This all began with @sarahdarkmagic raising an innocuous question on twitter: how to run breaking into a castle in 4e. Specifically, the issue was that doing it as a skill challenge did not provide the right feel, which was more fast and skirmishy, taking out guards and such. Now, I could argue that a skill […]
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Pacing
The first post-holiday game of the Cold War game I’ve been running was last night. Coming back from a break is always rough, and there’s often a fear the game will have lost it’s inertia during the hiatus. Thankfully, things went off very well, and we had a great adventure chasing shadows and lightning in […]
Gamma World: Vehicle House Rules Rough Draft
So, vehicles. They exist in Gamma World, but they’re poorly supported. Here’s a very rough sketch of how I might handle them in mine, if it came up: – Vehicles have hit points (a given) and sometimes a resistance to physical damage. Size the hitpoints about how you might a monster of a level on […]
Hack: Use Your Grid-Maps With Fate
So, I love our semi-abstract method of zone maps in Fate, but playing and running (far more run than play) 4e has left me a little bit bitten by the maps-and-minis bug. There are times when I’d like to see Fate happen with a little more of a rooted, concrete, tactical map-reality. So that’s been […]
Skill Challenge Preview
So, the preview for the Skill Challenge chapter of the DMG II is up here and careful readers may note a reason I’m particularly curious to see it. The skill challenge they present is, by the by, also a decent illustration of how to do a seamless skill challenge. While the DM can absolutely explicitly […]
OK, it’s on
D&D, my place, noon on saturday, running til 5 at the latest. 7th level characters, usual treasure rules (1 7th, 1 8th, 1 6th or 3 7th level items, plus cash equivalent to a level 7 item). Classes are limited to those in need of showcasing: choose from Artificer, Barbarian, Druid and Shaman. If we […]
The City Challenge
judd_sonofbert put forward a really fascinating challenge to try to capture the feel he enjoys about China Mieville’s New Crobuzon (The city from Perdido Street Station and other books) using D&D and it’s magnificent weirdness as a starting point. The rules, such as they are, can be found here, but in short, they call for […]
The Whiff Factor: GUMSHOE Edition
As a part of getting my head wrapped around the upcoming GUMSHOE game Mutant City Blues game from Pelgrane (think the Powers comic book as an RPG), I decided to sit down with The Esoterrorists and give it a read. I’d heard some mixed reviews (1, 2) about this game both online and off, and […]