The Retired Adventurer

No mechanic can prevent people who are committed to playing orcish genocide, but I do think that one of the reasons it has remained a consta...

I like to play crunchy systems: Mythras, later D&D editions, Shadowrun, etc. I often play in groups where there are widely different lev...

One of the things I hate in games is when melee weapon damage is relatively static - you roll a die, add some modifiers and maybe roll a cri...

This is a theoretical exercise that I've never tested out, though I think True20 does something similar. I was reading this paper on h...

Tracking the known ranks of spells for divine and battle magic for PCs and NPCs in Openquest is the most tedious and annoying part of charac...

I have to admit that I cringe a little whenever I see the substructure of the modern consumer economy replicated in settings where it is tot...

So, on Sunday night for the Thousand Thrones campaign (session 3), a couple of people couldn't come, right at the first session where yo...

I'm sure you can guess that if I don't think a hulking lizard man and a halfling should have different attribute rolls, I also don...

Part 1 is here. Yesterday I said, " The adventuring party with a consistent membership and unified goals is the most pernicious const...

The adventuring party with a consistent membership and unified goals is the most pernicious construct to good gaming known. Get rid of them....

Technically in Openquest this skill is called "Battle Magic" and in Mongoose Runequest 2 / Legend it's called "Common Mag...

One idea I've been considering lately for the Dawnlands' mechanical realisation is simply not distinguishing one PC species from ano...

I've been growing increasingly critical of attributes that measure properties that are so dependent on a player's abilities that the...