All About That Mace
Tuesday, September 18th, 2018
One of the things that always bothered me about D&D-ish games were the “variable dice for weapon damage” rules, not necessarily because of concerns about “realism”, but because there didn’t seem to be any particularly meaningful trade-offs in not picking the biggest weapon you could. I’m looking at you, two-handed sword.[1]
It always made me wonder:
- Why would a fighter take anything but a two-handed sword (d10)?
- Why would they take a shortsword (d6) instead of a sword (d8)?
- Why fight with a dagger (d4) at all if you didn’t have to?
1st-Level Wizardry
Tuesday, August 7th, 2018
I’ve recently gotten back into regular gaming after a years-long hiatus, and am playing with a group almost entirely new to gaming in general. We’re running an OSR mash-up of the Elmore Red Box and 5th Edition, starting at 1st level, and having a darn good time of it. But even experienced gamers forget how things work when they haven’t played a particular game for thirty-some years.
One of the things I had only vaguely remembered, in an intellectual way, is that in the basic game, 1st-level wizards are one-hit wonders. To be fair, they are powerful one-hit wonders. But it leaves wizard characters with very little to do once they’ve fired off their single spell — besides running, hiding, and waiting for the fighters to mop up.
This was proving to be a frustration for our wizard players.
Fairies and Half-trolls and Liches, Oh My!
Wednesday, March 11th, 2015
Over on Nerdwerds, a point was raised about letting players with wild character concepts play those characters, and play them as conceived rather than hosed versions of them. And it reminded me of a few times this has come up in my own gaming history as a GM.
Around a decade ago, for an on-line game I was DMing, our group had put out a call for new players. One of the applicants had a character concept he insisted I should give a chance, that it was “a great character”: a high level multi-class (rogue-cleric-mage) half-troll. The character could regenerate and the Ability scores were insane. I think there were some other bits that resulted in quirked eyebrows, but those things are what I recall.
I turned the character down for being much too powergame-y and didn’t think much about it.
Lotus Review
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Shane O’Connor, one of RPGNow’s featured reviewers, recently reviewed On Lotus Magic. Five stars and many nice things to say. Raven is honored.