Posts Tagged ‘Philosophy’

The House Always Wins: Examining the Concept of House Rules

Sometimes we old hands, tired of a subject that’s been talked to death, or thinking that everything there is to be said on the subject has been said, forget that a lot of players and GMs have come into the hobby more recently than we have, and hence weren’t privy to those discussions. This produces, […]

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A Game For All People: The Perfect DnD Recipe

This article is being written in advance of reading any material concerning the actual content of DnDNext from WOTC. Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, the odds are that you’ve heard the announcement of D&D… well, no-one’s quite sure what it’s going to be called yet. The most common handle seems to be […]

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The Foundation Of Averages: Psychohistory and RPG Rules

Confession Time: This is not the article I intended to post today. I simply ran out of time – after my sense of the day-of-the-week was thrown off by the Holiday Season, leading me to start late. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible! Over the last few weeks, I’ve re-read the Foundation […]

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October Blog Carnival Wrap-up: A cavalcade of posts about goodies

Well, it’s that time of the month when, following a Blog Carnival, the hosting site compiles a list of the blogs posted on their chosen subject and officially passes the baton on to the next host. Hold on a minute – this month the person that has to do that is me! I guess I […]

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Top-Down Plug-in Game Design: The Perfect Recipe?

As someone who writes about RPGs a lot, I am naturally interested in game design techniques and philosophy. As a former I.T. professional, I have discovered that a lot of the principles of sound program design practice also apply to rules design. With those as my starting point, I thought I would have a stab at defining […]

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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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The Nth Level Of Abstraction

During the last week, the RPG Bloggers Network brought an interesting post to my attention: “Discussion: Time Gaps” at Reality Refracted. This got me to thinking about the hierarchy of abstraction, and how often we (GMs) move from one level to another in the course of a typical game session, and how we can use […]

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Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 5: Rules Touchstones – Combat

This entry is part 5 of 4 in the series Rules Mastery

In the course of part 2 of this series, which was all about overcoming a resistance to studying rules for their own sake, I suggested that the GM learning a new set of rules should watch for patterns, and use them to make understanding the rules a little easier. Starting in this part of the […]

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Rules Mastery For Dummies & Busy GMs Part 4: The Quality of Rules

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Rules Mastery

A lot of blogs and articles talk about “realism” (or verisimilitude) in RPGs and how to achieve it. Campaign Mastery is no different in this respect, a number of my articles having dealt with the subject. Over the last few weeks, as I write this, I’ve been spending time thinking about a fundamental question that […]

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Jolting The Status Quo

Life’s full of surprises. Some are pleasant; others challenge us, and may even seem overwhelming. Take me, for example: I’ve been living in the same rented unit for the last 20 years or so. Last week, I was sent a termination of lease by the landlord; the place needs serious renovations, and he had forewarned […]

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Let’s Have A Good Clean Fight…

I’ve written on this topic before, but only as part of a larger subject. But I recently had occasion to expand the EL-CR chart that I created for my own use, and decided to share it with our readers – and have written this Blog Post to explain what it is and how I use […]

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Ask The GMs: Rubbing Two Dry Words Together

Why have different languages in an RPG? How can they be used to enhance a story? And what’s wrong with Universal Translators, anyway? I have a question about using languages in fantasy RPGs. There are numerous articles and advice out there on how to create fictitious languages and make them sound realistic or add verisimilitude […]

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