Campaign Mastery

I was thinking about the perception of time and how that doesn’t match up with the mechanism of time-keeping in the standard initiative systems in games. I mean, it’s certainly possible to design additional mechanics to take these variations into account, and reinvigorate a system that has become predictable. More interesting AND more realistic at […]

Concluding Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the December Blog Carnival hosted by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. In Part 1, I looked at why we roll dice for various things in RPGs and what these die rolls are attempting to simulate in game-world terms. In a nutshell, the dice represent all […]

The December Blog Carnival by Rising Phoenix Games is on the subject of “No Dice“. This is the beginning of Campaign Mastery’s contribution to the subject. There are times when it can be useful to the GM and his simulation of reality not to require a roll for something. This article is going to explore […]

Hopefully, my internet connection is now fixed. It’s been functioning perfectly since Friday when a technician attended the hardware connection – at least, I assume they did; I was notified that they were on their way, and then notified some time later that the call was completed, without ever seeing them or being informed about […]

My internet connection is still fraught. It will sometimes work for hours, and then not be available for days. Which makes this article fraught with potential problems. I’ll do my best – but it’s worth noting that less than an hour after last week’s post, the internet crashed and stayed down for about seven hours. […]

The Glass Spider – metagame It’s not often that you think of an encounter that would be equally at home in a D&D / Fantasy setting, a Swashbuckling Pirate game, a Sci-Fi environment, a Superhero game-space, or even – if you allow a little genetic engineering to escape the lab – a Cyberpunk game. So […]

You may not know it, but it’s possible to be too creative. Last week, as usual, I spent some time thinking about what I would be writing about in this post, and almost immediately, three different ideas came to mind in what felt like a single flash of inspiration. Well, by the time I had […]

While introducing the players to the characters for the chase mechanics playtest a couple of weeks ago, I found myself ruminating on (of all things) the Charisma stat and what it represented. You might think that this is a simple question – but it’s not, as readers will see by the end of this article. […]

Chase mechanics are some of the hardest things in an RPG to get right – so much so that a lot don’t even try (and sometimes go to considerable lengths to hide the fact). So I was very interested when Evil Genius Games offered me the chance to review the chase mechanics from their upcoming […]

When I studied Chemistry in Secondary School (which, when I started, was known more commonly as “High School”), we started with the Dalton Model of Atomic Structure, of atoms as fundamental units of matter that could not be subdivided, and then moved on to the Thompson “Plum Pudding” model. In essence, this describes a negatively-charged […]

WARNING — This turned into a very long post of more than 12,500 words – that’s three times my usual length. Get yourself a drink and a snack before you start! How Long Can You Hold Your Breath? It’s a simple enough question, isn’t it? And so easy to resolve – all it takes is […]

A relatively short and focused article today, designed to give me the maximum running room to get the final part of the ongoing Long Road series out the door. Adding Layers To Encounters Imagine that the PCs are in the middle of a fight, battling a non-sentient creature. It’s been a knock-down drag-out affair that […]