Tag: theory

May 29, 2011

Old thoughts on Wraith

My wife is planning on starting up a tabletop Wraith game. Wraith has a bit of a bad reputation, but it is one of my favorite games out there in some ways. Its game mechanics required PCs to care about things. Its setting was rich, and it could handle stories both intensely personal or epic in scope equally well. Unfortunately,...

December 8, 2008

Playing for the endgame

How many times have you heard people say that, in D&D 3.5, it doesn’t pay to multi-class with a spellcaster because it would inhibit your ability to get 9th level spells? How about telling you not to take a particular feat because it will be useless after 15th level? …or that you should take several sub-par feats because, at high...

November 24, 2008

Beyond Alignment: Adding Moral Complexity to your Game (Reprint)

Reposted from 9/4/07 This article first appeared in the Silven Trumpeter (Vol. 4, Issue 2, June 2006). Many people play roleplaying games in order to escape from the moral ambiguity of real life. They want to sit down, roll some dice, kill some goblins, take their stuff, and feel good about it. Perhaps the only personal growth that they are...

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...

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...

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...

May 19, 2008

4e: The anti-minion?

Earlier today, I wrote about minions in 4e. Since then, I’ve been wondering… about the flip side of a minion. A minion is an otherwise normally powered opponent who can be taken down with a single hit. What about an otherwise normally powered opponent who simply can’t be taken down? I’d call this a “mastermind” but that name appears to...

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 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...

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...