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Recently I was at Infinity Con in Lake City Florida, where I encountered two gents (young but older than college-age) in a small booth offering the Shattered Dawn RPG. The con turned out to be a multimedia con with almost no gaming interest so I spent a lot of time talking with the guys and...

Another reason to use hirelings/henchmen (and mules!): they could help absorb the effects of a sleep spell, which at 4-16 could wipe out an entire small party of low level characters.

I see lots of wargamers who play RPGs, but few Eurogamers who do. Likely part of any difference in observation is that I don't regard every non-wargame as a Euro (Catan is *not* a Euro, as many have observed), whereas others do. If you treat every non-wargame as a "Euro", you'll inevitably see...

A large subset of board games is Eurostyle games. These games are almost exactly the opposite of RPGs in many ways. Keep in mind, board (including some card) games are a vastly larger segment of tabletop gaming than RPGs in monetary terms, and Eurostyle games are a large part of that segment. So...

The Tragedy of the Commons often kicks in with digital products (e.g. video games, especially mobile games). Individual publishers drop prices soon after release to make a short-term profit, but collectively the lower prices for digital cause consumers to be less willing to pay full price, or...

A lot of "reviewing" suffers from the same problem that informs much of Internet comment, people know so little about what they're talking about but think they're experts. (Dunning Kruger Syndrome) Browsing/skimming instead of actually reading is another big problem. I suppose it derives from...

(I read a review at ENWorld that reminded me that many reviewers of games don’t entirely know what they’re doing! I reviewed games and related materials for Dragon and White Dwarf a long time ago, but almost never have the time to do so these days. I’ve modified a handout I created over the...

(I read a review at ENWorld that reminded me that many reviewers of games don’t entirely know what they’re doing! I reviewed games and related materials for Dragon and White Dwarf a long time ago, but almost never have the time to do so these days. I’ve modified a handout I created over the...

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.