Design
A lesson learned about playtesting
Not long ago, a gaming acquaintance sent me a copy of a game he’s working on and asked me to playtest it. What I’ve learned from this experience is very simple: Make playtesting your game as easy as possible. If you can, provide playtest packages containing everything needed to play. If you can make playtesting… »
Trade-offs: Phases/Vigor
During character creation, the first three phases are required. They get your character into the office with the rest of the team. The last two phases of character creation are optional. If you choose to pass on both phases, then your character is still relatively inexperienced. She’s been on the beat but working investigations is… »
Giving In
If your character already has a Vice, at the end of a case you can forgo your Resolve roll and give in. You still get a tick on your character’s Vice track but by giving in you also recover 1 tick of Toughness stress and 1 tick of Resolve stress. If the new tick on… »
Vice
Protecting the streets is stressful, it wears you down. Eventually, you need to relax. You need to find something that takes away the pain from the street. You need vice. Examples: gambling, drinking, danger, sex Mechanics: At the end of each case, make a Resolve check. If you fail, your character finds a Vice. Roll… »
Broad Strokes
I finished reading Diaspora not long ago and one of the interesting things that it does is take the idea of cooperative character creation at the table that was in Spirit of the Century and extend that to the setting too. Players each create a planetary system in the Cluster they will be using as… »
Ideas: Fudge Dice Pool
I’ve been thinking for a while now that there are a number of ways that you could Fudge Dice with different dice pool mechanics. Gobble Pool (ala the old White Wolf system): roll a number of dice equal to your Stat + Skill. Minus results cancel Plus results. If you have more Plus results than… »
What I did with my day . . .
With part of my day today, I created a double sided quick-reference sheet for the FATE game that Peter is currently running for our group: http://www.jadettman.com/FATE_QuickReference.pdf . Unfortunately, FATE appears to be compact enough that I’ve got a bunch of extra room on one page. Now, I could put the minion and companion rules on… »
Already Broken
I’ve already given up my latest forum break. It turns out that when I give up forums I, instead, spend a ridiculous amount of time over at RPG Geek creating entries for obscure games both old and new. Now, overall I don’t find creating new entries over at the Geek to be a waste of… »
Looking Back
I was looking through my archives the other day and it’s interesting the things you turn up. Last year, I posted about a project I was working on called Perfect Fantasy that was based on Levi Kornelsen’s Perfect 20 which, like True20 or Mutants & Masterminds, is a streamlined version of the fantasy SRD from… »
Hyperspace Rails: The Board So Far
Here’s where I am with the Hyperspace Rails board: http://www.jadettman.com/HSB.jpg I shrank it down but it’s still pretty big, so keep that in mind before you hit the link. I think it’s looking pretty good, if I do say so… »