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I am a land surveyor by trade. I use maps a lot. It is easy to get turned around even when you have one on hand. But really this isn't about realism. it is about making the game fun, and making exploration and the effort the PCs put into it worthwhile. If (general) you don't think mapping is...

You are being pedantic. RPGs are a conversation about everything. Every element of gameplay depends on an "audio narrator." You are singling out mapping, pretending it is different than the rest of play, when it isn't.

Yes. Exactly. You suggested there was no verisimilitude reason to map,and have now proved there is.

Never got turned around in a school or hospital?

Last night I looked at the numbers and stuff, and in the end I don't think trying to break down the domains into a "classless" system will work. Liek you said above, the design is too tightly integrated. That leads to new class design. What classes would be necessary for a Gammaheart game, and...

I am planning on running a big dungeon thing (using Shadowdark, but I don't think that is relevant) and I am considering options for how to deal with mapping from the player side. My first impulse is to do "theater of the mind" exploration, letting the players map as they will (or won't; that's...

Every domain is shared by 2 classes in the core book. If we look at the details of those shared classes, we can probably glean something about the values of those domains.

Separate from creative work, there are a bunch of games I want to find the time to run for at least 6-12 sessions this coming year: Dragonbane, Alien, and Daggerheart. I am running a monthly DH campaign that is an extension of a con campaign, so that should be okay. I don't know if I can gather...

A thought I am having about classes -- or, more specifically, "classless" Daggerheart (for use with Gammaheart): If we analyze how the domains are shared among the classes, and the base functions of those classes, it should be reasonable to figure out what each Domain provides as a function of...

I intend to restart a blog or maybe do a newsletter -- either way as long as I can create and share fun game things. I don't really want to dive fully back into freelance or go through the trouble of publishing, but I like to make stuff and I like it when people see that stuff in some form or...

Specifically the tension of "oh crap don't move or you'll die" is not something I have ever seen work at a table outside of its gameplay implications. There is a degree of removal from the action, with the dice and character sheet etc... serving as a veil. Like I said, i don't think it is...

I know we have a bit over a month left, but sometimes these things take some thinking and planning. So, do you have any New year's Resolutions for your gaming life for 2026? A big project you want to embark on, or a new campaign, or a a character to play, or whatever?

Dungeon Master of None is a good podcast.

Cinematic tools for drama and tension don't really work that well at the table, in my experience. Unless you have really immersion oriented players, it still immediately becomes a gameplay conundrum and everyone looks at their character sheets for a system appropriate solution. I think this is...

My question is simply: who is this for? I can't imagine too many Traveller fans want it in a completely different, class and level based system. And 5E already has a metric ton of sci-fi adaptations out there. Why does this exist?

I think that Communities can work pretty much as is for a post apocalyptic game, although I might be inclined to create something like a Vaultborne and/or a Pastborne (cryonic/hibernation) community. The real question is what to do about classes and domains to shift them from the heroic fantasy...

Traps might be designed to make some sort of sense in the world, but they are really the ultimate expression of D&D being a game, not a world simulator or a story engine. Traps exist for essentially purely gameplay reasons. So the function a given trap serves in the gameplay should determine...

Final first draft of the mutations section: ----------- Random Mutations “Gammaheart” is an attempt at a post apocalyptic science fantasy setting for Daggerheart in the vein of Gamma World, Darwin’s World, Mutant Year Zero and similar properties. This random mutation system is intended to...

What is a "trap" in the context of this question? Does it just refer to intentionally constructed hazards meant to maim or kill those who set them off? In that case, no, traps should not have tells. But if "trap" is a broader term that includes everything from unsafe architecture to natural...

I tend to run it TotM until a big combat, then break out the TacTiles. I also leave mapping to the players. If they don't care, neither do I, but if you gotta run...