Category: Uncategorized

September 12, 2007

Bad Press

Lore Sjöberg thinks he’s funny. He hasn’t been. Not since the Brunching Shuttlecocks… and I suspect that Brunching may have been funny despite him. I sometimes find myself reading his column in Wired – mostly because I follow a link and didn’t realize it would end up on his column. I find that I am invariably sorry I did so....

September 10, 2007

Character Roles, Part II

So… last night Angela and I were talking a bit about Character Roles. It occurred to me (sometimes I am slow), that the roles presumably designated in 4e (Controller, Defender, Leader, Striker) are primarily combat roles. What about non-combat roles? One of the big reasons why I think that many D&D games move from fight-t0-fight with little in-between is that...

September 10, 2007

Weekend Gaming

This weekend was Nick’s birthday, so he ran some games. He ran his nominally-bi-monthly Mage game (last played in early July, maybe?) and, on his birthday, he ran an Alternity game. Before running the game, he asked us for input. He was planning on making a bunch of pregenerated PCs for us to choose from, but he wanted to know...

September 7, 2007

The Rhythm of the City

An excerpt from the current draft of The City of Gourm: With its multitude of pumps and gears all ultimately driven by a single engine, the City of Gourm has an innate rhythm to it that has given rise to a distinctive musical tradition. Gourmish music tends to rely upon this rhythm, building melodies directly over it and occasionally accentuating...

September 6, 2007

Sometimes, I am a flake

I haven’t been getting much work done on the Goblins of Gourm. I think that a combination of factors have contributed to this. Mostly, I think it is that I just lost momentum. On the other hand, for the past couple days, I’ve had an idea germinating for a huge gaming project. Maybe it is a setting book. Maybe it...

September 5, 2007

Meat Elemental

Archmage Elmer researches led to the discovery of the Elemental Plane of Meat. He has been known to employ the grotesque Meat Elementals as warriors and, occasionally, as servants. The material enclosed in the box below is released via the Open Game License. Meat Elemental Meat Elemental, Small Size/Type: Small Elemental (Meat, Extraplanar) Hit Dice: 2d8+2 (11 hp) Initiative: +0...

September 5, 2007

Character Roles

There has been a lot of talk about character roles in 4e. It sounds as though each character class is designed to produce PCs who will fill one of the following roles: Defender, Striker, Leader, or Controller. I understand, I think, why this is the case. It’s frustrating when you really want to play a Monk but what the group...

September 4, 2007

Beyond Alignment: Adding Moral Complexity to your Game

This article first appeared in the Silven Trumpeter (Vol. 4, Issue 2, June 2006). Many people play roleplaying games in order to escape from the moral ambiguity of real life. They want to sit down, roll some dice, kill some goblins, take their stuff, and feel good about it. Perhaps the only personal growth that they are interested in for...

September 4, 2007

Facelift Mark I

There will probably be tweaking… and there’s a good chance I might scrap the design altogether.

August 31, 2007

Some people like to buff?

This morning, I read the D&D article on PC Roles. It looked at a Fighter 4/Bard 7 under running under 3.5… and how the PC was relatively ineffective. The character, Nils, could increase his party’s effectiveness though bardic music and spells, but that took actions in which he wasn’t actively accomplishing anything on his own. The 4e solution to this...