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When I first saw D&D I said “I hate dice games.” But I discovered that it wasn’t a “dice game,” played properly. It is a microcosm of Life: do everything you practically can to avoid having to rely on a die roll to save your bacon. You won’t always be able to, but you can minimize the number...

Most skills that happen mostly in the mind are undervalued these days, because people don't see it happen the way they can see an artist draw or paint, a sculptor sculpt, etc. - not that people with those skills have it easy. There's also the Dunning-Kruger effect, people think they could write...

Spot on. I bailed out of the game industry in the early 80s because I had to make a living (in computers and teaching, ultimately). I especially remember having to stop writing for the RPG magazines because switched to buying all rights, which I refused to sell. But as a result I control the...

Thanks for the reference. Interesting article.

We continue our “beginners notes” for world building, answering questions ranging from the gods to magic to transportation and communication. Picture courtesy of Pixabay. These are the questions we were discussing last time: What are the players going to DO? Who are the...

Sigh. My title was "Getting Started with World Building". As sometimes happens, the editor changed the title, and as sometimes happens, his title may have been misleading. I did not say worldbuilding is bad and useless and should not be done. I said the game is much more important than the...

For 45 years I've thought that the game breaks down when you get into double figure levels, because the offense becomes too strong. Whoever shoots first gets a big advantage (just as in WW II tank battles, I understand). Cut down the offense by eliminating ALL the high level spells, or at least...

About retcons: historians in effect do this with some frequency, simply because of disagreements in interpretation, or discovery of new evidence, or even new political agendas. Yes, what happened, happened, but often we don't know exactly, so different historians have different versions of what...

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...