A little idea called “wibble”
Stats. Aspects. Keywords. Grid maps. Trackers. Feats. What do they all have in common? They nail down something that was fluid, amorphous, hard to grasp (abilities, health, location in the world). They turn it into something that can be manipulated, calculated, or at least used or pointed to (I have a Feat that allows me……
The Lord of Silence
Across the many and diverse realms that I have travelled, the Lord of Silence can be found in every one. In the steppes he is called the Horse-lord’s Companion, and a chair is left empty when camp is made for his convenience. In the riverlands and the Tributaries he is known as Saint Iohannes the…
It takes 4 days to cross a hex…
…If you’re lucky. The base travel time for a hex is 3 days. (If you’re using a square grid, 3 days to go vertically or horizontally, 5 to go diagonally). The Travel Burden Die starts at 1d6. The following factors reduce the Travel Burden Die by 1 die size: The following factors increase the Travel…
I attack the dungeon
Finally, what you’ve been waiting for. Random encounters, exploration, time tracking, all in one roll. When you take 30 minutes to explore a dungeon, make an Exploration Roll: roll 1d20 + Exploration Bonus (usually INT/WIS bonus, or level for statless games) vs the current level’s Difficulty Class. If you roll >= 20, you achieve a…
The case for killing STR
Wait, what? Yes, killing, nixing, putting STR on the chopping block. A game without STR scores. That’s insane, I hear you cry. STR is usually one of the core scores, the hardest one to change, the last to go. It’s qualities are immediately obvious: A higher strength means you’re stronger, duh. Dexterity has to contend…
Living under the Shadow of the Dungeon
Why are we, in the year of 2021, still talking about Dungeons and Dragons? Not the game, D&D. But the world, dragondungeonworld, the world of fighters, wizards, clerics and thieves. The hostile world, where players barge into places they don’t belong, kill their inhabitants, and loot the room. We can do it in space, with…
Strongholds by any other name
Are you tired of the same old castles and wizard towers for random encounters? Roll 1d6 based on the biome to see what structures you generate! Note: I’m assuming you’ve already planned out the big cities/major locations of your game world, so these are just for random encounters, and naturally will be smaller in scope.…
You, me, and reified numbers
So a while back I had a chat with a fellow gamer about HP. He mentioned that he wasn’t a big fan of metacurrencies (understandable). I then mentioned that, from a certain point of view, HP was a type of metacurrency. It had no immediate physical connection to the game (unlike, I dunno, your Strength…
OD&D but PbtA
Recently I finally read White Box Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game. I made some comments about its seemingly hard-line, arbitrary nature. Helpful commenters informed me that this was not because the creators of Original Dungeons & Dragons (from which Swords and Wizardry and its clone White Box are derived) had any interest in hard, rules-as-written play…
Dissecting RPG Fantasy
What makes a game “generic”? What makes a game “original”? The weird and at times eclectic fantasy tropes in D&D, forged by the original booklets and codified through the ages, have more or less come to define the fantasy genre in RPGs. We can “tell” when someone is going for this type of fantasy, to…
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