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Oryan - I would definitely have Orcus kill the player's god. Then this next chapter of the campaign would be either trying to bring the god back to life or getting revenge on Orcus and his minions. Since Dead Gods is from Planescape, I take it you have a Planescapy kind of campaign? To...

Back with the original Starcraft 1 had 15 update patches, some were rebalancing patches. In my experience, people who were "negatively" affected by the rebalancing had a lot of complaints. For example, "Now my Protoss Dragoons cost an extra 25 minerals! That totally slows me down and wrecks my...

Old-school AD&D had the same sense of goofy irony as Gamma World, but I too didn't think the original GW was so far as silly. Up to 3rd(?) edition (was that the one with the ACT table?), the game had some tongue-in-cheek humor, but it was nowhere near spoof level. I'll be watching this version...

Azmyth, it looks like the internet might have swallowed any message you sent to my hotmail account (and the ENWorld server crash ate my post in this thread). Let's see if third (or is it second?) time is the charm...

Chad, I think the majority, if not all, of the sample characters have a "theme" attached to them. Also, some people on the WotC forum has a thread reverse engineering the themes to their base mechanics.

I think there should be a mechanic in the system where the player have the freedom to choose their level of escalation and risk. For example, in the beginning of an inception/(what was the name they gave for a regular job stealing unconscious secrets?), the mark would be "Unaware/Dreaming" so...

I jokingly use omnivorous to mean "not wedded" to a specific gaming system. I enjoy story games (Mouse Guard is my current fave) but I've thrown polyhedrals for nearly all editions of D&D. I'd like to be in/run a regular 4th ed game, mostly because I haven't had a chance to really try out...

Oh, Jeebus Christo! All these visual design-type DMs get all the "ooohhhsss!" and "aaahhhhs!". What about us writer-type DMs? Why don't we get an adoration with our use of adjectives and adverbs? Gabe spends however many hours making pretty planets for his game, while the rest of us will...

I'm being a little loose in definition when I say "subsystem". When teaching the game, I tend to break down the ideas in 4 or 5 discrete chunks as below: 1) Except for certain circumstances (as in the Conflict rules), there is no failure in skill/ability tests, only degrees of success such as...

Mouse Guard has about 4 or 5 different subsystems (aside from d6 dice pool) that are interconnected, but feels like totally different systems. It takes a while to realize why you do things with subsystem 1 to affect subsystem 2, which affects subsystem 3, etc. I think you have to tackle Mouse...

I had the exact same questions! I think it's the fault of the adventure that the information is so piecemeal like that. And it still doesn't have any real info about "survival days"! I don't think the designers wanted arcane magic to be a drawback mechanically, since that would detract from...

My friends have played about 11-12 sessions worth of Mouse Guard. It took about 6 sessions for me to grok it, and my players understand the game in "theory", but they occasionally forget the "practice". The game is very well thought out, but the layout is a mess. The game reads like how I...

There is one thing I will say about Moffat and this series/season: he does deliberately choose ideas, images, and plot threads with care. It may or may not work in whomever's opinion, but I don't get the same "throw the kitchen sink" feeling I get with Russell T Davies. Overall, I liked this...

There was a thread about Free RPG Day in general which discussed the adventure in passing, but not in detail... My answers:

I can't find any info on how many survival days characters are supposed to start with. Am I missing something obvious? Also, doesn't the second skill challenge... with it's -3 survival days for failure seem much harsher than the first skill challenge with it's +1 day to travel time for failure...

I got it! Read through it briefly.

I see the Wire as one big character study, not just of the individuals, but of the character of Baltimore itself. There's a plot, but it's stretched out over the whole season, so the climaxes are tamped down a little, and they don't really (except for a couple of exceptions) have cliffhanger...

Marriage. But for the Fairy Queen, it's a political marriage designed to distract her opponents while she plots her real scheme. Since the PC is now tied to her throne by contract, her opponents will have to get rid of the PC, so assassination attempts. And as the "King" of the Fairies, the...

I'm with Umbran. If the player is enthusiastic about your game and isn't a jerk, I would say that you have a good player there. And also in my opinion, if he's mimicking a character from a novel, at least he envisions his character with a personality. I recall a friend creating a fighter and...

The sonic screwdriver MacGuffin reminds me of how the TARDIS should/shouldn't be used: My girlfriend and I were watching "Seeds of Death" on netflix streaming the other day. (It is based on old VHS/magnetic tape copies, so it has all the flaws of age; occasional skips, scratches, and background...