Fantasy Heartbreak Workshop

On Sep 19, 2012 +Ramanan Sivaranjan said: Any Dark Sun game I run now could never live up to the game I imagine in my head. I never actually played Dark Sun back when I was buying and reading all the books, so it's even more mythic than it really should be. But yeah, old school Dark Sun hex crawl. I can imagine that. This is pretty much exactly my experience of Dark Sun:  An epic setting that no one every played, and which could now never live up to the promised dream. BUT, a hex crawl seems like the prefect fit.  And I say this as someone weened at the teat of story-ish, plot-heavy AD&D adventures, an who has never played a hex crawl (and precious few dungeon crawls) in my life. I think the thing is that the big ticket plot features in the setting are all so in your face: killing off a sorcerer-king, inter-city-state politics, saving Athas from further environmental disaster, etc.  If those are your goal, it's so front-loaded from the get-go that being kill...

A recent invitation to play Dungeon World, Land of Nod's post about Quests of the Mind , and recent Hack & Slash pieces on " Design Demons " have gotten me trying to sort out my own preferences with regard to externally narrated vs. immersive styles of play.  These terms may not be a great fit, but what I'm trying to get across is: The more "immersive" a game is, the more the mechanics and style of play are trying to put you in the character's viewpoint, trying to use their limitations and abilities to make choices and overcome problems. The more "narrated" a game is, the more the mechanics and style of play allow you to step outside the charater's viewpoint, and allow you to make decisions about the character and possibly even setting elements and events beyond the character's control. Reviewing my experiences as a player, there are elements of both I like, but I find myself gravitating more and more toward the immersive. ...

This is the short story of how I edited together an system reference document (SRD) of the Generic Old-school Role-playing System (GORE) by Goblinoid Games . (SRD now found here .  PDF  here .) Took a break from grinding away at Wyrms & Warrens stuff for awhile, and was paging through a copy of  Bug Hunters! , a  world-book designed back in the day for TSR's old Amazing Engine.  And the idea of cloned space-marines with the injected personalities of folks back home started sounded pretty damn badass. Amazing Engine seems to run on a percentile based skills system.  I'm not normally a fan of percentile based systems, but I occasionally get nostalgic for the Elder Gods, and the RPPR folks do make all that jazz sound damn sexy.  And and in this mood I thought me the following thoughts in approximate order: BRP seems a little less wonky than Amazing Engine. I bet you could convert the skills over without much trouble. Skil...

I've always liked psionics in my D&D, both as an innate set of traits, and as a trained or ascetic practice.  But one of Telecanter's blog posts, which helped highlight these differences got me thinking about how odd it is that a character whose claim to fame is self reliance, would be marauding through a dungeon looking for wealth and power. I posed this question in the comments, and in  Telecanter's response , he mentioned a similarity between kung fu narratives and westerns.  This led to a roundabout epiphany on my part. In my mind westerns will now always be associated with this weird little niche of geekdom: The Dark Tower - With it's knightly gunslighters. Knights of Cydonia - Which crosses the kung fu and western genres. 21 Guns - Which crosses the Dark Tower with Knights of Cydonia. The Dark Tower in particular suggests a foil to the gunslinger:  the failed gunslinger. Gunslingers who fail their Test are forced to turn in their g...

Telecanter's blog post today about psionics, and especially the  older one  he references, got me thinking about the details of my own ad hoc psionic system. Not sure if this would end up Crude Simulation Engine or not. I'm thinking more of a snap-on attachment to any pre-4E systems. I go back and forth about whether to represent characters as classes or just have a single character path where abilities are chosen a la carte. This leans a little in the class-based direction, but is pretty flexible. Aside from a liberal dose of "middle of the road" attack, save and hit point progression for the psionic class, the class would have the following qualities: Disciplines ≈ Spells Trained "disciplines" and wild "talents" are represented by borrowing or slightly re-skinning divine and arcane spells of similar effect. There are a few caveats to this: Psionic powers never consume material components and rarely require words or gestures to work. ...

Circa d20 System era, I'd been posting my D&D ideas to my friends' blog Protozoic.  Since some of that is the basis for work here, it seems best to collect it in one place for reference.  Especially since I keep thinking I've done a writeup of armor for the Crude Roleplaying Engine, but apparently haven't done anything extensive about that yet. Armor & Damage Reduction - The basis for most of my armor rules: Injury & Consequences - Mechanics relating to what injury does to a character and how it is recorded.  Also a revisited version . Playtest - A playtest of some of the armor and injury mechanics. Tradesman & Sage - Two new 3.x classes.

Looking at how various old school derived and inspired games treat classes, I go back and forth about how I should structure these things in CSE.  There seem two be two basic philosophies:  Few (2-5) well defined and relatively unmixable classes, or 1 class that fights and maybe casts spells through items or difficult rituals but typically have no "race" distinctions (elves, dwarves, etc.). The issue that I run into is that neither of these easily allows the kind of customization I'm looking to allow.  Even the Warrior vs. Mage dichotomy I'd proposed earlier seems like it complicates some things (why have a separate class for magic except in the name of "balance"?), and oversimplifies others (so your magical ability, based on class level helps you both to draw forth your natural physical strength, and prepare learn rote procedures better?). So after more hemming and hawing, I'm leaning toward a single-class system (tip o' the hat to Bandits &...