rant Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Neitherworld Stories

January 23, 2007

Dumb Luck

Who is it that decided that a character in an RPG who is extraordinarily lucky should have that luck modeled by re-rolling dice? I know that White Wolf did this – both in their World of Darkness games (in which Luck was a Merit) and in Aberrant (in which it was a power). I am fairly certain that I saw...

January 11, 2007

Game Bloat

I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with White Wolf’s Storyteller system and its variants over the last year or so, but I find that I am still most annoyed with my original pet peeve with them – I call it skill bloat. In the Storyteller system, characters have a number of skills that range from 0 to 5 points. At character creation,...

December 15, 2006

Where did I put that beast…?

Okay, if you attack a Displacer Beast and you hit it, you roll a miss chance. Why is it that if you miss you don’t roll a hit chance?

October 20, 2006

Character Death

Character death is not something I have dealt with a great deal. In general, I’m opposed to player character death determined by the roll of a die. This is odd, of course, because most of the games I play include this as a possibility and, indeed, as the assumed method of character death. In my mind, player characters are the...

October 2, 2006

I always hated being the banker in Monopoly…

EN World has been pushing this Fantasy Money thing hard, billing it as the ultimate gaming accessory. Essentially, fantasy money is a bunch of bills in denominations like 5cp or 100gp or whatever. It is Monopoly money for D&D. This strikes me as the worst idea ever. Part of it is that I don’t like to worry about piddly sums...

August 29, 2006

let me give you some background here…

So, I am playing in an Exalted game that meets every other week or so. It started up relatively recently. I don’t really have the time for it, but I wanted to play in the game. So far, I’ve been having fun. I have one strange problem with the game. The GM wants me to submit a character history. I...

August 11, 2006

Theory

Okay. Yesterday, RPGpundit declared (among other things): D&D is the model of what most people define as an RPG, and therefore also the model for a successfully-designed RPG. It can be improved upon or changed, but any theory that suggests that D&D in any of its versions was an example of a “bad” RPG is by definition in violation of...

July 28, 2006

d20 Magic System Musings…

Spellcasting in d20 bugs me for a number of reasons: Spell knowledge is all-or-nothing. If you know a spell, you can cast it without error. If you don’t know a spell, you just can’t cast it. There is no looking up spells you don’t know in ancient grimoires. Moreover, you can’t be in the process of learning a spell and...

February 21, 2006

Use the cool

No, I am not talking about Fonzie again. I’ve been thinking about some of the things that I find frustrating in RPGs, and I’ve noticed some patterns. In D&D, there are a lot of cool options – feats, prestige classes, races, spells, and things like that – but in any given game, you are likely to only use a small...

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