Between Sea of Stars, G+, and a few other places, there’s been some discussion lately about what I see as the problem of fire mages. This problem generalizes somewhat to other tightly themed spellcasters, but the fire mage and the mind mage have it worst, I think. The problem is that […]
This post is a response to Mike Mearls’s two items on save-or-die mechanics, here and here. I wrote a bit about the situation with save-or-die in high level play back in this post, but I’ll expand on it a bit here. (I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you: I […]
It’s been almost five months since I last commented on crafting systems in any detail in this blog – but no longer! Kainenchen and I were talking about… something or other, I can’t recall what, but we came around to discussing some particular instance of crafting that I felt didn’t […]
This post is in reaction to the most recent Legends & Lore post by Monte Cook. This will be a serious test case for my rule against fulmination in this blog – but never mind that, go read Monte’s post and come back.I’ve run two D&D campaigns up to 13th […]
I have, from time to time, done some freelance design and writing in the general area of D&D (starting in 3.0 and continuing through d20 Modern and 4e), so while I am far from an authority on matters of the Open Gaming License and its hollow look-alike, the Game System […]
The concept of designing D&D around a certain number of encounters per day first came to the fore in D&D 3.0. I think everyone reading this is probably familiar with the concept already, but I’d like to drill down on it a bit, because this approach completely changed D&D, and […]
The announcement of D&D Next, 5th Edition, whatever you want to call it, has unsurprisingly lit a fire under the gaming blogosphere, and now that I’m past the DtD one-day, I’m certainly up for commenting on what I’d like to see and the problems that I hope they attack. Much […]
One of the most significant challenges that I’ve faced in running Mage: the Awakening is working out how to structure a satisfying challenge. For all that the many books of new Mage include chapter after chapter of advice to GMs on different kinds of campaigns one could run, ideas for […]
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 […]