Recent content by Thomas Shey

Just a note: when talking about wargaming, you really need to make it clear if you're talking about miniatures games, hex-and-chit games (or their equivelent) or both. While there's some overlap, they're almost separate hobbies.

There are ways you can set up things to do that, but they're inevitably going to make character generation more complicated than a simple point-buy, array or random generation method. Possibly much more complicated.

Cards are possibly an underutilized randomizer in games. I kind of understand why (depending on things like play space layout they can be clumsy to work with, and there are issues where depending on the implementation player number impacts it) but there's something to be said for a randomizer...

You'll occasionally see this sort of thing done in superhero games, but as you say I'm not sure its a practical choice for most groups, and that may be even more true in fantasy games. Almost statistically certain, I'd think. I'd expect its more likely out of the D&D sphere though (and not...

You can get some interest in games that are heavily focused on survival elements (less over-the-top post apocalypse and survival horror come to mind here) but those aren't for everyone.

I stand corrected. It was so long I no longer remembered the name of the creators.

Started in school (back in the 60's and 70's) and then got more in my college days during some anthropology classes.

I don't do much with board or card games anymore, though I did when I was younger. With computer games I'm almost entirely in the Turn Based Strategy zone (I'll occasionally foray into Realtime Strategy but it has to hit just right in how its handled); I stopped doing CRPGs because I stall out...

Cortex Prime was really, really late, and an argument can be made that some of its stretch goals never arrived in the form it was pushed as. Grimmerspace is immensely late, and is being handled by a new party. If the Reliquery is the 13th Age product, its out but I have no idea about its...

At one point I did a couple of custom Savage Worlds setting--I've forgotten what they call them, frameworks or some such--for them back in the day, one for Broken Earth and another I'd done for a custom XCOM game. So I was able to do that stuff to a point myself (I'd have never gotten a...

And yet I've seen people on this very board badmouthing players who are only interested in playing what they want to play.

Oh, and back in the days when we played games where there were significant chances of character death on the regular, usually people played more than one character, so you weren't particularly likely to be left with nothing to do.

Well, part of it is at least investigative ones also often have less combat. There are other things that can get you killed (and sometimes with less you can do about it) but the risk levels is countered by the frequency. Even once is a campaign breaker for some kinds of campaigns.

Ah, I forget most people using VTTs are used to it also being a character manager.

Out of curiosity, was the Raspberry Pi necessary for some reason? I'm curious in case I ever decide to leave Maptool, Foundry would probably be my drop-back choice, but a dedicated piece of hardware isn't too appealing.