Recent content by Staffan

In Rolemaster, which is rather heavily influenced by Tolkien, you have three "ranks" of Men: High, Mixed, and Common. High Men are basically Dunedain, and have a specific culture as well. Mixed and Common men have different stat bonuses, but both have the same variety of cultures available (e.g...

I'll just put this here:

Ah yes, there's certainly no precedent for non-Force-sensitive characters to trust in the Force in order to pull off some spectacular deeds.

Wizards started with The Primal Order, and fairly quickly moved into board and card games (there's an anecdote about how Richard Garfield tried selling Peter Adkison on RoboRally originally, to which Adkison responded "That looks amazing but it's way too much stuff for a company our size. Got...

I believe Ryan Dancey at one point said that the reason there was no Magic RPG was that Wizards already had the best-selling TCG and the best-selling RPG, and that trying to make a Magic RPG would draw attention away from D&D which would be bad. I think that was also the reason they shelved...

I agree, and even more so when the GM metacurrency is at least partially tied to the PC's actions. This is one area where 2d20 has some interesting ideas. In most versions, PCs can spend metacurrency to gain extra dice on their rolls. This can either come from their pool of pre-acquired Momentum...

I think Draw Steel Malice shouldn't be thought of as a counter to hero tokens, but rather to the various Heroic Resources the heroes get. The Fury gets Ferocity, the Elementalist gets Essence, the Tactician gets Focus, and the Director gets Malice.

I think it shows the difference between world-first and PCs-first game design. Some people prefer the verisimilitude that comes from creating (or buying) a world that is a certain way and has certain things in it, and expect players to respect that world's integrity and create characters that...

Right. It's not fool-proof, but it sets up the expectation that (in our case) Wednesdays evenings are for gaming. As an example of the opposite, I sometimes play with some other friends from the old gaming club I was in in the 90s. We play on weekends, and in a more ad-hoc fashion. Two of the...

What has been working pretty well for my main group is fixed scheduling. We play on Wednesday evenings at 19. We're a group of 5, and we generally play if one but not more can't make it. That way, people can take care not to schedule other stuff for that evening if they can avoid it.

FWIW, I strongly suspect that the marketing effect of this tactic is at best indirect. It keeps things happening, which keeps the people who already backed interested, and thus makes them more likely to spread the word. But I'd be surprised if anyone looks at the campaign and goes "Oh look...

I'm not sure this is what's done here, but in other crowdfunders I've often seen something that's clearly intended to be a larger stretch goal split into several parts and once all the parts are done the last one is "and we'll collect all the X into a Y!". For example, the TORG Eternity...

G'Kar and Dukat are nothing alike. If there's a counterpart to Dukat in Babylon 5, it's Londo Mollari: trying to advance himself while also doing what he thinks is best for his empire, and convincing himself that the empire's conquests were good for those conquered actually, and turning to...

I think there's a difference in people's ideas about what a campaign is. The currently prevailing idea is that a campaign is a specific "story" (even if that story in some cases is mostly apparent in hindsight) featuring a mostly static set of characters. But I think those with super-long...

Right, I forgot about that change. But looking at the hardbacks, it seems they're on par with the 3-installment APs in scale – most are 1-10, though there's the occasional 11-20 and even some weird outliers like 5-14.