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Yes a lot of cheating occurs. One of my first rules is, if a die falls off the table, it never counts. I have read of people who can control the result of dice rolls. This is why casinos require you to roll off a wall. Cheating and control are why some gamers use dice towers, or make people...

Don't underestimate how strongly moderns believe in magic and the supernatural. If we can have flat earthers, we can have dice rollers who really believe their superstitions.

Ridiculous to English-speakers, of course. (How many do you think can even pronounce them?) And they sound really interesting and different, at least as I pronounce them (which may not be right, of course). As the names of volcanoes, they don't have the same kind of context that "xenophobia"...

There's a lot of "superstitious mumbo jumbo" (to quote Sir Alec Guiness about The Force in Star Wars') in the world. I take the scientific, naturalistic approach. I don't accept the supernatural as an explanation for anything, so why would I think there can be anything magical or supernatural...

In the Moria adventure I was using the LOTR character motivation and personality to make play easier for newbies; but I had to express those characters in terms of the game mechanisms. Aside from this use, I cannot recall ever introducing literary/movie/comic fictional characters into my...

There are two ways of rating fictional characters that you want to add to role-playing games (and other types of games as well). These are the functional method and the emotional/perceptual method (for want of a better name). What's the difference? The functional depends on what the...

'jammers can hover. That makes it much easier to bomb accurately, if you're only a thousand feet (or 20,000) up and not under attack (as opposed to bombers flying 150 mph and being shot at). I suppose it might help to find a way in the rules that doesn't allow 'jammers to hover. . . kind of...

I ran SJ with a low-power campaign, where a double-figure level character was as rare as a US congressman. In that situation, there aren't enough others to prevent general use of 'jammers, though maybe you could get together a group to go after just one. In other words, the more magic and...

What did I do to change the mechanisms of Spelljammer when I devised my own version? Picture courtesy of Pixabay. When I taught video game design in college I discovered that students who were asked to write down their conception of their game, usually wrote about a story and not any actual...

Biologists have settled meanings for these terms, of course. Races (of birds, for example - yes, some have races) can interbreed. Species rarely can interbreed successfully (mules, from horse and donkey, are sterile). Humans, dogs, and cats are three species, not races. All human races are part...

I watched a short vid on the maker's ideal Star Wars ship and laughed. The military side of Star Wars, from a practical point of view, is ludicrous. Spherical ships are boring, but far more practical than anything he suggested. I still remember complaining, after watching the first movie the...

Nice analogy. Like the "magic" of great ocean going sailing ships (e.g. galleons), I can see Spelljammers meeting a low-magic campaign, where even the 'jammer people are generally in a low-magic state, they've just figured out 'jammers for some reason.

I think you misunderstand. Almost all of my standalone games are models of some (possibly fictional) situation, whereas a great many modern board games (such as many Euros) are abstract (model of nothing) even if a story is tacked on. Modeling is essential. But if you only have story, you don't...

My title was "Spelljammer's Game Design", but the question as title is better for eliciting comments. I have drafted another piece to explain the major changes I made in my game (not enough room for more in 600 words). Many of these comments talk about story elements/setting, few about...

I enjoyed playing Spelljammer in conjunction with the 1e D&D rules back in the day - I'm a naval guy at heart. For those who don't remember, it's FRPG in outer space, with different physics and magical spaceships that often resemble creatures such as sharks or wasps, for 7th-13th level. (There...

I recently talked with a gamer who's often full of unusual, and sometimes impractical, ideas. He asked me about the difficulties of running a medieval-style low-magic D&D campaign. Lord of the Rings had to come up in the conversation, because it's the most well-known low magic fantasy setting in...

My wife and I recently began watching the HBO series Game of Thrones (based on George R. R. Martin's books) from the start. I had read the books, neither of us had seen any of the series. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series (to give it its proper name) is very different from Tolkien's...

Interesting analysis, and the obvious answer is “It Depends”. Virtually all of us early D&Ders were wargamers. So of course it focused more on combat than anything else. I have always used a grid for maneuver and spatial relationships, which are the heart of warfare. But wargames are a Baby...

Video game designers use two terms worth understanding for all game designers and adventure designers, "atoms" and "loops". Some time ago I talked about Loops, this time it's about Atoms. Why do we care about Atoms? Adventure design is a subset of game design, and I'd expect most of the GM's...

"In his Philosophical Investigations,[4] Wittgenstein demonstrated that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one...