Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Henchmen and henchwomen:  (henceforth I'm only using henchman or Hench as unisex terms.) Many parties have them. They are the  lucky towns folks that the bard coerces, the fighter intimidates, the  cleric guilt's, and the wizard geases into carrying all of the groups stuff.  In Adventures with a high level of resource management, a good henchmen just loaded with food and torches can mean the  difference between  getting home or starving to death in the dark while a bunch  of  albino blullywogs look on hungrily from the  darkness. Characters ask allot form their henchmen.  Imagine the pitch, party leader to perspective henchman: "You carry all this stuff into a dangerous place filled with monsters, test uneven ground, and open  risky looking doors. If any of us live, we will give you enough gold to feed your family for a year. You know gold right? It's that stuff you have only dreamed about that can buy a crap ton of  dried fish and  pickled cabbage for the winter. Yeah

Being this is my 200th post I expect Cake. From the  tumbler "humanHeart" I can't site the  real source. Here is my non-review of, "A Red and Pleasant Land" by Zak Smith. This is based on my reading of the PDF. I'm waiting on my physical copy which wont be here in the states for a while yet. Review: "If You have been on the fence about buying it, Buy it.   Or Just Buy it,  It's very good." End of Review. Forget that it is hard cover and amazing to look at. fro get that the  production values make this book a game changer. Forget that the  artwork is miles ahead of any of the photo-shop paintings that have become all the rage in the gaming industry. The only thing that matters to me is  that It's game-able. It has interesting usable charts. It has ideas, style, thoughts and all kinds of things that a GM could use / steal even if they don't give a darn about the setting. It is a usable game book, In fact one of the most usable I have ever

First off here are my notes form the game.  Everybody does it this way. Right? On a 9"x 12" piece of  70 lb  drawing paper with a uniball micro. an awful scan, The characters: Damascus : Played by Neal, A self disguising magic wielding, energy sword having nano from Numenera. Made for this game specifically, I think. Reginald : A Paladin 5th level from A&D second edition.  This character has been played by Russ for a long time. Howard Bristleshield: Another 2nd ed Paladin played to the hilt by Chris, originally made for my 2nd ed game this was Howard's first real run. Rik: Another long time character this time played by Jay. Rik was written in the Phase Abandon rule set which is kind of our own in house game. Quizaris : Which I may have misspelled Run  by Otto as only he can a Necromancer using the 5th ed rules. I have to quickly touch on one of the  biggest troubles with online gaming. We're all adults ranging in age from 22 through over 40. We all have jobs and

And you know what? It's pretty legit. This is going to be a long post, you have been warned. I should split this bear up, but I didn't. This blog entry will be written one hundred percent from my perspective as a guy who runs games, not from the stance of a review. This will be me riffing on the  new DMG. I can safely assume there will be thousands of reviews written on blogs that  are written by people who are more adept than I could ever be at pulling apart a book and  tweazzing every pube out of it. So here's my  "review"       It's legit, buy it if you want a 5th ed DMG.      You can quote me. * What I'm going to do is point out things that I think that I would in fact get some use out of. I will also point out parts I'm going to steal form my own games, or change so that they become useful. So what do I look for in a DMG? I have a love / hate relationship with  Dungeon Masters guides. I don't want a book preaching to me about how to run my gam

This is a post that will be primarily of interest to group I normally game with. I figured I would post it publicly because every one loves a good train wreck. The  annual Krampus fantasy adventure is upon us! The  bitter anti-saint is again terrorizing the land and heroes are needed. Last year Jay ran the wildly successful caves of Krampus, this year I'll be doing the honors. Big elf shoes to fill, no doubt. here are the rules of the game. Bring any character from any fantasy  based game we have played. Normalize that character to  5th level. Your charater will be treated in accordance to whatever system they were built in. WTF? I'll explain If  Russ uses a 3rd edition character, when he attempts something. I will set a difficulty that he will have to beat on a d20 + atrib mods , using feats. If Jay uses a first edition character he will be using D20 Vs a THAC0 armor class. If someone uses a dungeon world character I will  slot his  action into  moves and he will roll 2d6 +app

In this post I'm going to share with every one The most recent handout or "player info page" ( It's all computerized now days, I host this stuff on another blog. ) from my fantasy style game. ( Usually run in  D&D , but has been run in several flavors over the years ) I'm posting it just to point a few things out that are probably not helpful. First off there are implied hooks in the text but, but nothing overt, no jump out and grab the player things going on, it's all very  vanilla. I limit the description to things that the character's might know when arriving in the area. Why? I need room to breath. If the  players go off to do something I never even gave a thought to  I will have enough room to fill in the blanks, also if I have a lightning bolt idea for an adventure hook I can place it with out having to contradict or overwrite some hook I already had in place. Why so much odd ball information about population and what these  towns sell? These are