Busy looking at apartments, getting moving quotes, etc. Not a lot of time for games at the moment.
But was thinking earlier about ways to combine CCG concepts of mana curve and tempo with RPG gameplay; something like a D&D prepared spellcaster combined with a ramp-up mechanic.
More on this to follow.
Most games start small, and get big.
Not all. Some cut straight to the big fight, the galactic scale, empires and civilizations. Some stay tightly-focused on the character issues and the street-level problems.
But most don’t. Scale increases over time; the party starts out dealing with small issues, gradually these become larger issues; and eventually the players [...]
Do you name your campaigns?
I do. It’s a major part of campaign building for me. Coming up with something suitably descriptive and evocative — and I’m not above stealing. My original Mage game was “Between the Candle and the Star”, intentionally referencing Babylon 5’s Grey Council and hitting themes of light, darkness, and an epic [...]
Instead of digging deeply into a new setting, I’m going to throw out a couple of roundup ideas. Trying more to throw a few thoughts into the air and see which ones fly. Any thoughts and feedback are welcome. These are all potentially the basis of a short (4-8 session) game, though some could easily [...]
So, I’ve been thinking about 4e so far, and how to push it into a different style of game. More review is forthcoming, by the way — PHB Part II should be up sometime this weekend, depending on my free time.
But in the meantime, below the cut you’ll find a few of my thoughts on [...]
Seth made a comment in the last post that I’d like to look at in fuller detail.
As I play more of them, I’m starting to move in my desires away from RPGs where balance is an issue that requires anything beyond some basic cursory attention.
So, when does balance matter, and when doesn’t it? I talked [...]
So, let’s look at two example characters from two different games, and think about some potential issues. The facts are real, but the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
The Iron Gnome: The Iron Gnome was a friend’s D&D character. Gnomish cleric with an armor class of roughly “lots” and saves of “cleric”. Lots [...]
I know that I have a readership of at least six people, because I warned the players in my Ptolus game that I would occasionally post game-relevant details on here with no warning. So the failure of the grand and nebulous “you out there” to respond to my query on psionics in sci-fi settings is [...]
I’ve covered GMing techniques I like. But what about mechanics?
Let it Ride
The single mechanic that’s hit me the hardest with an “Oh, hells yeah!” is from Burning Wheel, and it’s called ‘Let it Ride’. The idea here is to cut down on repetative dice rolling, on both sides of the screen. On the GM side, [...]
If I had to pick a few core ideas that I’ve really tried to incorporate into my GMing style, here they be:
White Wolf is full of shit
This is a big one, and one that may shock some of my regular group, who know that my favorite game of all time ever is Mage: The Ascension. [...]
So, in discussion of my upcoming 40K game, Seth brought up the idea of rotating who would play the inquisitor. The situation here is similar to that arising in Ars Magica or Buffy – there’s one central character (the inquisitor/mage/Slayer), plus their posse, whose primary relationships, (or at least, primary buy-in to the plot) are [...]
Win: The trait and escalation mechanics in Dogs are flexible enough that it won’t be too much trouble to work in varying levels and types of psyker traits.
Loss: Dogs has a very straightforward escalation ladder – words, fists, weapons, guns. 40K has a rather… broader range of options. Something like words, fists, weapons, force weapons, [...]
Interesting back-and-forth over the Big Model and Creative Agenda over at the Forge. Probably the best example I’ve seen of really drilling down to the relevance of BM/GNS theory in a specific game in a potentially useful way.
(Via Attacks of Opportunity.)
On balance, I think Seth raised some good points in the previous post.
By and large, I like Wushu’s Principle of Narrative Truth, and I think it captures a lot of what a “Story Now” narrativist game should be. It just doesn’t seem quite as applicable to Exalted as I would have liked. There’s a thesis [...]
Cribbed from an RPG.net thread, this is the system I intend to use if I (ever) run Exalted again.
The Problem: Base Exalted is fate-at-the-end, ie, describe intention, narrate intended action, roll. This results in narrative issues like “I leap from the top of the wall, sprint down the length of his daiklaive, jump, and kick [...]
Silvered Glass on the RPG.net forums has a remarkably excellent summery of rec.games.frp.advocacy theory discussions. RGFA created what was probably the first coherent critical model of RPGs – a thread that would be later picked up by The Forge and Ron Edwards specifically, though as the thread addresses, many of the terms would undergo some [...]
