Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Below is a reprint of the very rough and ready rules I posted in our Rules Cyclopedia D&D game. Placed here for posterity and possible expansion someday. Thieves Guild:  A loose guide to running a new thieves guild.  House rules for the Aleria game the basic functions of the guild: 1. Rumors: The guild will gather rumors about what's going on around Aleria, some true some false  2. Research: Rumors can be researched to get more information and to determine their viability  3. Intimidation: Strength in numbers, sometimes people will give you money just to leave them alone… this is extortion, it’s also business. The more intimidating the less likely another guild is to challenge our territory.  4 . Finding Jobs: Thieves find marks and targets all the time. Picking good jobs is the hard part, that’s why you need a guild master.   Executing Jobs. The Gm will assign jobs a difficulty (1 to 10).  The thieves doing a job will be taken into acco...

A couple of posts ago , I wrote about  playing Basic D&D again for the first time in several a couple of decades. We are two short sessions in now playing exclusively on roll20 in the  evenings. Things are going well, the  players are exploring room by room, the game is going basicly as planned. For this post I'm going to  go back to my  other post and comment in RED  on how my original observations have stood up to actual play. Here it goes. Original Post starts here: _________________________________________________________________________ I have players who have never seen Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling presented as classes. It took them a few minutes to accept that as how it is. I always like Race as class. In my mind it lets an elf be an elf, and a dwarf be a dwarf  (halflings are a bit underwhelming but .. should be given their literary source.) A demihuman class is something a player will choose because they want to play that race on it's own meri...

My D&D 5th ed campaign has lost it's steam for the moment. The holidays brought with them a gaming drought which stole any momentum or desire I had where running my game is concerned. It happens every year. We will get back to it, we always do. * I  have proposed that we try something I have actually never done. A full on dungeon crawl. My games have traditionally been about  characters traipsing around the land, dealing with things they find and moving on. Rarely have they gone below ground. As I have gotten older I have started obsessing a bit over odd details... Why is the  mega dungeon there? How was it built? where did all the dirt go? Who paid for this huge public works project. How do those orcs get food? Air? Gravity, hows that work? and so on. Without question if I have a big ass multi-level magical dungeon in the middle of my game world I want it to have some logic behind it. with that in mind, the whole mega dungeon concept doesn't fit very well into my own...