Tag: musing

November 19, 2008

On the use of treasure…

In the beginning, we killed things and took their stuff. Some of us still do that. Others of us got this crazy idea that maybe our PCs could do some other things and have some complex motivations. What’s the role of treasure in a game that follows that second path? Is it a reward? If so, it isn’t really the...

November 4, 2008

Fallout 3 – intro and character generation

As I mentioned yesterday, I just picked up Fallout 3. I haven’t had much time to play, but i like what I’ve seen so far. Good games often give me ideas about how to improve other games, so I may be commenting here from time to time on possible applications to tabletop RPGs. This wouldn’t be too weird. The SPECIAL...

November 3, 2008

Fallout 3 and thoughts on edition change

I picked up a copy of Fallout 3 yesterday. This is going to really cut into my productivity. When I heard that the developers had changed, I was a little worried that the tone of the game wouldn’t be quite the same under the new team. The 50s-style post-apocalyptic future that wasn’t is what really appealed to me in the...

September 2, 2008

Deal-breaker: random character generation

Last week, in reaction to our Wednesday-night game-planning meet up, Jeff mentioned that random character generation is a deal-breaker for me. Yes, I grew up on it, but I grew up doing a lot of stuff that I no longer enjoy. This weekend, though, I got to thinking about why – specifically – I don’t want to play games with...

August 11, 2008

Understanding Old-School

The 4e honeymoon is over. There’s a lot to like in it, game mechanically, but I can’t help but feel like there is something about 4e D&D that disagrees with me. I’m pretty sure that the bit which disagrees with me is either the same thing or very closely related to that which a lot of nostalgia-oriented gamers seem to...

June 10, 2008

When you’re good…

In my Monday night game, my PC has played a very successful game of chess. The game uses Storytelling/WoD rules. Game mechanically, we just treated chess as Int+Academics rolls. My die pool in that is 6. Pretty good, but far from awesome. The thing is, I’ve rolled it twice for playing chess – and got amazing levels of success (4...

June 4, 2008

The Curious Case of the Cleric

What the hell is a cleric? Originally, I pictured them as holy warriors – knights dedicated to a god. They wore heavy armor and they were pretty good at fighting. Then the paladin came along. It pretty much eclipsed the role I’d imagined for the cleric. Clerics then got shoved into the role of religious leaders/priests. Of course, priests usually...

May 29, 2008

4e: last minute thoughts

I have the core books on pre-order through the Armored Gopher… so, hopefully, I will get them on release day. The more I hear from people who have the books or have seen them, the less optimistic I am as to whether the game will be one I’ll want to actually play. I’m pretty sure the system will be fun...

May 19, 2008

4e: Minions, mooks, and extras, oh my!

Today’s 4e preview is about minions. Essentially, a minion in 4e is an opponent that is made to come in a horde. You can wade through them, dropping them left and right, but you can’t ignore them. In 3.x, this was very hard to accomplish. Someone of sufficiently low level to be dropped with a hit or two was often...

April 9, 2008

Interesting observation…

I was checking my blog stats, and it appears that the Culture-Making Checklist that I posted a bit over a year ago has been getting a lot of hits lately. I wonder if a disproportionately large number of people are engaging in campaign design at the moment… prepping for the imminent release of 4e.