The way I see it, roleplaying games should be about teamwork. We have a bunch of people around a table trying to come up with something cool. Now, real teams don’t have a hierarchy. This might feel like something preposterous or even down right blasphemous to some people, but not having a hierarchy doesn’t mean you can’t have different roles.
Palasin juuri lomalta Kanadasta, joten en ole tätä ehtinyt tehdä, enkä ole itse asiassa tänä vuonna osallistumassakaan (ainakaan tällä tietoa), joten en ole hirveästi asiaa tutkinut, mutta en halunnut jättää tätä tekemättä (ja tätä itse asiassa vähän kyseltiinkin), joten tässä on: Tämän vuoden Ropecon-pöytäropesuositukset.
I’ve been playing rpgs since ten and most of that time (24ish years) I have been a GM. And I have never ran Dungeons & Dragons. Sure, I started with ANKH that was in essence just a D&D clone in Finnish. But the actual grandfather of rpgs has been a bit of a boogieman for me. The Old School Renaissance introduced me to DCCRPG and most recently I tried out 5th edition while I participated in Out of the Abyss. But now I think I would like to try to run DnD5e.
In this post I share me ideas for my first campaign as well as my impression and thoughts on the subject of starting such a campaign and about DnD5e in general as a first timer.
Oh yes, I’m back with one of those. This time the heading might be way too long, but there we are.
I wonder how many hours of work have I done on different characters before I get to play them over the years? How many times have I used a lot of time on a character only to find out that it didn’t fit into what the GM had in mind at all?
In fiction, AIs are mostly depicted as people with Asperger’s. Its probably not that far off from what a real AI would be like. On the other hand, as people have very varying ideas about what Asperger’s actually is (and my perspective might not be that much better), we need to delve a little deeper.
I don’t know how long I’ve actually done this, but I’ve noticed this recently.
Okay, I’ve said that before, but here’s a good example from RECON, a pretty old RPG published by Palladium, even if its outside of the Palladium family.
Possibly the most often heard words in all roleplaying tables around the globe. One of the most houseruled and diverse rule between different roleplaying games. From roll d6 each side to different narrative rules, the rules and rulings are never enough to satisfy every roleplayer, or even the majority of roleplayers.
Let us start from the beginning, OD&D. Roll d6 for each side, high roll goes first. Then the tweaking begun. Bonus from dexterity, bonus from being whatever and the seemingly endless exceptions to the rule. Someone claimed that when all the rules and exceptions for AD&D were put together, the text would take at least one full page, if not two. Some, if not most roleplayers take this taking turns thing for granted and have succumbed to it, going through the motions without even thinking about it.
I originally wrote this for our Dog Week last summer, but our attempt to get that theme week going didn’t really work out. However, I think there’s something to this, so now that I found this in the drafts, I thought I’d flesh it out a bit and publish it. So, here goes…
I encountered this situation in Hyde Park last year. I was walking through it when I saw two women. One of them had two unleashed dogs running around playfully. The other had one unleashed dog following her intently at a set distance to her. Of course, the other two dogs tried to get this dog to participate in their games, being social animals, and the dog did, for a second, before its owner said sternly something in the lines of “Princess, that’s not like you”, and the dog returned to its spot meekly.
Last Sunday I published the beta version of rules for Eldritch Sigils. This is a game I have been working on for about five years. I have actually published earlier drafts over the years but this was the first time it actually has consistency and it is actually playable.
This has been a long process and one that is still in the works. But now that the rules are “out there” I thought it would be a good chance to talk about them. Since game design is quite an interesting topic I hope that sharing my process might produce new ideas or at least be curious.