Projects that Could Have Been
By request, all commentary on this Projects that Could Have Been post has been redacted. I apologize for any grief this has caused.
Adding Depth to Fighters 3
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 […]
Content Presentation: the Mystical Vignette 3
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 […]
Effect Counters by Spell School 1
This idea emerged right at the end of a previous post as I was writing it, and I’ve had some time since then to turn it over in my head. I liked where the ideas about effect counters even better when applied to the eight spell schools – it was […]
The Problem of the Fire Mage 2
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 […]
Save or Die!, or: For it to feel like doom, there has to be a track 2
This post is a response to Mike Mearls’s two items on save-or-die mechanics, here and here. I wrote a bit about the situation with save-or-die in high level play back in this post, but I’ll expand on it a bit here. (I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you: I […]
LARP Thought Experiment: Next-Gen Games 7
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 […]
Brainstorming on Necromancy 3
So I was playing Battleheart on my iPhone… kind of obsessively (hush, Kainenchen)… and the particular way that the power level of the skeletons advances gave me a few ideas. I really like something about the idea that undead from this one particular canyon, swamp, or whatever have different powers […]
Crafting: More Than Just a Find Item Mission 2
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 […]
Mage: Had We But World Enough, and Time 3
My most recent session of Mage: the Awakening has reminded me, quite directly, of the problem of time in the system. I’m not talking (well, not directly) about the Realm of Time, which – all things considered – is pretty cogent. No, in this case I’m going back to the […]