Fancy a game of football on Saturdays? I mean all Saturdays. Every one, for the next few months. We need you to join a pivotal part of the game. This is you. This is how you sound when you ask people to play D&D. You can't miss one game, or we'll have to call the whole thing off for that week and no-one will be …

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A 'fair' RPG game immediately cuts the believability from a game. It slays engagement far more than a golden dragon, or a mushroom-man. A 'fair' game takes the fear out of the players, which robs RPGs of one of their unique abilities among games - death. Let me tell you about the 'unfair' things my world did to my …

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As established in the previous article , the World of Darkness' combat system sucks. But the right system can make everything better. (If you want to skip the system explanations, you can just download the revised White Wolf pdf ) No Combat Emphasis First off, I'm not making a combat system. The World of Darkness …

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The cynics say that we keep reinventing the wheel. They say we have too many RPGs, mostly doing the same thing, and why bother to write yet another RPG about elves and magic swords? And they have one thing right - we should stop re-writing RPGs from scratch. Instead, we should change them. Knave started as a …

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Overview BIND is a fantasy tabletop RPG designed to solve a number of problems: Character backstories are a pain. Solution: Story Points Players never engage in the adventure in the right way; when they should go left, they always go right, but railroading them never gives good results. Solution: Side Quests Standard …

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It's hard to remember all those little things mid-game, so I'm thinking of making a LaTeX footnote for stories, which mentions a random very-normal-thing. Three young students, complaining about the mosquitoes. Retired accountant, walking his dog at 5am because he cannot sleep. Traffic jam made by two German tourists - …

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In some sense, you don't care about your washing machine. You have no clue where that powder comes from, or where those particles go after the wash. But you care a great deal when your washing machine breaks down. When to Blame the System When combat drags out for 45 minutes the system has failed. Even the purest of …

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I love the notion of OSR books - the bare minimalism, the daring reinvention and questioning of schemas and tropes. So here are my musings on some OSR-style mechanics.1 Goals 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 Why HP? If …

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I sometimes feel that collections can imply something shameful, and it's especially potent in RPGs. It has something to do with wanting to horde, rather than use; to own rather than do. I can't fully articulate the feeling, but it has something to do with one thing coming from on high as the 'definitive' idea, the …

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When designing Fenestra, I noticed it had no magical universities. I really mean 'noticed', rather than 'stipulated', or 'invented'. People think that if anything's possible at the start, then it'll all be possible later. Options 'A', 'B', and 'C' are each possible, so perhaps we might select option 'A', and later 'B'. …

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