I cheat a bit when I run Leverage and its variants. According to the rules, when the GM spends a PP to create something, it’s created at d6. I’m less kind, and when I create things, they’re d8s, and for all intents and purposes, I have an infinite budget of d6s that I can use […]
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It’s On Fire
Fred here. The following is an excerpt of a post I made to the FateRPG Yahoo Group, where someone was trying to wrap their head around the whole “On Fire is an Aspect” thing that pretty much comes up every time someone’s talking about aspects with folks who are less familiar with them. High time […]
How I See The Credits
The Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game rolled out today. It’s awesome, simple as that, but I wanted to take a moment to throw up my own version of the credits page. That said, if you’re on this, and want your descriptor changed, add a comment, and it will happen!
Notebooks
Curiosity was expressed regarding how I come up with stuff, so here are a few pages from the notebook I’m thinking in, representing a few thoughtful days..
WOTC’s 3 Pillars
Not sure I buy into this, but a mention on twitter of WOTC’s 3 pillers of RPG (Exploration, Roleplaying and Combat) popped it into my mind. (EDIT: Dave rightly points out that Wizards views these as the three pillars of D&D, a subtle but important distinction)
More Guys With Swords
For a friend’s birthday this weekend, a request was made for a game to be run, and given a combination of short notice and assessment of the taste of all players involved, I ran Two Guys With Swords. 2GwS has a somewhat fantastic self-selection process. It is run (at least by me) with a certain […]
Tags and Axes (and Axes)
Ok, so if you’re not going to do damage types (or even more complicated things like weapon versus armor type tables) then how should you go about meaningful weapon differentiation? Well, first off, why would you want to? Isn’t that a pretty finicky idea? Yes, it kind of is. And it’s entirely possible (and reasonable) […]
The Golf Bag Tactician
There’s an interesting question over at Rob Schwalb’s D&D blog about whether weapon damage should be typed. In practice this would mean that weapons might do, say, “slashing” “bludgeoning” and “piercing” damage, and implicitly removing entirely the idea of “untyped” damage from the system. This is, on the surface, a kind of compelling idea (and […]
Archetypes and Planting Flags
We respond instinctively to archetypes, and a lot of shysters take advantage of this. Yes, there’s a lot of interesting, useful stuff about them (Hero With A Thousand Blah Blah Blah) but the reality is that if you come up with a list of, say, 3 or more things, and define it broadly, then it […]
The Five People At My Table
I believe that when you design a game, it helps to have an audience in mind, the more specific the better. Trying to make a game for everyone seems noble, but it’s unlikely to challenge you as a designer, and it’s more likely to produce something that’s fairly weak sauce. Yes, targeting an audience runs […]