One of the Specialties available in D&D Next is the Healer. Now, a Specialty is a pre-packaged path of feats, and these feats primarily deal in expanding or improving a character’s combat functionality. This might be an improvement on your class’s existing functions, such as a wizard that takes the Magic-User […]
Sometime within the next month or two, I plan to start up a new campaign, now that my Mage chronicle of a year and a half has ended. There are a few other short-run games that we’ll play first, which means I have a bit more time to plan both […]
A couple of posts ago, I discussed economics in tabletop games, with some specific elements that focus on the ways that game-economics are like and unlike the study of real-life economics. This time around, I’m shifting the focus to LARPs. CI/Ro3 and Wildlands LARPs – the ones I have real […]
Before all else in this post: I am not an Economics major. I am, moreover, aware that I am not an economics major. I do know a few things about games, though. (Commentary by actual economics majors is welcome, though.)I’ve been reading the Valve economics blog, and it got me […]
It’s been almost five months since I last commented on crafting systems in any detail in this blog – but no longer! Kainenchen and I were talking about… something or other, I can’t recall what, but we came around to discussing some particular instance of crafting that I felt didn’t […]
I’ve been working on creating a decent crafting system for tabletop games for as long as I’ve worked on this blog, and then some. I’ve discussed some of the hurdles to doing so before; the things that make crafting interesting in MMOs don’t apply in tabletop gaming. There are big […]
In working on Dust to Dust, one of the significant areas of design theory discussion has been which rules to reveal and which to keep secret from the publicly-posted rules. That secret rules exist should be no surprise to most gamers; in one form or another, it’s a practice as old […]
I made some references in this post to crafting in 2e. Since then, I dug out my 2e Player’s Handbook and Complete Fighter’s Handbook to reread the rules there. What I found there was interesting for what it is and what it isn’t. Let me start by pointing out that these […]
So Kainenchen and I got to talking this morning about crafting in LARPs. I touched on some of this in an earlier post, but I’m going into more detail here. While crafting systems in MMOs are sometimes problematic (too rewarding or not rewarding enough, ruinous to the economy, and so […]
The Weaponsmithing design laid out in my previous entry continues here. I’ve mapped out ideas for how a number of different recipes might progress, though I’m still not getting into specifics on the value of the materials or how much of each is required. I’m also adding options for the […]