Tag: old-skool

February 12, 2012

Pushing your Luck

Let’s revisit a topic that I brought up five years ago. I’ve never liked that luck tends to be handled in RPGs by a reroll. The other day, while driving into Baltimore, I think I realized why: a reroll is a test of skill. This is largely system-agnostic, but I’ll describe it in d20ish terms. Let’s say my character is...

November 22, 2011

The sweet spot: simple, creative, tactical

The resurgence in old-school gaming has highlighted the appeal of simple rpgs that foster creativity. There is a powerful appeal here. Remove the learning curve for the rules, and you can focus on the learning curve for play. Player skill becomes a matter of critical thinking and decision-making rather than rules mastery. (This last bit raises issues of tension between...

November 9, 2011

How Many Stats?

What’s the sweet spot for the number of attributes and skills in an RPG ruleset? Last week, I complained a wee bit about the proliferation of attributes and skills in Eclipse Phase. One of my biggest frustrations with the Dresden Files RPG is how many disconnected social skills it has (Contacts, Deceit, Empathy, Intimidation, Performance, Presence, Rapport… ). Old World...

October 1, 2009

Shadowrunning the Dungeon

I’ve only played Shadowrun a few times. Most of them have been with the same group of people. Our playstyle focused upon extensive recon and planning, and – while that style of game might annoy some people – I enjoyed it quite a bit. Yesterday, I got to thinking about how that playstyle could be merged with a dungeon crawl....

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...

August 1, 2008

Housecats vs. Wizards: Test Case I

You know how in certain editions of D&D a housecat could pretty easily take a wizard? Well, we had a bit of a test of that the other night. Jenn (housemate) seems to have acquired a cat. It has been living in her room since July 4th. I have a cat. Angela also has a cat. Angela’s cat, Tempest, is...

July 25, 2008

4e: Is it D&D? Does it matter?

After the game on Wednesday, Jeff said something to the effect of, “I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just not playing D&D” when playing 4e. He reiterated this on his blog. My response was that I think that the difference between 4e and 3.5 is smaller than the difference between 3.5 and any pre-3.0 edition. The thing is, 3.0...

May 28, 2008

Retro-Pretension

So, the other day, Jeff Rients called ‘bullshit’ on the foreward to the 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide. This got me thinking. On the Internet, the retro-nostalgia gaming movement has been gaining a lot of currency lately. I think it has clearly gained momentum from an anti-4e backlash (and, sadly, the death of Gary Gygax), but it was also fairly clearly...

April 25, 2008

Nostalgia and Ingenuity

Last night, in the final session of our Gygax Memorial 1e AD&D game Jeff has been running, we finished clearing out the moathouse near Hommlet. Up until last night, out performance had been kind of lame. Last night,I think, we got into the dungeoneering mindset. We set an ambush. We used decoys. We took advantage of those few tools we...

March 12, 2008

The slippery slope – a dungeon trap?

Yesterday, Jeff posted about “classic” dungeon crawls – the sort that get more challenging the further down you go with numbered dungeon levels that correspond to the levels of characters for which they are an appropriate challenge. Something has been bothering me about the post, but I didn’t put my finger on it until this afternoon. Most of the discussion...