Personable Thoughts

 A recurring element of many role playing games is crafting systems, whether for alchemy and magic, or more mundane pursuits. These system often end up too simple to capture any interesting nuances of the crafting (spend X worth of "alchemy ingredients" and succeed an alchemy check), or too fiddly to engage with in a game where they are not the main focus (long list of specific ingredients for a long list of exact recipes). There are of course exceptions to this, where the level of abstraction allows for interesting gameplay while removing excess complication. One example of this is His Majesty the Worm , where monster guts will always yield an alchemical effect thematically appropriate for their origin, or the excellent Scrabblecraft from 400 independent bathrooms (among approximately one billion other blogposts each with their own solution ). In this blogpost, I will attempt another solution to the problem using playing cards and common blackjack mechanics. One of my m...

Another year passes, another set of Bloggies is awarded. A round of applause is in order for the category winners, and a flower bouquet and fancy chocolates (perhaps even a bottle of wine) should be prepared for Sacha as thanks for the hard work of hosting, to be presented after the crowning of the overall winner. The Bloggies this year truly presented a bumper crop of blogs, each of them would have been a worthy recipient of an award, but alas, only one could prevail in each category (I guess three if you count silver and copper Bloggies). There are just more good blog posts to go around than there are spots on the podium. This is good for us blog readers, but less so for all the awards hungry bloggers out there. The Bloggies being decided by popular vote after the initial nomination process, there were votes whose outcome I disagreed with, but I guess this is just the curse of not being the median voter. Rather than complain about this, I'm being an adult about it: I'm takin...

Bear with me folks, I'm going to do a discourse. Nobody asked for my thoughts, but what is a personal blog, if not a soap box for me to yell them out anyway. As always, but this time in particular, feel free to tell me that I'm wildly off base, and the things I say are bad are good actually. Recently, I read a post on Gaby Fermi's excellent blog, rolling d6 (go read it, it's good), about the price of tabletop RPGs . Here, she argues that RPG books are not too expensive because they offer a good value proposition in terms of how many hours of fun you can get from a book. While I solidly agree with her conclusion: No, RPG books are not too expensive, I'm not a huge fan of her reasoning to get there. As a preamble, I will just acknowledge that I am writing this from the relatively privileged position of having a job that gives me enough disposable income to buy many more games than I will ever have time to play. I understand that people with lower incomes will of cou...

  While calling Infærnum a big book is perhaps a stretch, the lavish 192 page hardback is certainly not a zine, and these are obviously the only two categories of book and thus it must be a big one. Published by Mind's Vision , Infaernum was originally written in (Brazilian) Portuguese by Caio Romero with graphic design by Raul Rinaldi.  Unfortunately, I think the game suffers from being a translation, sentences are often clunky and unusually phrased in a way that does not feel like an intentional stylistic choice. This is a huge shame, as the book looks great, there has definitely been a significant investment in the presentation, so it would be great as if the crowdfunding could also have paid for another editing pass on the text. Fortunately it is generally clear, so it presents no obstacle to reading and playing the game, it just does not read particularly naturally. The version I read was the deluxe Apocalypse Edition, which is a gorgeous tome, full of colours and with g...

  Christmas has come, and is well on its way to going, as I write this. It's nice spending time with family and eating yourself fat etc, but that's not the topic of this blog. As part of our Christmas celebrations, I received several nice RPG books as gifts, which got me thinking of The Book as An Object. There has been a lot of discussion about what "the game is", is it what's written in the book, does it only exist at the table (whether wooden or virtual), or is it some abstract space defined by the written rules? An interesting, if academic, question, but not one I will attempt to answer here, except to say that the RPG book serves multiple purposes. There is a discussion about information design that often rears its head: Is it better to design the book for someone sitting down and reading it, or for someone referencing it at the table during play? And is it possible to design for both simultaneously? Many games try to solve this with play aids at the table in...

  A common type of resolution mechanic in tabletop role playing games is the skill check - often resolved with comparing the value of a dice role plus a skill bonus to a target number ( E.g. difficulty class/DC, actual terminology may differ). The value of the DC tells you the difficulty of the task ahead, and the larger the character's skill bonus, the higher the chance of rolling over the DC and succeeding at the task. This framing essentially positions the roll as determining how well the character does at the task, which can feel unsatisfying when a character who should be skilled at the task fails something relatively simple (you could of course argue that relatively simple tasks should not warrant a roll, but you have to draw a line somewhere if you want to have skill checks in your game, and I like skills). One option is of course to forego the dice roll completely - select a difficulty class and compare it to a "skill level", if the skill is higher, it's a suc...