Money Sinks: A Different Angle 3

In talking about the system of upkeep I discussed in the last post, Kainenchen, this one guy, and I worked out another sort of monetary drain, to be used in place of or in conjunction with the upkeep mentioned previously. This started as a discussion of how players should be […]

Play, As Time Goes By 7

If this isn’t the first post you’ve read in this blog, you’ll probably realize that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about crafting in tabletop games lately. Talking around and through the problems with designing a crafting system has brought me to another point that bears discussion, and that […]

Crafting Systems in Tabletop Games: AD&D, Second Edition 3

I made some references in this post to crafting in 2e. Since then, I dug out my 2e Player’s Handbook and Complete Fighter’s Handbook to reread the rules there. What I found there was interesting for what it is and what it isn’t. Let me start by pointing out that these […]

MKULTRA D&D: Session report 2

(See previous post.) I was fortunate that we eventually wound up with four players and a lot of time to play in the game I ran this past Sunday. It looked for awhile like that might not pan out thanks to the Great Southern Ice Age of 2010. The party […]

A Boxing Day One-Shot 2

I’ll be running a one-shot D&D 4th edition game on Sunday. I’ve asked the players to create 7th level characters of any race, but using only the martial and psionic power sources. This is a mashup of, at the very least, Psychonauts and Inception. The players are MKULTRA operatives for […]

Follow-up to the Rout idea

So Samhaine and I got to talking in the comment thread of the previous post, leading to an IM conversation. The idea we came up with was Dungeon Inertia, allowing players to weaken superior numbers of enemies in a dungeon by demoralizing them, and allowing players to worry a little […]

3e/4e design idea: Rout 8

So, I was talking to a friend about an issue in my D&D 4th edition campaign that generalizes to most (though not all) game systems. Specifically, it’s incredibly difficult to escape a combat unless the fleeing character(s) have a movement mode not available to the pursuers. Xorn movement (a.k.a. earth […]

Crafting Systems in LARPs: Part One 3

So Kainenchen and I got to talking this morning about crafting in LARPs. I touched on some of this in an earlier post, but I’m going into more detail here. While crafting systems in MMOs are sometimes problematic (too rewarding or not rewarding enough, ruinous to the economy, and so […]

From Here to There

Please excuse me while I blatantly publicize a work in which my own writing appears. The two adventures of mine that are in this book I wrote back when D&D 4th edition was still new, and though I have learned more about adventure design for 4e since then, I think […]

Shadows of Azathoth: Design In Progress 5

So a friend of mine is working on designing a game he’s calling Shadows of Azathoth. There are a lot of neat ideas going on here, but the ones that interest me at the moment are that memory is priceless and memory is unstable. With his permission, this post comments […]