In many live-action games, there exists a mechanic to represent the players’ actions between events, since otherwise players can only take part in the world and its goings-on for maybe twelve (for some games, as many as twenty-four) days out of every year. Since the plot committee is dedicated to […]
There’s been a good bit of information distributed on spellcasting in D&D Next, most recently this; the broader ENWorld aggregation of information on wizards and spellcasting is found here. These pieces of information might or might not contradict one another, depending on how you want to interpret them. Today I’d […]
So, for Dust to Dust, we have introduced a number of games-within-the-game. I’ve commented at some length about Wizard Dueling before. This works well in LARPs, because even when things are scheduled well and everything is on time, there will be downtime that could stand to be filled. It’s just […]
It’s interesting to me how conversations about specific topics sometimes crop up in multiple unconnected places at the same time. Just as Ryan Macklin is discussing disadvantages and experience points in his blog, there’s also a lively exchange on experience points going on in Google Plus. The G+ conversation is, […]
Several weeks ago, a Conscientious Reader commented that I have a long history of giving a lot of design consideration to spellcasters of every type, at the apparent expense of fighter and rogue characters. My Swordplay series of posts aside, I’m comfortable calling this an accurate observation of a blind […]
Following a considerable gap in posting caused by a Dust to Dust event, I want to talk a bit about a common thread between DtD and several of my favorite games, culminating in thoughts on applying the concept. Nobilis may be the first game I saw that communicated a huge amount […]
Between Sea of Stars, G+, and a few other places, there’s been some discussion lately about what I see as the problem of fire mages. This problem generalizes somewhat to other tightly themed spellcasters, but the fire mage and the mind mage have it worst, I think. The problem is that […]
A little while ago, a friend of mine started a conversation in G+ about the Next Big Evolution in LARPing, without getting into specifics of what he thought that change might represent. The idea has been knocking around in my head since then, and I’ve come up with a number […]
The concept of designing D&D around a certain number of encounters per day first came to the fore in D&D 3.0. I think everyone reading this is probably familiar with the concept already, but I’d like to drill down on it a bit, because this approach completely changed D&D, and […]
There’s been a lot of discussion lately in Eclipse‘s Rules Forum about invisibility and powers that counter invisibility. This is a very complicated topic in LARPing; we spent the better part of a year (off and on) discussing it while designing DtD, and I’m going to try to summarize the […]