Search results

My favorite CCG for this is Spycraft. Great 4-color art for lots of modern games. NPCs, gear tokens, and plot twists or advantages/disadvantages in Genesys. I've also used Netrunner Agenda cards make a deck of tips from contacts about stuff the corps are doing, turning into triggers for side...

I think most people make the decision that minis either are or aren't going to be part of their gaming. It's easy to end up with a handful of personal character minis or enough to to rep a typical party, but if you're a DM who's using 'em, you end up collecting more and more for everything you...

Probably around 2,700, but that includes a lot of vessels and vehicles for wargames as well as RPGs: WotC Star Wars, 28mm fantasy, CAV: Strike Operations, 10mm fantasy, 1/2400 WWII ships, Star Fleet Battles, 1/1200 Napoleonic sailing ships, Crimson Skies.

Alternity. Roll less than the relevant skill on 1d20 "control die" modified (+/-) by a "situation die", which is another polyhedral 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d12 , another d20, or no second die at all.. The choice of situation die and whether it's added or subtracted creates a range of situation...

I backed the pdfs of John Carter, and they fit pretty perfectly on my laptop screen! :p Seriously though, I had honestly wondered when I got them whether the design was a concession to the electronic format. I'm not a fan of landscape print books, only because pages don't flip as easily when...

I do understand the need for services to discourage people from binging for a week then dumping their sub. But at the same time, I think the genie is out of the bottle. Everybody has gotten way too used to seeing as much as they want when they want. Trying to get people to go back to weekly TV...

Alternity remains one of my favorite systems of all time. The core mechanics are elegant in their direct relationship to charaters' abilities, and the rules take a modular approach that allows everything from a freewheeling narrative to a much crunchier attention to tactical detail. Alternity...

It seems to me that if you're interested enough in games to buy at least four of them in a year for $200, you've become interested enough to want to select what you're getting. A more casual interest isn't going to pay that up front, and a more dedicated interest isn't going to want a blind buy...

Star Fleet Battles is an awesome tactical wargame that is very evocative of the original series. With the limited power of your ship's engines, you have to allocate available energy at the beginning of each turn to give you speed, arm weapons, power shields and operate auxiliary systems like...

I bought a copy of this from the designer at GenCon South in 1982. I never played it. I sold it at another con in the late '80s to fuel my shift to historical minis. The author of this post is correct that there was a phase in the early '80s in which attention to the minutiae of combat details...

It's worth noting here that Decipher ported the game mechanics from the SW:CCG to a new, original sci-fi setting they called WARS. Despite having the worst name ever, the WARS ccg is an awesome game. I never played the SW ccg, but my understanding is that WARS stripped out a lot of the...

Development responsibility for PD Traveller seems to be pretty solely in the hands of ADB.

From what I understand, the main holdup seems to be adapting the massive scale of SFB ships and combat to a workable Traveller system. In the other iterations of Prime Directive, they didn't really bother trying to adapt d20 and GURPS vehicle/ship rules in any meaningful fashion. Instead they...

The diversity and depth of what SFB can do is one of the reasons that it is my favorite game. I think a lot of people miss out on that because of the focus on tournament-style duels. My group recently finished an extended campaign that started in the Early Years. We used Avalon Hill's old 4x...

The issue of command authority is, I think, the main reason that there are so few military RPGs in general. It definitely takes a set of players willing to buy into a certain group dynamic. If your PCs tend toward the chaotic, you may have a tough time with any kind of defined group structure...

I think the most enduring depiction of Star Trek in gaming is Star Fleet Battles, which was originally published in the late '70s and ended up developing its own extended universe before Star Trek itself ever expanded into movies and additional TV shows. Consequently, much of SFB's universe...

I'm still a big fan of Alternity's core mechanic. Roll less than your skill value on 1d20 +/- a second "situation die". The difficulty of the task determines the value of the second die (d4, d8, d12 or d20) and whether it is added or subtracted. Replacing a wealth of fixed die modifiers with a...

I have not had a chance to play it yet, but Shadowrun Crossfire is looking like a fun coop game.

Mortality Radio! Yes, that's it. Thanks, Russ! Were you ever able to get an archive of their shows? Do you know if they're accessible somewhere?

Before podcasts really got going, there was an online RPG radio show whose name I cannot remember. It featured two guys who did the show from their garage. The audio was often horrible and the sound effects were out of place (The show started with the sound of a massive explosion). The whole...