Following last year, when I reviewed the announced Ennies nominees to predict winners and generally snark, I thought it would be fun to make things more challenging for me this year and try and predict the nominees for the year’s most prestigious roleplaying awards show. Seemed like a fun/dumb enough idea for a blog post.
Putting this together led to some kind of weird places. Continue reading
Why all the hate for custom dice? Ok, so Fantasy Flight Games aren’t model examples – overcharging for dice packs, limiting the number of dice per pack, covering the dice with bizarre hieroglyphics. But tailoring dice to better fit a setting or gameplay style is a useful design tool, and the Star Wars RPG range is a great demonstration of how to do this well. Continue reading
After playing some more Force and Destiny, I’ve come to realise that whilst I stand by all the criticisms I had of the rulebook’s Morality system, I don’t like the rules hack I suggested last month much better. Too complicated, too time consuming, too pedantic… and too unbalanced. Balance issues could be resolved by spending the next few months of play tweaking, until I work out exactly how many Evil Points stealing is really worth, but I have zero enthusiasm for doing that. So I decided to start from scratch. Continue reading
EDIT (April 2018): It turns out this is one of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written! So I should probably say that, when I playtested this, my gaming group rejected it after a single session. It’s not all bad though, because I created another morality system, which we liked much better and used for the rest of our campaign (40+ sessions). Find it here!
I recently started running a Force and Destiny game, which seems to be going quite well. However, even though we’re only two sessions in, we’re already struggling with the most controversial element of any Star Wars RPG: Morality, how the game measures a character’s alignment to the Light and Dark Sides of the Force. Continue reading
Roll Plus Hot 