I love Hero System for its engineering and its utility as a design toolkit. I’m not so fond of the roll-under mechanism for task resolution. I was very happy when D&D 3e moved to a roll-over mechanism. This post explores what we can do to change Hero System to use …
In 2016 I gave some thought to a card-based dungeon crawl game (Keeping My Hands off My Deck, Just Decking Around), and I’ve recently been thinking about it some more. Not all the details are settled yet, but some are more firmly decided and some are different from before. I’m …
A conversation today about conveying campaign information to players reminded me of something I did long ago. Every session, I would provide each player with a sheet of information the character could be expected to know. This information was often relevant to the current situation (a druid might know things …
Microscope is a very cool game by Ben Robbins, focusing on the collaborative generation of fractal history. I cannot recommend it strongly enough if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I’ve run a few sessions, including one to prepare for my Seekers of Lore campaign, and I’ve been consistently …
Yesterday I created a couple random overworld maps and pondered which to use. I decided to use the first one as my base, but really used it as a general inspiration. Trying to exactly replicate this map wasn’t really feasible. Precisely placing 2,500 tiles is awfully tedious, and the base …
This might be biting off more than I can chew, but maybe not. It’s certainly a volume I can handle in a tabletop RPG. Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine Publishing) has an excellent book on sandbox construction, Red Tide: Campaign Sourcebook and Sandbox Toolkit. Crawford suggests starting with an area 200 …
One of my broad strokes in building an RPGMaker game is to model, more or less, the Echelon chassis. Specifically, the talent system. At each level a PC gains a talent and upgrades a talent. The new talent is gained at the current tier (that is, it is a level-appropriate …
Years ago in my day job, we had a senior manager who kept coming to us with new things he wanted us to work on, clearly higher priority than all his previous requests. “I am a good idea generator!” “Well, you’re a powerful generator of ideas…” Let’s see which one …
The first step in any project is to identify what you’re trying to achieve. “I want to make a game” is not sufficient, since almost anything could satisfy that. “I want to make an RPGMaker game” is a little better, but even then it’s not very specific. Let’s see what …
I’ve always liked the idea behind RPGMaker MV (current version, initially released October 2015; there have been previous versions, and ‘RPGMaker MZ’ is scheduled for release later this week). It’s a tool specifically for making JRPG-style games, in the vein of Dragon Quest and (certain) Zelda games and Ys and …
