Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

recent posts

about

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

Category: RPG Systems

  • 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…

  • Post-poverty SF: Some Reflections on the Vast Inequality in the Star Wars Universe

    I have been playing Star Wars recently with my regular group, first using the Genesys rules and (since yesterday) using a port of the Coriolis rules, because we’re all sick of Genesys. The Star Wars universe is fun and, like D&D or Lord of the Rings, has that particular positive quality that you can settle…

  • Nobi Nobi TRPG: A Unique, Cute and Chaotic way to Role-play in your lunch break

    While digging around in Amazon recently I stumbled on a cute 1-5 person card-based role-playing game called “Novice Novice Table Talk Role-playing game [steampunk]”, pictured here. In Japanese it is shortened to “Nobi Nobi TRPG”. The game is a simple and relaxed system in which every player (including the GM) picks a PC, and every…

  • 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…

  • Brawn vs Agility in Genesys: An example

    A commenter at a Genesys community group online has made the following comment about my criticisms of the role Brawn plays in the Genesys combat rules: One rule that stands out to me relates to party composition in combat and I haven’t seen it mentioned here. If an ally is engaged with the target of…

  • Is Brawn Overpowered in the Genesys System?

    In the Genesys system brawn determines your wound threshold, the damage your melee weapon does, how much you can carry, whether you can use a cumbersome weapon, your resilience skill, and how much damage you take. Its role in determining wound threshold and soak means it is double-counted in survival: if my brawn is 1…

  • House Rules for Combat in Genesys

    Chapter 1 of my Genesys campaign is drawing to a close with our “heroes” slinking out of the mountains with their bloodied tails between their legs, and I am considering some refinements to the rules for the second chapter. In particular, I want to refine some of the rules for combat based on my experience…

  • 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…

  • Some House Rules for Coriolis

    [UPDATE 2026/1/2]: If you enjoy Coriolis and are interested in my contributions to this setting, please consider reading my novel Shadows of the Firstcome, serialized for free at Royal Road or available for complete download if you wish to buy it from my Patreon. I have been running a Coriolis campaign for 39 sessions now,…

  • Genesys Campaign Setting: The Archipelago

    As my Coriolis campaign comes to its extremely violent conclusion, I am completing preparations for the next campaign I plan to GM. The last few campaigns I have GM’d have been science fiction: Coriolis, before that the Spiral Confederacy (Traveler), and before that a post-apocalyptic water-world campaign called Flood (using Cyberpunk rules, natch). My players…