In my previous post I suggest removing mechanics around the important parts of the game to see if a more freeform rulings style of play will give you what you looking for, instead of defaulting to adding new mechanics.
Let’s look at one of the most popular areas to begin to add rules to games: combat maneuvers.
read moreHanging out on forums, game design communities, discord servers and the like I come across a lot of people trying to hack games, old school D&D in particular to do more than what it currently does for them.
Some examples include things like:
This is all great – hacking is very much in the spirit of D&D and roleplaying and definitely should be done. Some really awesome games have developed out of the tradition of grabbing D&D, removing stuff you don’t like, adding stuff you do, and putting your own mark on it.
What I want to do is make an argument for removing rules to do what you want, before adding them in. This may seem counter-intuitive – how can you establish something as a priority if you don’t have a concrete rule for it?
read moreedit: I accidentally numbered the last session report as 7 when it was actually 7, sorry for the confusion
The party continues into the maze, fights with shadows and loses one of their own, discovers a frightening ally, and an elfish play troupe arrives in town.
read moreedit: I accidentally listed this as session 7 before, but have edited the title to the correct number, sorry if the URL stays the same and is confusing.
I am going to try more of a short summary this time around (instead of the longer form narration of events), since I’ve fallen behind updating these. This may also allow me to kind of summarize process a bit more.
If you’re reading along and you have a strong preference for one style or the other let me know.
In my last post I wrote up a summary of a Primeval 2D6 session that I ran, and I got a lot of great feedback and a lot of questions about how I run a closer-to-freeform/FKR rpg. I wanted to write a follow-up post to kind of explain the how I did as well as clarify a few of the questions I received.
Over the weekend I ran a playtest of my Primeval 2D6 system along with some sword & sorcery rules I have been working on for a while. The basic setup was that I had each player generate a positive and negative trait, a homeland, background, virtue, vice, then each player generated a pulp adventure title.
They then free form pitched their character’s appearance in this tale, along with a special ability, item, relationship or unique detail. Then the player to the right of them had their character featured in this tale, and they helped the primary protagonist out of some pickle.
The adventure was one I have ran before. Its a bit of a magical detective mystery, filled with decadent corruption and horrific monsters, it has a number of avenues a party can take. It has been interesting running this and seeing some groups go purely investigative, some purely skull-crushing, and an in-between. Spoilers for one avenue the adventure can take, if you ever want to playtest this with me.
summary followsThis is a tad late as I have been super busy since this session, so I may have forgotten a few things. Also my notes are complete trash – usually it will contain a bunch of numbers scrawled onto a page, unlabeled tick boxes, and phrases like “rocks fall” without context. When playing they make sense to me, but are complete gibberish outside of it. None the less, here’s my memory of our last session.
Along with their hirelings:
So I’ve been fortunate to run a few playtests of my Primeval d6 (which I should probably “rename” to Primeval 2d6 since that’s pretty much all I roll) and I’ve been honing the kind of basic form of the system. I need to sit down and update my actual play document, but here’s how I’ve been running it lately and why I have made changes.
changes followOur cast for our fourth session:
My first entry for the 2020 Eclectic Bastion Jam is up, it’s a failed career – the former Ghost Impersonator.
If you take a look definitely let me know what you think, and I absolutely recommend contributing to the jam – Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland are two of the best games out there and are great foundations to hack from.
