You – Dec 2014 Blog Carnival – I take a look at the effects of being surprises in the real world and discover that most game mechanics get it wrong to a greater or lesser extent – then put together some alternatives for consideration. There’s some discussion of the issue and the proposals in the comments, but most of them are pingbacks or announcements of other posts in the Blog Carnival (this post was the anchor for the month).
- Phase 4: Development from the “New Beginnings” series – Detailed examination of the process of Campaign Development is made, touching on Campaign Plotting, Research techniques, Societies and Cultures, Races, Rules Conflicts, House Rules Theory, Rule Importation, Plot Organization, Campaign Structure, and Plot Sequence. This constructs the major “bones” of the campaign skeleton.
- Lessons from the Literary Process – takes quotes from a half-hour TV show about writing and the Literary Process and examines the RPG applicability and relevance, and how the RPG writing process differs from the literary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it all comes down to confidence, so I then examine that in some detail, listing for substantial reasons for even a beginning GM to feel confident, and a way out if none of the four helps in your current situation. Note: the source TV show had 13 parts (but the channel went belly-up half-way through showing it), the article is a standalone item, not the start of a series.
- Blog Carnival: The Unexpected Reality – A submission to the RPG Blog Carnival (that CM was hosting at the time) opened a pandora’s box of a concept: deliberately leaving things out of player briefing materials so that they can be revealed as surprises in the course of play,” in other words, using Plot as a Rules Delivery System. This article uses my Shards Of Divinity campaign extensively, and especially the Illusion rules, as an example and as a tool to test the arguements along the way. I identify three specific dangers inherent to the proposal, but when examining solutions to those problems, find that there are indeed circumstances (including a variant on the sci-fi campaign rules/campaign that inspired the article in the first place) in which this can be an asset to, and positive virtue of, a campaign – if they are used properly. Mid-way through outlining the article, I realized that this sort of thing happens on a smaller scale all the time – every time you encounter a situation in which the established rules are inadequate and have to concoct a house rule to resolve the situation.
- Feel The Burn is the final part of the “Portals To Celestial Morphology” series. In my introduction to this part, I start with Mutually-Assured Destruction by Portal and go to a means of sucking dry any magic items that the PCs shouldn’t have at this level before once again recapitulating the basic parameters. The theme of this final quintet is “Energy Flow In Transit” – as though you were entering a portal at one altitude and exiting at another, gaining potential energy in the process, or vice-versa: #16, Gaining Energy In Transit, has two subtypes, “Balanced” and “Unbalanced” (and be warned, some of these hit game physics with a two-by-four, and in the course of discussing the various “energy forms” that could be gained, I offer up some house rules for making Negative Energy Levels Scary,, which they aren’t in standard D&D / Pathfinder); #17 flips the coin to consider Losing Energy In Transit; #18 considers Portals as Planar Batteries (a possibility that I’ve actually used in one of my campaigns, and attached to a couple of really interesting external links – both still valid, I just checked 5/1/19); and finally, #19 and #20, which look at the momentum of events as a kind of energy (a concept players in my Zenith-3 campaign will be familiar with) that can be gained, lost, or inverted during transit.
- Ask The GMs: The GMs Help Network – Where does a GM go for help and advice? I discuss the history of GM connectedness from GM Bull sessions through to social media before creating a list of places where a GM could go for advice in a reasonable time-frame (read: a couple of days or less). Most of the advice contained in this post is still 100% accurate – the one thing that stood out is that these days FBook won’t even show you all the posts that you’re specifically tagged in, just the ones that IT thinks you are mostly likely to interact with. That’s a good thing – just because I liked a movie or a book or a TV series or whatever doesn’t mean that I want my FB timeline to be filled with posts about it, and you are still more likely to get a quick response through Twitter. I’m listing this in all the categories for which help has been asked and seen to have been recieved in recent years through my Twitter account, and redundancy be damned.
- Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again starts by studying the theoretical foundations of Skills Systems, identifying two different types (bottom up, with lots of specific skills and narrow definitions, and top-down which has few skills and applies them liberally), and determining that a lot of GM problems and GM-player conflicts stem from using the wrong approach with a specific system type. I then find that the D&D / Pathfinder skills system (as of version 3.x) can best be described as “confused” in this respect, and offer three solutions: A bottom-up solution, A top-down solution, and a flexible compromise. I also describe (too briefly, to be honest) the skills system in use in my Superhero campaign.
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Efficiency Of Mechanics
- One reason why Cinematic Combat works (as described in the series above of the same name) is that it is VASTLY more efficient than standard combat mechanics.

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- Taming The Time Bandits: Some time-saving combat techniques – In Johnn’s review of the Chronology iPad app, he identified three major problems that he felt were responsible for the slow pace of combat resolution in his Riddleport campaign, but offered no solutions. In this response I offer the techniques that I use to solve the problems of 1) Not knowing the spells and supernatural abilities of the monsters in the encounter; 2) Being unfamiliar with the specialized combat subrules that applied to this particular battle; and 3) Being unable to identify which Mini went with which PC, which Mini went with which monster, and who was attacking who. There are some more great solutions in the comments, especially to the last of those three questions, and some great discussion of the first problem and my solutions.
- The Application Of Time and Motion to RPG Game Mechanics – Although the article is specifically aimed at testing House Rules, and I deliberately advise against doing so, the principles contained within this article can be used to test the efficiency of published game systems and subsystems with a view to identifying a problem area.
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Importing Rules from other games
- The topic of importing rules from other game systems and integrating them with a core system is explicitly discussed in the “Plunging Into Game Physics” series on the Metagame page, and in particular, Pt 2: Strange Mechanics.

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- The Personal Computer analogy and some Truths about House Rules – I realized that constructing a campaign was analogous to constructing a Personal Computer, that the analogy revealed some valuable insights into the relaionships between different bodies of rules, and that there were some especially notable points to be made in this context about House Rules and importing rules from other game systems.
- ‘I Can Do That’ – Everyman Skills For Pulp – After (briefly) explaining the skills system within Hero Games’ Champions Fifth Edition, I look at the everyman skills that we give the PCs (and NPCs) in our Pulp Campaign, provide some additional rules relating to their use, then expand on the concept of Everyman Skills to adapt the principle to other game systems, like D&D/Pathfinder.
- Phase 4: Development from the “New Beginnings” series – Detailed examination of the process of Campaign Development is made, touching on Campaign Plotting, Research techniques, Societies and Cultures, Races, Rules Conflicts, House Rules Theory, Rule Importation, Plot Organization, Campaign Structure, and Plot Sequence. This constructs the major “bones” of the campaign skeleton.
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Fixing Broken Rules
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- The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You – Dec 2014 Blog Carnival – I take a look at the effects of being surprises in the real world and discover that most game mechanics get it wrong to a greater or lesser extent – then put together some alternatives for consideration. There’s some discussion of the issue and the proposals in the comments, but most of them are pingbacks or announcements of other posts in the Blog Carnival (this post was the anchor for the month).
- Phase 2: Baggage Dump from the “New Beginnings” series – This is not so much about clearing your head more than temporarily, it deals with what you want to keep from previous campaigns and what to throw away. Significant areas of attention are GMing (stress & exhaustion & recovery), Races, PCs, NPCs, and Players.
- Phase 3: Rejuvenation from the “New Beginnings” series – In addition to a proven method of recharging all your batteries before you drain your reserves to the point of mental damage and risk of breakdown (see Phase 2 for the theory), other subjects that get considered include Campaign Tone and Adventure structure.
- Phase 4: Development from the “New Beginnings” series – Detailed examination of the process of Campaign Development is made, touching on Campaign Plotting, Research techniques, Societies and Cultures, Races, Rules Conflicts, House Rules Theory, Rule Importation, Plot Organization, Campaign Structure, and Plot Sequence. This constructs the major “bones” of the campaign skeleton.
- Pt 1: The Sales Pitch of the “Some Arcane Assembly Required” series is all about my convincing myself that spell components were worth the trouble. Most GMs immediate response to the article briefing would be, “Why Bother”? In answer to that question, I provide five answers to the question, but don’t find any of them initially convincing, especially in light of the “Eschew Material Component” Metamagic Feat. An in-depth analysis of the mundane, non-magical item, “The Spell Component Pouch” unlocks the puzzle and leaves no doubt – every D&D / Pathfinder campaign either needs a house rule eliminating spell components as a factor of concern, or it needs a House Rule eliminating or revising this item. With it in its current form, it is impossible for Spell Components to be taken seriously. Since this analysis also finds conceptual issues with the item big enough to drive a Mystic Mountain through, I’m forced to advise the latter. So that’s what the article does. I look at mutliple ways of revising the concept, find multiple consequences of value to a campaign that result, some of which mandate the rating system for rarity, and that leaves me (and most readers who followed along) convinced of the answer to that initial question. Next, I revise and review the rarity scales and propose rules to implement them into a campaign and make them relevant (which also unleashes all those side-benefits discussed earlier). Finally, I offer three solutions to the bookkeeping tedium that makes most GMs ask “Who Cares” in the first place – then postcript that with some extra tantalizing applications.
- Rules problems are usually solved with a House Rule – the “Plunging Into Game Physics” series on the Metagame page describes how to use a Game Physics as a guideline to their construction and consequences in Pt 2: Strange Mechanics.
- Part 6 of the Basics For Beginners series, Challenges is really about how hard to make challenges to overcome, and building safety nets into your plots in case you get this decision wrong. It starts by describing a challenge I was facing in real life, which seems both ironic and appropriate in retrospect. I then discuss the question, and point out the number of results produced by Google searches at the time for the term “Encounter Balance” (123 million results), “Encounter Level” (another 123 million results) and “Challenge Rating” (145 million results). This shows, I argue, that a lot of people find the subject difficult, and that there’s no shortage of people who consider it important, or even critical. I then look at the reasons why it’s so hard to do, why it’s so important, whether or not it’s actually essential, and whether or not it’s realistic to aim to ptovide balanced challenges every time. The next two sections detail the very abstract process that I employ in written adventures to get a quick and satisfactory answer, and then describe an alternative based on narrative that I employ when improvizing. I discuss plotting within character limitations (the first of two tools that I employ), how it permits the narrative solution to present multiple possible pathways to an overall success or failure, and how to use a skill-check to thus direct the narrative rather than determine the outcome. There’s a very large paragraph containing an example – make sure to read this because subsequent sections keep referring back to it. The second tool is a beginner’s checklist that I use osmotically to set the difficulty numbers of any challenge (regardless of game system). I discuss each item of the checklist seperately, some deeply, others very briefly, look at when such assessments should occur, and illustrate the whole process with a metaphor. I wrap up the article by examining a list of 5 DO’s and 5 DON’Ts (considering a couple of side-issues and the resulting advice along the way), discuss the problems of linking challenges with xp, and recommending that the two experience a permanent divorce. I wrap up with some final advice and a progress report on that real-life challenge.
- Part 9 of the Basics For Beginners series discusses Rewards With Intent. This is one of the longer and more complex articles in the series. In fact, I would find it difficult to defend against an allegation of forgetting who it was supposed to be aimed at. Fortunately, if that was the case (I don’t recall), I discovered the problem before it was too late to do something about it. I start by making the bold statement that thinking of rewards as having no meaning beyond powering up PCs and being either dreaded or reveled in when they threaten the campaign has probably destroyed just as many campaigns as giving away too much in rewards. After justifying that assertion, I move on to listing four purposes for rewards; later in the article, I will argue that the fourth is by far the most important. I then break rewards into 15 categories, and how to value each of them; along the way, I offer the occasional bit of specific advice. The categories of Secrets, Reputations, and Enemies get special attention. There are lots of adventure plot hooks offered. After the fifteen, I describe an unresolved debate over the entitlement of PCs to rewards. I then discuss an expanded version of the rewards system described in Objective-Oriented Experience Points, which was itself an expansion of principles spelt out in another article. After describing the basic premises of the system, I offer two variations on the approach, and then propose an entirely new system that is simpler and hence better-suited to use by Beginners. I then walk back through the two basic mistakes that GMs make, time and again – too much and too little reward – and describe a third situation, the Dirty Snowball, just as deadly to campaigns, before offering a method of breaking that cycle by changing what magic items can do, within limits. I also point out that the presence of identify as written in the standard rules will completely destroy this solution, and recommend that readers adopt one of the solutions to the problems posed by this spell in Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot as a House Rule if they are going to employ this approach. I then sum up the article into eight bullet points that I want to be the takeaways from the article.
- Blog Carnival: The Unexpected Reality – A submission to the RPG Blog Carnival (that CM was hosting at the time) opened a pandora’s box of a concept: deliberately leaving things out of player briefing materials so that they can be revealed as surprises in the course of play,” in other words, using Plot as a Rules Delivery System. This article uses my Shards Of Divinity campaign extensively, and especially the Illusion rules, as an example and as a tool to test the arguements along the way. I identify three specific dangers inherent to the proposal, but when examining solutions to those problems, find that there are indeed circumstances (including a variant on the sci-fi campaign rules/campaign that inspired the article in the first place) in which this can be an asset to, and positive virtue of, a campaign – if they are used properly. Mid-way through outlining the article, I realized that this sort of thing happens on a smaller scale all the time – every time you encounter a situation in which the established rules are inadequate and have to concoct a house rule to resolve the situation.
- Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs – I start by looking at the logic (some might say, ‘Illogic’) of bus timetables and why any given bus is almost always early or late. I then use the phenomenon of passangers getting on or off the bus to create a means of getting rid of monty haulism once and for all, and the distribution of game rewards like wealth and treasure, and (finally) consider a hypothetical way of letting PCs benefit from good character design without coming to totally dominate combat. That last is more of a thought experiment, not yet ready to be seriously advocated.
- Ask The GMs: The GMs Help Network – Where does a GM go for help and advice? I discuss the history of GM connectedness from GM Bull sessions through to social media before creating a list of places where a GM could go for advice in a reasonable time-frame (read: a couple of days or less). Most of the advice contained in this post is still 100% accurate – the one thing that stood out is that these days FBook won’t even show you all the posts that you’re specifically tagged in, just the ones that IT thinks you are mostly likely to interact with. That’s a good thing – just because I liked a movie or a book or a TV series or whatever doesn’t mean that I want my FB timeline to be filled with posts about it, and you are still more likely to get a quick response through Twitter. I’m listing this in all the categories for which help has been asked and seen to have been recieved in recent years through my Twitter account, and redundancy be damned.
- Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again starts by studying the theoretical foundations of Skills Systems, identifying two different types (bottom up, with lots of specific skills and narrow definitions, and top-down which has few skills and applies them liberally), and determining that a lot of GM problems and GM-player conflicts stem from using the wrong approach with a specific system type. I then find that the D&D / Pathfinder skills system (as of version 3.x) can best be described as “confused” in this respect, and offer three solutions: A bottom-up solution, A top-down solution, and a flexible compromise. I also describe (too briefly, to be honest) the skills system in use in my Superhero campaign.
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Rules Theory & Analysis
- See Also the “Touchstones Of Unification” series on the Genre Overviews page.

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- On The Edge: Implications of the D&DNext Advantage mechanic – I respond to an article by The Online DM by considering the consequences of the results that he generated. There’s lots of tables and mathematical analysis, and more than 15 implications identified. If you don’t want to know how to conduct such an analysis, you can skip down to the interpretation, but be warned: I am uncertain how relevant these results are to the still-in-development/playtest system. One of the few posts at Campaign Mastery that is topical more than evergreen in nature. That said, the system is still current and still has something called “Advantage” in its mechanics.
- ‘I Can Do That’ – Everyman Skills For Pulp – After (briefly) explaining the skills system within Hero Games’ Champions Fifth Edition, I look at the everyman skills that we give the PCs (and NPCs) in our Pulp Campaign, provide some additional rules relating to their use, then expand on the concept of Everyman Skills to adapt the principle to other game systems, like D&D/Pathfinder.
- On the binding of Wounds – Everyday Healing For Pulp – After describing the normal Hero System damage rules, I run through all the reasons why they don’t work as well for Pulp and similar “Normal” genres, then propose variations that might solve those problems but that don’t completely satisfy. That’s all set-up for presenting the Medical Intervention rules, which do solve the problem, and some explanation. The rest of the article looks at applying those rules to other game systems, in particular D&D / Pathfinder.
- The Unexpected Creeps Up Behind You – Dec 2014 Blog Carnival – I take a look at the effects of being surprises in the real world and discover that most game mechanics get it wrong to a greater or lesser extent – then put together some alternatives for consideration. There’s some discussion of the issue and the proposals in the comments, but most of them are pingbacks or announcements of other posts in the Blog Carnival (this post was the anchor for the month).
- The Thinking Man’s Guide to Intelligence for Players and GMs – I presage this article with a drop-in editorial concerning what has become known as the Lindt Cafe Seige. I suspect that the huge number of likes this article got on social media at the time had more to do with that editorial than with the content. That content: Practical advice on how to roleplay characters of different Intelligence levels, both PCs and NPCs. The categories discussed are Low Intelligence, Very Low Intelligence, and Very High Intelligence. It is assumed that characters with “Normal” Intelligence require no modification in playing style to represent that intelligence. Readers who find this interesting and/or useful should also check out the two-part article on Charisma linked to in the opening paragraphs, which also (in part 2) demonstrates how to build general perceptions of a race or class into a social structure through house rules.
- Part 9 of the Basics For Beginners series discusses Rewards With Intent. This is one of the longer and more complex articles in the series. In fact, I would find it difficult to defend against an allegation of forgetting who it was supposed to be aimed at. Fortunately, if that was the case (I don’t recall), I discovered the problem before it was too late to do something about it. I start by making the bold statement that thinking of rewards as having no meaning beyond powering up PCs and being either dreaded or reveled in when they threaten the campaign has probably destroyed just as many campaigns as giving away too much in rewards. After justifying that assertion, I move on to listing four purposes for rewards; later in the article, I will argue that the fourth is by far the most important. I then break rewards into 15 categories, and how to value each of them; along the way, I offer the occasional bit of specific advice. The categories of Secrets, Reputations, and Enemies get special attention. There are lots of adventure plot hooks offered. After the fifteen, I describe an unresolved debate over the entitlement of PCs to rewards. I then discuss an expanded version of the rewards system described in Objective-Oriented Experience Points, which was itself an expansion of principles spelt out in another article. After describing the basic premises of the system, I offer two variations on the approach, and then propose an entirely new system that is simpler and hence better-suited to use by Beginners. I then walk back through the two basic mistakes that GMs make, time and again – too much and too little reward – and describe a third situation, the Dirty Snowball, just as deadly to campaigns, before offering a method of breaking that cycle by changing what magic items can do, within limits. I also point out that the presence of identify as written in the standard rules will completely destroy this solution, and recommend that readers adopt one of the solutions to the problems posed by this spell in Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot as a House Rule if they are going to employ this approach. I then sum up the article into eight bullet points that I want to be the takeaways from the article.
- Tales from the front line: The Initiative Conflict – In my 3.x campaigns, a dispute arose over the meaning of Initiative scores. I was mapping initiative values over the round, and one of my players wanted initiative outcomes to be instantaneous. I still disagree with his interpretation – it means there’s virtually no difference between an “Instant” and a “1 round” casting time, for example – but once I figured out why he was so adamant, I was able to compromise my view of ‘reality’ to produce more player fun, and hence more fun for both of us. And his interpretation was, admittedly, a lot less work.
- Sequential Bus Theory and why it matters to GMs – I start by looking at the logic (some might say, ‘Illogic’) of bus timetables and why any given bus is almost always early or late. I then use the phenomenon of passangers getting on or off the bus to create a means of getting rid of monty haulism once and for all, and the distribution of game rewards like wealth and treasure, and (finally) consider a hypothetical way of letting PCs benefit from good character design without coming to totally dominate combat. That last is more of a thought experiment, not yet ready to be seriously advocated.
- Transferable Skills From Bottom to Top and back again starts by studying the theoretical foundations of Skills Systems, identifying two different types (bottom up, with lots of specific skills and narrow definitions, and top-down which has few skills and applies them liberally), and determining that a lot of GM problems and GM-player conflicts stem from using the wrong approach with a specific system type. I then find that the D&D / Pathfinder skills system (as of version 3.x) can best be described as “confused” in this respect, and offer three solutions: A bottom-up solution, A top-down solution, and a flexible compromise. I also describe (too briefly, to be honest) the skills system in use in my Superhero campaign.
- The villainous pair named Maxima and Minima are devotees of a radically-extreme televangelist, and are described in Pieces Of Creation: Maxima and Minima. Their powers are designed to be complimentary and Force Multipliers (a Combat / Military concept) for each other, a potent demonstration of what can be done in the Hero System with only a little deep thought about the design – so much so that many GMs wouldn’t hesitate to house-rule them out of existence. I briefly mention the Roman Catholic Church of this game world and it’s leader, Gregorovich II. St Barbara and Blackwing are explicitly involved in the backstory of the first (and so far only) encounter with the duo. There are suggestions for adapting the concepts and design techniques to D&D / Pathfinder and other genres such as Cyberpunk through magic items and rewards.
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