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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RPGs with a shared narrative mechanic - where players and the GM both come up with interesting people, results, and situations - come with a cost. They pull focus away from the puzzle elements of the RPG, and that's my favourite element, so I can't see myself enjoying shared narration mechanics. Let's start with an …

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Domination In Vampire: the Masquerade, the first level of the Dominate ability lets the vampire issue a one-word command, which the target instantly obeys. It might be 'sit', 'stay', 'fight', 'run', or any other one-word command. It's flexible genius, because it clearly defines what the ability does, but can still …

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RPGs have dungeons...well more often those dungeons are caves...no, actually RPG plots often feature caves, which we call 'dungeons'. Anyway, these caves look rather strange, because people began drawing them on graph paper, and later they made sure to fit the entire map onto a single square at the top of a page. RPG …

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Why is it always the same old elves, and hobbits, and +1 swords? Can't people come up with anything different? ...I hear this every so often, and I wonder if any of these people actually pick up the myriad gonzo-RPGs with novel races (or at least 'novelty races'). Of course, many have the extra barrier of 40 pages of …

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What's great about dice-pools is meaningful results, all the time. You'll struggle to get that with a D20. Listen... Example 1: Good Chances The party ranger wants to navigate through the forest. Forests are dangerous, and he might fail, but his bonuses mean he succeeds on the roll of 3 or more. A 90% chance of success …

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This chronological rundown of how I approach RPG design will go over the most universal principles I've learned or copied from others. Attitude All rules are bad, but some rules are worth it. The rest of the ideas here will talk about technical implementation, but the core thought, riding alongside every notion, is …

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I was once attacked by a horde of kobolds, and it taught me a lesson. These attacks weren't uncommon, when playing the old Baldur's Gate computer game. I threw a poison cloud spell at the kobolds, and they started randomly falling over, getting up and walking a few steps, then falling over again. As the dozen little …

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