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: RPG Systems

  • Cyberpunk House Rules: Drew’s Ghost

    But you sleep like a ghost with me It’s as simple as that So tell me I’m mad Roll me up and breathe me in Come to my madness My opium den Come to my madness Make sense of it again   My Cyberpunk character, Drew, started the campaign with some contraband Russian cyberware inside…

  • The End of the World: Zombie Survival One-off

    For our final session of 2015 my group and I tried a short run through the Fantasy Flight Games zombie apocalypse role-playing game The End of the World, a rules-lite system intended to simulate zombie survival in a collapsing world. I’m going to give a very brief summary of the game we played, and then…

  • Redesigning Warhammer Skill Resolution

    In yesterday’s post I talked about my desire to redesign the Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing 2nd Edition (WFRP 2) rules so that they are less punishing of PC actions, and introduced the problem of asymmetry in task resolution. Following on my list of principles for good RPG skill systems, I’d like to propose a simple reformation…

  • 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…

  • Let’s Enjoy Hello Kitty LARPing Together!

    I have been in Oita on a ferocious business trip, one day of which was meant to be spent watching fireworks in Beppu, only to have them rescheduled due to a typhoon that failed to deliver either any rain or any wind. Nothing interesting happened in Beppu, although I am proud of having survived a…

  • Character Classes for a Mad Max RPG

    One of the members of my regular gaming group is thinking of running a one-off set in the world of Mad Max, probably hacking the Fate rules. I don’t know how the Fate rules work but I’m very excited to consider gaming in Mad Max’s crazed world. So here are a few ideas for character…

  • Cyberpunk House Rules: Lackeys

    Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets – The Falcon, dialectical ephemeralist revolutionary, talking about lackeys Our recent train heist involved a serious number of low-ranked enemies, the full complement of which hasn’t been described yet (Drew’s breathless reports take her a lot of time to write,…

  • Cyberpunk House Rules: Armour, and Some Tactics for Breaking it

    The original Cyberpunk rulebook has a simple and nasty system of armour, which is completely broken. In this system your gun does a handful of dice of damage, between 3d6+1 for a good submachine gun to 7d10 for a high quality sniper rifle, and your armour has a stopping power (SP) that ranges from 4…

  • Poison Rules for the Cyberpunk System

    One of the PCs in my Flood campaign, Quark, has gained a level (even though they don’t exist in Cyberpunk rules), so he has access to a new set of abilities – the ability to make and deploy poison. He has two types of poison: poison darts and gas canisters, which he can deploy from…

  • Cyberpunk House Rules: Fixing Dump Stats, Fumbles and Combat

    The Cyberpunk system is stupidly simple and easy to play, but in its basic form it is also quite broken, and especially it is broken in favour of Solos (fighters in Cyberpunk terms), and ideally designed for min-maxing your character. Basically in the rules as written there are only two stats that matter, Body and…