The third part of my personal rpg history series. The second part dealt with my formative years in the mid-’90s, so here I’ll write about how I stopped roleplaying. I’ve told this story to many people when it’s come up, but perhaps there’ll be some interesting detail here for those interested in that sort of
My Roleplaying History #3 Read More »
The story of my roleplaying history continues. The last part was about my earliest rpg memories and how I came to initiate myself into the hobby of roleplaying in the first place. This second part has some real rpg action, I’ll write about my first rpg-playing years.
My Roleplaying History #2 Read More »
A friend of mine, Sami Koponen, wrote about his roleplaying history a while back (in Finnish). He also asked a bunch of other Finnish roleplayers to write similarly about theirs. I’ve been relatively busy with work-type things, but I might as well do this rpg history thing at this juncture. This’ll be quite a long
My Roleplaying History #1 Read More »
I haven’t been blogging much lately, what with being busy doing real work. A little convention report should be doable, however: we were at Levels in Jyväskylä this past weekend with my brothers to represent and advocate for roleplaying game culture amongst the other game programming. Levels is a small video game convention (500 people
Levels at Jyväskylä Read More »
I’m something of a fanatic when it comes to the rules of Diplomacy. I have a reverence for them that must be quite unhealthy – I consider the game one of the most perfect designer games, a wonderfully powerful and robust engine that does exactly what it purports to. Thus I’m very hesitant to give
Challenging the Diplomacy rules? Read More »
Diplomacy is one of the most played and researched of modern designer boardgames. Regardless, many interesting theoretical issues remain. One I’ve been occupying myself with is scoring games – or more generally, evaluating player performance. I have some vague notion that this’ll be useful when we have tournaments here in Finland, but mostly I just
Overview of the Diplomacy scoring conundrum Read More »
This is a sort of sister thread for my look at Vancian magic from last week. Looking at what you actually do in D&D (generally, not specifically the modern take), this is what I get: Plenty of freeform negotiation of situations (which I’ve sort of already dealt with last year in my discussion of challenge-based
About the D&D Combat System Read More »
I’ve been reading Dungeons & Dragons books from the end of the ’80s – meaning the Mentzer edition, to be exact. They’re full of freaky shit that makes little sense, but is certainly thought provoking. My favourite is the Crucible of the Blackflame, the halfling racial artifact that has the minor power to repeal entropy
Busy, busy… but luckily I’m again having a bit of time to develop the English-language Arkenstone webpages. Those have been lying in a somewhat unfinished state through the autumn and winter, as I haven’t had time to create the materials to make them complete. Now I have a bit more time, though, so I’m doing
I’ve managed to get some work done on the new TSoY book I’m supposed to be creating. Difficult to make time for uninterrupted writing, but perhaps I’ll manage now that the holidays went away. Aside from planning the book and writing some chapters, I’ve been planning more campaign frames for playtest. Specifically, I’m figuring out