So I was making a better combat system for World of Darkness games, and eventually started remaking the whole thing. Overview Merits are stupid. Merits are gone. Let's look at the merits, and keep in mind the golden rule when designing a game It's not complete when nothing can be added. It's complete when nothing can …

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Standard initiative rules do far more damage than good. Without Initiative, the sequence goes like this: 1 1 Roll to attack/ 2 2 └── Roll Damage That's 2 steps, and if we add initiative, we have 3: 1 1 Roll initiative 2 2 Roll to attack 3 3 └── Roll Damage For 1 PC + 1 Monster, that's a potential 6 steps! It's a long …

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Automatic dungeon generators are rubbish. Some are pretty, but all of them are completely unusable. You enter a room, it has a goblin, or treasure, or nothing. Next room. It makes no sense. Why was the goblin sitting there? Why was there treasure in the next room, and why didn't the goblin take it? Everything looks …

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'Session 0' is the pre-game evening to talk about the game, without having the game. I don't see any reason for five people to lose an evening, planning future evenings. I want to run through the standard arguments, just to give solidity to the feeling of wasted time prompted by the phrase 'session zero'. People should …

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Character Creation While I'm remaking the World of Darkness Combat system , I'm starting to feel that Character Creation could stand to be a lot more balanced. But it's more of a Storytelling system. This isn't about killing trolls for gold pieces - it's adult story-crafting. ...that's what I hear the books echo back …

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A hundred paces down the dark tunnel, you see dozens of goblins dancing round a fire and singing about eating anything that moves. At this point the crew begin to plot. Could we just stay here and shoot at the goblins? We should be able to get a load of arrows off in three rounds. If we run back to where we avoided …

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Every fantasy work has two characters: magic and the landscape. Landscape In Earthsea, the water compartmentalizes the locations. Here, Ged grew up. There, he learnt about magic. And every time we want to know more about this land, water provides punctuation to the story and isolates the area. Middle Earth has a very …

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Pre-Game Post a link to the pdf (but assume nobody will read it) Get snacks (or make dahl if you're feeling fancy - everyone loves dahl) Put water and glasses on the table Dice, rubbers (or 'erasers' in American), pencils, and coins Plan smoke-breaks (even if you don't have smokers) Intro Hide the beers until the …

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I feel like the Old School Renaissance ('OSR') games could achieve their goals easier. The exact goals vary, but it's something along the lines of: like old D&D don't fill the character sheet with 1,000 special skills simple rules lethal game-play, forcing players to be clever Rather than ditching feats and …

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My recent background-watching videos covered the Old School Renaissance ('OSR'), which looks to revive a lot of old-school D&D-style play. I started with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, so a renaissance intrigued me. Strange Premises While I've not heard of some of the more egregious rules returning (thieves …

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