Sorry about the hiatus, folks. Work is into a crunch and I am lucky to get to the end of the day with enough energy to watch TV, much less put pen to paper. Still, trying to wrestle this beast to the ground, since I don’t want this idea to wither on the vine. So, […]
Ok, so you’ve got a nice shiny die representing your class. That’s all you need, right? Well, sure, we could leave it there, but that would be kind of dull. Instead we’re going to jazz it up with a little bit of crunch that really shines a light on what a class does. At the […]
Classes in ICT are explicitly designed to carry a lot of weight. They have their own rules, with the idea being that you need to learn the core rules, but beyond that you only need familiarity with the rules relevant to your class or classes. In this sense, it’s a bit like 4e, but unlike […]
DistinctionsIndex Card Tactics made use of distinctions – 3 per characters. For the unfamiliar these are descriptors without die values. Some of the ones we had in play included “Poor sense of direction” and “Very good at WANTING to be a knight”. Players may add a single distinction to a roll: if the player […]
This is not technically part of Index Card Tactics, though it’s related, in that another part of ICT is that it uses situation generators like Two Guys With Swords. This is another such tool (and don’t worry, I’ll be getting onto classes and equipment and so on). This trick works best for a group of 4 or […]
I was talking about this with Ryan Macklin last night and I had a moment of “huh, I should write this down” so here it is. At Pax East, I ran a game of what can probably best be described as tabletop Final Fantasy Tactics. Early in the con I had run a game of […]
Not Particularly Contentious: GM Skill/Quality strongly impacts quality of play experience. Only Contentious In a Fake Way: Choice of game system strongly impacts quality of play experience. My (Possibly Contentious) Thesis: As quality of GM increases, the impact of choice of game system on quality of play experience diminishes (though it is unlikely to diminish […]
I called this out as too long for twitters, so here it is. In Everway, Jonathan Tweet laid out a model for resolution of uncertainty in RPGs that’s been pretty foundational to a lot of thinking. Basically, when faced with a moment of uncertainty (such as a conflict) there are three factors that play into […]
One of the neater little susbsystems on Road to Amber is something that equates to an automated system of sealed envelopes. The player receives the meta-object, which contains any number of seals, often sequential, but sometimes parallel. Each seal has its own requirements to be opened, such as being in the right place, using the […]
Not sure if this is a handout or just a placeholder, but it fell onto my screen tonight. Additional thoughts Make sure to keep the NPC cards. If you do this more than once, you can start adding them to the table beforehand and changing the number of new vs existing NPCs used. If you’re […]