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 …

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Environments In Word and Acrobat, you can make some limited environments, like a header. But in LaTeX, you can make literally any type of environment you want. Need 10 encounter environments? Just make one macro. Arranging some encounter table then copy/ pasting it and filling in new monsters doesn't sound like a lot …

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Random character generation is great, especially random Attributes. Why you hate random Attributes People think Random attributes will ruin your game because D&D has taught them that Attributes cannot be raised quickly. If one rolls a bad character, they'll have to play 'Jake, the pointless', forever after. This …

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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 …

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RuneQuest's Glorantha setting is 500 pages long, so it's about half the length of Lord of the Rings. In order to help with character creation, players can get a 'Player pack' pdf, which tells you that the book as written was too confusing for normal players to build a character. The character creation begins with your …

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Trouble at Grogs is one of the best adventures I ever ran, and I've run it many times, in multiple systems. It looks like any other adventure at first. The players find a roaring tavern owned by a half-ogre named 'Grog'. Grog asks them to find out who's been stealing things in town. Reading more, you (the GM) find out …

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I so often hear people giving the golden rule of RPG's as 'remember it's a game, and to just have fun'. I can see that if nobody likes the game then it's not a good game, but the 'have fun' advice, while common enough, doesn't help anyone to do anything. John Mill discussed the paradox of happiness. If you want to …

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