Category: General

Players never like to feel unprepared when it comes to situations in games. If there is a way to have an upper hand or even to “hovervan” past an encounter, the players will usually take that as a win in their book. That desire to be ahead of the game can often lead to massive slow...

I’ve been a bit absent lately because of a lot of personal stuff happening all at once in my life. It’s been a difficult year. I was stressed out, and even considered putting a stop to all the Game Design aspects of my life. On July 11th, I received a mail from the great Mario Ortegon...

I recently wrote up an article detailing the simpler setup I use for my FFXIV x DND game for currency. In that setup, I distill costs down to ranges for various categories of items and just figure out the appropriate cost within the range on the fly. Part of that concept is based on using the...

It’s time to rise above it all and take a look at the Scion Player’s Guide: Saints and Monsters. Scion 2nd Edition is Onyx Path’s game of modern urban fantasy, where players are the children of the gods, just waking up to their power and their place in the grand schemes of Fate. But what if you...

I’m currently reading David M. Ewalt’s book Of Dice and Men with the large d20 featured on the cover and I keep looking at the dice. I remember purchasing new dice, a dice bag, and dice earrings when first visiting Gen Con back in 2010. I attribute my renewed love of gaming and dice to two people:...

A very simple trick that I’ve used in many games and might have picked up from someone somewhere along the way is using the equivalent of a coin flip when I need to decide something quickly, or to see if I answer some player bid for advantage, or whether a guard can be persuaded. I’ve...

Today we’re going to take a little bit of a break from diving through rulebooks and take a look at a tool for running games at the table. As more games have provided additional tactical options, it has become increasingly important to have a way to represent position, usually on a grid. Even in...

  Dr. Lisa Su states that “Gaming brings people together.” There are benefits and drawbacks of playing RPGs with people we know versus people we don’t. There are advantages and disadvantages to gaming with the people we are closest to, and the people we’ve never met. This article...

In the 90s, when the World of Darkness became the hottest thing in RPGs, I was on the outside looking in. My friends went off to college, and our gaming got more and more sporadic. That meant that I didn’t really want to spend time learning a new system and exploring what all of this was about. In...