In working on Quintessence, I’ve been trying to think of situations, either realistic or cinematic, that other tabletop games don’t model well, if at all. So when Kainenchen and I watched Stardust the other day, I was struck by the many times that a character sets a blade at another character’s […]
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve put 15k words into a playtest document for Quintessence, and today I got to a span of rules I’ve seriously dreaded writing. The 4e brawler build of the fighter class is about the only version of grappling rules I think I’ve ever seen in […]
There are a lot of lessons of good game-running that carry over between tabletop and live-action gaming. This post, though, concerns itself with an area in which the two are quite different. As usual, I’m talking about a certain band of LARPing, not all LARPing. (There are almost no statements that […]
With a lot of my posts about game design, I talk separately about how things work in tabletop games and live-action games. When I came to the topic of lore skills, I first discussed how they work in a number of local LARPs, because I feel like LARPs have a […]
The final-final update to the playtest packet offers a second paladin oath (apparently this is where they’re storing the avenger class now?), some tweaks to paladin spell DCs (not paralleled in the ranger, for whatever reason), and a huge revision to Wild Shape and the Circle of the Moon, over […]
We’ve had the druid, paladin, and ranger in the last couple of playtest packets. These three classes have a greater burden of justifying their own existence than many other classes in the game. They need to differentiate themselves from the classes of which they were offshoots, way back in 2e […]
The last few Legends & Lore posts have touched on issues around healing in D&D Next, as have a number of the blogs I read, so this is me, casting my chapeau in again… jauntily, of course. As one does. The driving conflict here is whether D&D Next will adopt […]
It’s long established in this blog that I like to talk about spells and magic, and today is another of those days. D&D Next spell design is currently a bizarre melange of new ideas and old spells that have been with D&D for two or more editions. For example, lance […]
In a recent post on rogues, I discussed some of the issues surrounding 4e’s implementation of skill challenges. I’ve had a few days to give it more thought, and the idea has expanded in my imagination into something I might try to publish as a PDF, someday when I have […]
Before all else in this post: I am not an Economics major. I am, moreover, aware that I am not an economics major. I do know a few things about games, though. (Commentary by actual economics majors is welcome, though.)I’ve been reading the Valve economics blog, and it got me […]