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After receiving a couple of spam comments, I've decided to moderate the comments that people add to my blog entries...it's not that I don't want the feedback. It's just that I want feedback to actually be meaningful.

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Game Mechani(sm) of the Week #18: Life Path

Let's grab something I loved from an old game... Something that hasn't really been seen in many of the more recent games that I've been looking at (whether independently produced or mainstream). (Yes, I'm doing this because I've noticed that my blog is running behind on it's weekly game mechanisms and some of my own ideas just haven't seemed adequate as I've started numerous times to write this post) I love the concept of the life path in Cyberpunk 2020, I adapted some of it's ideas when I wrote the Eighth Sea. I know that the concept has also been thoroughly explored in games like Traveller and HoL (with both of these games offering options that can kill a character before they even enter play). I like the idea of rolling a bunch of dice to fill put the backstory of a character instantly gives characters a time and place in the setting where they will be developing their stories. It helps to set the tone of the game, gets into players minds that thi...
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Storifying Mage: the Ascension (Part 7) - Skills and Magic

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(I was sure that I had posted this bit earlier, but looking through the posts it seems that I had skipped this entry when transferring the posts from my word processor to the blog...so there may have been a bit of a disconnect earlier. Sorry about that,) I like consistency in my game systems, rather than subsystems here and there each functioning in different ways and slowing the game down as players adjust. But, there are things that are natural and things that are supernatural, so I’ll accept some variation in the mechanisms driving the magic in a system compared to the mechanisms driving the mundane. Much of a character’s development through the spheres of magick is basically an expansion of flavour text and narrative potential. At the lowest levels most spheres can sense the mystical energies associated with them, at higher levels subtle manipulations occur along specific lines, and at higher levels more powerful and more diverse effects may be harnessed. Spheres can...
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A quick guide to Mage: the Ascension

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As one of my favourite games, I had to chime in when someone on G+ asked about Mage, why it's good...why it's current version is a 700-odd page tome...what could be done to streamline it... I thought my answer was pretty good, and thought it needed to be shared. Having played and run all editions, here's my thoughts... 1st (WW4000, 1993) is wild and a bit clunky when it comes to rules. It's probably the edgiest of the settings, in that it was opening an amazing concept to the world but no-one really knew what to do with it at the time. The players were fighting a war for reality. 2nd (WW4300, 1995) streamlined the rules a bit, instead of different rolls, coincidental and vulgar magic basically now used the same rolls with varying difficulties. The setting was reined in a bit, and like most White Wolf second editions it became more "professional" and more sterile. A bit more effort was made to address global cultures as complex entities rather than ...
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