Tag: frustration

November 3, 2011

Almost Loving Eclipse Phase

Eclipse Phase is almost a great game. As a rule, I don’t like science fiction games set in space. I just don’t get excited by them. I’m not sure why. I mean, I went to Space Camp when I was a kid. I like space travel. My best guess is that in space games, you’re typically just playing a normal...

July 15, 2009

Coming to an End

Sunday was the last game in our Woodstock campaign. The campaign was set in an alternate Woodstock, NY… in a world in which Dylan collaborated with the concert organizers and Woodstock was actually, well, held in Woodstock. In the game-world, a lot of people actually stayed there, and Woodstock is now a thriving city. The game was in the urban...

September 15, 2008

Whose game is it, anyway?

About a week ago, Angela picked up Spore. I’ve tinkered around with it. The character modeling and such is really cool. That’s not what I want to focus on, though. If you look at the Amazon link (above), you’ll note that Spore has a lousy rating. It isn’t because the game is bad (although parts of it seem very oversimplified),...

August 26, 2008

Vampire allergies and other strangeness

I’ve talked a bit about the Monday night game that I play in – it is a Morrow Project game that uses White Wolf’s Storytelling system. The Morrow Project is a game about operatives for a shadowy philanthropic paramilitary organization who are cryogenically frozen in case of disaster. We woke up to a post-apocalyptic world ~150 years after a nuclear...

June 18, 2008

4e: GSL

So, Wizards released the GSL. I’m not sure I see why anyone would use it. I haven’t read through it in detail, but it doesn’t seem to actually grant any worthwhile rights. The OGL was arguably worthwhile. You agreed to abide by WotC’s restrictions. In return, you got to use a whole lot of content more-or-less as you wish. The...

May 16, 2008

4e: Economic downturn

Earlier this week, Wizards posted a preview about the treasure-economy of 4e. As has been noted elsewhere in the blogosphere, it is rather rigid. I understand the reasoning. In 3.x, magic items make an enormous difference in terms of character power level… and, therefore, game balance. Today, the preview was specifically about magic items. One of the stated goals of...

April 22, 2008

Flaws in Game Design

I tend to be a fan of a particular game-mechanical trick that first (to my knowledge) showed up in TSR’s old Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP) game – that of spending experience points (or their equivalent) for temporary power boosts. I’ve often thought that one good way of making veteran-types characters would be to allow them to more cheaply buy higher-level...

March 27, 2008

Rethinking Tactical Combat in RPGs

Two months ago, I posted about my frustrations with how big monsters are handled in D&D. This is part of a larger frustration I have with tactical combat in RPGs. How to define this larger frustrations? Well, there are a number of things that RPGs tend to model poorly: size differences between combatants, positional advantages, the importance of mobility in...

March 19, 2008

How should PCs be special?

I haven’t been writing a lot about 4e, but I’ve been keeping up on the released information (official and unofficial). One thing that got me thinking was Keith Baker’s recent LJ post, in which he talked about how the PCs in an Eberron game are presumed to be special and use different rules from most NPCs. Now, I’ve long been...

March 3, 2008

Proprietary feelings

In all but the most sandboxriffic of games, GMs put things into play specifically for certain players and their PCs. In many cases, this might be as simple as polling players on what sorts of enemies they want to face – or creating in-game rewards that will have special meaning to one or more of the PCs. This is, in...