Random Average

I’m very excited about the first play session of our new Primetime Adventures game this Wednesday, and while I’m putting a lot of mental effort into it, another game is on my radar, and I really had to share.
There are a few games that I think of as the touchstones in independently published roleplaying ’story’ [...]

So last night we got got together to work through the Pitch Session for a new Primetime Adventures game.
((For those who don’t know, Primetime Adventures is a game meant to emulate action/melodrama television shows. The purpose of play is to create a short-run television series (5 or 9 episodes) driven by the Issues of the [...]

Wednesday night rolled around, and we were set to play In a Wicked Age. This was going to be my fourth or so time running the game, the second time for both Tim and Chris to play (revisiting the same characters) and the first time for both Meera and Randy.
Participant background
It’s not unimportant to [...]

The simplest little RPG ever
This is an RPG intended to be played with kids. It requires one adult (or semi-adult) GM, and assumes that the player characters go out and have adventures. Said adventures need not be violent gore-fests, but they can be heroic swords-and-sorcery affairs if that’s the way you swing. There is a [...]

So I looked over the various gaming threads that had come out of discussions of Action Points and how they were used — I agree and disagree in equal measures with what folks are saying, so I’m just writing down my thoughts on Action Points from my own point of view.
This essentially codifies the House [...]

I noticed early on that LotRO’s main conceit about their “Health Bar” really really works in DnD 4th with regards to healing.
Lord of the Rings refers to your ‘health bar’ as Morale — so it’s mostly representative of your will to continue the fight — the rest of the game works in similar ways — [...]

This is a SotC rules tweak. I didn’t come up with it, though I am tweaking it.
FATE and Spirit of the Century already let you change a character’s aspects whenever it’s appropriate or interesting or just plain cool to do so. That’s well and good. It’s a kind of ’staying put’ character [...]

Fred Hicks asks:
What do *you* think needs to be in a 15-minute demo of Spirit of the Century?
The best, though not necessarily most useful response:

Small mook group to be scared/confused by the talky types, then mowed down by the brawlers, but not before the BigVillain joins in.
On a Zeppelin.
Which is on fire.
Over Manhattan.
With a bunch [...]

I dreamt a game mechanic last night, based on the five Chinese elements and Rock-Paper-Scissors, as in “Fire scours Earth. Earth blocks Water. Metal slices Air. Like that.
Except I think almost everything beat Air and Metal, the way I dreamed it.
So anyway, the character sheet has a kind of pentagram on it, where the [...]

For no particular reason, I decided to see if I could (via harsh editing and severe formatting) squish the Frogger rpg I wrote down to two pages.
Result.
Downside: I lose all the great illustrative quotes that kept me chuckling while I wrote the original rules.
Upside: everything is much more concise — I wish I’d done this [...]