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 […]
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Index Card Situation
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 […]
Index Card Tactics
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 […]
A Thesis
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 […]
Why Anime Conflict is Hard
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 […]
Sealed Envelopes
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 […]
An Idea
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 […]
Heroic Adventuring
I ran a game last night on relatively little prep. I was using Dave Chalker’s Marvel Heroic RPG-D&D 4e hack, and I threw together some notes to create the adventure as quickly as I could and threw them up on google plus, just because they’re a nice showcase of how I think (NARCISSIST). However, fate […]
Don’t Take The Affiliation, Even Though It’s Awesome
Affiliations are one of the neat ideas in the Marvel Heroic RPG. They touch upon what I had to say about normal the other day because they are (arguably) the central part of any roll you make in Marvel. That is to say, you could conceivably make a roll where none of your powers, distinctions […]
What Makes a Skill
Yesterday, I stole one idea form Bulldogs! and today I’m going to steal another. Back in the day, Feng Shui presented a very interesting way to handle skills that worked very well for it’s wide, loose model. In short, a skill represented three things. The first, Physical Ability, was the traditional meaning of a skill […]