Tag: rules

October 23, 2008

Crunch Fetish

Sometimes, I have to indulge my twisted love of overcomplicated rules. I blame 1e AD&D for this. The thing is, I don’t think I’d want to play a game with such rules – I just enjoy coming up with them. Anyway, here is a sketchy draft of an add-on to 3.x to complement my last post (it doesn’t do nearly...

October 21, 2008

The Tyranny of the Turn

In the beginning (i.e., the 1970s and early ’80s), turns in combat were very abstract things, representing a series of exchanges of blows. (I’m avoiding technical usage of turn vs. round here – just assume I’m talking about both of them.) The assumption was that only a small percentage of attacks were effective. As time progressed, the abstraction diminished. People...

October 14, 2008

d20 Patch: Caps

One of the big complaints about 3.x was how unbalanced the game could become given the ability and propensity of some players to create mechanically optimized builds. It is pretty clear that this was a major consideration in the creation of 4e. What, though, if you want to play a 3.x game and are still concerned about this? One solution...

September 11, 2008

To the pain!

Combat in RPGs tends to have a serious problem: it ends in death. Sure. Some RPGs have morale rules and such. Usually, these are limited to NPCs and they tend to be more applicable in mass combat than skirmishes or duels. It is duels that I’m concerned with here, duels and practice bouts. Non-lethal combats have a place in many...

September 10, 2008

The Temptation of FATE

Since I read through Spirit of the Century, I want to run everything in FATE. I expect this is largely because it is new and shiny (to me). Perhaps it is heightened by the fact that what FATE seems to do extraordinarily well is the stuff that I feel was left out of 4e D&D. Still, it seems like an...

August 5, 2008

Stunt Modes

I like the stunting mechanic in Exalted. The way the rules are written, almost every action that a PC takes that is described by that PC’s player in terms other than game mechanics is a stunt. Most people don’t play the game this way, but let’s ignore that fact for a moment. I’ll get back to it. So, yeah. Saying,...

July 3, 2008

4e: Wizard

One of the things that bugs me about the wizard is how non-combat magic is an entirely separate system than combat magic. Here is a very quick draft of a possible ‘fix’ that I thought up about 10 minutes ago: Feat: Utility MageHeroic TierPrerequisite: Wis 13, wizardBenefit: When you take an extended rest and you have access to your ritual...

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 9, 2008

4e: some neat things

Encounter design: I’ve been really skeptical of 4e’s encounter design in which each combat encounter has, by default, one creature (or trap) per party member. Here’s the thing, though, encounters are defined in such a way as being separated by a short (about 5 minute) rest. So, if you are in a dungeon and hit two rooms with monsters in...

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...