Design

Spreadsheets are Great

Jan 27, 2023 · 3 min read · RPG Theory Design BIND

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 …

Ordinal Fallbacks

Jan 1, 2023 · 1 min read · RPG Design

Game designers often lecture (or bemoan) that nobody can possibly make a realistic game. But in the words of Queen Victoria, I am not interested in the possibility of failure. Instead of looking at 'is this showing what would happen if you really mounted a dragon while wearing armour', I prefer to look simply at the …

Word Game: Ghost

Dec 21, 2022 · 1 min read · Design

My favourite word-game is Ghost. You go round in a circle, each person stating a letter, which builds to a word. If someone completes a word of four or more letters, they lose. 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 …

Standard Initiative Sucks

Oct 4, 2022 · 4 min read · RPG Theory Design

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 …

An Alternative OSR Style

Jul 23, 2022 · 3 min read · RPG OSR Design

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 …

Systems and Genre Representation

Jul 12, 2022 · 3 min read · RPG Theory Design

Systems should represent genres, and some do this better than others. System Excellence Dr Who One Dr Who RPG (I forget which) contained an absolutely genius initiative system. The initiative turn-order was: Speak Run Use an item Attack This clearly produces unrealistic results. The system cannot allow anyone to shoot …

Fate Points in BIND

Apr 12, 2022 · 8 min read · RPG BIND Design

Remember that book or film where the protagonist received a nasty wound, then persevered, and won the day? Well that can't happen in RPGs, and that's a shame. So my solution is Fate Points (FP). Reasons People Created Hit Points Hit Points make sense as a standard game abstraction, until they apply to PCs. If PCs …

The OGL is not Open

Mar 22, 2022 · 4 min read · BIND RPG Design FOSS

The Open Gaming Licence (OGL) does not in fact produce terribly open games, so I wish people would stop referring to such RPGs as 'open source'. No Real Books The OGL specifically excludes Product Identity. "Product Identity" means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade …

If You Want to Understand an RPG System, Remove the Dice

Mar 5, 2022 · 6 min read · RPG Theory Design

Reading over systems with all of those 'Add this, roll that' can give someone the appearance of a massive, complicated RPG engine, churning out all sorts of details and replicating various interesting minutiae of the gaming world. But sometimes what's really happening in all those tumbling pieces of plastic, and once …

Weaving Stories

Jan 30, 2022 · 9 min read · RPG Design

Classic RPG adventures suffer from chronic flaws. When PCs should to go somewhere, they don't. When they should take interest in an item, they ignore it. Any NPC who will lead them to a secret cave in Chapter IV gets stabbed in Chapter II because the players thought he was up to something. After all the carnage, they …