Proving Grounds of a Million Mad Overlords

A bit over a year ago (Friday, July 17, to be exact) I complained about the lack of outreach to potentially new gamers. Apparently, I should also start complaining about not having a million bucks because oh what a diff[...]
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Proving Grounds of a Million Mad Overlords

A bit over a year ago (Friday, July 17, to be exact) I complained about the lack of outreach to potentially new gamers. Apparently, I should also start complaining about not having a million bucks because oh what a diff[...]
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Old School Dice Pool Class Sketches

So, more sketches related to the Old School Dice Pool concept I’ve been playing with. (You need to read those to understand this.) Designing character categories is neat because you break out subsystems, see their [...]
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How You Can Get Nice Things

Yes, last in the series, from here to here and now, next steps. Oh, there’s still plenty of room for negativity, but I think anybody who’s going to get it has taken time to look at themselves and their commun[...]
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Fantastic: Assumption or exception?

In most roleplaying settings there is something I call here fantastic: Something the players are not familiar with. Exception Lovecraft mythos, sword and sorcery, horror in general, LotFP’s products (this post of m[...]
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The Critical Threshold: A brief debate on the Merits of Extreme Results

This is not the post that I expected to make this week. I simply ran out of time and could not finish either the article I had intended to post this week [about time travel] or the one for next week [the long-awaited fo[...]
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It’s Not Like Shooting Sushi In A Barrel: A Personalised Productivity Focus For Game Prep

While watching the special features from Numb3rs season 3 on DVD, I got to thinking about one of the phenomena of TV shows – that some episodes you really like, and some you don’t, and some episodes are real[...]
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Yeah, I’ll Tell You What to Do

Drama? Russell Bailey got offended; Eddy Webb backed away slowly. Or something. It all started with some horrified reactions to my positions in an extended (and in my opinion, productive) talk with Jim Henley about the [...]
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Playing with the Sword-and-Board Fighter

Ian over at the Swashbuckler's Hideout has a neat new variation on the "shields shall be splintered" house rule. It's considerably more attention-intensive than mine, but he also has very different goals:My goal for this[...]
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More Neoclassical Social RPG: Mass Effect Musings

Josh of brilliantgameologists.com recently asked about making a Mass Effect pen and paper RPG. Gamefiend responded as follows:First thing you need to define is what makes ME compelling in the first place. I thought it (a[...]
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A Theoretical Framework for the OSR

The Old School Renaissance has been getting some notice just lately (more on why I think that is later, no, really, I promise) and that means new readers to our little cluster of blogs.  Unfortunately, this means we[...]
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Gender, Rules, and RPGs

Greg over at the Synapse Design Blog is, er, well, designing an RPG called Synapse. This started out as a reply to his latest post, and then, as happens too often with my replies, grew huge and unwieldy. And since I do[...]
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Friends Are Even Better Than That

Over at Jim Henley’s Livejournal I made an offhand comment that many games under the “indie” banner are designed to be played by people who meet at conventions, primarily know each other online or have similar remo[...]
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Zenwhat?!?

Zenslap, apparently. I’d never heard the term before. (Just another clear example of my personal cultural illiteracy.) New words are fun to learn, but I’m more interested in what Mr. Donoghue has to say:Since then[...]
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And Now a Word From the Counter-Revolution

In the tabletop RPG community people think that skimping on the world is okay, because the fans can fill it in – everyone has a D&D campaign world, right? It’s also easy to believe that nobody really wants the in[...]
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Where Did You Go, Tabletop Joe?

It’s no big news that tabletop games are at or near the lowest point they can hit. This actually creates the illusion of a recovery because once something bottoms out to long tail activity it’s not going to get much&[...]
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Story is So Over

It’s easy to bring creatives and managers together in a fiction-based media venture by emphasizing “story.” A supposed story focus makes writers feel good because they can take credit for it, and managers feel good[...]
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Cognitive Disson4nce

There’s been some neat back-and-forth between the Escapist and WotC. WotC interviewed ZakS who’s I Hit it With My Axe will be appearing on the Escapist sometime in the near future, while the Escapist got to intervie[...]
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Houserules and Dice Fudging – at what point are you no longer playing D&D?

In the comments to my last post many people made the point that D&D is never played RAW, and each group will come to a consensus together on how the game should be played.  My post was about PC mortality, and Ro[...]
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Character Death = Function of Play Style?

In the middle of another controversial post, Faustusnotes tosses out that character death rates have nothing to do with system and are actually dependent on the style of play.  Taken to the extreme, I suppose I[...]
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Building a Better Adventurer Trap

Via Baz Stevens and his RPG Treehouse comes this call for help from Rodney Thompson of WotC:So, what I’d like to hear from the community is what you think would make published adventures better. What areas are WotC adv[...]
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How to DM – Play to your strengths

I have a feeling that the one thing that all successful DMs have in common is that they play to their strengths.  The old maxim "be true to yourself" is kind of what I am getting at here. When I was much younger, I [...]
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Criticism

At its core, criticism is the only antidote that human beings have discovered against error. It is the chief method that a skilled person can use to become "even better."– David BrinAlexis puts out the call for standar[...]
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Are you experienced?

This was prompted by this post and this post at the Tao of D&D - a thought provoking blog if you haven't checked it out.Sitting on the toilet at 3:30 AM last night after returning from the first 8 hour D&D sessio[...]
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The Bastard Out of Boston and the End of the World

One of the interesting things about tabletop roleplaying is the ability to set up tensions between the game’s concepts and practical play considerations. Many tabletop gamers have a Manichean streak where something[...]
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Oldschool Roleplaying & Random Chargen

Recently I’ve been reading James Maliszewski’s blog Grognardia, which is devoted to oldschool roleplaying of the ’80s/90s ilk. In addition to information on old games like Twilight 2000 and Traveller, i[...]
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Levers and the fruitful void

Theory post. It’s been a while since the previous one. Fruitful void is a concept for designing and analysing games. Let us take some roleplaying game and assume it has rules. Fruitful void is something the rules d[...]
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Pick a lever, any lever

Levers are parts of a character sheet the player can pull on to effect the game, but not all levers are created equal.[...]
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Government Funding for RPGs?

The other day I was reading up on the various New Deal programs that were created then to get through the Great Depression. ^_^ Among them was a great deal of arts programs, the ancestor of modern government programs whi[...]
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Chad Henderson’s Speech about D&D

This has been making its way around but I thought this five-minute speech, All I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons, was interesting. It’s too bad he wasn’t up on the podium for lon[...]
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Metaplot 2.0 (Part Two)

Over in my last post on metaplot I talked about the good and bad in metaplots, how they compare to other game/IP development methods and proposed some ways they could be improved. This time around I want to develop a mod[...]
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Metaplot 2.0 (Part One)

Metaplot sucks, except when it’s totally awesome. Nobody likes it and they miss it when it’s gone. It’s a pain in the ass godsend for game developers and an alienating useful tool for groups. What What?[...]
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RPGs and Art That Challenges

Art isn’t always for challenging the audience, but a creative community needs that if it’s going to thrive. RPGs aren’t doing that. By “challenges,” I don’t mean Maybe old D&D rule[...]
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The Two Essentials of RPGs

It’s been ages since I’ve posted, and I must apologize profusely. -_-;; The solstice and (thankfully) RPGing has gotten in the way of my posts. I was thinking recently about what, to me, are the irreplaceable[...]
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Balancing The Game To Encourage Genre Appropriate Actions

One of my primary goals when designing game mechanics is to make the game encourage actions which are genre-appropriate, fun, or fit well with the theme of the game. Encouragement can mean different things, but it most o[...]
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Fudging, Fiat and the Regulation of Desire

Participant fudging and fiat are excellent techniques for all RPGs (and other games, but they’re really great in RPGs). People say a lot of silly things about it for three reasons: Peer pressure. An unacknowledged[...]
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You Can’t Do That in RPGs: a History

The history of RPGs is the history of things you can’t do, and various strategies to veil, deny or accommodate that fact. Players like to think they can go anywhere and do anything with their characters unless th[...]
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The RPG EBook of the Future

To follow up on the Next Gen RPGs post I’d like to toss up a sample interface: This is probably a Flash application. You can resize, minimize or dismiss each pane in the interface above. The book screen is actually[...]
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White Wolf: Now It’s Semi-Official

Today’s been an interesting one for White Wolf, CCP’s tabletop imprint. At ICC it announced that it was “freeing” (and dismantling much of) the Camarilla, developing new community and game managem[...]
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Escapist Archetypes

Lately I have been thinking about why people play roleplaying games. (Of course, they play roleplaying games because in the words of Conan, they are “what is good in life,” but more specifically. ^^ ) Normall[...]
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You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Rules-Wise)

I recently put my homebrew SF game on hold to get back to our previous Star Wars Saga campaign. Now I like Saga in a lot of respects, but all in all I think it has too many rules, requires too many “build” st[...]
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All Talk, No Rock, No Friends

I think the RPG scene is plagued with two tendencies that feed from each other, blocking gamers’ ability to get regular games off the ground, but these disguise a bigger social problem. Gamers describe games in ter[...]
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GM as God 4 . . . ish: More on the Land of Miracles

As I said in the last part of this leg of GM as God, settings are bullshit. There are no vampires and elves. Even in grounded settings, real human beings are interested in a whole bunch of ordinary things I doubt you hav[...]
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Disadvantages, Part IV: How the types of disadvantages work with the disadvantage system goals

In my last article, I classified disadvantages into 4 types, and previously to that, a described 2 goals of disadvantage systems. Now I will discuss how each type of disadvantage fits into each goal.If you are thinking o[...]
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Poooooooodcasting! On Darker Days

I did an enormous podcast interview — almost three hours — with the folks at the Darker Days podcast. Check it out! I think the important bit is where I answer why I like RPGs, but there’s lots of bits [...]
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Disadvantages, Part III: General Classifications

As I mentioned in my previous article, I’m going to classify some general types of disadvantages:1. The negative ability. This sort of disadvantage is something that makes your character statistically worse, the opposi[...]
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Disadvantages, Part II: Design of the Champions disadvantage system

In my previous post, I said that there were 2 different goals for disadvantage systems, encouragement and compensation. Now I will go into some more specific analysis and say that Champions, my reference system, is prima[...]
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Suicide is Painless

I normally don’t talk about my house game here, but on my personal journal. Indigo uses a heavily hacked version of Adventure! set on a Dyson Sphere.  The protagonists are posthuman members of the Fleet Syndicate:[...]
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Disadvantages, Part I: Overall Purpose

A major game mechanic I've often thought about and analyzed is the disadvantage system. This is a complex subject, so I’ll start with some introductory analysis. The classic disadvantage system is that of Champions/Her[...]
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RPG Settings: Messiness Rules, Structure Drools

One of the things I’m playing with in Mage: The Dirty Version is a partial rebellion against highly structured RPG settings. Setting design took its lumps this decade, driven partly by genuine changes in what gamer[...]
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