The classic World of Darkness system has some impressive features.

System Summary

1. Add the character’s Attribute + Ability,
2. And roll that number of D10’s.
3. Each die which meets the difficulty number (default: 6) means one ‘success’.

Bust in the Door!

• Strength 3 + Crafts 3 = 6
• Roll 6D10 (difficulty 7): 7, 4, 4, 3, 1, 6.
• Result: 1 success (bottom of door cracks open, letting you squeeze through).

Outrun the Cops

The One Page Dungeon contest asks people for a single-page dungeon with a Creative Commons, share-alike, attribution licence.

“Huzzah”, I thought, “that’s GPL compatible!”, I imagined, wrongly.

The first caveat is ‘GPLv3’, which is still fine for what I do, but a shame.

The next caveat is ‘only CC BY-SA 4.0’, not version 3, just version 4. The competition has been going since 2008, but people only recently started using CC BY-SA 4.0 commonly. Still, some earlier years had some entries using the 4.0 licence.

Sometimes the party needs to make a decision as a group. Most of the time, in fact.

• The strange man beckons you to follow him
• The goblins spot you, and instantly retreat back into a hole in the hillside

You know the drill.

And sometimes, people perfectly capable of deciding what they want to do, will not make decisions for the group. That’s quite understandable, but sometimes the entire group just stalls, unsure of what ’they’ want to do. Discussion does not come easily, perhaps because nobody has a strong intuition one way or another, perhaps because they want someone else to speak first.

I think it’s fair to say that Adobe’s InDesign is the standard publishing tool for RPGs, or at least the most common among the most well-known RPGs. However, it’s clearly inappropriate for BIND.

BIND’s all about working together on an open project, but InDesign is geared to limit that openness.

Cash

In order to use InDesign, one has to:

1. Have Windows or OSX (both of which cost a fair amount of cash),
2. sign up for a monthly subscription (more cash!),
3. agree to never work with countries deemed unfriendly to the USA (or Adobe will flat-out ban you, even if you have a licence).

No Git

Currently, anyone can download all of the BIND books from Gitlab (or Github, or my own git server, et c.) but an Adobe book would require its own site, with its own hosting. The InDesign file-format doesn’t allow for people to make myriad concurrent versions, then make one of them a proposal, and seamlessly send those changes back into every other proposal.

Parallel actions speed up resolution in a way nothing else ever could.

5 Players vs 10 Bandits

Look at how the table acts, focussing for a disturbing moment on the players, rather than characters.

Standard One-at-a-Time Initiative

The GM calls for initiative:

1. Alice, Bob, Charlie, Drake, and Emily roll Initiative.
   • The GM either adopts a new initiative system (we now have two!) or rolls ten dice and records every single one.
2. Brief intermission while people sort who goes first
3. Drake attacks a bandit.
4. Drake rolls Damage.
5. Alice attacks a bandit.
6. Alice rolls Damage.
7. Charlie attacks a bandit (miss).
8. A bandit attacks Charlie.
9. GM rolls Damage.
10. A bandit attacks Alice (miss).
11. A bandit attacks Alice.
12. GM rolls Damage.
13. A bandit attacks Drake (miss).
14. GM rolls Damage.
15. A bandit attacks Charlie (miss).
16. Bob attacks a bandits.
17. Bob rolls Damage.
18. A bandit attacks Bob (miss).
19. Emily attacks a bandit (miss).
20. A bandit attacks Bob (miss).
21. A bandit attacks Drake (miss).

In engineering, this is referred to as a ‘complete shitshow’. We’re clearly going to die before reaching the end of this combat.

I have a collection of images without any copyright. I suspect a lot of people who write books which should have pictures do the same thing.

Searching various images for the right types of images is boring. Collecting these images is boring (right click, save, copy author name, paste author name into directory, move image to directory, copy image name…). Sifting through these images is also extremely boring.

It’s time to get organized.

Christer Enfors at Hexed Press created a procedure for generating hex maps.

It uses the basic notion of altitude to make hexes each have a similar altitude to the next hex. The result is that mountains tend to be next to mountains or hills, and hills might generate a forest as the next hex. The entire thing results in a more natural feel than a completely random hex map.

However, it struggles with rivers. The first problem is, there are no rivers. The next problem is that if we add a river, we would either have to modify a lot of existing hexes (as our new river floods through them) or have the river end in a dead-end stump all too often.

Waves of scepticism about the standard fantasy notion of ‘racial languages’ - i.e. languages tied to a particular race - have been building and crashing. Having one language per region, instead of one language for all dwarves, seems much more sensible. And how could all the dwarves in the world speak ‘dwarvish’? Shouldn’t there be many dwarven languages? But I don’t think these objections work.

Different Walks of Life

I have a heavy suspicion that people who think that languages divided across racial lines look ridiculous have fallen afoul of mixing ‘fantasy races’, and ‘human races’. Thinking of human ‘races’ as having in-built languages would, of course, look ridiculous. But a ‘fantasy races’, has about the same relationship to ‘human races’ as ‘gorge’ (the depression in the ground) and ‘gorge’ (meaning to eat too much). They have a clear connection, but they’re not the same thing. A fantasy race is quite real (at least within the fiction of the fantasy world), and this real division entails living separately from the other races.

Chekov’s gun poses a real threat to some games.

If a group playing Vampire: The Masquerade (‘VtM’) encounter a Ravnos, spinning illusions, and confusing mortals, then the next time they hear about unusual events, they will assume that the Ravnos did this. Clearly - the Ravnos is part of the plot! After all, VtM draws heavily from literature; or rather, it draws a lot from the idea-spaces of people who like to analyse literature while telling you that they analyse literature.

They say you have to playtest, but they forget that I’m a lazy man, so when it came to travel rules, I didn’t feel like simulating a bunch of journeys. So it’s time to get the computer to do the work for me.

Setup

An encounter roll occurs every 1D6 intervals in BIND (where an interval = ‘one quarter of the day’ = ‘6 hours’).

Travel rates are around 10 miles per day for a caravan on a road, so to travel 50 miles, the troupe will need 5 days (i.e. 20 intervals). In bash, we can represent these rules as so: