I've been playing the original Star Wars RPG (WEG 1987) in a solo game and damn if combat isn't cumbersome. Lots of rolling and comparison and adding numbers up, as trad games like this commonly require. Photo by Zacharias Korsalka on Pexels.com First, you roll your skill (e.g. "Blaster") to attack against a target number … Continue reading Cumbersome Star Wars Combat
Lots of discussion happening today around games that are missing rules or worlds. That's a bit simplified, so here are the posts I'm thinking about: Negative Space"F**k-You" Design As a note to the latter: I don't really love the way the author implies such a strong sense of emotional negativity, but this does resonate with … Continue reading Be specific about unwritten rules
A quick set of thoughts on naming, focused on NSR and FKR and other abbreviations.
What makes Into the Odd (and, by extension, Electric Bastionland) so great? Here are a few reasons.
Mothership has made some excellent changes to the Stress and Panic system. I'm very grateful to them for doing this.
I just concluded another Blades in the Dark campaign that ran from February 2021 to now, covering 18 sessions, and I think I'm done with Forged in the Dark for a while even though I have really loved it.
I like Numenera, especially the setting (even if it is a bit canon-heavy). But the Cypher system has some weaknesses, and I want to talk about how to improve them at your own table.
Some thoughts on giving information to players, spurred by a Discord conversation with friends.
After some reflection, I have decided to mark some posts private and thereby make them unavailable. In the interests of transparency, I want to document the reasons why. Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash First, I have removed access to my list of free D&D 5e adventures. The traffic to that one post overwhelms everything … Continue reading Marking some posts private
Musing this afternoon on @benlaurence1's older blog post "Pleasures of the OSR: Secrecy and Discovery". The thing I like about this play style (and I like many!) is precisely the surprise of what happens when random tables drive play. Making sense of these seemingly unrelated bits of ephemera (random encounters, generated NPCs, found objects) means … Continue reading Random Tables in RPGs
Technoskald's Forge 