Neitherworld Stories - Page 47 of 56 - Tabletop roleplaying games and other geekery

January 29, 2007

About last night

Last night’s D&D game was fun. It was our third session, and we finally (sort of) saw some combat. Combat the first: a guard recognized me as an escaped prisoner. I tried to bluff him with the ‘do all dwarves look alike to you?’ sort of line, but my bluff score is less than stellar. I’ll need to do something...

January 25, 2007

Complete Scoundrel: First Impressions

I’m feeling updatey today. This isn’t really going to be a review. I’ve skimmed through the book, but I haven’t read it in detail. I’ve already talked a bit about skill tricks and luck feats – two of the more notable things included in the Complete Scoundrel. After skimming through it, what do I think? I think this book would...

January 25, 2007

Brainwriting a Campaign

Today I was in a training all morning. One of the things we covered were some team-based brainstorming techniques. I’d been familiar with the idea of brainwriting before, but this morning I thought of using it for group campaign design. Here’s the basic (slightly edited for my purpose) idea. You begin with a grid/table (a spreadsheet works). Across the top...

January 25, 2007

Game Drama

Last night’s Aberrant game had some player-drama. We are still less than a half-dozen sessions in to the game. Some of us are coming together into a cohesive group. Others, less so. One of the players believes that his character’s concept is dependent upon him having a secret identity. Another character is a telepathic spy who revealed the first PC’s...

January 23, 2007

Dumb Luck

Who is it that decided that a character in an RPG who is extraordinarily lucky should have that luck modeled by re-rolling dice? I know that White Wolf did this – both in their World of Darkness games (in which Luck was a Merit) and in Aberrant (in which it was a power). I am fairly certain that I saw...

January 18, 2007

Surprisngly good gaming

Last night was Aberrant. I’ve been skeptical about it, mostly because I am worn out on White Wolf and there are some system elements to the game that I really dislike. That’s okay. Last night it was about the roleplaying. Considering that most of the game was a big fight scene, that’s pretty cool. The campaign is set in 1998....

January 11, 2007

Game Bloat

I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with White Wolf’s Storyteller system and its variants over the last year or so, but I find that I am still most annoyed with my original pet peeve with them – I call it skill bloat. In the Storyteller system, characters have a number of skills that range from 0 to 5 points. At character creation,...

January 11, 2007

Am I repeating myself?

It just occurred to me that my second-to last post here was near-identical to one I’d written back in September. I think I am getting old.

January 10, 2007

Fun without playing the game

More thoughts inspired by Iron Gauntlets combat… So, IG combat involves a tactical resource management minigame. Sometimes, as mentioned in my last post, I approve of tactical minigames in combat. Thinking about it, though, I believe they should be somewhat optional. If I’m playing a character who is a competent warrior, my skill in combat shouldn’t be wholly dependent on...

January 9, 2007

Do I know what I want?

I keep thinking about the system in Iron Gauntlets. One of the things that I love in resolution systems is stuff akin to IG’s overkill mechanic: if more dice come up successes than you need to succeed at a task, the extra dice represent overkill. I like it when systems allow this overkill (or its analogue) to be used flexibly....