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 …

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A few RPG creators might make bank, but for the most part, we don't. For the most part, people don't even want to make it their entire career - they have a particular vision of a game they want to make. I think if indie designers want to see their ideas succeed, they should release them and start working with others, …

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So there you are, storytelling a twisted tale of modern horror about a coterie of vampires, when an odd ability crops up. One of your players has focused on controlling people so much with the Dominate Discipline that she can now enter other people's bodies, taking them over as if they were her own. So we know that the …

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A response to Antolius' post, Star Trek Adventures TTRPG has a fatal flaw . 3D Chess When Star Trek fans wanted to make a Star Trek (ST) chess-board, there were two schools of thought - one reconstructed the rules from actors who were moving pieces randomly, and another created a game from the same board, but with …

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RPG Vloggers chatting about Gygax note on real-world time-synchronization have got me thinking about really using this rule. In case you haven't heard the idea - Gygax demanded that every day which passes in the real-world, one day passes in the game. The troupe starts and ends their games somewhere safe, like a tavern …

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Vampires could never feel really plausible, but Vampire: The Masquerade created a lot of fantastic reasons to buy into the World of Darkness. Enough that once the reader allows the vampires and their magical powers, the masquerade they all keep - the mass conspiracy that they don't exist - feels easy to swallow. Pull …

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I feel the World of Darkness could have done better by having the various spirit worlds accessible only through some trance, where someone enters that world in spirit-alone, and leaves their body behind. Unintended Teleportation Garou traversing the umbral planes, Giovanni vampires wandering into the land of the dead, …

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In the new Contest System for the Storyteller system books, both players roll the same Attribute + Ability combination for 'Extended and Resisted', so Subterfuge is used to lie and spot lies, and Investigation allows someone to uncover crime as well as hide it. This has made a number of people online strangely irate, …

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White Wolf's Attributes were surprisingly revolutionary, as D&D had set such a strong precedent with 'S,D,C,I,W,Cha'. The deviation's great, but they retained some bizarre ideas from D&D. Dexterity 'Dexterity' should really refer to coordination, but it was soon used as a 'speed' stat, showing how fast someone …

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Specializations in White Wolf allow someone with a rating of 4 or more in a Trait to re-roll any '10's for a chance at an extra success. Expertise (not used in all books, but present in the Dark Ages), allows a character +1 success. Mechanical Problems The specialization rule clearly has to go. White Wolf's basic rules …

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