After putting some money into The Dracula Dossier by Ken Hite (which you can – as of this writing – still back) Kickstarter informed me that this is in fact my tenth backed project. Seems like a nice round number to recount some of my experiences.
This is my view on John Harper and Paul Riddle’s The Regiment, run by Lauri. There’s nothing much I can add to Lauri’s description of the session, so I’ll talk a bit about my impressions of the system. Do keep in mind that even though the version number is 2.5, The Regiment is still a work in progress; beautiful and promising, but flawed. I hope these notes will a) help the designers hone the game, b) make you interested in testing in it, and c) give you a couple of hints while playing it. Continue reading
Ville pointed me to this page on DriveThruRPG. Its a page on shipping costs to selected countries. So, what’s so interesting about that?
The first draft of tunnel to the Fernkeep
Forewarning – Though I labeled this post as to be used with Dungeon World it should still be very suitable for most games.
I’m not exactly sure how Dungeon World wants to approach the subject of dungeons. On the other hand you should “play to find out” and on the other hand the use a ready dungeons seems to be the way to go. As the correct answer of “how I should do it” is always “however you feel most comfortable with” I’d like to discuss the topic of not using pre-made dungeons. Continue reading
There’s a book called Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton. The subtitle is Lessons in life from saints, spies and serial killers. I’ve mentioned Dutton before while discussing the peculiarities of the PC psyche.
Last night, while trying to get sleep, this topic popped into my head. I came upstairs to write the title down, so that I could write about it. Can’t really remember what my thoughts were last night, but we’ll see where this goes.
Once again, I might be full of shit, but what I understand, psychologists studying happiness seem to believe that happiness has to be intrinsic (come from within us) to last. However, right now, most of our society seems to be geared towards getting extrinsic (from outside us) happiness.
This might sound like some New Age garbage, but this wasn’t told to us by the universe (at least not personally), but its a real result of real studies.
So, why am I writing about this in a gaming (sometimes comics) blog?
Since I don’t get to GM that much, I do my best to use the opportunities I do have to do something different. I gave the instruction of something like “300 with Vikings” in the beginning to my players.
Mild spoilers on the Battle of Iceland scenario ensue.
At the point where I am writing this the Dungeon Master’s Guide is not out yet, so this is really too early to form a cohesive opinion about it. My comments will be all over the place; because there is so much that I know that will fit into place only in larger context, and when the game has seen at least a year of usage.
Let’s start with the races. There are all the Tolkienesque races first and after a brief disclaimer the rarer races are introduced. Familiar from D&D4, none of the races get any minuses for their abilities, only bonuses. I like this approach better, as I firmly believe that not handing out bonuses is penalty enough in itself. Dwarves are good fighty types, as much is to be expected. But Mountain dwarf armor training bonus does not mesh with powergaming aspect at all. Same can be said of the half-orc/barbarian combo. Half-orc already has bonuses that a barbarian will get later on, so powergamers won’t get to squeeze all the juice out of it. Wood elves and lightfoot halflings are naturally sneaky and they have Dexterity bonuses as well, so it is a good idea to put them in sneaky classes. There’s no powergaming un-synergy going on in those latter cases. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why!
There’s much unbalance going on here, and it is a good thing in my book! D&D4 tried really hard to be mathematically balanced (without a 100% success, I might add), and ended up being a somewhat bland numbers-crunching game. It is a very good game though, just not for me.
Briefly about the classes. Much has changed, but special mentions go to:
Right. Onto spells. They have condensed and streamlined whole spell “chains”. Some of the spells are really unbalanced. These unbalances are by design choice. For example, a high level druid could create a whole forest of loyal awakened trees to serve him, without any kind of limiting factor. Why? Because Fuck you, that’s why!
It is as if the design team would have had an epiphany that it is not their problem what goes on in each individual gaming table, it is the job of the dungeon masters to even things out. This is a real improvement to the viewpoint that both 3.x and 4e tried to convey. “We tell you how it is supposed to be played”.
That much said, I must say that I have never been a fan of high level play in D&D. With this edition, I probably wouldn’t go much higher than the 7th level. To conclude, I say that it is very well made, and I will definitely give it a spin someday. There are probably some kinks here and there, but nothing that a little good old fashioned GM work won’t smoothen out.
This was actually played months ago, but it went so horribly wrong, I didn’t really feel like writing about it. I guess partly to get me to write more RPG-stuff and for the sake of completeness, I’ll put this up.
So, for those who don’t know, this is a sort of tremulus campaign, but more like a recurring setting. Certain characters and places reappear, but many things are left to the players and the GM. You can find the earlier frameworks in the Resources page (as well as this one, but here’s a direct link), but you can also read up reports on these by following the bell-end tag.