Tag: theory

March 19, 2008

How should PCs be special?

I haven’t been writing a lot about 4e, but I’ve been keeping up on the released information (official and unofficial). One thing that got me thinking was Keith Baker’s recent LJ post, in which he talked about how the PCs in an Eberron game are presumed to be special and use different rules from most NPCs. Now, I’ve long been...

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...

February 8, 2008

Fairness Rules!

I’ve been thinking a bit about rules that I’ve seen D20 as not handling well (or at all): disproportionately-sized opponents, facing, grappling, mass combat, surprise, mounted combat, and things like that. (The astute among you will note that many of these are related.) Most of my thoughts have been along the lines of attempting to create relatively realistic models for...

February 5, 2008

What if you don’t like carrots?

One assumption that I’ve been toying with is that PC advancement is tied to accumulated, earned experience points. For most, this is a no-brainer. I, however, lack a brain… so I had to question it. Once I did, I stopped and wondered… why, if D&D assumes an average rate of advancement of one level per 11 encounters, does it bother...

January 25, 2008

The Unholy Trifecta

One week and I will be free. I’m seriously considering ZeFRS (or a tweaked version thereof) for running the Thundarr/Exalted game. One unlikely benefit of this? I think it comes pretty darn close to the Retro-Stupid-Pretentious ideal of Jeff’s Threefold Model. Retro: ZeFRS: a game system out of the 1980s Stupid: Thundarr: doesn’t get much stupider Pretentious: Various bits: Exalted,...

January 4, 2008

The Experience Equation

Rate of Character Advancement = 1 / Character Capability Something like this was an assumption of early D&D, but it has been lost. In today’s D&D, as it is meant to be played, you advance a level every 11 balanced encounters or so, and each level is roughly balanced with every other. Who knows what tomorrow’s D&D will bring? Well…...

December 26, 2007

One-on One Gaming

I ran into this thread on EN World this morning and it got me thinking about GMing for a single player. This is a subject I’ve been interested in for awhile – so much source material for RPGs is based around a single protagonist rather than a team. It seems as though a one-player, one-GM game might be liberating in...

November 28, 2007

What do you want to play?

I’ve been getting the GMing itch lately. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to run a game until February at the earliest. One of my first reactions to the idea of running a game was to think about asking people I play with the following questions: If you could have me run any RPG campaign for you… What genre would it...

November 6, 2007

Exalted: when virtues aren’t

White Wolf games have a habit of using dubious morality mechanics. As far as I can tell, this began with Vampire – as a method of tracking the loss of humanity and the dominance of a vampire’s inner beast. In Exalted, characters have virtue scores (nearly the same ones as in Vampire): Courage, Conviction, Temperance, and Compassion. Each of these...

October 18, 2007

Is character advancement a sacred cow?

A lot of the discussion about 4e has been about questioning (and euthanizing, where appropriate) sacred cows – leftover rules and assumptions that are there because they’ve always been there and have been considered to be necessary parts of the game. As I was driving Pat home from the last Rebel Scum session, I observed that my PC (Kip Fendo,...