Neitherworld Stories - Page 24 of 56 - Tabletop roleplaying games and other geekery

March 17, 2008

Random observations (that aren’t mine)

On Saturday, Angela and I went for a walk and ended up talking mostly about gaming. Angela has a somewhat different perspective on gaming than I do. She never gamed growing up, but she had an old (1e) AD&D Monster Manual that she enjoyed. She got pulled into LARPing in college – first Vampire (which she didn’t really like the...

March 17, 2008

Character Update: Bart

Angela’s been running her D&D game for over a year now. We play about twice a month or so, on average. I’ve been playing Bart, my dwarf chef, for the entire time. The group’s at 8th level now – though we often end up tackling things much harder than we should. Tonight, for instance, we took out a 17th level...

March 14, 2008

Happy Pi Day

In honor of Pi Day, my favorite pie recipe: TO MAKE AN AMBLONGUS PIE Take 4 pounds (say 4 1/2 pounds) of fresh Amblongusses, and put them in a small pipkin. Cover them with water and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and proceed to boil for 4 hours more. When you...

March 12, 2008

The slippery slope – a dungeon trap?

Yesterday, Jeff posted about “classic” dungeon crawls – the sort that get more challenging the further down you go with numbered dungeon levels that correspond to the levels of characters for which they are an appropriate challenge. Something has been bothering me about the post, but I didn’t put my finger on it until this afternoon. Most of the discussion...

March 12, 2008

In which we make bad gaming/politics analogies…

Last night, while playing Exalted, we got into a discussion about how we would write up the various U.S. presidential candidates as Exalted characters, with a particular emphasis upon their virtues. Here’s my take: Barack Obama: Zenith Caste Solar key abilities: Integrity, Performance, Presence, Socialize virtues: Compassion 3, Conviction 3, Temperance 4, Valor 2 Hilary Clinton: Eclipse Caste Solar key...

March 11, 2008

Ramblings on monster diversity, combat, and Oblivion…

A lot of people love monsters. Personally, I like reading bestiaries for fun. I can sit down with a Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, or Creature Catalog and read it cover to cover. I think Angela has MMI-MMV and has made noises about acquiring others. Do we really need that many monsters, though? If so, why? I’m pretty sure it isn’t...

March 7, 2008

Barbarian’s Dream House

It strikes me as odd, but I suspect that most D&D characters are technically homeless. This varies for other RPGs, of course. Many PCs in modern games have homes. Having a home in an RPG is often something of a liability. In a Mage game I played once, I sunk a ton of background points into a mansion. My PC...

March 5, 2008

Dear Gary,

When I was a kid, I looked up to you. I never told you that. Maybe it’s because I pretty much grew out of my childhood heroes (except for Zorro, of course). Pretensions of maturity and resentfulness get in the way of a lot. Yeah, once I learned that there were options, I grew to resent a lot of the...

March 3, 2008

Proprietary feelings

In all but the most sandboxriffic of games, GMs put things into play specifically for certain players and their PCs. In many cases, this might be as simple as polling players on what sorts of enemies they want to face – or creating in-game rewards that will have special meaning to one or more of the PCs. This is, in...

February 29, 2008

Potion go boom

I just saw this thread over on EN World, and it got me thinking… The material enclosed in the box below is released via the Open Game License. New Feat: Create Spell Grenade [Item Creation] PrerequisiteBrew Potion BenefitYou can create potions from ray spells (spells in which the effect is a ray) of third level or lower using the normal...