Category: RPG Systems

  • On Sunday afternoon I had my first ever experience of playing Fiasco, a “story-based” role-playing system by Bully Pulpit Games. The basic idea of the game is to build up a narrative, cooperatively-generated storyline that follows the pattern of movies like A Simple Plan: a group of friends/acquaintances/family/colleagues who hatch a scheme to pull off…

  • A Facebook campaign running in England at the moment is driving the song Ding, Dong the Witch is Dead up the charts, in celebration of Margaret Thatcher’s death. This has the right-wing media up in arms, and has led to an open case of attempted censorship of the BBC. But old school role-players should also…

  • Continuing my thoughts on developing a simplified version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3 based on the Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars system, in this post I will present some suggestions for simplifying the magic system. It is likely that my suggestions for magic will tend to over-power magicians, because that’s exactly what I like in…

  • Drawing on yesterday’s post about simplifying warhammer, here are the outlines for a high fantasy character class, akin to the Rogue class from Rolemaster. Introduction The rogue is a criminal and a thug, the kind of knave who hires themselves out to do nasty jobs in the bad parts of dirty towns. Rogues fight and…

  • I wrote a post sometime ago about the challenges of GMing Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing 3, and the possibility of simplifying it to make it easier to manage and quicker to run, or to apply it to high fantasy settings. Fantasy Flight Game’s new Star Wars RPG basically does this, by removing all the resource management…

  • Today I received my copy of Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, along with some necessary WFRP3 materials. Edge of the Empire is described as a “beginner’s game,” which means that it essentially doesn’t have any character creation rules, has a very stripped down combat system, and contains a well laid out…

  • Following yesterday’s post, here I present flow charts for the best survival options for Dwarves (Figure 1) and Halflings (Figure 2). Both charts are based on CART analysis of the simulation data generated for yesterday’s post. For dwarves, weapon and armour choice is crucial, and weapon finesse is a decision so bad that it actually…

  • Introduction In previous posts in this series, I showed the differences between fighter builds, and especially that “fast fighters” are a weak decision that is particularly bad for halflings and elves even though they are the more agile races. In this post I will approach the question of fighter builds from a different angle, that…

  • I had my third near-total party kill (TPK) in yesterday’s Warhammer 3rd Edition session. This one was so savage that I had to drop a hidden thief from the monster roster, because it was clear that I’d overpowered the opposition. This is an adventure I’d previously run using Pathfinder, and the difference in deadliness of…

  • This weekend I continued my work on the epidemiology of Pathfinder, including an expansion of my programs to allow for different types of point buy. In the process I took the advice of some commenters at a related thread on the Pathfinder message boards: I think for the non human fast fighters dropping weapon finesse…