The blogroll is convenient, after a fashion, but doesn’t really lend itself to providing detail about the links, especially when I want to drill down to specifics in the site. I’m putting together this page for links to articles and sites I find particularly useful or interesting to me.
The Alexandrian
The Alexandrian contains a number of essays and other writing from Justin Alexander. I find myself agreeing with a fair bit of what he says, and some of the articles formalize techniques and processes I’ve been using for a while.
D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations
I found this article to be pretty insightful. It explains a view of what different levels mean in D&D, and how being really good at something does not necessarily mean being really high level. In fact, most of the ‘greatest people in history’ in real life would probably be considered pretty low level in D&D.
Which means that high-level play in D&D can quite reasonably be pretty insane by real-world standards. This has had a significant impact on my design philosophy for D&D and Echelon, and I think provides an explanation for ‘mundane characters’ (i.e. those who don’t cast spells) actually not being limited to what is ‘believable’.
Node-Based Design
This essay (in seven parts) formalizes my scenario design practices, or at least a significant subset of the practices. The intersection between how I design scenarios and the techniques presented in this essay is pretty large, but neither is a subset of the other. I’m expanding mine to incorporate some ideas from this essay. Look at my Campaign Setting Design articles for more detail.