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The game starts with 5th level PCs, so there's no need to worry about spells higher than 3rd level (they get access to some but they're not game breakers). As the game progresses, they'll get access to more powerful magic, but it will still be scoped within the design objectives and won't break...

I think so. I just want to work on it for a few sessions and get real-world playtest experience before I start making it available to the public. I may want to try and commercialize parts of it too but I haven't quite figured out how to do that yet.

The Undermountain wiki is complete from the player's perspective. It is incomplete from the GM's perspective (at this time) (for example, there's no monsters in it yet). You don't have to refer to Pathfinder to play Undermountain. But if we get into some corner case situation where there are...

Removing things is not the same as changing things. The design goals include Pathfinder Archetypes, and people familiar with D&D being able to play with little difficulty.

I blatantly ripped off Dragon Age. :) Here's my chart: Injury Effect Badly Bruised: Hit Points received from healing magic are halved. Broken Bone: Cannot use Dexterity Modifier. Vulnerable to Sneak Attacks. Concussion: Cannot cast spells or use spell-like abilities without making a...

The past six columns I’ve been laying the groundwork to talk about my own personal home game and why I think it will be interesting to the people reading this column. I haven’t played in a tabletop RPG group since I stopped living full time in the Seattle area about 10 years ago. During the...

The bulk of this month’s column is going to talk about development choices and marketing for tabletop RPGs. There is an important part that relates to our objective of getting more fun out of the 4 hour game session, so I’ll lead with that and those of you uninterested in the business analysis...

Lets Have a Flamewar! I have, from time to time, been accused of making comments designed to inflame passions and ignite debate. That may be true to some degree, but when it comes to the art of driving people crazy with terminology, I tip my hat to the people at Global Underwater Explorers...

I think you'll really like my upcoming columns! RyanD

Notes for Every GM and Player A Call to Action for GMs! I have a couple of old 1st edition modules covered in badly obfuscated handwritten notes from my earliest days of playing. I can remember constantly having to improvise various things as we played because I couldn’t remember exactly what...

Each session can have a beginning, a middle and and and regardless of the point in the story where that session occurs. You "frame" that session as the GM. The start is your recap of what happened in the last session, the middle is the play of that session, and the end is whatever cleanup you...

Realtime and the Game When we were working on 3rd Edition, one of the questions that we thought a lot about was “how long do you play the game in one sitting”. Most of us remember marathon games that lasted so long nobody bothered to track the hours played. But we also know that lots of...

darjr: At this point, I'm taking notes on my iOS device surreptitously. :) There's probably people out there who use a more sophisticated system, and I could see some value in that, but at the end of the day I want to be enjoying my gaming, not conducting a deep-dive psychographical study of...

tgayoso: In general it means that over time more content is added to the game system. That could be through GMs allowing bits of the game system to become "ok" which were formerly "off limits" (like item creation, for example, or planar travel). Or it can mean the introduction of new game...

That's not what GW means when they talk about the "Warhammer Hobby". What they mean is that they believe that other than on a macroeconomic basis they aren't competing with other hobby gaming products. In other words they think the competition for your dollars between Warhammer and D&D is the...

Matt, I left CCP in November. I can't talk about the major project I'm currently working on except to say that I am working on one. In addition I'm doing some side projects like judging the 2011 edition of RPG Superstar for Paizo, writing this column, and doing some consulting work for MMO...

Yes, I mean a liscence just between the parties. I think Wizards ended up with what they wanted and minimized the fallout on launch of 4e.

Well Living City was one of the most humbling experiences I have had so I better have learned something from it. :) OrganizedPlay was never supposed to be in the content creation business. I designed the company to be the "back office" for hobby gaming businesses (and hopefully later...

I should have known better than to go up against Living Greyhawk. It was such a better solution than Living City. I learned a lot about large social campaigns but also spent way too much money trying to fight the tide. Ruins wasn't a good idea but it was the only one I had. I should probably...