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(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...

What part does creativity play in game design? Novice game designers often have a confused idea that game design is all about creativity, which is very far from the truth. Creativity is important, but a small component of game design. Most of the work involved in designing the game is fairly...

We take having many playable species in fantasy role-playing games for granted. For example, 30-some years ago I wrote an article "My Life as a Werebear" (in White Dwarf #17) that provided rules for player character monster species such as blink dog packs and giants. Picture courtesy of...

I was attending a college game club for the first time, convening at the odd time of 7:19. I was quite early, having come from another college game club, so I sat down and spread out a couple of games I was seeking to playtest. Not far away a group of guys were talking, and I finally heard...

Some people think that every character class must be equally balanced with every other class, but why is that necessary? Are they competing with the other players in a co-operative game? Picture courtesy of Pixabay The Destination or the Journey? When approaching a discussion of class balance...

I've been talking about good ways to devise RPG monsters for tabletop games (See "Just Say No to Boss Monsters"). In the previous installment we covered the unknown, unusual characteristics, monsters that cooperate, and critters with combined characteristics. But there are many other ways to...

Many people try to design really tough monsters for RPGs, but that’s often a consequence of the boss monster mentality, suitable for computers, not tabletop. I like to focus on surprising the players, and here’s how. Picture courtesy of Pixabay Something that's near and dear to my heart...