Search results

History of the world (Lanefan): I have a Ph.D. in history, so you can believe I'm "pro-history". But in the 21st century, the average American doesn't give even one naughty word about history, let alone two. People instead imagine what they'd like history to be, rather than understand what is. Far too...

One more to this piece, and I've submitted another. Writing one or two more. I don't think of it as a series, however.

If you want to make up your own adventures, your own campaign, instead of using something someone else wrote, then sooner or later you’ll need to approach world building. This is “beginners notes” for world building, it's not comprehensive. It's primarily for gamers, but much of it applies to...

The "Laws" reflect what IS, not what we want it to be. I'm glad you can make it as a "killer" GM, but that's rarely how it works today.

Interesting to see this. My original Timelord (for 1e) will be in one of my books of reprints of my material from olden days, within the next year or two I hope.

If GMs (and game designers, and gamers) understand “the odds” they will be able to make better choices and understand why some things happen in their games - and some don’t. Picture courtesy of Pixabay. Never tell me the odds! --Han Solo (Star Wars) Most people don't understand odds and...

The economics suggest (if not demand) that there will be a 6e sooner or later (there's a Worlds of Design column about that). The new chief coming in suggests sooner rather than later.

A problem that I have in GMing RPGs, and I imagine a lot of other people have, is reluctance to kill characters that players have become strongly attached to. I'll describe my evolution in how I have dealt with this. Picture courtesy of Pixabay. The Law of Survivability In its early days...

I prefer the method that is fair in game terms, not in life terms - life is clearly not fair. If the excitement of rolling characters is a significant part of your campaign, there's something wrong with your campaign. Your character is the accumulation of what he/she/it does, and chooses not...

Let’s talk about methods of generating RPG characters, both stochastic and deterministic. Picture courtesy of Pixabay. When creating character attributes, there are two broad approaches to generating them: stochastic and deterministic. The stochastic method involves chance, while the...

(Total) Wartime morality tends to be different from peacetime morality . . . If I'm intending to be Good, and I know there's a war on between good and evil, and my Good god says that the orc gods are Evil, and I should smite all orcs . . . then yes, I KNOW I'm doing the right thing, in a way no...

I am surprised that the following has not come up in the discussion: In RPGs (well, certainly D&D) the gods are diverse, real, and manifest in the world (unlike the real world, where gods are, um, ideas, and not manifest in the world). I think a great deal of characterization about foes, and...

I think the generation that fought World War II (now dead or far into their 90s) probably had stronger black-and-white tendencies because of that experience. The farther we get from "the war", the weaker the belief in strong good and strong evil. I was born near enough to the end of the war to...

I agree. My title was "Is Fighting Evil the Focus of Your Campaign". Sometimes the editor changes the title. Sometimes that can be misleading, sometimes not.

When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (1975) I had a clear idea of what I wanted to be and to do in the game: fight evil. As it happened, I also knew I wanted to be a magic user, though of course I branched out to other character classes, but I never deviated from the notion of fighting evil...

Jon Peterson has investigated these questions in his book Playing at the World, at great length. It's been a while since I read it. Evidently Arneson was the person who made the breakthrough of players having avatars. He was likely using Chainmail at that point. But Dave wasn't a rules writer...