By Brent on 11 March 2011
My previous blog post got me thinking: What is an adventure’s intended use? A lot of adventure writers (myself included) design adventures with a “commercial software” approach: the user will install the software and start using it immediately, probably without a manual, and it needs to work well up-front. It should guide the user in its use and require minimal fiddling to be useful. What if one were to take an “open […]
Posted in Role-playing |
By Brent on 9 March 2011
There’s a great post over at RPG Musings about buying third-party products. I have a similar problem: I rarely buy third-party RPG products. In my experience, those products are too-specific slices of other peoples’ campaign worlds, which don’t fit into my own. I’ve only bought generic tools, like Gygax’s Book of Names, or completely self-contained adventures that don’t connect with my world, like a jungle temple adventure I bought. […]
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By Brent on 20 July 2010
Check in on my Google Wave RPG game, The Legacy of the Lines, a D&D 4E game: [wave id=”googlewave.com! w+Ov21ogmKA”]
Posted in Role-playing |
By Brent on 16 July 2010
I’ve been thinking lately about the best way to give feedback to players in my role-playing games. By “feedback,” I mean pointing out particularly effective and particularly ineffective behavior, like creative problem-solving, forgetting to update a marker, effective teamwork, or aggressive interpersonal behavior. I used to essentially ignore this. I’d occasionally reward a creative solution with a quick “Great thinking!” I essentially ignored bad behavior. This, of course, is ineffective. I then picked […]
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By Brent on 12 July 2010
Last week, I finally finished and published a D&D 4E adventure, The Goblins of Summerkeep, to DriveThruRPG.com. It took a while. There are all sorts of little finishing steps, such as checking for errors, verifying that the generated PDF looks good, uploading to DriveThruRPG, etc. I’m also working to make it available in multiple formats, and that’s a classic time suck. DriveThruRPG provides a print-on-demand service, but that requires its own PDFs. […]
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By Brent on 9 July 2010
In the previous posts in this series, I laid some groundwork for adapting D&D 4E to a mecha universe, establishing some basic stats and skills. Let’s create some sample mecha units, using the stats we’ve defined so far. The Stats We Need If you recall, each mecha has the following stats: Manufacturer, which corresponds to race Class Size Speed Initiative AC Fortitude Reflex Strength Constitution Dexterity HP […]
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By Brent on 9 July 2010
This month’s RPG Blog Carnival over at Mad Brew Labs is on Growing the Hobby. I quote: While I don’t think the hobby is disappearing, by any means, I don’t see it expanding by leaps & bounds either. I’d personally like to see it grow, and I would like to hear what the RPG Blogosphere has to say. “Blogosphere.” :shudder: I so hate that word. Ah well; not their fault. Can […]
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By Brent on 2 July 2010
This is part 4 in a series of posts about an RPG system that uses D&D 4E mechanics for a giant robot system. D&D 4E simplified the skill list dramatically. Let’s look at each one, and figure out which ones can be transferred to a giant robot combat universe directly, which will need to be tweaked, which must be dropped, and what we must add. Acrobatics – OK […]
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By Brent on 25 June 2010
In the first post in this series, I laid out some basic ideas for a role-playing system for playing in giant robot universes, using a straight port of the D&D 4E system. In the second post, I defined basic stats and attributes for PCs and their mecha. Today, I’m going to lay out the stats needed for a mecha, and the stats needed for a PC: Mecha Character Sheet Name Manufacturer — Corresponds to race Class Size Speed Initiative Defenses AC Fortitude […]
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By Brent on 25 June 2010
In my previous post on this topic, I suggested a few basic rules for a giant robot RPG system using the basic D&D 4E rules. Let’s review the rules so far: Mecha operate on a scale 10x that of the human scale. So, mecha weapons do 10x the damage of a human weapon, mecha are about 10x bigger than humans, etc. Mecha combat occurs on its own grid, which does not represent […]
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