Monthly Archives: December 2011

3 Dice Dungeon, A Solitaire Dungeon Crawl Game

Nearly a year ago, Greywulf posted RPG Solitaire Challenge: 3 Dice, a simple solitaire game of dungeon exploration. In his game, you roll 3 dice for your adventurer’s stats, then for each room in the dungeon, roll 1 die to determine the room’s type, 1 die for a monster, and 1 die for a treasure. I played the game a couple of times, and while I had fun, I found two major issues: The game is very swingy. I played … Continue reading »

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50 Games in 50 Weeks: InSpectres

InSpectres is a lot of fun. It’s a tabletop role-playinggame that’s basically Ghostbusters. The lightweight system includes only four attributes per PC–Academics, Athletics, Technology, and Contact–with a focus on one of them. A total of 9 points are distributed among these attributes. The core mechanic involves rollingsix-sideddice–as many dice as you have points in the attribute that applies to the attempted action–and looking up the highest die rolled in a results table. Higher numbers provide extra … Continue reading »

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50 Games in 50 Weeks: Everyone Is John

As part of DC Gameday, I volunteered to run a game of Everyone Is John. System basics: Each player is a voice in the head of a totally insane man named John from Minneapolis. Each voice has a few skills, an obsession (something they really want to accomplish), and a pool of Willpower tokens. Whenever … Continue reading »

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Castles Were Decoration

I’ve been listening to a series of lectures on historical castles, and it’s changed how I think about castles in an RPG setting. Debate rages, naturally, so take all this with a grain of salt, but: Castles were not just fortifications. Indeed, fortification was a relatively minor element of their function. Castles were homes and … Continue reading »

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Let’s Play an Interesting RPG, episode 5: Dungeon World, part 3 of 3

In our 17 December 2011 session, we played Dungeon World, a story-oriented game of fantasy adventure with a classic D&D feel. The Group: Let\’s Play an Interesting RPG About the group (with instructions on joining or watching our games) This session\’s Google documents: characters The System: Dungeon World Rules complexity: Medium (124-page PDF) Availability: $10 … Continue reading »

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Let’s Play an Interesting RPG, episode 5: Dungeon World, part 2 of 3

In our 17 December 2011 session, we played Dungeon World, a story-oriented game of fantasy adventure with a classic D&D feel. The Group: Let\’s Play an Interesting RPG About the group (with instructions on joining or watching our games) This session\’s Google documents: characters The System: Dungeon World Rules complexity: Medium (124-page PDF) Availability: $10 Basic … Continue reading »

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Let’s Play an Interesting RPG, episode 5: Dungeon World

In our 17 December 2011 session, we played Dungeon World, a story-oriented game of fantasy adventure with a classic D&D feel. The Group: Let’s Play an Interesting RPG About the group (with instructions on joining or watching our games) This session’s Google documents: characters The System: Dungeon World Rules complexity: Medium (124-page PDF) Availability: $10 PDF Website: … Continue reading »

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One Little Tweak

I ran a game of Searchers of the Unknown, a simplified and free original D&D rule set, at RyvenCon a while ago. \’Twas fun, and the system worked well, but we agreed that it could use one little tweak. This way, madness lies. It\’s so tempting to house-rule a system because it\’s \”not perfect.\” Soon, a rules-light system grows into a rules-moderate system. Well, this is a minor issue, but a significant … Continue reading »

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How Does Magic Work?

Magic is weird. By definition. As role-players, this creates problems. We exercise one magic system, become comfortable with it, then move to another world and struggle to understand its ways. This blastr post includes a chart (shown at right) of the “rules of magic” for 51 different worlds/universes. It answers six questions about each: Where … Continue reading »

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Let’s Play an Interesting RPG, episode 4: Hangout playtest, part 2 of 2

The Let\’s Play group plays a different RPG every week. In our 9 December 2011 session, we played Hangout, an experimental system that Brent is still developing. The system is explained over the course of the session. The session was set in the world of TRON. The Group: Let\’s Play an Interesting RPG About the … Continue reading »

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