TTRPGs

Bored of the Tables

Nov 6, 2025 · 4 min read · Design OSR

Random tables of D100 zany-silly things that might happen in your adventure need to cease, because they've stepped out of bounds. I get the motivation: emergent stories are great, it's what the game's all about. dice are great at 'emerging' those elements which become the story - the random challenge, the unexpected …

GM Journeys

Oct 29, 2025 · 2 min read · Prattle

The most important things you should do to improve your GMing skills depend on you: they are unique or rare. Generic 'how to GM' articles and books will not help with anything unique to you. So generic 'how to GM' writing do not contain the most important advice. If I could go back in time and give younger self only …

Folding Rules

Oct 14, 2025 · 6 min read · BIND Design

All rules are bad, but many are necessary. A game about travel without rules for carrying things just forces the GM to come up with rules on the fly. But needing rules to resolve a lot of situations doesn't mean a lot rules. Designers can cheat by folding rules over each other, so they cover more area, without taking …

Reading the Dice

Oct 2, 2025 · 3 min read · Design

Nobody struggles to roll a D6 and add +2 in their head, but there's something nice and immediate to any system that lets you just read the dice as they are. Here's a random proposal for a system which takes things into account, without any mental arithmetic. This whole thing will follow the format of my thinking on …

Playtesting BIND

Sep 29, 2025 · 3 min read · BIND Design

I can't remember most of what playtesting taught me over the last ten years, but I remember these things: XP on the Sheet Players didn't like having to look up the cost to buy Traits with experience points. This seems a bit ridiculous, given that you only look up costs (at most) once per session and there are only a …

Review: Exploding Kittens

Aug 28, 2025 · 1 min read · Review Design

When your turn comes, play as many cards as you want, then pick up one. If you draw an exploding kitten, you die. These rules are a rare treat, because they avoid the nasty element of so many games: reading and remembering. The first pitfall these rules avoid is any special notion of turn-order. By just saying 'your …

Scheduling Again

Aug 28, 2025 · 3 min read · Realtime

Like a spectre that moans about dead problems, Sci-Show have made a YouTube video on the deep Mathematics of scheduling an RPG night. Sci-Show on D&D Scheduling Of course, the Greek-laden formula is just a vector to tell the audience about Maths, but I still can't approve, because I couldn't follow any of the Maths. So …

Only a Company Can Make an RPG

Jul 31, 2025 · 3 min read · FOSS BIND

The RPG scene has repeatedly laughed, cried, or tooted about the various 'indie RPGs' made by corporations with with multiple accountants. But wherever you want to draw the line, it can't be a single author, because nobody makes a standard RPG alone. Even the smallest, the most indie of the indie-RPGs, has a credits …

Scot Hexes

Jul 19, 2025 · 3 min read · Blorb Cartography Theory

This is a response to Robgoblin's post on hex maps . It should have been an email, but Robgoblin has no contact details on the blog. Our cartographic goblin argues that a six-mile containing one settlement doesn't map to Middle Ages European fantasy settings, as any six-mile area would contain more than a single …

The Tale of Toad, Part III

Jul 18, 2025 · 7 min read · Review Memoirs

We were en route to find the bones of St. Gravis (as usual). Part II The giants aren't bad once you redirect their bountiful energies. We slept soundly next to this one, who was plagued by little men with stabbing, rusted knives, who woke him with a stab every time he slept. Once the little lights from their …