Second editions are *hard*
Second editions are hard. Something I didn’t realize until I had to do it is that writing the second edition of an RPG is hard. The first edition was shiny and new – I wrote that thing by working for a month straight, nearly every day. One of the reasons I was able to is I had no idea that the work I thought I had to do was only ten percent of the work I really had to do: typography, pdf work, Index and ToC, headers and footers, manual pagination, and much, much more. This time around it isn’t a new game system, but a...
commentMessing with Players, part 1
OK, truth is, I don’t really know if this is the first part of an ongoing series or the only part, but let’s skip that question and get right to it: As a GM and story-crafter, sometimes it’s fun to hide the truth in plain sight. Case in point: in the Wild West game I was running yesterday (in DF2, naturally), the characters met a wise old Indian (as settlers called them then), who dispensed sage and though-provoking advice. He said he was named by his tribe for his technique of helping them dig burrows and hide...
commentPublic Enemy #1: The Fade
I have been running and playing roleplaying games (RPGs) for over thirty years now (I’m old! Mid forties! Argh!) and I have seen my fair share of stories come to an end. Sometimes it’s because the story is done – like a TV show, the players, after several season’s worth of story-telling may decide to conclude the story and move on to a new one. However, much of the time it’s not a planned end – instead it’s cancelled or goes on indefinite hiatus, usually never to return. Sadly, this happens all too often...
commentTotems and Tracking Traits, oh my!
The base mechanic in Dream Factory is the Outcome Check(OC), which you use for, well, determining outcomes – whether it’s the player or the GM that gets to decide how something turns out. In order to win an OC, the player needs to get a higher total than the GM – so the more dice they can roll, the better a chance the player has to do that. Players get extra dice by invoking Traits. Each character sheet has four listed, descriptors of the player’s character’s four most dramatically central aspects, invented by the...
commentDo we need Ding in our RPGs? Part II
Carrying on from the previous post, I spoke about not needing character advancement in a role-playing game – but does not having advancement mean not having ways to award players? Hardly. Take my game for example. In Dream Factory there are two kinds of awards, point based and plot based. You get a Karma point each episode for embracing your character’s personal struggle – whatever that is, whether you succeed or fail – so long as your success or failure is dramatically interesting. You also also are given a...
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