February 10, 2006 Good Read The Power of Cool: Arthur Fonzarelli as Archetypal Shamanfound via a rather strange thread on RPG.net
February 7, 2006 D20 tweaking: Part I I enjoy playing with D20/OGL rules. They make an interesting toolset, and D20 is as close to an object-oriented game system as I think we have come. On the other hand, to paraphrase something I read recently, I find the D20 rules-tweaking potential to be more fun than the actual gameplay. That isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy playing...
January 31, 2006 wtf? Upon Jeff’s recommendation, I took a look at WTF?, a game written by Daniel Solis that was included in the Nopress RPG Anthology. WTF? is either a minigame or a metagame. I’m not sure if it makes a difference. It might be both. It is billed as a competitive RPG, but I didn’t find the reward mechanics particularly compelling. What...
January 25, 2006 Pull Over at Sin Aesthetics, Mo is talking a lot about what she calls Pull. Go and read it. I’m still not entirely clear about the conceptual space that Pull inhabits. It seems to be defined largely in terms of what it is not. Pull is not Push. Push is easy enough to define. Push is the development of story/drama/theme through...
January 24, 2006 The Neitherworld (a wuxia urban fantasy?) In case you wanted more details concerning the premise of Neitherworld: Ages ago, magic was torn from the Earth. Those responsible shaped their own world, a world whose very bedrock was created from the stuff of dreams, a paradise in which they could live out their every fantasy for eternity. All that it cost them was Earth’s dreams, hopes, and...
January 24, 2006 An Introduction to Neitherworld Neitherworld is a game that has been rumbling around in my head for the past year. I’ve written bits and pieces of it. Most of these I have found unsatisfying. I’ve been trying to determine why that is the case. So far, this blog (which gets its name from the aforementioned game-embryo) has been useful for that. In Neitherworld, the...
January 23, 2006 Fixing the Lone Wolf Problem This is a follow-up to my last entry. In particular, I want to look at my second suggested method for dealing with the Lone Wolf Problem: Multiple players share the single heroic character. Each of them might have a different agenda and different commitments (some of which they may be able to impose on each other). This would be a...
January 13, 2006 The Lone Wolf Problem Seeing Kill Bill the other night brought to mind one of my major frustrations with roleplaying games. Like many, I like to use characters and stories from other media (whether novels, movies, television shows, or whatever) to inspire my roleplaying games. Unfortunately, many of those stories that I would otherwise consider excellent fodder focus on a single character (whether exclusively...
January 13, 2006 The beginnings of a campaign setting idea I was brainstorming the other day about twists on D&D-style fantasy, and the following is what resulted. I will almost certainly never use it, so it becomes a gift unto the world… In the stories you heard as a child (the ones that began with the words, “A long time ago…”), there were other lands. That was an Age ago....
January 12, 2006 Why do we trust the dice? Last night, members of my household sat me down and we had a bit of an intervention. It seems that it had come to their attention that I’d never seen either of the Kill Bill movies. This was, mostly, an intentional oversight on my part. While I certainly appreciate his ability to craft a film, I am not an enormous...