When Torchlight II first came out, I meant to pick it up, but I was in the middle of something or other and it slipped my mind. A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned in G+ how much she and her whole family were enjoying the game, so Kainenchen and […]
This is another of those things that I am not entirely sure it’s okay to post, so if someone from Wizards of the Coast comes across this and tells me to take it down, I will do so, with apologies. (That said, I suspect a lot more than this has […]
The last few Legends & Lore posts have touched on issues around healing in D&D Next, as have a number of the blogs I read, so this is me, casting my chapeau in again… jauntily, of course. As one does. The driving conflict here is whether D&D Next will adopt […]
A couple of weeks ago, Harbinger Readers JohnKazuo and Ms. J replied to my post on PvP design to specifically address the dynamics of PvP in LARPs, and now I’m returning to the topic. To state a few things up-front: this has a lot to do with pure aesthetics, and I […]
Kainenchen and I have been talking about the economy of actions in D&D Next lately, particularly in light of the fact that most characters have no way to spend their reaction in a round unless someone provokes an opportunity attack. Further, D&D Next needs more movement in combat (since we […]
Video gaming, as a medium, lives now in a constant state of public debate over when it might bridge the gap into being an art form. A conversation sprang up the other day in G+ over this article, and I had enough that I wanted to say that, well, here […]
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about some of the high-level principles of PvP design. These principles readily apply to video games and LARPs. I want to be clear from the start: this is not master-class level stuff – for that, you want to talk to Stands-In-Fire. Quite seriously, the […]
It’s long established in this blog that I like to talk about spells and magic, and today is another of those days. D&D Next spell design is currently a bizarre melange of new ideas and old spells that have been with D&D for two or more editions. For example, lance […]
This post was written for the second annual New Year, New Game blog carnival hosted by Gnome Stew as part of the 2013 New Year, New Game challenge. I started my Aurikesh game recently enough that I’m basing my comments on that, but overall this is a post about how […]
I’ve been posting a lot lately about the work I’m doing on skill challenges, and now that I’ve had a chance to run two of them by my players, I’m posting about what I think worked and, more importantly, what I think didn’t work. Fair warning – this gets a […]
