Last week I had little time for gaming, but I did manage to pull off a rather interesting session of trad-style adventure gaming with Runeslayers. We played for five hours, during which time we managed to create characters for two players and play through a large enough arc of adventure. There were two players and […]
Fantasy Adventure: Runeslayers Read More »
After a brief bout of illness, back on track with my routines, including laying down track on my version of challengeful fantasy adventure. The topic this time is bootstrapping for adventure; this is not exactly at the center of my vision as far as my personal interests go, but it’ll probably be useful to understand
Fantasy Adventure #4: Downtime and Adventure Read More »
The combat system is at the heart of classical D&D, which is something that is actually a bit annoying for me. The core content of adventuring never was violence for me, so the relentless focus on fighting strikes me as a bit dull and wrong-headed. Thinking back, this is the main reason for why I
Fantasy Adventure #3: Combat system basics Read More »
Continuing my notes on my own version of the traditional fantasy adventure game, next up are character classes. My approach here is to preserve the 3rd edition multiclassing kernel and the way players define their characters as combinations of different classes. Meanwhile I also want to utterly decimate the D&D idea of preplanning character advancement
Fantasy Adventure #2: Classes and Levels Read More »
Re-creating Dungeons & Dragons is a common pastime of rpg enthusiasts. I started doing it myself with the 3rd edition in 2001 or so, when I decided to run a traditional fantasy campaign with the rules set. At the time I ended up rewriting the whole game starting with the combat and magic rules and
Fantasy Adventure #1: Abilities Read More »
I’ve been fiddling with a couple of Diplomacy variants based on the Baltic area during various times in European history. My interest has mostly been in figuring out how to make Diplomacy work well for different numbers of players. This is a non-trivial task, as most Diplomacy variants tend to leave different players in grossly
Diplomacy: The Triangle Theory of Variant Design Read More »
Inspired by the game carneval ludopedagogy seminar I attented last month, some basics on the topic follow. This is mostly just unwinding stuff from my own head without a particular goal to it in the short term; in the long term I wouldn’t mind working on some new pedagogical gaming; it’s an interesting topic, after
I visited Oulu for a long weekend last month, to participate in the game carneval around there. It is a most fascinating experiment, a gaming convention distributed into theme-coordinated events along a month’s time and funded as a cultural project. (They even paid my travel expenses, which is one surefire way of getting me to
Game Carneval of Oulu Read More »
Hmm… haven’t had time to blog lately (an eternal lament of the blogosphere, I’m sure). To fix it, a couple of words about a game of Diplomacy we played on Saturday with the kids around here. I’ve played lots of beginner tutorial -type Diplomacy games lately, and this one was no exception. In between me
Diplomacy: the Italian Cha-Cha Read More »
Continuing on my last post, I’ll outline a theory of what investigative play in Call of Cthulhu is really about. Investigation in roleplaying games is at the same time a rare yet common beast, so it’s important to understand what it does. Consider: almost any plot-based roleplaying game adventure is predicated on characters investigating this
What say you, Cthulhu? Read More »