The Blade films portrayed a vampire language, which makes no sense. Why spend another night with some bald twat memorizing cases when you could be in a club getting your teeth wet? Why would vampires develop and sustain a vampire language when they could speak Wallachian? Vampire: the Masquerade made no direct use of …

I was chatting with a Turkish gent, and he told me about his time playing D&D as a kid. And to prelude a short anecdote, I have to take my hat off to the bunch of young teenagers reading hundreds of pages of rules in a second language, translating character-sheets on-the-fly, and live-translating the rules for magical …

RPGs should have a 'social stat' to roll, not because you should always roll for social interactions, but because you sometimes must roll for social interactions. I acknowledge all counterarguments: This is a ROLE playing game. It's fun. We need to know how that player bribes the guard - rolling dice does not provide a …

I don't think any sane individual could write something like BIND without automation tools. Games with a similar scope require a team. (BIND also requires a team - everyone who's joined to comment, edit, or draw, has improved the game immensely, but that's not today's topic) Step Five A lot of people imagine they could …

Why all the rules for torches in caverns? Rules for the darkness, for light and torches, spring up among OSR games like a new cockroach infestation - first you see one, but a thousand more hide in self-made dark recesses. And like cockroaches, the rules are not new. They're simply out in the light, presenting …

One Reddit comment described the problem of using Mana Points in an RPG (as opposed to spell slots): If it's a game with more-or-less d20 fantasy or JRPG video game progression, then it's very difficult to find a cost for an ability early in the game that feels worth the price when you have max 8 mp that doesn't seem …

Music cannot add much to a game, and can easily remove a lot. If one must add music, it should always avoid being too lively, or attention-grabbing, because players shouldn't spend their attention on the music - it should be on the game. On the rare occasions I have music in my games, I often use sound tracks, or …

Every RPG class system is bad, but before I tell you what you should want, let me tell you about you. Or rather, let me say whom I want to speak with. I'm not writing for people who enjoy class systems, so much as for people who want to sit above it all, with an ineffable air of enlightenment, saying 'everything is …

One beef I've had in games is a chonky source book which says 'changelings do this', and 'always describe the traps, don't just say 1D6 trap-damage', and then expecting the reader to create the world in adherence to these principles. "How about you do your job and write this into the adventure modules?", I find myself …