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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Vampires could never feel really plausible, but Vampire: The Masquerade created a lot of fantastic reasons to buy into the World of Darkness. Enough that once the reader allows the vampires and their magical powers, the masquerade they all keep - the mass conspiracy that they don't exist - feels easy to swallow. Pull …

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I feel the World of Darkness could have done better by having the various spirit worlds accessible only through some trance, where someone enters that world in spirit-alone, and leaves their body behind. Unintended Teleportation Garou traversing the umbral planes, Giovanni vampires wandering into the land of the dead, …

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In the new Contest System for the Storyteller system books, both players roll the same Attribute + Ability combination for 'Extended and Resisted', so Subterfuge is used to lie and spot lies, and Investigation allows someone to uncover crime as well as hide it. This has made a number of people online strangely irate, …

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White Wolf's Attributes were surprisingly revolutionary, as D&D had set such a strong precedent with 'S,D,C,I,W,Cha'. The deviation's great, but they retained some bizarre ideas from D&D. Dexterity 'Dexterity' should really refer to coordination, but it was soon used as a 'speed' stat, showing how fast someone …

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Specializations in White Wolf allow someone with a rating of 4 or more in a Trait to re-roll any '10's for a chance at an extra success. Expertise (not used in all books, but present in the Dark Ages), allows a character +1 success. Mechanical Problems The specialization rule clearly has to go. White Wolf's basic rules …

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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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