Diary of a Failed Game Designer

View from the  building I work in. One of my coworkers took this from the 4th floor the other day. Damn look at that sky. Mountains seem good. Can't wait to get out and about. -Mark.

This despite how it reads at first is post about respect. Respect for my  hobby, myself, and my ideas. Most of all respect for the  three of four people I have played RPG's with for many years and who constantly put up with my ideas. If I don't they'll put a stop to it quick enough. Sometimes in my enthusiasm I will jump into a project with both feet. I Run around in the project and dance like a like a cat with water on it's paws for a week or so before I finally slow down and look at what I'm doing. Kind of a bad way to get anything productive done. So I have been working on a game explicitly to run my campaign. Something that finally encapsulates what I want to  do with my  game, and how I want to present things.  Just reading that last paragraph seems so fucking pretentious and stupid to me right now.. That is the  definition of "A heart breaker" or a darling of a game. The game is a good idea, and it may contain great ideas, but in the end it is co...

I own a decent amount of RPG books both old an new. *  They are all either glue bound soft covers, "perfect bound" I think they call it, or case bound  hard covers. There is also a smattering of older or smaller staple bound zines or booklets. Nothing spiral bound. Until now. I recently went through LULU to have one of my games printed for my fiends. I wanted to avoid perfect bound because I don't know how good LuLu's printers gluing methods are. (And I'm too lazy to ask G+ I didn't  want books that would dry out and fall apart in  year. I did not want to go hard cover because it was only 82 pages long and I figured a hard cover while tempting was just plain overkill. Then I noticed they had an option in  A5 size for spiral bound at about 40 cents more than perfect bound. "Bound with a black plastic spiral though punched holes." I did give some thought to pages pulling out form the  spiral, but put those thoughts to rest pretty quickly. I know my fri...

A shadowy kitchen, deep in the  sub levels of the wizards college, flour hangs in the air the heat of ovens makes the air heavy... The old mage spoke as if to himself.... A group of anxious students line  the walls around him straining to hear. The scratching of quills to papyrus almost drowning his voice, he begins. "Anyone can brew a potion. First year acolytes can have wounds healing in just a few hours given a cauldron and the right herbs. I'm not impressed." He steps froward to a large silver domed platter on a podium, his voice growing louder. "No my students, we shall aspire to more. let the  apothecary, quacks and dirty nailed herbalists brew their teas and distill their tinctures." He deftly lifts the  silver dome to reveal a pile of  biscuits and petits fours, meticulously decorated and  impeccably displayed. "We will know the truth. We will see the  starter alive, know the feel of well proofed dough, understand the sponge. We will be wizards...

Your Number is 5: 2 or more players one of them is a GM. If your character is bad at something  you roll 1d6 If your character is  OK at something you roll 1d8 If your character is  good at something you roll 1d10 If your character is  very good at something you roll 1d12. To be successful you have to roll 5 or higher. The higher you roll the better your character does at whatever. The lower you roll under 5  (1-4) the  worse off your character is from whatever. That's it. Ground covered a thousand times before. I guess that makes this a boring post. I'm still going to press forward, cause it's Wednesday. Is it a game? It could be if we played it, right? No, No, No .. this is just a mechanic not a game... why? What makes it not a game? It's just a "thing" right, like a stupid Mark thing like the rest of those things...? What makes a game at all? Fruitcake? Some Links sending you off to things I read before writing this: What ma...

Ok, I have to admit I feel a bit dirty typing this. I hate spell lists. (A door slams violently as Otto leaves the room.) Whopping huge lists of spells are sort of my great D&D buggaboo. I know lately I have picked on hit points allot, but honestly I have no real beef with hit points. I can look hit points in the eye and say, "Buddy no one understands you and you kind of  smell like old Doritos's but I still love ya" and be done with it. Show me an endless list of  spells collected by "school" or in alphabetical order and I have no such  understanding. My eyes glaze over. This cow is so much a baller. Whats worse the  spells are one of the  great D&D unspoken sacred cows. DON'T MESS WITH THE SPELLS or for better or worse it's just not D&D any more. I just grabbed my print version of OSRIC off the shelf the spells chapter runs from 35 to 120. (book total is a hefty 396 pages I think that's around 21 percent of the book.) Fifth edition Play...

I have not posted for a few days, Been working through some ideas and want to work a bit on the  blog it's self: I plan on taking this weekend (I hope) to  tag every post in the blog and  organize them so that they can be  viewed by any one interested a bit more easily. Also I have to cut back and redo the blog roll as it's a bit unwieldy. I may even  fiddle with the template a bit. Who knows. -Mark.