When a Bad Idea is the Right Idea 10

Often in gaming, characters are faced with options that are Obviously Bad Ideas, whether in terms of a plot hook, a magic item, a bargain of some kind, or a button that just begs to be pushed. Some characters are rational and cautious, and avoid such involvement; probably the most […]

4e Bar Brawling, Part 5: Sulimo 2

I’ve come to the last of the Bar Brawl power lists I created back in 2009. This set shows the beginning of some thinking about terrain powers; in this case, though, I was reskinning the character’s core powers to interact with terrain that I could know for certain would be […]

4e Bar Brawling, Part 4: Dendric 1

Many of Dendric’s powers didn’t work as well as intended or weren’t as appealing as intended due to the DM being sort of a moron. Allies in the Crowd didn’t work because I forgot that I needed to place all of the uninvolved NPCs. Silvershield Soldier shouldn’t have been Wisdom-based […]

4e Bar Brawling, Part 3: Terrence Wilhelm

Terrence is one of the key examples of how I adapted a character’s existing combat style to brawling. In this case, obviously, I added elemental stuff (we’ll call them “particle effects”) to the normal things you’d do in a bar brawl – punching and throwing beer. Also, since Terrence was […]

4e Bar Brawling, Part 2: Azamon Fyori 4

Azamon Fyori was (in this campaign) a tiefling resourceful warlord. He was much less of a sociopath than some of that player’s previous characters! He normally fought with sword and shield, and (like all tieflings before the rework of their racial power) was all about the fire damage.As you can […]

4e Bar Brawling

Early on in my 4e campaign, I wanted to experiment with odd powers and temporary change-ups in character stats. I was a little more adventurous in the general area of kitbashing in the first year of the campaign’s run, when only one or two players were using DDI heavily. As […]

Design Theory: Secret Rules 3

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 […]

4e Terrain Powers, Part Three

I thought I’d go back to terrain powers today, since I always meant to go back and add more ways to interact with the fantastic terrains of the DMG and DMG 2. Several of them go away when used anyway – if you look at that as a “per encounter” […]

LARP Design: Culture Packets 9

So, for non-LARPers in the crowd, I want to explain culture packets in a few words, so that the rest of this post will make a damn bit of sense. A culture packet is a document describing one of a game’s cultures, organizations, or races, with details on a variety […]

Five Kinds of Plot 5

I’ve been playing a lot of Avadon: The Black Fortress lately. I’ll be saving my full review for another time, as I haven’t yet finished the game, but it’s gotten me thinking about the kinds of plotlines and stories that drive scenes within games, and games as a whole. Before […]