Mark Chance
Boingy! Boingy!
Hello! Long time no see. Well, not really "see", but you get what I mean. I recently completed the A to Z Blogging Challenge for April 2012, and I figured I'd share the results here with a series of links and italicized teasers.
[sblock=Hidden Rollcall of A to Z Blogposts!]
A Is for Angels
Medieval scholastic philosophy posited that angels exist as purely intellectual beings. In other words, angels have no corporeal substance. This doesn’t mean that angels are ethereal or vaporous creatures. Rather, angels have no material form at all. This idea has several interesting consequences....
B Is for Boring
It’s time for your weekly game. You’re ready to sit down and roleplay for the next six to eight hours. You’re in character. Your fellow players are in character. The scenario is interesting, engaging, and then combat starts. Three hours later, you’re on round six, and there’s no end in sight. You start to consider having your character commit suicide.
C Is for Carrot
How many ways are their to motivate players? Well, if we’re to believe cliches, there are two: the carrot and the stick. Since today is C, I’m going to talk about the carrot....
D Is for Death Knight
"Ah, memories! How fondly I recall my acquisition of 1E’s Fiend Folio and my amazement at the assortment of bizarre creatures therein. From the sticky adherer to the preposterous flumph to science-fictiony yellow musk zombie, there was so much in that slim volume that just screamed, "Use us! Use us!"....
E Is for Exploding Dice
Since I’m a guy, I like it when things explode. Cars that fly off cliffs, buildings full of bad guys, vampires exposed to sunlight, et cetera. Of course, these things are most fun when they’re not real. I don’t like it when real people are inside exploding cars, and even bad guys and vampires deserve something resembling due process. (Well, maybe not vampires, especially the sparkly kind.)....
F Is for Folklore.
Today’s letter inspired me to pull Kemp P. Battle’s compilation Great American Folklore from the history section of my library and flip through its pages for inspiration. Pages 41 and 42 list several superstitions about traveling, and I said to myself, “Self, this might work!”
G Is for Gröd the Gorilla
Gröd the Gorilla transformed from a common jungle ape into an evil, intelligent beast after exposure to the eldritch energies of a glowing hunk of starmetal that fell from the heavens. Those same energies unlocked wild psionic powers from the beast’s mind....
H Is for Horror (for Free)
Mythopoetic Games “is dedicated to publishing a small number of free tabletop pencil-and-paper roleplaying games.” The site and the games are from the minds of Christopher Johnstone and Dean Suter. On the downloads page, Mythopoetic Games has five free tabletop RPGs. The one that we’re interested in today is Danse Macabre....
I Is for Ignorance
Way back in the early days of D&D, playing a monster as a character posed certain difficulties. Chief among these was that most monsters didn’t have any ability scores other than a general range for Intelligence. Monsters (as opposed to NPCs with class levels) and PCs weren’t built using the same rules....
J Is for Jumping
In Pathfinder, the Acrobatics skill has several uses, among them determining how far a character can jump. Leaping out of the rules about jumping is this sentence: “No jump can allow you to exceed your maximum movement for the round.”....
K Is for Knowledge
A couple of days ago, I talked about ignorance. That post ended with a reference to knowledge, touching on the intersection of player knowledge and character knowledge. In the wonderful world of Venn diagrams, player knowledge and character knowledge obviously cannot be kept complete separate....
L Is for Luck
One of the many things on my overcrowded plate is preparing for Texicon near the end of July. I’ve committed to running two different events, “Metro Gnomes” using Dyson Logos’s inspired Geodesic Gnomes and “Castronegro” using a mashup of Beyond Belief Games‘s Go Fer Yer Gun! and Chaosium‘s Call of Cthulhu (CoC). While reviewing the rules for the latter game, I was re-introduced to the concept of the Luck roll....
M Is for Monks
I’ve always liked monks. All the way back to 1E, I’ve liked monks. I liked the 1E Player’s Handbook, and I really liked the 1E monk presented in an issue of Dragon that I still have buried away somewhere in my library (but that I’m too lazy right now to look for). 1E’s Oriental Adventures also had a great monk, especially considering the DIY martial arts rules contained in that book....
N Is for Nagendra
Sultan Nagendra rules a desert kingdom that controls several important oases and, therefore, controls the trade routes through the region as well. Things were not always so. Decades ago, Nagendra was a desert giant outcast, banished from his tribe because of his too enthusiastic worship of Apep....
O Is for Ocelot Atlatl
O nearly had me stumped. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t think of anything good for O. Orcs were too obvious. Old School? Too ubiquitous. Ovaltine wasn’t really game-related. Then I remembered growing up that my mother wanted an ocelot.…
P Is for Poem for Mr. Birsinger
Today I take a break from game stuff in order to wax poetic about a fellow teacher.
Q Is for Quit Whining & Play!
I read many threads on Paizo’s Pathfinder messageboards. I don’t respond to most of what I read, in large part because I simply cannot relate to the topics. Chief among these topics are the threads about the lack of rule clarity (usually accompanied by demands that one of Paizo’s developers respond....
R Is for Reflex Saves
Okay, so here’s the scenario. The adventurers are in the middle of a 40-foot-square chamber. Other than a bit of debris here and there, the room is empty and devoid of cover for the adventurers to, well, take cover behind. Suddenly, an up-until-then invisible sorcerer appears....
S Is for Snakes
Animals are amazing. They often have abilities that seem as if they’ve been lifted out of some science fiction story. Game stats for animals often (usually?) give the short shrift to some of the remarkable things animals can do. For example, a tiger’s roar can stun its prey....
T Is for the Thriller
Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize y’all’s neighborhood. The foulest stench is in the air. The funk of forty thousand years and grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom....
U Is for Undead Turning
Remember the good old days when your cleric unleashed some turning against some undead? Some of them ran away. Others exploded. What variety! Nowadays with Pathfinder, undead take damage from turning, which is now called channel energy. The undead get a saving throw for half damage....
V Is for Vampires & Energy Drain
For as long as I can remember, the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game has included energy drain as a special attack for various monsters, especially certain iconic undead such as vampires....
W Is for Warp Thief
One of the neatest things Pathfinder has done is to introduce a variety of archetypes as variations on character classes. The gist of archetypes is that you lose some standard class features in exchange for gaining other class features that fit a particular theme....
X Is for X-Ray Vision
One thing that 1E has over some of the later Es is the plethora of visions. There was infravision and ultravision, which survive mutated into darkvision and low-light vision. Some monsters, such as the Fiend Folio‘s nycadaemon had x-ray vision, gamma vision, and indeed a vision for every part of the electromagnetic spectrum....
Y Is for Yo-Yo Magus
Yes, that’s right. Y is for yo-yo fighting. First, I enlist the aid of yo-yo fighting spokesman, Andy Lau....
Z Is for Zahia!
And here I am, finishing up the A to Z blogging challenge. Huzzah! Since I’ve been doing an NPC a week, that seemed like a good way to wrap things up. The other NPCs (Gröd the Gorilla, Sultan Nagendra, and the Thriller) were all leader monsters, conquerors of sorts who seek to expand their ability to control and destroy. Zahia, however, wants to be left alone to play with her pets....
[/sblock]
[sblock=Hidden Rollcall of A to Z Blogposts!]
A Is for Angels
Medieval scholastic philosophy posited that angels exist as purely intellectual beings. In other words, angels have no corporeal substance. This doesn’t mean that angels are ethereal or vaporous creatures. Rather, angels have no material form at all. This idea has several interesting consequences....
B Is for Boring
It’s time for your weekly game. You’re ready to sit down and roleplay for the next six to eight hours. You’re in character. Your fellow players are in character. The scenario is interesting, engaging, and then combat starts. Three hours later, you’re on round six, and there’s no end in sight. You start to consider having your character commit suicide.
C Is for Carrot
How many ways are their to motivate players? Well, if we’re to believe cliches, there are two: the carrot and the stick. Since today is C, I’m going to talk about the carrot....
D Is for Death Knight
"Ah, memories! How fondly I recall my acquisition of 1E’s Fiend Folio and my amazement at the assortment of bizarre creatures therein. From the sticky adherer to the preposterous flumph to science-fictiony yellow musk zombie, there was so much in that slim volume that just screamed, "Use us! Use us!"....
E Is for Exploding Dice
Since I’m a guy, I like it when things explode. Cars that fly off cliffs, buildings full of bad guys, vampires exposed to sunlight, et cetera. Of course, these things are most fun when they’re not real. I don’t like it when real people are inside exploding cars, and even bad guys and vampires deserve something resembling due process. (Well, maybe not vampires, especially the sparkly kind.)....
F Is for Folklore.
Today’s letter inspired me to pull Kemp P. Battle’s compilation Great American Folklore from the history section of my library and flip through its pages for inspiration. Pages 41 and 42 list several superstitions about traveling, and I said to myself, “Self, this might work!”
G Is for Gröd the Gorilla
Gröd the Gorilla transformed from a common jungle ape into an evil, intelligent beast after exposure to the eldritch energies of a glowing hunk of starmetal that fell from the heavens. Those same energies unlocked wild psionic powers from the beast’s mind....
H Is for Horror (for Free)
Mythopoetic Games “is dedicated to publishing a small number of free tabletop pencil-and-paper roleplaying games.” The site and the games are from the minds of Christopher Johnstone and Dean Suter. On the downloads page, Mythopoetic Games has five free tabletop RPGs. The one that we’re interested in today is Danse Macabre....
I Is for Ignorance
Way back in the early days of D&D, playing a monster as a character posed certain difficulties. Chief among these was that most monsters didn’t have any ability scores other than a general range for Intelligence. Monsters (as opposed to NPCs with class levels) and PCs weren’t built using the same rules....
J Is for Jumping
In Pathfinder, the Acrobatics skill has several uses, among them determining how far a character can jump. Leaping out of the rules about jumping is this sentence: “No jump can allow you to exceed your maximum movement for the round.”....
K Is for Knowledge
A couple of days ago, I talked about ignorance. That post ended with a reference to knowledge, touching on the intersection of player knowledge and character knowledge. In the wonderful world of Venn diagrams, player knowledge and character knowledge obviously cannot be kept complete separate....
L Is for Luck
One of the many things on my overcrowded plate is preparing for Texicon near the end of July. I’ve committed to running two different events, “Metro Gnomes” using Dyson Logos’s inspired Geodesic Gnomes and “Castronegro” using a mashup of Beyond Belief Games‘s Go Fer Yer Gun! and Chaosium‘s Call of Cthulhu (CoC). While reviewing the rules for the latter game, I was re-introduced to the concept of the Luck roll....
M Is for Monks
I’ve always liked monks. All the way back to 1E, I’ve liked monks. I liked the 1E Player’s Handbook, and I really liked the 1E monk presented in an issue of Dragon that I still have buried away somewhere in my library (but that I’m too lazy right now to look for). 1E’s Oriental Adventures also had a great monk, especially considering the DIY martial arts rules contained in that book....
N Is for Nagendra
Sultan Nagendra rules a desert kingdom that controls several important oases and, therefore, controls the trade routes through the region as well. Things were not always so. Decades ago, Nagendra was a desert giant outcast, banished from his tribe because of his too enthusiastic worship of Apep....
O Is for Ocelot Atlatl
O nearly had me stumped. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t think of anything good for O. Orcs were too obvious. Old School? Too ubiquitous. Ovaltine wasn’t really game-related. Then I remembered growing up that my mother wanted an ocelot.…
P Is for Poem for Mr. Birsinger
Today I take a break from game stuff in order to wax poetic about a fellow teacher.
Q Is for Quit Whining & Play!
I read many threads on Paizo’s Pathfinder messageboards. I don’t respond to most of what I read, in large part because I simply cannot relate to the topics. Chief among these topics are the threads about the lack of rule clarity (usually accompanied by demands that one of Paizo’s developers respond....
R Is for Reflex Saves
Okay, so here’s the scenario. The adventurers are in the middle of a 40-foot-square chamber. Other than a bit of debris here and there, the room is empty and devoid of cover for the adventurers to, well, take cover behind. Suddenly, an up-until-then invisible sorcerer appears....
S Is for Snakes
Animals are amazing. They often have abilities that seem as if they’ve been lifted out of some science fiction story. Game stats for animals often (usually?) give the short shrift to some of the remarkable things animals can do. For example, a tiger’s roar can stun its prey....
T Is for the Thriller
Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize y’all’s neighborhood. The foulest stench is in the air. The funk of forty thousand years and grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom....
U Is for Undead Turning
Remember the good old days when your cleric unleashed some turning against some undead? Some of them ran away. Others exploded. What variety! Nowadays with Pathfinder, undead take damage from turning, which is now called channel energy. The undead get a saving throw for half damage....
V Is for Vampires & Energy Drain
For as long as I can remember, the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game has included energy drain as a special attack for various monsters, especially certain iconic undead such as vampires....
W Is for Warp Thief
One of the neatest things Pathfinder has done is to introduce a variety of archetypes as variations on character classes. The gist of archetypes is that you lose some standard class features in exchange for gaining other class features that fit a particular theme....
X Is for X-Ray Vision
One thing that 1E has over some of the later Es is the plethora of visions. There was infravision and ultravision, which survive mutated into darkvision and low-light vision. Some monsters, such as the Fiend Folio‘s nycadaemon had x-ray vision, gamma vision, and indeed a vision for every part of the electromagnetic spectrum....
Y Is for Yo-Yo Magus
Yes, that’s right. Y is for yo-yo fighting. First, I enlist the aid of yo-yo fighting spokesman, Andy Lau....
Z Is for Zahia!
And here I am, finishing up the A to Z blogging challenge. Huzzah! Since I’ve been doing an NPC a week, that seemed like a good way to wrap things up. The other NPCs (Gröd the Gorilla, Sultan Nagendra, and the Thriller) were all leader monsters, conquerors of sorts who seek to expand their ability to control and destroy. Zahia, however, wants to be left alone to play with her pets....
[/sblock]
Last edited:
