Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Blissfully stolen HTML form  Quarzis's blog. Here are more links to  "Why I love this game" entries which are all awesome. Written by awesome people About things which are .. wait for it... ... kinda awesome. Quarzis Loves Castles and Crusades (He also loves footnotes, allegedly) Why I love 5th Edition D&D Not Loving Friend Computer is Treason – A Paranoia Love Story Re: Why I Love Apocalypse World For the love of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia Why Arcana Evolved is Awesome Why I Love RPGS: C. J. Carella’s WitchCraft RPG Why I Love RPGS: Moldvay Basic Why I love Elthos RPG Why I Love HeroQuest 2 Blueholme In Loving Memory: Everway Remembered with Honour: Lace and Steel Please take the time to read these and perhaps try a new game.

Here are 100 random thoughts on RPG's The industry of RPG's and a whole bunch of other stuff. As if anyone asked ...no-one did. I know it's excessive.. No explanations for these. They are just statements written as I thought them.  There will be a wagon load of links to things I find interesting in this post, please use them. Go to the comment section to discuss accordingly. (BONUS: Can also be used as a handy D100 "Why is Mark an A-hole" chart!) There will be no secrets after this  Alice. Tl;DR $4,402,267 this is Hasbro's 2013 year end total assets as shown in their 2013 year end statement found here   Q3 2014 report states 243 million net income for  Hasbro. Also found  here . Out of both documents Magic The Gathering is mentioned once and shown pictorially twice.  Dungeons and dragons in not mentioned at all that I could find in my quick view CTRL-F. Nerf guns, ponies, transformer movies, comics movies in general, and a working relationship with Disney i...

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...

This post was inspired by this post  from the "Disoriented Ranger" blog. Go read that post it's interesting So your  players are working their way through some caverns and you feel they are not yet at one with the inherent danger of life below ground. It's time to throw a random natural hazard their way. Natural hazards are defined by being non-fantastic. A field of giant sentient mushrooms that puff out rainbow colored rot spores are cool. They are not a natural hazard. The entries on this chart are things that could be in any hallway of any cave and don't necessarily require their own map entries. I will include notes about equipment that may be needed to  traverse the obstacle, however I will not include details like die checks, saves, or, damage values as they are system dependent. I will try to word these details in ways that are system agnostic. I will place equipment that might be used up or needed and  possible threats in (brackets) at the end of the entri...

Troll bait title right ? right ? OK maybe it is , but I mean it. As a caveat though I need to add that does to mean I don't love dungeons, I do! Like I might love a kitten with a lazy eye, I love the holy hell out of them. I run dungeons, I have mapped dungeons. I just think that the concept is kinda dated and  well...stupid. Another Caveat: Before someone jumps my shit and says, "I used such and such a mega dungeon and my  group loves it and  I'm certainly not stupid ~!RAWR OLD SCHOOL! RAWR!~" I agree. You are not stupid and  Dungeons are fun, old school is awesome, and  lets calm down and here have a drink. Let me spell out thoughts on dungeons, as I think of them. Many of them are ungodly huge and full of stuff. I mean who digs these things? Who stashes their shit in them? Designers go to great length to explain how these things came to be and I think real world examples of truly mega and old underground areas are pretty sparse. Sure the New York subway syste...