Diary of a Failed Game Designer

I have taken a break from Shards of Thibral, just a bit of tie to get some space and some air, so I can look at the game from a fresh direction next week. The rest of this post is a decent into gamer madness.. enjoy. Part of this break has to do with on singular and innocent post from a friend of min. He posted “I love charts.” while we were discussing old school games in general after one of our 2nd edition games. Whit his post in my mind I dug around on my portable hard drive and found PDF copy of “The Tomb of Adventure Design” http://froggodgames.org/tome-adventure-design by Matthew J Finch. I totally want to buy a copy of the dead tree version, and I likely will as soon as I can. I digress, the book is collection of random charts for everything. You want random towns and cities, in there, you want random swamps sure. Random adventure plots? Sure! You want a random spell sure, you name it it's likely in there. It really is a fun useful well done book, I highly suggest it.

Happy 40 th birthday to Dungeons and dragons. No matter if you are a grognard from the tan box days, or started with red box like I did, If you Like your D&D with an “A” in the front or a “3” at the tail, if you are a rabid 4 th edition love or are desperately waiting for dungeons and dragons Next, we all owner the original a debt. For me I think the thing I owe the most to D&D for is the starting of the largest do it yourself hobby the world. Before D&D people read stories and played games, after D&D people played games to make stories. What seems plain now 40 years latter was indeed a sea change. The game is simply the framework the content, that you do your self. The DM sits down with the players and they create the content. What you used to buy in a book, you are now doing yourself, sharing with others, laughing over and remembering. No other hobby, you could argue outside of the inherent drama of sports, does that. Role playing games are inherently do it

        For this post I think A bit about my personal relationship with the 4 th Ed of Dungeons and Dragons would be a great place to start, for clarity. We had at some point converted our 2edAd&D game over to third and soldiered on (lost some players in the transition). Like a lot of gamers at the time the group I game with were pretty embroiled in a 3 rd Ed game when the 4 th Ed dropped. My friend Jay and I were riding home after a game and had a conversation that ended in something like, “no way I am buying new books, lets just keep doing what we're doing, or why not write out one damn game.” From that conversation our game Phase abandon was born and D&D of any color was left behind for a few years. In turn we both bought the first D&D 4 th Ed players book, but more as a curiosity than anything we planned on playing. We tried it once, and put it on the shelf. We had our game Phase and we were fine with that. That's the history. This is the now: With our recent

We play tested Shards of Thimbral once again this morning.  I feel that we made some good progress so lets break it down. We started with character creation, each player making a completely new character and a new party.  Character's were Edward a blacksmith whose goals were to expand his foundries and to reforge the hammer of Vulcan. And Blake who is a noir detective type whose goal is to find the murderer “Europe Malloy.” Their group connection was Blake is helping Edward find the parts of Vulcan’s hammer. The party connection is they are both members of tinkerers guild. As the Gm I choose reforge the hammer of Vulcan and find the murdered Europe Malloy as the starting goals to use as kickers. Edward's player had mentioned that he had a foundry on an island named DelFracked so we started there. This is the first time we had tried the new “chapter” system in-which the gm gets a pool of d6's called “response dice.” After a player rolls back a die to take an action, if the

The other day I read this: following-footsteps-and-casting-shadows Over at Dyver's campaign's blog. I read a lot of the articles on Dyver's, the sheer volume of posts that Charles puts out is pretty amazing, I highly suggest his blog it's well written and entertaining. But that plug is besides the point. The article is about being original, and generally boils down to no one writes adventures or games or anything really in a vacuum. It's almost impossible to be wholly original. Everyone is influenced in some way by their precursors. I totally agree. I am going to add my own input as a dovetail to what he already wrote so well. I think being less than original is a benefit to the players and the game as a whole. In our hobby there are touch stones. Examples could include Tolkein, Lieber, Lovecraft, and a many other authors. More recently the works of the hobby progenitors, such as Dragonlance, Blackmoor, Forgotten Realms and the like can be sighted as influences

I was looking at my blog posts and got to thinking, “very rarely do I ever look back in other people’s blogs.” I think I will start, and encourage everybody to the same when they get a chance. If I have one problem with the “Blogosphere” in general it’s that old posts tend to get buried, and then relegated to a drop down menu list of entries off in the right margin right some place. Furthermore the most recent five posts are always shown, leaving a regular reader no reason to scroll down to see what’s lurking at the bottom of the blog. (How many of you have seen my tag cloud? Or list of most popular posts?)   A busy blog where there are posts every day or even more than that could have some great content lurking just out of view. With that in mind I promise that next time visit any blog, I’m going to peruse the back log of posts to see if there is any thing great that I missed. Any adventure worth his salt knows some times you have to dig deep for the good stuff! And with that in mind

Lately I have been in a complete stall with my Shards of Thimbral project. This blog which I intended to use as a backbone and support for that project, has been ranging widely around the world of RPG's. Meanwhile and I have not been making much progress on the game. Yeah that about covers it. I hit a place just before Thanksgiving , where I need to play the game a lot to iron out kinks. The holidays came everyone got busy and I have not been able to recover my stride quite yet. Add to this I have been second guessing my design. I’m not sure my original design decisions are leading me down a path that will take me to the game I want to create. It's an odd place to be because I am generally very confident about my design decisions and while I think the ideas I have are strong, I have this nagging feeling that I am missing some important element.  I have a strong feeling that I will answer my own nagging questions once I start play testing again and can get a e more games unde

Designing an adventure, matters of style, and falling towers. Adventure design is a personal art. I use the term art with purpose. It's telling that everyone does it differently and that a hundred GM's could take the same subject and wind up with a hundred different adventures. Art: (according to Merriam Webster's) The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. OK, so that is a bit off my point but still “The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination,” definitely applies to the topic. I have a very defined method for creating my adventures game to game. This method comes from years of habit, laziness and problem solving. I am going over it here only to start a discussion about what other peoples processes are like, not to say (DO IT MY WAY HEATHEN!) The Heathen count around here ma

Played a bit of Numenera last night and it brought some things to mind. God damn I revel in a good Role playing game fight. You see this is not going to be about Numenera in general but more about kicking the shit out of things in our imaginations. Lest face it pretty much all big time RPG’s over the years have a detailed “combat system.” Smaller press RPG games have at the very least a “task resolutions mechanic” that is used mostly to beat things up. Where I’m going with this is that violent conflict is generally a big part of role playing games. (What? no way?! duh …) Is it that rpgs' grew out of a war-gaming tradition? Is it our pent up aggressions, testosterone, inferiority complexes, inner angst, machismo, the id telling the super ego to go take a flying jump? I don't know though I will admit..... It’s an awful lot of fun to You know, bash things. In what has traditionally been a male dominated hobby (slowly changing thankfully) Hitting things with other huge

Dyvers: Old and New School? This is fun. He describes the best fountain ever. - and he makes a good point, were all just playing games. Put it on the table, lets roll.

This is a post based almost entirely on an a reply to another one of my blogs titled "Looking at old games with new eyes." http://dustpangames.blogspot.com/2013/12/looking-at-old-games-with-new-eyes.html Check that out if you're grappling with context for this post. The reply is from Otto Q and he should get at least 75% of the credit for this post, co author credit and a glass if IPA to top it off. His reply was concise and well thought out and deserves more than the, "thank you for posting here is what I think " treatment that I do my best to give every reply I get. It needs to be said in the name of transparency, I know Otto, he and I have gamed together, and I have a great deal of respect for him and his opinions. The format is this .. Mr. Otto's paragraphs will be in normal font, my replies be in blue italics simple as that. Otto Q shared your blog post on Google+ I don't know... I agree with you in theory. It seems like narrative/modern ba

Numenera A brief review and some thoughts / Lamenting Brick and Mortar. I received the Numenera core book in the mail this week. I am I think the last person in the RPG blog-o-sphere to get my hands on this game, but I say that as a plus, I have never been what you would call an early adopter. I have read about and know people who backed Monte Cook's wildly successful kick starter. BEHOLD The Numenera Kick starter page ! Almost every thing (but not all) I have heard or read form these people, has been a moat of gooey positivism, the likes of which has not been seen since the Ghost busters brought the statue of liberty to life. This game is at least in my view the epitome to date of a successful kick-starter, and what can be done with that success. So, “Why you no Back Kick-starter?” Let me be 100% honest, If I could talk to Mr. Cook in person I would be humbled, the guy has been in the R.P.G.industry for 25+ years and is very obviously very, very good. Advice from him would be s