Blog Archives

There’s sort of an unwritten rule in rpg discussion. There’s several of them, really: System doesn’t matter; it’s the GM that makes the game. There’s no reason to really be doctrinaire about which edition of a game is best; whatever works! The only wrong way to play rpgs is to tell people they’re doing it […]

It’s simultaneously the most marvelous and the most aggravating aspect of the really old role-playing games. Every time you pick up the rule book you can stumble across something that you never saw before! Just as the latest example, in the combat example from section 2.31 of 5th edition Tunnels & Trolls, an elf rogue has […]

If there’s one topic that’s been done to death in the old school scene it’s the all around adulation they have there for the unmitigated wisdom of classic D&D’s “XP for gold” rules. And it’s no wonder, really. The older XP rules are obviously dumb. Anyone can look at them and come up with more “realistic” ways […]

Traditionally, dungeon designers begin creating a fantasy adventure by drawing a map. (Really traditional dungeon designers cram as many rooms as they can fit onto a single piece of graph paper, but never mind that!) Then faced with dozens of empty rooms, the Dungeon Master is faced with the soul-numbing task of “stocking” them all. Most […]

Aaron B. writes in with a question: “Okay, that frequency of deaths is new to me, so I’m intrigued. I really like this idea of not seeing a new character as a hero with a destiny that the player is immediately attached to. As a practical matter, though, what do you do when it happens? […]

Over at Walker’s Retreat, Bradford Walker calls out a trend away from role-playing towards a more rules-oriented style of play he characterizes as “piloting the mech”: As this phenomenon accelerated, more and more people abandoned TRPGs for videogame counterparts because videogames did all of the mechanical operations better, faster, and with better visualization…. Meanwhile, the real […]

From my previous columns, one might think I live in the past and never play anything new. But, recently I did play something new, er, newish, sorta new. That is was a player in a session of Modiphius’s: Mutant Year Zero which was released around 2014, I think. It has a lineage way back to […]

This is the game that delivers on what no other tabletop space game has ever done in the history of space games: it’s gives you full featured fleet battles with almost no tedium. Set up is painless. The action is furious. A great deal seems to happen moment to moment. The game rewards planning but […]