Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: DMing

  • House Rules for Warhammer 4e: Reforming Combat

    I am currently working through a Warhammer 4th Edition Enemy Within campaign, and am finally beginning to get annoyed with the combat rules. I am playing online using Foundry, which handles all the fiddliness of success levels (ugh!) and critical rolls and the like, so it’s relatively smooth, but I imagine if I were playing…

  • Archipelago 48: The Outsiders

    The Wrathbreakers have visited the Lambent Cays and met the Gull, from whom they received some further clues about the secret activities of the Deep Cult. They had considered traveling from Pearl Reach to Jasper at the Southernmost tip of the Lambent Cays, but something happened to change their plans. Itzel had placed a folded…

  • My Campaigns are Combat-lite: The “You’re not like other girls” of GMing

    I recently posted some of my criticisms of the Genesys combat system to a forum for Genesys-related material, and received a surprising amount of resistance to the idea of making any changes to the rules. In amongst the resistance there were a large number of people telling me “you shouldn’t be doing that much combat…

  • Campaign Ideas: The QAnon World

    Some years ago now I played in a World of Darkness campaign set in a near-future world where McCain was president and a secret conspiracy was slowly pulling the world into an evil and hellish future. I played a washed-up communist called John Micksen, who served the Winter Queen and had found magic (he eventually…

  • Which Parts of Online Role-playing will you Transplant to Physical Gaming?

    Yesterday I wrote a post about the ways in which online teaching and supervision can be superior to physical teaching and supervision, and today I want to follow up with a short post about what aspects of online gaming can be transferred to physical gaming. I finished my Coriolis campaign online, and we have started…

  • Coriolis Background: Dr Md Jenin Abad

    Who is Dr. Abad? In the words of Banu Delecta, medic on the Beast of Burden: Md. Jenin Abad was my senpai at medical school Came from a poor Nomad Federation family Big chip on his shoulder about class and the station/planetary divide Soooo exhausting to deal with, constantly inserting politics into like everything Ultimately…

  • Skype D&D: In Search of the Ordinary

    Two good friends and I are doing occasional Sunday evening sessions of original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D) over skype. I reported the first session here, and haven’t reported the subsequent four because … well, because there’s nothing to hang onto. Our second session ended with a TPK, but I think I didn’t report it, and…

  • Traveler Combat House Rules

    On Saturday I ran another session of The Spiral Confederacy campaign, culminating in a vicious battle in a floating forest built on the ruins of ancient spaceships (report to come). One player went down in the first round of the surprise attack and the entire battle (with three waves of attackers, approximately) was over in…

  • Adapting Degenesis Dice Pools for a Simpler WFRP3 System

    For some time now I’ve been thinking about ways to simplify the Warhammer 3 (WFRP3) system to make it less cumbersome and more free-flowing, while retaining the basic structure of attributes and skills. I previously described dropping action cards and moving to a more skill-based system, and also simplified ways of calculating difficulty. This, combined…

  • The Relativity Problem in RPG Skill Systems

    Today I’ve been thinking about ways to remodel Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2 (WFRP 2) to make it more user friendly and less punishing, and in the process of thinking through the system’s underlying probabilities I have run up against a problem with the reference frame for skill tests that I think is common for many…