Recent content by Jackelope King

Interestingly enough, psionics actually represented my tastes for how fantasy magic should work better than Vancean magic. So much so that I dumped traditional casters in one 3.5 game for a high psionics game set during a stalled Age of Exploration. Vancean magic never really worked for me...

Oh, I hear ya. For the most part, I just use the simple rule-of-thumb with a DC between 0-9 being "easy", something that anybody could reasonably do. 10-19 are a little harder, but something that you'd expect someone with a little bit of training to be able to do most of the time. 20-29 are the...

If you don't use a skill system of some sort, you're resolving challenges with a game of "DM May I?" It's a declarative style of resolution, where if you declare the correct action or actions, the challenge is resolved. And if you know how the DM thinks and know how to appeal to (or just agree...

An RPG is an activity that allows two or more participants to create fictional agents (usually characters) who will face challenges on behalf of the participants in a shared imaginary space. That's what every single RPG boils down to. How a game does these things can vary from game to game...

The fighter's mark is really simple to understand: The fighter is behaving like a headhunting jerk in Unreal Tournament or Halo. Have you ever played any sort of multiplayer video game where it's every player for him/herself, but one jerk decides he's going to headhunt someone? Or even a chaos...

I'm glad this thread has been raised from the dead as well. Very interesting stuff! I'm actually trying to work towards something like this myself with a few folks more web-development-savvy than myself. We're currently discussing it here (on Dragon Avenue.

For the most part, I come up with my adventures from scratch. I get a rough idea of what sort of encounters I want to create, get the skeletons of stats down for most important NPCs, and then let the players loose. They almost always find more interesting ways to get to those encounters than I...

It depends on the character, and the situation. I can see a cleric, bloodied and down on one knee, heaving for breath as he leans heavily on his hammer, suddenly raising his head and crying out, "PELOR GIVE ME STRENGTH!", then lifting himself off the ground and swinging his hammer upward at the...

I apologize for not replying promptly... I feel I've been swindled, SWINDLED I SAY! by the thread subscription (and more importantly, me forgetting that I signed up for ENWorld with a very old email address which I no longer use). But now that the problem is squared away... Magic is covered as...

I think "player skill" encompasses two slightly different ideas: 1. System Mastery. If you've played 3.Xe enough, you know that taking the Toughness feat is a waste of your feat choice, but first-timers might think that it looks great. Veteran Shadowrun players (at least for... 4e, I believe)...

I've actually included a few 4e concepts (like saves-as-defenses) in a system I created based on Mutants & Masterminds (upon which True20 is based). See the link in my sig for details.

If a mechanic doesn't serve to simulate actions in the game-world (i.e. "cannot be 'justified'" in-game), then it can still serve to promote the overall narrative feel of the game (Dread's Jenga-tower, for instance) or just be to make the game more fun (such as random starting hands as you...

I voted 4e, but to clarify: 3.X of any flavor (including all the variants) or 4e... they're all pretty good games. I can't pick a favorite from this bunch. Pathfinder and 4e both still have a chance to wow me. Older editions I'm basically done with. I'd pass on games being run for one of those...

D&D 3.X and 4e: still both great games I've awalys enjoyed. Mutants & Masterminds: After struggling through character creation once or twice, this game became my new favorite, enough so that I derived an entirely new game from its OGC mechanics (see my sig). True20: Loved it, though M&M still...

RIFTS. Just... RIFTS. Castles & Crusades. The attraction of the surprisingly elegant SIEGE Engine just wasn't enough to overcome the things we didn't like, with a lack of customization for characters and some changes that struck us as nostalgic but necessary. True20 took its place as the "lite"...