Tips that can help improve the setting or flow of play. Very little ‘real game content’, except perhaps as examples of how rules or techniques can be applied.
… I suppose I could have found a way to get a dash in there or something. What’s one more separator in a title? I realized today after Random Encounter Tables: Second Thoughts (Heavy Lifting) went up that the raw percentages might not be so useful overall, but didn’t have …
I had some Second Thoughts about Random Encounter Tables. Erik Tenkar likes using three dice for his random encounter tables because he likes the curve, and planned to have deliberate, potentially large gaps in the table so he could combine the random encounter check (determine whether there is one) and …
After talking about Building Random Encounter Tables a couple days ago, I’ve seen a few suggestions that could improve the results somewhat. Erik Tenkar talks about deliberately leaving blanks in the random encounter table so a single table handles not only the selection of encounter but whether or not there …
I was chatting with Martin Ralya (from Gnome Stew) about building random encounter tables and thought I’d try to capture some of my thoughts here. For a long time I’ve leaned toward simulationism in gaming. I wanted to know why everything was and for it to make sense. As you …
When developing something new, it is often worthwhile to look around and compare to similar things that already exist to make sure you’re not going too far off the rails — or if you are, that it is in a direction you want. In this post I do a rough comparison of my intermediate results with the Greyhawk pantheon to make sure I’m not too far out of line. I’m mildly surprised at what i find.
Now to show what the Polyhedral Pantheon might look like in practice. I have completed a worksheet and taken snapshots of it as I went. Overall the sheet took less than an hour to complete, including storing it at different stages and in multiple formats (the Publisher file I was …
The Revisited Polyhedral Pantheon Design technique still has a couple difficulties, though. First, if you use only the Revised System Reference Document (RSRD) you don’t have enough domains. The RSRD includes 22 domains — slightly more than needed if you don’t want the gods to have personal domains, but not …
Yesterday I Revisited Polyhedral Pantheon Design, a method of choosing domains (and indirectly portfolios) for gods in D&D 3.x. It is an update to Polyhedral Pantheon Design, something I wrote several years ago. I overlooked an important part — how clerics work. Overall they are pretty similar to the core …
A few years ago I wrote an article on Polyhedral Pantheon Design. I decided it was finally time to follow up on that post (especially since it predates this blog — it’s here on its original publication date to another location). I was recently looking through Pathfinder’s Advanced Player’s Guide …
Years ago, a friend online told me of the guidelines she was given in designing her character for a supers campaign. Have a way to get to the fight. Have a way to be useful in the fight. Have a way to survive the fight. It occurs to me that …
