Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude
I’ve long held an antipathy for high art, including serious modern literature (the kind that gets major awards). I appreciate the classics, but I thought modern lit was like pretentious modern art, a dot on a canvas that costs a million dollars because it represents the inimitable sensation of modern ennui and man’s fundamental disconnection from himself. Which is why I’m so glad I know Nick. He’s dived deep […]
What’s better: Rolling d100 or flipping a coin?
Somebody mentioned to me a few weeks ago that rolling a d6 feels more limiting than rolling a d20. That’s certainly how it feels. It’s fun to find a combination of bonuses that leverage the dice in your favor, and a d6 gives you fewer opportunities to do so. Indeed, lots of potential bonuses would quickly overwhelm the die’s randomness. However, when examing the math behind a system’s mechanics, one finds that […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: The Hangout RPG
New online video tools provide new opportunities for tabletop role-playing. Games that used to require face-to-face meetings can be played by people from around the world. However, these games are still being played with systems built for heavily scheduled, face-to-face gaming. What would a system built for this new world look like? That’s what I […]
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Pushing a Noir Story Forward
When telling a story collaboratively–as in a tabletop role-playing game–how do you know when to move on? Particularly if you’re running the game, how do you know when to push clues towards the players, and when to have two thugs with guns burst through the doors? I’ve been playtesting a new noir game, The Coin’s Hard Edge, recently. While the mechanics work beautifully, it can be hard to know where one is […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Warrior, Rogue & Mage
I love Warrior, Rogue & Mage because of its statistical approach to fantasy role-playing. The System It’s a beautifully simple system. Instead of various attributes, races, and classes, WR&M uses three attributes: Warrior, Rogue, and Mage. Each player-character has 10 points total to divide among these three attributes. A character with many points in Warrior and […]