You know why I dislike Dungeons and Dragons 4 e……well, there are actually a lot of reasons, but this is the one I am ranting about right now! It is not broken! Druids……

So I have played a lot, and ran even more, 3.x games in the past. While I quit running DnD because it was too much work and way too much of a miniatures game, I still feel that the rules of 4e are awesome.  [Insert hippie indie gaming gobbled y gook here] I actually enjoyed it though because the mechanics were broken……This is so disgusting for me to say.

If read all of the books and spent a lot of time building a character and kept track of their advancement with regard to the  new content, I could be build a horribly broken character. And this is where I circle back to my hippie gamer self. I can, without dereliction of conscience, say that I made broken characters for DnD 3.x so that I could role play them better. If there are two level 7 fighters in a room how do you distinguish them? (Huh, well that is an interesting allegory) You do it, if you are a player, by making one extremely broken in at least some regard.

I never realized what appealed to me about some games, now I know. It was the fact that if I wanted to build a charismatic commander I would have to tear apart the game and figure out how to do such a thing. I could not just say so, and because of the work involved my masochistic nature actually felt rewarded for it.

And thy rant is done.

/shout http://www.storygames.com

From Thursday August 5th to Sunday August 8th, we will be elbows-deep in geekdom!

Oh yes, I’m stoked.

So I got into a discussion with someone on the Forge about creating a system that could emulate the flow of the time on a show similar to 24. Here is what came to me. And I have to say that this just sound awesome to me. I think I found my next project.

Here is an idea. Players will roll a die based up on the difficult of a task, lower the die the more difficult the task is, higher means it is easier. Record the number in grid box on a campaign tracking sheet. When you have two numbers that are the same next to each other this creates another complication. Any time a complication is created you circle it and make a note about what is happening, and in what episode. You gain advancement based upon the number of complications you resolve in a given episode. You only have so many boxes per episode, until you need to make it to the cliffhanger box to the side. Advancement could be spent on the ability to roll an extra die of a specific size on a challenge, or possibly a re-roll under certain situations.

The grid would look something like so:

XXXXXXXX      XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX      XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX      XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX      XXXXXXXX

Each grid section is an entire episode. This shows the finite amount actions you can make in a show and the cliffhanger you must connect with in the middle.
There should probably be some sort of minor penalty for not completing a complication from a previous episode.

Like maybe complications that did not get resolved can no longer award XP.

Or even they can still award XP but will automatically fill certain boxes in the next episode. Maybe they fill the boxes in the middle fist so that players have to “Work around” the complication.

Older campaign journals

02.02.10

I have ashamedly not been keeping campaign journals for my most recent games. I will have to start doing that again. Here are some journals of my older games.

Those that I have made:

• CHUPA OPEN ROLEPLAYING ENGINE

• BESM D20

• [HR] MUTANTS AND MASTERMINDS

Those I did not make:

• 3.x SYSTEM REFERENCE DOCUMENT

• d20 MODERN

• FATE 3.0