We’re about fourteen sessions into my Mage: the Awakening chronicle, and I’ve been pondering the game’s system of distributing experience points. Mages receive the normal share of experience that all World of Darkness characters receive (“general experience”), as well as earning a secondary pool of Arcane Experience.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately in Eclipse‘s Rules Forum about invisibility and powers that counter invisibility. This is a very complicated topic in LARPing; we spent the better part of a year (off and on) discussing it while designing DtD, and I’m going to try to summarize the […]
On 19 November, 2010, I created this blog and posted about the games I was running and playing. Things have changed an awful lot for me since then, with six months of unemployment followed by a new job, friends moving away, and the beginning of Dust to Dust. Games I’m […]
This post continues the development of ideas presented previously, with specific numbers and the introduction of a few new ideas to the mix. As before, I’ll tip my hat to Wombat Warlord, who has worked with these ideas a lot more than I have, and without whom I probably would […]
As part of Samhaine’s ongoing tests of all kinds of indie-gaming systems, we recently played a very enjoyable evening of Don’t Rest Your Head. I played Corwin van der Hoyt, a crosstown courier who worked for some kind of shady people; he was a Mirror’s-Edge style thrillseeker. Ever since the […]
Shortly before our most recent Dust to Dust event, we released rules for wizard dueling. In this post, I want to talk about some of the design considerations that drove this project, some of the ideas we set aside, and some of the problems that we didn’t discover until after […]
I’ve been playing Echo Bazaar pretty constantly since I started a couple of months ago, and it’s what brought this to mind for me, but Samhaine pointed out that Smallville did the same, and as I thought about it I realized that it’s not a new idea, I just happen to […]
I’ve been working on creating a decent crafting system for tabletop games for as long as I’ve worked on this blog, and then some. I’ve discussed some of the hurdles to doing so before; the things that make crafting interesting in MMOs don’t apply in tabletop gaming. There are big […]
Samhaine has recently been posting his GM-side analysis of Technoir, and I’ve been talking about it more or less nonstop in my posts, so here’s my actual post discussing it. In the second session he ran, I played Thornton “Pierce” Kimball, an investigator who had been working for Minnesota’s Big […]
There’s been a lot of talk lately about skills in D&D 4e. Sarah Darkmagic’s last two posts (here and here) are a working summary of the current round of this discussion, and I can’t say enough good about some of Rob Donoghue’s posts on this topic, though you’ll have to […]