theory Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Neitherworld Stories

September 10, 2007

Character Roles, Part II

So… last night Angela and I were talking a bit about Character Roles. It occurred to me (sometimes I am slow), that the roles presumably designated in 4e (Controller, Defender, Leader, Striker) are primarily combat roles. What about non-combat roles? One of the big reasons why I think that many D&D games move from fight-t0-fight with little in-between is that...

September 5, 2007

Character Roles

There has been a lot of talk about character roles in 4e. It sounds as though each character class is designed to produce PCs who will fill one of the following roles: Defender, Striker, Leader, or Controller. I understand, I think, why this is the case. It’s frustrating when you really want to play a Monk but what the group...

September 4, 2007

Beyond Alignment: Adding Moral Complexity to your Game

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 interested in for...

August 31, 2007

Some people like to buff?

This morning, I read the D&D article on PC Roles. It looked at a Fighter 4/Bard 7 under running under 3.5… and how the PC was relatively ineffective. The character, Nils, could increase his party’s effectiveness though bardic music and spells, but that took actions in which he wasn’t actively accomplishing anything on his own. The 4e solution to this...

August 30, 2007

More external effects of the 4e announcement

I’m finding a lot of people writing thoughtfully about the d20 rules and how they might be tweaked and/or rewritten. Some of this is speculation. Some of it is wishful thinking. Regardless, I think it is, in general, a good thing to think critically about rules and whether they serve the purposes of fun. I’m enjoying reading EN World’s 4e...

August 24, 2007

Abandon All Hope… and stop having fun

This is a continuation, of sorts, of my last post. Let’s assume that the primary point of gaming is to have fun. You might disagree with this, but if you do… well… then what you and I do when we game are wholly different activities. Anyway… In any situation, some things can make a gaming experience more fun and some...

August 24, 2007

Playing in the Sandbox

Three weeks ago, Jeff blogged about sandbox play, and I said that I’d address it here at some point. Between then and now was a New Orleans trip, moving, and GenCon. Now, I am trying to get caught up. The basic idea of sandbox-play is that there is a world around the PCs and that the PCs can go anywhere...

July 30, 2007

Gauging morality

Moving is tonight. Tomorrow starts a week in New Orleans. Now is the time to be distracted. One of the things that I claimed I was going to talk about when I began this blog was morality in gaming. I don’t mean the morality of gamers at the gaming table, but rather how gaming can have moral content in various...

April 25, 2007

Sequential art

Monday after work I picked up Angela and we met Tim over at the Krannert Art Museum to see a talk by Scott McCloud. It was good. It was in fact, the best use of a powerpointesque (Keynote, actually) presentation I have ever seen. I suppose that shouldn’e be a surprise coming from someone who is a sequential art theorist…...

April 17, 2007

“The Great Clomping Foot of Nerdism”

I’ve seen a lot of talk about this lately, and its relevance to rpgs. For those of you afraid of following links, sf writer Mike Harrison has declared worldbuilding to be dull, unnecessary, and futile. My thoughts? First, what he has to say is about writing – and reading – not about roleplaying. He claims (note that I did not...

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