Recent content by John Dallman

I've been exposed to several people's attempts to create their own RPG. They tend to have have a common problem: the rules-writer is also the designer. They are very used to the ideas of the game, and tend to regard "what the game is about" as totally obvious, and don't explain it. This can be...

The original Arduin Grimoire volumes aren't a game in their own right. They don't say what they are, but they're a load of add-ons for early versions of D&D.

We are making our way hop by hop, from Earth to the Pleiades. We came to a system that is a little strange. There's a fairly sun-like star in the middle, and a pair of low-mass red dwarfs as a fairly close binary orbiting it. There are a bunch of asteroids at the barycentre of the pair of...

Mongoose Traveller 2300, Bayern campaign: Astrophysics by Mongoose undermine story.

GURPS 4e Cold War Pulp Most Antarctic Space Nazis surrender.

We used to say we played RuneQuest e - 2.71828. It was a group with a lot of mathematicians.

AD&D 1.2e, Avalon Campaign: Athena, Poseidon helpful, Dionysius not.

RPG books tend to need tables. And tables are tough for Kindle, ePub, and similar formats that reflow text freely. PDF has fixed pages, which means they can use the same layout as print.

No fixed behaviour here. For the last two systems a group has introduced me to (Honor & Intrigue and Unknown Armies) I've bought the core book in PDF, but that hasn't been a requirement.

Honor & Intrigue, Privateers of the Complications: Through tunnels. Huge lake. Pteranodon?

I don't have a price limit, although I'm more likely to buy something in PDF than paper, simply on the grounds of storage space. Things that make me more likely to buy something include: Does it look interesting? Can I integrate it with something I have already run, or plan to run? Is it...

I've known a few people who gave up playing or GMing, and just wrote for A&E. Plus somebody who has been designing what he considers to be a "proper" RPG for over a decade, without doing any playing.

For both of those cases, there are two players in common, the same two in both cases. Another example: the occult WWII campaign ran for thirteen-plus years with a total of seven players. One died and was replaced about ten years in, so there were always six players, plus the GM. Now there are...

I've done this on several occasions over the last 45 years, and never had a problem with it. Specific variants have included: Multiple plot lines running simultaneously in the same setting, with different sets of characters participating. A long-running sub-campaign in my main AD&D1e setting...

I'm cautious about software that gets really intimate with Windows, and I've had some bad experiences with data indexing systems with bugs.