I've implied all this heavily in other writing, but just to be clear, here is the game plan for BIND. Firstly, BIND doesn't matter. I want to see an open-source RPG that's actually open source. I want to see the community able to break away from a corporation telling them what they can do, and just make their own …

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BIND is changing how attacks work, and I can't believe I didn't think of this trick before. Very Bad Attacks The worst way to perform attacks must be GURPS Alice and Bob roll for Initiative Alice rolls to attack Bob rolls to dodge Bob rolls to attack Alice rolls to dodge That's 1 roll for the Initiative (both roll at …

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Players roll the dice, and wait to see the landing. Like roulette, football, or anything else, the pay-off emerges when they physically see the result, and know in that instant, how things have gone. They get a moment of tension, then relief, or panic. Having an unknown Target Number (TN) moves the results away from …

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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 …

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My favourite WoD RPG will always be Changeling. I've run one campaign, and I wish I had time to run more. I don't know if I'll ever have time to re-write it, like I did with Vampire, but I have plenty of concrete plans for changes. Seelie vs Unseelie The book began by saying 'Seelie' does not mean 'good', and …

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I'm an impatient player and a very impatient GM. Some systems are obviously more of a faff than they need to be, but it's not obvious where the faff lies, so I've made a system to guestimate it. It's not a total system, with a rating, just some methods to eyeball how much faff systems give you. The basic idea is to …

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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 their …

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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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