Observations of the Fox

For those who saw my little game about ferrets named " Tooth and Claw " there is some sad news. One of the constantly troublemaking ferrets who inspired the game has been struggling with respiratory problems, and generally losing the race against the eternal predator of time. Yesterday, we took her to the vet and we were offered a choice between a few more days of increasing agony for her, or injection that would painlessly put her to sleep and slow her heartbeat to nothing, before allowing her to pass on. It was a tough decision, but she had a good life with us, and we didn't want her to continue suffering. In ferret circles we say that Slinkabell crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and now wardances and creates mischief forever with her friends on the other side.

When Dark Sun came out, it did something radical for the time. It started every chaacter at level 3 because characters of lower levels just weren;t togh enough to survive in the mystical post-apocalyptic desert of the setting. I thought it was cool that everyone was tougher, but didn't think much more of it at the time. In retrospect, it didn;t really matter that the character's were tougher and more proficient, because everyone was tougher and more proficient. Unless you were doing some kind of Spelljammer or Planescape campaign where characters would interact with "weaker" characters from other settings then everyone just scaled up accordingly and the enemies you faced were still rougly pound-for-pound just as difficult as enemies you'd face elsewhere. But third level also meant that the numbers averaged out a bit. Instead of a wild mix of hit point possibilities induced by a flat die roll at level 1 (I don't know of anyone playing with the "Level...

I need to find a copy of HoL. That is all.

I remember going into game stores when I was younger, and encountering gaming books in a variety of shapes and sizes. There were softbound books, hardbound, spiralbound books from local authors, boxed sets, photocopied supplements and wargaming systems that looked like the underground 'zines you'd find in record stores...different companies used different sizes of book, and different styles of cover. I remember Palladium Books claiming that they were the first ones to introduce paperback books to the market, and watching the rest of the industry gradually fall into line. By the time of the early to mid 1990s, a few stalwarts like TSR kept the core D&D (and AD&D) rule sets in hardback form, then upstarts like White Wolf started releasing WoD core books in hardback and trend shifted slightly back in that direction.  Most books around this time seemed to linger around the A4 page size, but with the rise of small press and eventually "indie games...

In "Other Strangeness", the core of the system is the verbs that characters engage to perform tasks in the world, then the adverbs that give them automatic successes to their actions, and finally any quirky twists that result from the expenditure of accumulated advantage/disadvantage points. Since that's the order of importance, that's the way experience should be focused. Many "point buy" games suffer from the issue that a careful (or system abusive) player can focus on the minutiae that fiddles with the rules to get an awesome combo that might work once in a while, but otherwise they are functionally useless within the game. I'm trying to think of way to limit that idea, while still keeping things logiclly consistent within the "mutant animal comic"-genre, and generally common-sensical. The previous post still holds true. But now I'm delving into a few more details of the advancement system. First with the specific paths that charac...

Imagine a vast technological leviathan...miles long, hundreds of stories high, home to hundreds of thousands of people...a trading vessel that plunges through the astral plane with an arcane space fold drive capable of piercing the astral plane.  But millennia ago, this ship became trapped in Astral space, unable to return to physical reality for some reason. Perhaps an erratic astral jump caused it to intersect with another ship, perhaps the warp drive bent space too far and it paradoxically destroyed itself. Now it exists as a forgotten hulk on the edge of the imagination, an astral El Dorado filled with amazing treasures from a near forgotten golden age in the distant past. While there may be hidden treasures within the ship, there are also horrors, monsters and stranger things best left forgotten...things that will inevitably be faced by those who seek fame and fortune at the heart of the hulk. What sorts of chambers might have existed on such a ship? This variant on a megadu...

I've been thinking about the ways characters advance in various games. You get the systems that work off a leveling system. Basically these are a linear (or exponential) progression of characteristics, where a hero follows a specific journey along their chosen path. In some cases these systems may allow dual (or multi) classed characters, but it's still a predestined path. Then you get point buy systems, where anything is possible as long as you spend the points and meet the prerequisites. One of the more interesting character development systems I've seen comes from the Solar System (or The Shadow of Yesterday), where characters get XP for following specific paths that are relevant to their characters, then spent those points in a way that makes sense to the unfolding narrative (or at least that's the way I've played it). I've had an idea for something that combines elements of all these ideas into a single development system. It goes a little somethi...