Journalling on an Open Table campaign.
I often see people going on about d100 vs d20 vs 3d6, or the forever wars of THAC0 vs AAC (both are wrong, to-hit matrices are superior to either). They are all boring arguments. Here is something worth fighting about instead: your dice system only has the right to be different if it does something interesting with the fiction. Wait, it's all just statistics? That's all it ever was. In the end…
Or: how hard should a stand of ogres hit, and how much should it take to kill? In my (current) design for Mass Combat FOEGYG uses one base size. One regiment per stand, one footprint for every unit on the table. I made this choice because this allows for faster adjudication; rank-and-flank is always fiddly; too many models to scoot about, you need unit trays to keep your sanity and it just all…
I often rant about people reinventing square wheels and how it frustrates me to no end. The topic of experience and levelling is no different. Outside of OSR circles it seems like everyone has lost the plot, and instead of doing it right, they decided not to do it at all. Advice you commonly see boils down to something like "stop doing Exp; just tell them they level up when they finish a story…
Ah, fantasy roleplaying games, where we've made the fantastical mundane. Where the Dwarves don't feel like Dwarves, the Elves don't act like Elves, and where the half-Devil offspring of Satan act just like everyone else (ok, maybe that's actually rather realistic). This has been a long-building frustration from my own games. Any time someone ran a non-human character, I just... Forgot about them…
I've been trying to get my own shitbrew heartbreaker out there for a while. I've had the idea for at least three or four years, an idea of something the size of ODnD which spans all modes of play, hits every high note the fiction we so much enjoy does, in roughly the page count of the four little brown books. I gave the project the working title FOEGYG. That page count constraint isn't just…
My friend ran Scum and Villainy for some friends and I for about six months now, and I haven't been enjoying myself as much as I thought I would've when he posted the blurb. Running heists in a fantasy setting sounds like something I should've loved. Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars and the good bits of the Expanse. Imagine my surprise when I really wasn't enjoying myself all that much. This is…
I recently had an online scuffle with a few people regarding domain play and wargames, and its role in DnD. They argued that it was good it was taken out, and that doing so made the game better. I, unsurprisingly, strongly disagree. I want the complete progression from dungeon delving to hex crawling to domain play. This isn't some misguided sense of nostalgia; it's the complete D&D experience as…
In a recent twitter thread I was ranting about a 5e Curse of Strahd game I was briefly part of. I'd noticed my fellow party members being entirely happy about following the laid out raidroad even if it made no sense for their characters to do so. The gypsies had kidnapped us to the lands of Barovia, where we were told "yeah you can't leave until Strahd is defeated. You weren't the first ones we…
Or: revising the revisionist argument We played ADnD for a long time and have never used the training rules No one ever played ODnD with Chainmail, so I don't get why you're trying to. It's some weird sort of revisionist massochism. I have been playing for 45 years and we never did that Congratulations. So what? One of the most tiresome arguments I see is some variation of the above. Details…
The Third Misadventure Played: <2024-11-16 Sat> Dramatis personae Abraham, Cleric 1 Boris, MU 1 Clint, MU 1 Edgar, FM 1 Ferdinand, MU 1 Graham, FM 1 Huey, FM 1 The Plan Last time, they found a secret door in the ruined basement (AV-18). They intend to go and check that out. Everyone's feeling good again, so they're going in fresh. The Action <2024-11-16 Sat 08:00-09:00> The party quickly scrambles…