Recent content by John Dallman

After something of a real-time gap, our heroes recapped. They're on an Antarctic expedition, in May 1951, looking for Nazis who fled in spring 1945. They've found two cargo U-Boats, which had been mothballed, and a tunnel leading from the cove where they are to a rail tunnel. That seems to be...

GURPS 4e Cold War Pulp: Parked aircraft destroyed with bazookas.

AD&D1.2e, Avalon campaign Sacred creatures overawe border guards.

Mongoose Traveller 2300, Bayern campaign. Rescued 150 diminutive 4-armed aliens.

If the players have characters in the great OD&D/AD&1e meta-campaign, I can whip something up in that on the fly. If not, Toon. Everyone understands the premise immediately, character generation is trivial, and it's great fun and over quickly.

Or even a sober one.

Fairly well. I was doing this in 2015-16, but stopped when the pound suddenly sank against the dollar. I'd also made most of my practical ideas by then. At the time, Chessex took graphics files (I gave them PDFs I'd generated from designs done in Inkscape) and laser-engraved them, then filled...

I'll do the survey later, but here are some pictures of custom dice that Chessex made for me.

The session was mostly waiting for the High Priest of Zeus to show up. He was being scryed regularly, and it was clear that he wasn't making his best speed. He took a diversion to the Temple of Hermes, and arrived with a Priest of Hermes in tow. While we were waiting, Aster and the Bow of...

AD&D1.2e, Avalon campaign, in Artemisia: Zeus annoyed, High Priest thunderstruck.

AD&D+MAD system, convention game Kid rescued, evil temple destroyed.

Well, that all turned out quite well. The empress came out to address the convocation about 10:00 the day after we arrived. She's in her early forties, with a son in his early twenties. Her husband died in a war about ten years ago. There wasn't much ceremony. She read a speech welcoming the...

Having a single, fungible, advancement currency is simpler once the number of possible advanceable traits is considerably larger than the actual number of traits on a typical character sheet. That's why systems like Hero System or GURPS use character points. If every character sheet includes...

AD&D1.2e, Avalon campaign: Deception revealed, war plan aborted.

I think the clunkiness is coming from advancement being an interruption to play. Both methods seem to require significant knowledge of the game system. This is more work for the players, but that may not be appreciated by the system designer. In experience point systems, awarding experience...