LARP-running has any number of challenges that tabletop gaming can’t reasonably face. The specific case I want to talk about today is module parties. I assume modules aren’t a significant part of salon LARPs, though of the three salon LARPs I’ve played, two included adventure sequences outside of the main area […]
While writing my recent post on Birthright, I got to thinking about other settings that could use its model of domain play, reskinning concepts appropriately. These ideas aren’t fully fleshed out by any means, and I don’t have immediate plans to run either of these – though developing a riff […]
This is another post about my work in progress, Quintessence of Dust, where I lay out the game’s resolution mechanic and how I’ve gotten there. The first post and starting point on this topic is here.
So I don’t have a long history with roguelike video games. Not to twist the knife for any geezers in the audience, but I was not yet born when Rogue was first released. I’ve played plenty of games that take place in dungeons – Diablo, Diablo II, Path of Exile, just to […]
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve put 15k words into a playtest document for Quintessence, and today I got to a span of rules I’ve seriously dreaded writing. The 4e brawler build of the fighter class is about the only version of grappling rules I think I’ve ever seen in […]
One of the last projects I worked on for MFV.com has just been released on the App Store. The Quarriors! app is a transliteration of the Quarriors! dice-building game. I strongly recommend both games, but especially the one that I worked on. Ahem.Quarriors! WebsiteQuarriors! on the App StoreI hope you’ll […]
I’ve mentioned Birthright a dozen or more times over the past few years of writing this blog, especially while playing around with SIFRP hacks, but I’ve never written a detailed post of why it deserves its place in the canon of D&D’s settings. If it weren’t wedded pretty heavily to its […]
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a new iOS game called Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. I play a lot of things I don’t care about, and this isn’t a dedicated review blog, so if I’m bothering to post a review, then spoiler: I liked it. It’s not a […]
Dear Design Diary, While I was away for Thanksgiving, thanks to the unflagging support of Kainenchen, I started working with some ideas for a new fantasy roleplaying system for tabletop. I particularly want something that borrows a bit more from the style and substance of LARPing, without sacrificing usability. When […]
There are a lot of lessons of good game-running that carry over between tabletop and live-action gaming. This post, though, concerns itself with an area in which the two are quite different. As usual, I’m talking about a certain band of LARPing, not all LARPing. (There are almost no statements that […]