Recent content by mmadsen

Exactly. Games are mostly read and thought about, but the reading and thinking is motivated by the belief that it will all pay off in an actual game sometime — and books that are interesting to browse sell better than those that play well but don’t read well.

For the hobby as a whole. It’s the same with war-gaming. These are hobbies where people read and think about playing far, far more than they actually play. Even active players read up on far more classes, spells, magic items, etc. than they actually use. That’s a huge part of the hobby, and it...

Most time and energy (and money) put into RPGs does not lead to an actual game with players around a table.

Is the experience at the table what matters, when 99 percent of the time and energy put into RPGs is not playing with a group at the table?

Even for gamers with zero interest in westerns, that Boothill campaign write-up is full of insights: Which left me with a unique challenge: without changing the rules, how was I to create an excitement-packed Boot Hill game that wouldn’t overfill the graveyard? […] The economics of silver...

Rutskarn explains how he generated a deep Boothill campaign of politics, deception, and intrigue, after originally playing it as a joke.

I’m a bit confused by the spirit of your new rule and by your design goals. Firearms in real life and in fiction are known for being deadly if they hit but unlikely to hit, except in the hands of a skilled marksman — the opposite of automatic damage. (And being a skilled marksman only helped...

Fame and Fortune Points are on the short list of things I remember from Top Secret: When a character is generated the Admin will secretly roll a 10-sided die; the result is the number of Fortune points (or "luck") the agent will have in his or her career. In a life-or-death situation the agent...

I was going to suggest something similar, but without the careful tracking. Just roll a d12 each segment to see if you get to go. (Or, since the game uses d6s, and most characters have a speed of six or less, just roll a d6.) Champions was trying to model super-speed, so the model doesn’t work...

If you’re skilled, you can slip punches without much effort. If you’re not, and you’re not in fighting shape, it’s work — but it’s “free” in the Hero System. Punching uses energy, kicking uses more, and grappling uses even more — until you’ve established dominant position. Getting used to...

Champions suffers from a number of problems when its wide scale gets narrowed down to “heroic” humans, whose stats really only have a few possible values: half-normal, normal, 1.5x-normal, or 2x-normal. Simply dodging attacks should be exhausting for normal people. If you’ve ever worn heavy...

Exactly. In fact, to have even odds of winning 10 fights in a row, you need a 93% chance of winning each fight. But I get the impression that most people expect an adventure to string a dozen close fights together.

If we go back to the original proposal, it makes the most sense for combatants who are armored homogeneously, with a full suit of armor or a thick hide covering their whole body. In that situation, a hit is a hit, and any weapon has to overcome that armor. (This makes smaller weapons useless...

RPGs don’t generally model waiting for an opening, and if they do have a feint maneuver, it’s generally either worth doing or not worth doing, not something that comes up from time to time. I’ve thought about modeling openings by having characters roll one of their attack dice (in, say, a 3d6...

If you consider a fair fight to be 50-50, then winning 10 fair fights (and losing none) is virtually impossible, 0.1% chance of success. I don’t think many people have thought that through. Of course, in real life, one-in-a-thousand people do pull off the near-impossible. We can either play...