I think I’m getting old. I spent all of last weekend at Nine Worlds complaining about how tired I was, how stupid it was to attend the week after GenCon, and how I’d never be that stupid again. So I was pretty surprised to look back at old blog posts and learn that not only did I do the same cons back-to-back two years ago, but that I seemed pretty chipper by the end of it. The weary refrain of all men in their late-twenties: grant me the long-lost vigour of my mid-twenties. Continue reading
Star Wars
17 Great Things About Roleplaying in 2017
I think 2017 was a pretty good year, certainly compared to the one before. Here are my 17 highlights from a year with lots and lots of roleplaying games! Continue reading
How to Build Soundtracks for Your Roleplaying Game
I blame Will Hindmarch. It was his article for the Escapist, which I read over six years ago, that set me down this track. It started with a couple of sessions of experimentation, before it became the mantra I always live by. For every game in an RPG campaign I run – and every one-off game, where I can get away with it – I have a soundtrack that plays alongside the game. Continue reading
Force and Destiny Minigame: Podracing
Recently in my Force and Destiny game, the PCs found themselves needing to raise a lot of money in a short amount of time. Inevitably, it was decided that the best way to achieve this was to enter (and bet on) an illegal podrace. Continue reading
Review of 2016
There are plenty of more socio-political aware blogs providing commentary on the atrocity that was 2016. I don’t have much to add to that, only to say that, even disregarding international events, personally this has been the worst year of my life.
I played some cool roleplaying games though 🙂 Continue reading
31 Days, 9 Worlds and 1 Dystopian Universe
August is over and normal life is restored. GenCon is already receding into memory. Dragonmeet is pencilled in as my next exciting RPG event, but that’s still a long way away. I’ve got plenty of ways to round off my year in gaming before then.
So what have I been up to since GenCon, and what is coming up? Here’s a round-up. Continue reading
Not-So-Crystal Ball: Ennies Predictions and Weirdness
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
Mini-Review: Force and Destiny
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
The Middle Way: Another Go at Star Wars Morality
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
Ethical Mathematics: New Rules for Morality in Force and Destiny
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
