System, Hold the Math
Just to illustrate something, here are a pair of systems that you can use as a basis for resolution. They share two key characteristics - neither is math dependent but both are heavily expectations...
View ArticleQuick 13th Age thought
The obvious hack for 13th Age + Eberron is to make the 13 Dragonmarked houses into the icons. Yeah, sure, you'll want some feats for Dragonmarks[1], blah blah blah, but that's the easy part. I'm more...
View ArticleWhy Feats Fail Me
So, I started actually making up 13th Age characters the other day, just to get my hands dirty. If nothing else, it's a pleasantly fast and dirty job. The skills and one unique thing end up being...
View ArticleXbox Task List
Outside of games, I put a lot of time and effort into trying to stay organized. I've tried various systems and tools, and I usually gravitate back to some variant on Getting Things Done, usually to...
View ArticleTempo Lives
A while back I posted the system I was using for a spies game, and I talked a bit about using it as a platform to design a game. That went silent for a bit, but it bubbled to the surface this past...
View ArticleSilly Name, Fun Idea
So, the Marvel Heroic RPG has one of the most clever initiative systems I've ever seen. For the unfamiliar, it basically breaks down as follows - someone goes first, and after they're done, they choose...
View ArticleMetatopia 2012 - Overview
It's election night, but early enough that almost all the projections are nonsense, so rather than chew my nails and start at red and blue maps, this seems like I should take the time to write about...
View ArticleMetatopia Panels
Just a quick post: The recorded panels from Metatopia are going up here. Totally worth listening too.
View ArticleSmarter Than The Average Everyman
I think the idea of a smart character may be an essential dividing line between fiction and RPGs and in turn may be informative of a major split within RPGs along similar lines. So based on that let me...
View ArticleMooks Gone Haywire
This is related to the Smart Everyman thing, but in ways that may not be immediately obvious.If you haven't seen it, Steven Soderburgh's Haywire is a great movie. As with Mamet's Spartan it's an action...
View ArticleRich Skills
Sci-fi and Fantasy author Kate Elliot has a fantastic post up today about the skills that her protagonist has and why. While I do not doubt that it's useful stuff from the perspective of writing, it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Argument For Rich Dice In One Image
(With Apologies to Atomic Robo. For more info on Rich Dice, check here)
View ArticleUser Stories and Adventure Design
Agile project management (and related ideas like Scrum or Kanban) is something that I deal with a lot on a day to day basis. It's too big a topic to fully explain, but in a nutshell, it's a method of...
View ArticleWhere I've Been
So, I've run more silent than usual of late, but there's a good reason for it.Evil Hat kicked off the Fate Core kickstarter a little while back, and it's doing well. Really, really well. And part of...
View ArticleWhat's in a Book?
If you have never done so, stop and think about what goes into a good RPG book. Not the RPG, but the book itself.There are a lot of challenges a designer faces when it comes time to design the book....
View ArticleMy Kind of Stunts
I do not take a terribly mechanistic approach to stunts. It’s a taste thing, but by and large I want stunts to be big, sweeping things which say something big and meaningful about the character, not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Choice Triangle
There is a business idea called, among other names, the project management triangle. Basically, any project has three priorities - speed, quality and cost - and these are the points on the triangle....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crutch Questions
There are a category of questions in RPGS which are both tremendously potent and tremendously annoying to me. I refer to them as "crutch" questions because they are incredibly useful if you haven't...
View ArticleAn Idea I Don't Get
There's an idea that I see from time to time in setting design which I don't entirely get the appeal of, and that is the idea of the lethal setting. That is, there is some element of the setting which...
View ArticleSlow Menaces
(I turned on G+ linking, so we'll see how that works with this post)Dr. Who is has a Cybermen story in the pipe, and I guess maybe Neil Gaiman is behind it or something. I honestly have no idea. It's...
View Article
