Advancement rules are another aspect of roleplaying that sees heavy mechanization. Which I totally get – I agree that games are about what they reward. How these rewards are illustrated, handed out, and utilized, however, has a variety of methods they can be handled with – and like everything else in this series I think you can get away having a fully featured and rich set of rewards without explicitly mechanizing them.
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Trying out my hand at learning Affinity Publisher, so I tried to make a two column spread for Primeval 2D6. I also tried to cut through my verbosity and trim it down to one page, hopefully I was successful at making a more usable text.
I am currently working on an example of how I use the game as a framework to play in a world along with an adventure. Let me know if you have any feedback or recommendations for a “Play worlds, not rules” sort of product.
Also let me know your thoughts on the changes to the document, as well as any recommendations or tips while I am learning this stuff.
Thank you!
One of the things I have done when running Primeval 2D6 is to get rid of the more abstract notion of hit points, number of hits, etc. in favor of a more descriptive form of injuries.
This has coincided with my attempt to move all of my old school-styled gaming away from discussions of numbers and mechanics, and instead towards a discussion of the fiction as much as possible.
details followIn 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 moreIn 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 follows
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 follow
