Typical take – roleplaying can make new friendships and deepen old one.
Additional typical take – you don’t need to be friends with everyone you game with, nor should you necessarily game with all of your friends. See the Geek Social Fallacies for reference.
When you examine the corpse, roll d10:
If there’s something I have a problem with – its focus. I am constantly starting new projects, writing dungeons, hacking rulesets. Very rarely do I actually finish any of them.
Hell, the sparseness of this blog over the past two years should be indication of this.
I am not sure the best way to go about acquiring more focus, but it is definitely something I would like to improve upon.
I have a love/hate relationship with the ideas of critical rolls. On one hand, I love ridiculous tables, things driven by chance, etc.
On the other hand, I often dislike that something can be completely won or lost by a roll alone. I tend to like these sorts of things to be eventual outcomes of a successful plan or a stupid idea. The chance that something can just get a 5% roll, which will happen frequently enough, and maim or murder a character or npc outright is a little too frequent for me.
Because of this I have mostly modified my “criticals” in OSR games to require the person being critted upon to make a saving throw before any effects are levied, and even then I end up using a temporary wound chart.
Continue reading RPGaDay 2019: Day 9 (Critical)
Missed this during GenCon and while training, but I definitely want in on it.
So the word obscure is pretty close to my heart. Maybe its my inner hipster, but I just love things that are hidden gems – games, modules, music, stories, pretty much anything.
I think this is obvious by my collection of rpgs. While I try to be omnivorous, I absolutely love looking through things like Game Chef, the 200 word rpg contest, those kinds of things for fun games.
While not the most obscure, I’d like to highlight one of those games I found, one that I think can be relevant to OSR gamers and story gamers alike: Fuck, It’s Dracula!
I don’t have too much to write home about. Overall it was a really fun GenCon. I ended up working quite a bit for Games on Demand, but I was able to run Mothership as well as Maze Rats. I also got to play a bunch of games like Zweihander, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e, Star Crossed, and For the Queen.
I have a jiu jitsu tournament coming up that will take up most of my time, but I am looking forward to doing more design and writing afterward.
I will be heading to GenCon next week. Most of my time will be spent hosting at Games on Demand, but I will be offering to run Maze Rats or Mothership. Feel free to stop by and join in or just say hello!
I have been replaying Bloodborne and recently been running Burning Wheel with a group of players that are majorly magic users. Both of these have got me thinking about Insight and risk-reward style systems in rpgs.
I’ve been toying around with the idea of Insight as it exists in Bloodborne, and I think I have came up with something I want to toy around with more. Here’s the basic top-of-my-head version with no amount of play-testing or really running it by other people for quality control.
I’ve been coming up with a doc for my players to collect all the various parts from different OSR games that I enjoy, so I don’t ever have to print off multiple games again and then print a guide for what sections from what they have to follow for character creation or rules.
Mostly its just a collection of different mechanics copy-pasted from other games and blogs, some of it customized for me, a little bit changed and added, but most as-is. Here’s what I’m using for my own games and why.
I love the idea of weapon reach in games, but implementing it is a tad more complicated than I want to deal with in an OSR session. Good examples of it in more complicated games include Burning Wheel, RuneQuest, and Mythras.
But I want something simpler for D&D.
