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Okay, so I had this incredible idea for a mini-campaign. Epic on every level. The background to my specific idea is that it is a follow-up to my most successful campaign, the 2E/3E/3.5E campaign which ended in the PCs becoming 20th level and saving the world etc. etc. And this campaign was...

Is there a good (free) program that's good for making encounter maps etc. It needs to be easy to use and with a grid attached. I'm sick of drawing them by hand in grid books. What do ya'll use?

Having read through the 4E rules (though, as regular visitors will no doubt know, being underwhelmed by the whole product), I'm interested in the development process that occurred to create the rule set. Since it's far more of a ground-up rebuild than the change from 2E to 3E was, I'm interested...

Despite some level of skepticism, my group played our first 4E game today - a prepublished module for 1st-levels. I know there's been a lot of "edition wars" going on, but please note this is not me taking sides - I simply wanted to point out what I thought was good and what I didn't as a...

Okay. Something weird's going on. I joined Facebook. But here's the thing: I'm not quite sure how. I must have agreed to join and done the consent and terms of use thing, and indeed I remember doing so. But I'm not entirely certain why. Leaving that aside, here's a question for the great...

Upon the death of Gary Gygax, librarian, writer and unapologetic geek Tom Goodfellow, who it seems has stolen my life since I'm all three of those things, wrote this rather snappy article in defence of gamers everywhere for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The one question he...

I'm about to start a d20 Future campaign but, in order to make combat a bit more perilous (my players love to start fights they can't win :] ) I was going to use the Vitality/Wound system from Spycraft instead of standard HP. But then I discovered the idea of a Massive Damage Threshold, whereby...

A basic one, but it needs clearing up. I'm in combat against four orcs. I have two attacks. The orcs each have just one. Now, say I win initiative. I go first in the round. Am I supposed to make both my attacks at once, or make one, then the orcs make theirs, then I make my next one. What if...

I'm putting together my next world for my next homebrew. The world is an update of my old campaign, a "next generation" if you like, set one hundred years after the conclusion of the last one. In that campaign, the world was just starting to enter its own version of the Industrial Revolution...

Zombies. Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't ignore 'em. But you can control 'em, with the help of a handy animate dead spell. But, there's a problem. In order to cast animate dead, you need to be a Cleric of at least 5th level or a wizard/sorcerer of at least 7th level. At which point, you can...

It occurred to me the other day how often the PCs in my group, no matter who's DMing, tend to end up nude. Witness: The wizard that lost all his gear with a Deck of Many Things and reported nude to the chief wizard's office after the fact. The time we were all drugged and dumped in a field...

If they only change one thing, just one thing, in fourth edition, I hope they change the rules for cantrips (and orisons). A 20th level wizard can cast three or four ninth level spells. He can stop time, change into anything, undo the fabric of reality. But he can't cast detect magic more than...

What's the worst example of a newcomer's introduction to an RPG in your experience? An example: Once time we invited a player whose entire previous gaming experience consisted of Warhammer 40K. He therefore had no clue as to the nuances of "role playing", and thought D&D was just some sort of...

OK. In my country we have an expression. "More arse than class" means something is pulled off entirely by accident, but yet has a positive impact on everything. An example might be a person who, after blundering through a forest, totally lost, suddenly discovers the body of Jimmy Hoffa. That...

OK. Here's a way-out-one. The campaign I'm working on right now is an update of my previous one. It's a steampunky setting with a healthy dose of film noir, so we have a culture based on the United States during the Depression. None of which is really relevant to my point, which is that the home...

And here's a third one. Do you use different voices or accents when playing PCs or NPCs? I usually do, because it helps players and the DM know when I'm "in character" and when I'm not. Pretty much everybody does an American accent when we play Shadowrun or our current Spycraft campaign (I do a...

OK, here's another one. When you're naming your PCs or your NPCs, how much thought do you put into the name? Do you pick something that sounds good, do you try to make it culturally appropriate, do you reference popular culture, do you make the name 'mean' something? I tend to give a little...

My sig tells people that in a STARP session, it's one hour's roleplaying and ten hours argument. That's a slight exaggeration, but there's a reason ST stands for 'Side Tracked' in this instance. I'm just wondering on what side of the average we are here. In a normal session, which will begin at...

Thing is, under current rules, you can't make 'em. Once you drop to 0hp, you're alive but basically helpless. If you go down one more, you're unconcious and dying. You can't be dying while you're still concious. Does anybody have any alternate rules to allow you to be awake while the life ebbs...

Was it just me, or did the Eurovision Song Contest suck this year? Yes, yes, I know, it sucks every year, which is why we watch it. I don't watch Eurovision because it sucks and its supposed to suck. That's not it at all. Eurovision isn't supposed to suck - that's what makes it so entertaining...