Recent content by John Dallman

Suggestion: When you have the PDF, put it somewhere it can be downloaded, and start a new thread explaining briefly, with a link to the PDF. Answer questions about it in that thread. Participate in other threads as a general gamer, without bringing your game into it.

I've used the Hero System luck roll in several games, including OD&D, AD&D1e and GURPS. As my co-editor wrote in The Path of Cunning #5, When personal characteristics seem irrelevant and one just wants a random outcome, we use a “luck” roll inspired by the Hero system mechanics: roll 3d6, count...

I'm afraid you are operating under a misapprehension. The denizens here are familiar, between them, with a large fraction of the thousands of RPGs that are available in English. Approximately none of them have a character concept that they want to play that they can't find a system to represent...

I have, a few times, been in parties that were travelling by sea and got attacked by pirates. This has never gone well for the pirates. On one occasion, in a party with a lot of wizards, an important question was raised "Do we want these pirates' ship?" Nobody did, so we set to work with Wall of...

I've been playing "Privateers of the Complications" under Honor & Intrigue fortnightly for three years. We started out from England in a fairly historical 1660 as "mundane" privateers (because we didn't know our ship's surgeon was a necromancer), but things got complicated quite fast. The...

We have returned to Avalon from Artemisia, where we prevented a war, to find that our home country of Landcentre is at war with the larger country of Greensward. Landcentre is doing quite well so far. Since we weren't immediately asked to do anything, we decided to investigate a rather virulent...

AD&D1.2e, Avalon campaign: Two wars now, one biological.

None of the options fit everything I run, because my practice varies considerably. It's quite rare for me to have creatures or people wandering around that will start fights, or that I haven't thought about in advance. I will sometimes decide randomly when something happens because prescribing...

AD&D1.2e, Avalon campaign: Gained Accounting as weapon proficiency.

This is definitely good terminology. I don't think that's an unbreakable rule. It may well be common, but it really depends on what you're playing and how you go about it. For example, in a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy campaign I was playing a couple of years ago, the players all took slightly...

Me too, which is why if I run something in that period, I'm always willing to be contradicted by facts I didn't know. I prefer running stuff set before 1960, simply because there are a lot less technological escape clauses. If I'm running anything set close to real history, I'm perfectly happy...

GURPS 4e Cold War Pulp: Campaign hiatus, GM is overcommitted.

A GM of my acquaintance includes a group of "outsiders" in his setting, who are interplanar refugees from a post-enlightenment Earth. They don't dispute that the gods of the world exist, but regard them as powerful spirits, with human-scale minds, and unworthy of worship. Long before 3e was...

AD&D 1.2e, Avalon campaign: War approaches, possible biological attack.

GURPS 4e Cold War Pulp: Hans Kammler repents and surrenders.