By: Sam Kabo Ashwell
How would you feel if you were that DM who had spent his entire weekend designing the Castle of the Mad Wizard Yordor…, only to have your players march on past the lot to go grope the local chicks in...
View ArticleBy: Victor Gijsbers
You very perceptively point out the dual nature of early roleplaying games: on the one hand, these were systems made for a very special purpose and designed to deliver a very specific game experience;...
View ArticleBy: matt w
<i>they mustered their last bit of carefully hoarded mana</i> Mana? What is this mana of which you speak? I memorize my spells every day and forget them when I cast them. Anyway, absolutely...
View ArticleBy: Jimmy Maher
Ah, yes, spell memorization. That was one of the rules my gaming group (wisely, I think) chose to just ignore, as I recall. Didn’t clerics have access to all of their spells? (Not that clerics, or...
View ArticleBy: Victor Gijsbers
No, clerics also had to memorise spells, but they could memorise any of their spells (whereas wizards first had to learn them and write them in their spell books). This is at least how it worked in...
View ArticleBy: Gravel
Ha, a lot of the GM’s I know will scramble to put together a secondary story with only mild hard feelings – the same sorts of feelings players get when the trap room slams shut and begins to fill with...
View ArticleBy: Victor Gijsbers
There is no rules-roleplay continuum. There are just different kinds of roleplaying and different kinds of rules, and all the problems and tensions that arise when you attempt to do kind of roleplaying...
View ArticleBy: matt w
This seems to assume that RPGers have an infinite number of people to play with and systems that they have learned and can deploy. And it also seems to preclude the interesting dynamic that Gravel...
View ArticleBy: Victor Gijsbers
Maybe the examples I gave were a bit too monolithic: John wants X, Mary wants Y. In practice, people are open to a lot of things, and may have a preference for X but not mind doing Y once in a while,...
View ArticleBy: Victor Gijsbers
No, clerics also had to memorise spells, but they could memorise any of their spells (whereas wizards first had to learn them and write them in their spell books). This is at least how it worked in...
View ArticleBy: Gravel
Ha, a lot of the GM’s I know will scramble to put together a secondary story with only mild hard feelings – the same sorts of feelings players get when the trap room slams shut and begins to fill with...
View ArticleBy: Victor Gijsbers
There is no rules-roleplay continuum. There are just different kinds of roleplaying and different kinds of rules, and all the problems and tensions that arise when you attempt to do kind of roleplaying...
View ArticleBy: matt w
This seems to assume that RPGers have an infinite number of people to play with and systems that they have learned and can deploy. And it also seems to preclude the interesting dynamic that Gravel...
View ArticleBy: Victor Gijsbers
Maybe the examples I gave were a bit too monolithic: John wants X, Mary wants Y. In practice, people are open to a lot of things, and may have a preference for X but not mind doing Y once in a while,...
View ArticleBy: Gideon Marcus
By 1979, we were already playing D&D with spell points rather than pre-memorized spells. Not canon? Sure…but I defy anyone to show me someobe who played completely by the rules. :)
View ArticleBy: Mike Taylor
“just making things up in such unusual circumstances was preferably to buying yet more rulebooks” -> “preferable”.
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