Posts Tagged ‘Tools & Techniques’

The Mists Of Fear Orrorsh Revisited 1

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Extracts from Mike's TORG Materials

Preamble: A long time ago, I rewrote some fairly fundamental parts of Orrorsh, the Horror Realm, for reasons explained in the text below. While packing, I discovered where it had been filed away (hidden?). This is not a complete standalone work; you will still need the official supplement. Why, then, should I read it? First, […]

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All about Frames – Merry Christmas!

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series The Value Of Material Things

Christmas Day falls on a Monday this year – today, in fact! – and so I’m preparing this in advance, in effect doing on Sunday what I would normally do Monday, which means doing on Saturday what I would normally do Sunday, and so on. AND posting a day early as a Christmas Bonus to […]

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The Value Of Material Things III

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series The Value Of Material Things

News From the Rear-view Mirror: I’m usually pretty good at noticing anniversaries and milestones, but I have to admit to missing one. Back in August, officially, I posted CM’s 1250th article or part-article, Holistic NPCs: Creating Special Characters, which gave a process for finding consequences and ramifications of character elements that would feed back into […]

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The Value Of Material Things IIa

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series The Value Of Material Things

First, A Correction (and some expansion) I wasn’t going to be talking about this stuff today. I’ve done almost half of the third “Strange Places” article, and that was my intended post of the week. But…. When I calculated how much a Gold Dime would weigh last week, I uses diameter instead of radius. This […]

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The Value Of Material Things II

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series The Value Of Material Things

It’s been a long time since I’ve just had a ramble on about assorted semi-related matters but that’s what’s in store today. I’ll move from topic to topic with what may at times seem gay abandon, but it will all come together in the end. This is all stuff that’s derived from, or been inspired […]

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Expectations and the Theater of the Mind

I’ve decided to wait another week before posting the final part of the Economics in RPGs series, because yesterday, I thought up a new article. I immediately set about outlining the article. I know from past experience that if the outline is not substantial enough, by the time I get to actually writing it, I […]

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How Long Is A Generation?

Last week, I promised readers something completely different from the Economics in RPGs series, and even though this is a different article to the one I had in mind at the time, I still think it delivers – in classic Campaign Mastery style :) While working on the Adventurer’s Club campaign this week (as I […]

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Inherent, Relative, and Personal Modifiers

For the first time since I started it, when I went to draft the penultimate(?) parts of the Economics in RPGs series today, I found myself unsure of how best to structure the post. While I have total confidence that, given enough time, I would have found a satisfactory sequence to bring out the key […]

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Holistic NPCs: Creating Special Characters

Because the last part of the Economics in RPGs Series ran to three parts, I’ve decided to throw in an extra non-series article before continuing with it next week. Fortunately, I had an idea on tap. The Holistic NPC “Holistic” essentially means ‘complete’. The term derives from Holism, which is a philosophic notion that focusing […]

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The Power Of Basic Utilities

Today I’m going to tell readers about something I’ve been working on a lot over the last few months, because it highlights an important principle – you can usually do a lot more with basic tools and utilities than you think. A Recurring Pattern Every now and then we seem to get waves of tools […]

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Skating On Thin Ice: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’

“Show, don’t tell” is a common maxim when it comes to literary entertainments, and something that has been gleefully expropriated as good advice for other media. That includes TV, Movies, and, of course, Roleplaying Games. I was thinking about that during the last week, and noting how much easier it was for the other two […]

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Guesstimates in RPGs: Measuring Handwavia

The subject today is Approximations and Guesstimations in RPGs. I’ve got a number of article ideas in various stages of development, intended to break up the series on Economics in RPGs. When the time comes to select between them, one of the key parameters that has to be assessed is how long the article will […]

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