Standard drinking games are badly designed; if someone does badly, they get drunk, then do worse on the next game, which prompts more drinking. The only people who play drinking games want to drink, but when you lose, you drink, so the incentives don’t track anyone’s goals.

A better drinking game would have a drink as the prize, meaning that skilful players become lose their skill, and the skill-level evens out until everyone at the evening has reached similar levels of coordination, puzzle-solving, or just whatever the game involved.

Whenever I’m unsure about a rule, I pull out a basic spreadsheet, and start populating numbers.

The image I had for the ghoul spell began with a mage who could raise small things from the dead, like a cat, or dog. Slowly, the dark sorcerer would learn to raise gnomes, then humans, and finally raise undead ogres or basilisks.

The system should clearly set some maximum HP for the target. Standard spells in BIND always use the caster’s Intelligence Bonus, and sometimes use the spell’s level, so the final formula would have to be some combination of one of those.

Explaining an open source RPG to the community has been a challenge. Sometimes the misunderstandings are obvious. At other times, not.

Systems already have no copyright, so RPGs are already open source.

The mistake here is quite plain - this person has got mixed up between the rules and the rest of the RPG. This kind of comment often comes with the follow-up:

The rules are what matters, so we don’t need the rest.

I warned ye!

but did you listen to me?

Oh no…

you knew didn’t ye?

It’s just a harmless little licence, isn’t it?

…sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

I’ve implied all this heavily in other writing, but just to be clear, here is the game plan for BIND.

Firstly, BIND doesn’t matter. I want to see an open-source RPG that’s actually open source.

I want to see the community able to break away from a corporation telling them what they can do, and just make their own games. While people can technically do this already, when people believe they can’t, they can’t. I’ve heard Wizards of the Costs described as the ‘patrons’ of the RPG community, and find it sickening. A patron gives money, corporations try to find ways to take money - if some game is brilliant but cannot make money, a corporation won’t make it, except by accident.

A player rolls the dice, and the table watches the result, like a roulette ball bouncing about. Rothgar has a +4 to make the jump, but the chasm demands a Target Number (TN) of 12.

The player rolls 2D6…

               (( _______
     _______     /\O    O\
    /O     /\   /  \      \
   /   O  /O \ / O  \O____O\ ))
((/_____O/    \\    /O     /
  \O    O\    / \  /   O  /
   \O    O\ O/   \/_____O/
    \O____O\/ ))          ))
  ((

and they land on ‘8’.

Game designers often lecture (or bemoan) that nobody can possibly make a realistic game, which sounds like giving up on a challenge nobody mentioned. The real challenge a game should attempt is keeping the ordinals in check.

If a sword deals 10 damage, that’s fine (what does it even mean to deal 10 damage?). If a player character punches someone for 10 damage, that’s fine too. People have a problem with the system when they deal 10 damage with a kick, then pick up a sword, and still deal 10 damage.

My favourite word-game is Ghost.

1. You go round in a circle, each person stating a letter, which builds to a word.
2. If someone completes a word of four or more letters, they lose.
3. If someone receives a set of letters which cannot complete a word, they can challenge the person before them.
   • If the person before states a legal word, they lose.
   • But if they state a word, then the challenger loses.

Example

Round we go:

My favourite WoD RPG will always be Changeling. I’ve run one campaign, and I wish I had time to run more.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have time to re-write it, like I did with Vampire, but I have plenty of concrete plans for changes.

Seelie vs Unseelie

The book began by saying ‘Seelie’ does not mean ‘good’, and ‘Unseelie’ does not mean evil, then instantly forgot its own advice. Every paragraph associated the Unseelie fae with bedlam and banality, with slavery and death. The Unseelie clearly received the role of the ‘bad guys’ at every turn.

Some RPG systems are obviously more of a faff than they need to be, and some take more time than others. This feels obvious, but I want a better way to measure it than using my gut. I want to give a little flesh, with a Maths-flavoured guesstimate, similar to ‘Big-O notation’ (a method for guessing how fast a sorting algorithm works).

faff noun: An unnecessary or over-complicated task, especially one perceived as a waste of time. verb: To waste time on an unproductive activity.