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

  • Style and the Construction of Gaming Worlds

    I have always found it impossible to play magical cyberpunk outside of Shadowrun; I can’t imagine adapting the Shadowrun system to play, say, space opera or high fantasy. Similarly, I can’t imagine playing high fantasy with Traveller rules, or cyberpunk with D&D. Something about these classic games prevents them from being used outside of their…

  • Playing 4e Again

    I joined a new gaming group on Sunday, for 9 hours of slaughter with a group of blood-drinking, delusional toad-wranglers such as would bring disgrace on the name Dungeons and Dragons were their antics to become commonly known. My PC is a 3rd level human rogue called Shinan, a freelance negotiator for the various thieves’…

  • Some Calculations of Dice Pool Probabilities

    Perhaps this post will be useful for any part-time game designers out there. Clayton at Kill It With Fire put up a link to his new retro-clone game, Kill It With Fire, which uses a combination of target DCs and dice pools to resolve skill checks and attacks; basically, the player rolls a number of…

  • World Review: Carcosa

    I received the pdf version of James Raggi’s re-release of Geoffrey McKinney’s infamous Carcosa “supplement V” two days ago, and have been reading it voraciously since. I haven’t received the physical version yet, so can’t comment on that, but my main interest was the content so I’d like to give a review of it here.…

  • Using Material Components to Enhance Wizard Powers

    When I played AD&D I think one of the first aspects of its magic system I dropped was the material components. It’s a shame, but they just represented too much of a constraint on what was already a hideously underpowered class (especially at first level). Some of the material components even for first level spells…

  • Possible Elements of A Harry Potter RPG

    Commenter Paul suggested that a Harry Potter RPG would be limited by the problem of knowing the characters and the world too much, in his words: 1. You’re stuck playing a game where the grandest things that can happen are the books and your characters a left with a feast of crumbs. Harry Potter is…

  • Harry Potter: A Missed Opportunity for the RPG World?

    I recently watched the last of the Harry Potter movies,which was fun (and had a good dragon!), and thinking about it afterwards was struck by the absence of an RPG for this world. As far as I can tell, there is no official RPG. There are a lot of forum-based RPGs, but no apparent real…

  • Reasons to Play AD&D

    I gave up playing AD&D sometime in the early 1990s, and switched to largely Rolemaster for a good period of time, only coming back to D&D with 3rd edition after a very system-agnostic friend recommended it. For all that time I never regretted leaving AD&D behind, though I have many fond memories of it. My…

  • The Ongoing Rip-off that is Warhammer 3rd Edition?

    I recently received some new WFRP 3 products (Signs of Faith and the Creature vault), and was led to ponder whether I’m being massively ripped off. The proximate cause of this consideration was not, perhaps, very orthodox: both sourcebooks in the Signs of Faith boxed set contain largely flavour – that is, information on religion…

  • Lies, Damned Lies and Statisticians: A F.A.T.A.L Deception

    Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, so I put up a fake report on a campaign I never ran using the Game That Shall Not Be Named. I appear to have fooled one otherwise quite perspicacious individual, so I figure I fooled a few other readers too. So, how does this lie rate? Degree of Difficulty:…