It's my number one advice on anything trap-related: reverse psychology. Common sense tells us the players are after the loot, and it's secured by well-hidden traps. Well, if you spring a trap you only got the one moment of discovery. Suspense is a much better dynamic at a gaming table. Put the...
I'm amazed it took 5 pages that Seth Skorkowsky was mentioned :cool: His advice is on spot and his format is much more organic than what most Youtubers put out.
I see myself returning to AD&D 2 from time to time for purely nostalgic reasons. Being my first contact with D&D, to me it feels the most like what D&D "is". But I also recognize that this is completely arbitrary and that every generation has their own D&D, or even multiple D&Ds. It's different...
Well, they always showed interest in the subject, it's just that gaming in a group didn't seem to interest much. Admittedly there's no guarantee they'll have fun, but they've always been open to trying out new things ... so why not.
Seems you're talking more about TTRPGs but I was talking more...
I should've expected this to immediately devolve into a discussion of at what age you qualify as old 🤦♀️
But in the end it's about how to give people in general a taste of the genre, to be fair. Maybe excluding kids because they are outliers ^_^
My old people sometimes ask about "that RPG stuff you do". I had them visiting one of my tabletop RPGs a couple of times, they enjoyed the fantasy and story aspects but showed little interest in playing in a group themselves. So I thought about gifting them a cRPG they can play to really...
Breaking news from Ikol, our trusted insider source at WotC! The upcoming installment of D&D will supposedly feature a new game mechanic that could forever change the landscape of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay. Let me give you a quick rundown:
According to Ikol, OneD&D will introduce a...
Wait wait, it's an RPG based on a shared universe comprising living card games, video games and board games based on an RPG based on a shared universe comprising several authors based on a series of short stories and novelettes by a guy who started out emulating ... Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Dunsany.
The latter I've actually read a fair amount about researching this. Lots of fascinating tidbits, but alas, I haven't come across anything that neatly translates to good random success curves for RPG design yet. Admittedly I'm bad at maths, so a lot of it either takes a lot of time to digest or...
You can be sure I'll unearth this one myself from time to time, because the question what the average chance of success and failure (or how spanners get thrown in the works) for any given situation in a game should be to maximize player engagement and fun has kept me reading game design...
I don't think I've seen this one mentioned yet:
"[Insert various other advice here], because otherwise it wouldn't be realistic."
Note that that's bad advice even if the original advice happens to be helpful. But the reasoning you employ matters for implementation.
On the other hand, we can cut...
When designing new systems or homebrewing existing ones, one of the areas where I still often question both my experience and my gut feelings are the target values for average chances of success on a given roll. One thing I've been doing for a long time now is use a simple matrix that always...