Inspired by some very kind comments from the Fate Core Google+ Community, I recently took another look at the Firefly hack I blogged about last year. Whilst far too late to help my friend with the campaign he was running (sorry!), I thought this might still be of interest to other gamers out there. Today, I’ll look at a new sub-system I teased at the end of that post: the resolution of Mexican standoffs. Continue reading
Author: mpduxbury
Needs More KAPOW!: My Unsolicited Thoughts on Superhero RPGs
I’ve not been blogging much recently. Partly that’s because I’ve been busy, but also it’s been due to a lack of inspiration. Ideas of what to blog about haven’t sprung to mind as readily.
Here’s the thing though – I’ve been thinking about RPGs A LOT. Even more so than usual. Besides my ongoing campaigns, my plans for future campaigns, keeping an eye on new releases, Kickstarters, the Origins awards, other people’s blogs etc… I’ve also been thinking about game systems of my own creation. And my friends have been helping me with them. Continue reading
Play ALL THE GAMES: Tabletop Day 2015 and #51in15
I think I’ve played games on Tabletop Day before – sessions in an RPG campaign that happened to fall on the day, or whatever – but this year was the first time I actually celebrated it. My local nerd pit Dark Sphere was kind enough to host, opening up their impressively large gaming space and collection of board and card games, for the princely sum of a £1 all-day cover fee. It was a great day, a wonderful opportunity to acquaint myself with gamers I didn’t know, and as good a time as any to set myself a test for the year ahead. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Deathwatch
Even though Space Marines are the poster boys of Warhammer 40K, I still remember the raised eyebrows when Fantasy Flight Games announced they’d be getting their own RPG. Psycho-conditioned, fascistic, meathead superhumans don’t sound like the most fun characters to roleplay, unless you want every PC to sound exactly the same. But I remained optimistic. A military-themed RPG sounded interesting to me, and the different Chapters of Space Marines distinctive enough to present a variety of roleplaying options. To be fair, Deathwatch makes a concerted effort to reflect these themes in the mechanics. It’s a shame that those extra rules are the straw that breaks the camel’s back in an already overloaded and sluggish system. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Paranoia High Programmers
Power-fantasies are prevalent in roleplaying, but it’s not my cup of tea. Maybe it’s a British thing, but if my character is showered in glory after triumphing against impossible odds, I’ll find no satisfaction unless I suffered through hell first. Paranoia: High Programmers understands this. It’s playable as a standalone game, sure, but it’s best enjoyed by those who’ve already suffered through the nightmarish hilarities of the Paranoia universe before. Yet being in charge in Alpha Complex remains no insulation from jealous underlings, scheming rivals, or the insanity of your overlord Friend Computer. Continue reading
Showing Off: Musketeer Stunts in Fate Core
Some time ago I posted a swashbuckling mini-hack for Fate Core, to introduce a little more strategy and daring into how the game handles sword fighting. This was in advance of joining a Musketeers game, which has been an excellent opportunity to playtest those ideas, within the confines of an already extremely fun campaign.
At the end of that post, I teased the possibility of developing stunt trees to plug into those rules, framed around the six Fight approaches. My design goals for these stunt trees were to generate even more strategic options in combat, and to take advantage of one of Fate’s most neglected mechanics: zones. In a setting where everyone is a sword fighter, the Fate Core default is for everyone to pile into the same zone and stay there, so they always have complete choice about which opponent to attack. This is both a boring way to play, and a poor representation of the genre, in which leaps and dashes through precarious environments are as much part of fight scenes as quips and swordplay.
Below is the result of my efforts. Continue reading
It Follows: A Monsterhearts Mini-Hack
I went to the cinema to see “It Follows” the other day. It’s a good horror movie. Lots of interesting things explored about the male gaze, and why it is so threatening to women (when you don’t know which person amongst the crowd is a predator, survival instinct warns that they all are). Some of the acting and writing’s a little dodgy, and it’s not particularly scary either, but it’s interesting enough to be worth your time, if horror movies are your kind of thing.
I was struck afterwards how easy it would be to adapt the set-up of the movie to fit within a Monsterhearts campaign. So I’ve given it a bash below. Be warned that spoilers for the movie abound. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Apocalypse World
Four years and countless adaptations later, the original is still the best. Quibbling over the extent of its innovation (or which gaming primogenitor deserves to be recognised as the “true innovator”) is fundamentally missing the point. This is a landmark achievement of game design, and one of the best RPG releases of the decade. When gaming historians look back at The Forge and the Naughties’ story gaming movement, Apocalypse World will stand out as its crowning accomplishment. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Fate Accelerated Edition
Is Fate Accelerated Edition an expansion? A fresh system adaptation? A quick-start guide? Fred Hicks suggests that it and Fate Core are better viewed as points of a Fate spectrum than as standalone entities. Maybe that’s true, but it’s awkward from a critical perspective, so I’ve chosen to review it as a separate entity. Unfortunately, the problem with this approach is that comparisons to Fate Core are as inevitable as they are unfavourable. Continue reading
How to Talk Good: New Taglines for The Gaean Reach
Whoops, totally neglected by blog again. At least part of this was due to going on holiday (my first ever trip to Japan!). The rest of it was just laziness.
I mentioned in my last post that I’d been writing some new taglines for use in my ongoing Gaean Reach campaign, and that I’d share them on the blog, in case other GMs found them useful. But first I should detail some minor changes I’ve made to the tagline system, that are probably worth considering when using the taglines below: Continue reading
Roll Plus Hot 