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See More »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 […]
A little while ago, a friend of mine started a conversation in G+ about the Next Big Evolution in LARPing, without getting into specifics of what he thought that change might represent. The idea has been knocking around in my head since then, and I’ve come up with a number […]
So I was playing Battleheart on my iPhone… kind of obsessively (hush, Kainenchen)… and the particular way that the power level of the skeletons advances gave me a few ideas. I really like something about the idea that undead from this one particular canyon, swamp, or whatever have different powers […]
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 […]
My most recent session of Mage: the Awakening has reminded me, quite directly, of the problem of time in the system. I’m not talking (well, not directly) about the Realm of Time, which – all things considered – is pretty cogent. No, in this case I’m going back to the […]
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 […]
In the Eclipse campaign, I play a human who has been heavily modified with cybernetics. I’ve been playing this character since the start of the campaign, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about theoretical alternate implementations of cybernetics. I want to be very clear that this is […]
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 […]
As one of the test audience for Samhaine‘s system reviews, I played in a Savage Worlds session this past weekend, set in the classic D&D setting of Ravenloft. (In fact, he’s even posted the module!) The GM pregenerated characters and some backstory for each of us. I played Rhys Sulien […]
