What the-?!

D&D Miniatures Changes Explained Why the change from 8 miniatures to 5 miniatures per booster? When we set out to re-imagine the Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures line, our goals included increasing the quality of the product, dealing with the rising costs associated with producing the line, and optimizing the product as a D&D Roleplaying Game […]

Fluid Combat Rounds Rules

Crunch Fetish Szilard posted an insanely complicated set of D&D 3.0 rules for a less turn-based approach to combat. I can’t imagine actually using those rules (even if they weren’t D&D 3.0 oriented), but it did make me ponder whether there was some way to do the bookkeeping for them that would make it less […]

In Praise of Randomization

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action. – Ian Fleming Here’s two things about human beings: They are incredibly bad at randomizing They are incredibly good at recognizing patterns The implication of the combination of these facts is that if you’re GMing a game and you think you’re introducing something […]

Hasbro Announces Will Stop Selling Pigs in a Poke; Customers Pathetically Grateful

Questing GM; A Borneon Gamer: Word of Wizards – D&D Miniatures Changes Announcment Yesterday, Wizards has made an announcement that in Spring 2009, they will be releasing two new lines of miniatures; D&D Heroes and Dangerous Delves. D&D Heroes will be a non-randomized miniature set featuring miniatures for the classes and races from the PHB […]

What no Rambling Bumbler can resist

What’s the worst that could happen? My players are congenitally unable to resist this kind of thing. After one campaign where they destroyed the universe by shooting the doomsday machine before the villain could finish explaining that shooting it would doom them all, I’ve taken the precaution of removing all self-destruct mechanisms and other single […]

Special Purpose Wikis

I’m a fan of wikis for organizing and letting you search for game information. I’ve got the main Haunted Realm campaign wiki running on my website using MediaWiki, but that’s for public consumption; I still need a place for working on all my campaign notes that the players aren’t supposed to see. I’ve mentioned TiddlyWiki […]

The Mythic Game Master Emulator

The Mythic Game Master Emulator is pretty good for solitaire play; it’s actually more ambitious than just random dungeon stuff, it’s meant to allow you to use charts to randomly determine much more open-ended adventures. There’s a demo pdf that lacks the main chart, so you can’t actually take it for a test drive, but […]

Tolkien Not Spoken Here

I’ve just decided that in my new setting, the Haunted Realm, I’m not going to have either Orcs or Hobbits (or even “Halflings”). Probably no great surprise to my players, but I had mentioned Orcs as being one of the Invader races and I’ve thought the better of it. The grunts of the invading army […]

Desirable Generic RPG Qualities

Here’s a blast from the past, something I wrote ten years ago on what I was looking for in a generic RPG system. I still agree with a good bit of it, though some of it I’m less certain about, and about one particular issue I think I was just wrong. Subject: Desirable Generic RPG […]

Fluffy Crunch and Crunchy Fluff

Matthew Conway recently wrote Fluff and Crunch Are Dead To Me, about how he’s grown to hate the terms, but I see them as getting at something. To me, anyway, Crunch is all the mechanics of the game: you roll this, and subtract that number from this other thing, if the result is 0 or […]