Recent content by Smeelbo

Fate Something very different are the variety of RPGs based around the FATE engine: Spirit of the Century, Diaspora, Starblazer Adventures, Legends of Anglerre, Dresden Files. FATE is centered around story telling, while providing sufficient crunch. Smeelbo

Traveller T20, GURPS, alternately Diaspora I've played a fair amount of Traveller T20 and highly recommend it. They do a very good job of re-implementing character generation, and the result is parties that vary from 4th to 11th level, and it works. There are enough skills so that one...

I will be runing a 24-player Dragon Raid at our FLGS on Saturday October 30th, pitting 4 groups of six 9th level PF characters against a colossal white dragon, and I am looking for advice on designing the encounter and running the event. My initial character generation rules are: PathFinder...

My problem with Fantasy Craft is that, while full of good ideas, it was so badly disorganized as to be nigh impossible to play, or even generate a character. I hope that 2.0 is rationally organized, but feeling burned by the promise of 1.0, I will not be buying 2.0, either personally, or for...

You may not want to hear this, but: 1) Editing. Most of the adventures you publish, while crediting an editor, don't appear to actually have been edited. They are full of typos, errors, inconsistancies, lame story elements, badly designed encounters, NPCs that lack credible motivations, groups...

Fudge, fate I play a variety of FATE based games: Spirit of the Century, Starblazer Adventures, Diaspora, and so on, and the FUDGE dice are not really an issue. It gives a solid bell curve, and is easy to adjudicate on the fly. SbA uses d6-d6, and that's easy, too, although the curve is pretty...

5th/6th players worth 2 characters EACH I have found in practice that the 5th and 6th players are really worth as much as 2 characters each. That is, I up the encounter by 50% for 5 player groups, or double for 6 player groups. Because PathFinder characters are about as powerful as characters...

The spell Disguise Self is described as giving a +10 bonus on Disguise checks, and under the description for the Disguise skill, it suggests a similar bonus for the spell Alter Self. Is that the extent of it, or does it also eliminate the Disguise check penalties for different race, gender...

Post Away! Sharing is Caring. I am working on tables for scrolls and wands, but that is going to take a lot more effort. I don't mind the Ranger thing, it is a good specialization. Smeelbo

I am sharing the following potion tables that I made for PathFinder, using the Core rules. They include every game legal potion that would be made. Using a spread sheet, I created a population of potion brewers by class (adept, bard, cleric, druid, paladin, ranger, sorceror, and wizard) and...

Roll one array for all characters What we've done in the PathFinder campaign I am playing is that we rolled one array using 2D6+6, and everyone built their character out of the same resulting array. Completely fair. Smeelbo

How Encounter 1 went We started D&D Encounters last Wednesday, March 24th, and it went well enough. Half the players were experienced 4E players, holdovers from our previous in-store Wednesday night 4E campaign, and two of those were back up DMs in case we need to open up additional tables...

Today, we opened up our second game room for D&D at 1PM. As of the time of this post, we have three groups of D&D playing: one beginning at 1st level, one at 5th level, and another at 6th level. At 2PM, another table started for a Traveller campaign. We've made this space available to the...

3 Reknown for PHB3 race or class, 1 Reknown for PHB3 Feat, and 5, the highest Reknown Reward, equal to completing all quests, for making a character sheet using DDI. The first reward comes at 10 Reknown, not 30. Someone using DDI to make a PHB3 character with PHB3 feat starts 9 Reknown ahead of...

According to the PowerPoint slides used to discuss D&D Essentials internally at WotC, they estimate there are about 1.5 million current 4E players. At least one in five of those possesses at least one book, or more likely three or more. The gross profit for WotC on a typical 4E hardcover is...