There’s a game in the Alea Big Box range called Chinatown. It’s recently been reprinted by Z-Man games. The game is a fairly simple one: you trade with the other players to get sets of buildings which you then construct on the map. The more sets of similar buildings you have, the more income you make. What struck me about the game was how few rules … Continue reading Elegance and the Development of Game Systems
I like immortal characters. So did Roger Zelazny, and so that’s one reason I enjoy reading his work so much. Or perhaps, I enjoy Zelazny and his work has made me appreciate immortal characters. One of the two. I’ve read somewhere (probably something written by Steven Brust) that Zelazny liked writing about immortal characters because they’d lived long enough to do interesting things. So, when … Continue reading Immortals
What is D&D? According to some people on the ‘net, it’s their favourite edition, and anything that comes after it is no longer D&D. I like 4e, so every edition of D&D is D&D to me. However, there’s a couple of basic core concepts that I believe that D&D has to have to remain D&D: Attacking in melee: You roll a d20, higher is better. … Continue reading The core of D&D
Rodney Thompson wrote a really good post on non-combat challenges in 4e on EN World today which has mostly been ignored by everyone else, so I wanted to point it to anyone who reads my blog. I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing! 🙂 Skill challenges are the big innovation of 4e, and I don’t think they work yet. Yeah, the idea is … Continue reading D&D and non-combat stuff
I’m attracted to too many lifestyle gaming hobbies. What’s a lifestyle hobby? It’s a hobby that basically requires you to devote a lot of time to it, over an extended period. D&D is my pre-eminent lifestyle hobby. It’s one I’ve been playing now for (eek!) 28 years or so. That’s quite a chunk of my life, when you think about it. I spend about 16 hours … Continue reading Lifestyle hobbies
With us getting back to speed with our roleplaying campaigns, I thought now would be a nice time to discuss the Castle Greyhawk campaign and where it’s going. Because – as you might know by now – I don’t have a clue! The original concept for the game was mostly as a dungeon-delve campaign centred about Castle Greyhawk (using the Castle Zagyg material from TLG), … Continue reading Themes and plotlines in my Friday 4E campaign
One of the more common adventure types that I encountered during my brief time with the RPGA was the investigative adventure – the mystery. Recently, I’ve been playing the Star Wars RPG "Dawn of Defiance" series of adventures, and guess what we’re finding? Mysteries. Not every adventure, but enough of them. And I really, really hate them. Especially in Star Wars. But also … Continue reading I hate mysteries
I ran two campaigns in the County of Ulek between 2001 and 2007, using similar themes: the invasion of the county by the “Fhoi Myore”, deformed giants (read Fomorians) with mystical powers, drawing heavily on Celtic mythology and the works of Michael Moorcock. The County of Ulek was the homeland of my original AD&D character, Meliander Corthan, and material I developed for his background made … Continue reading Greyhawk – In the County of Ulek
At present, I’m running one of my groups through the H series of Wizards adventures; we’re about half-way through H2 at present. To some extent, I think the adventures published for a game display the feel of that game far more than the core rulebooks do. When I think about AD&D, it’s not really the rules that I concentrate on: it’s the early adventures. T1-4, … Continue reading Thoughts on Wizards’ 4e adventures
I’ve decided that I’m going to allow players in my 4e games to hire NPCs as henchmen, men-at-arms, hirelings or whatever. Whether this will make combats too easy, annoy the other players or suchlike we’ll see, and we might adjust things as the game goes on. One advantage of this is that if a player is missing, there’ll be a henchman (etc) to back you … Continue reading Henchmen, men-at-arms and hirelings
