Friday 17 June 2016

Distinguishing D&D Alignments (again)

So following my previous post on the matter, a rather different way of thinking about alignment occurred to me.

Wednesday 8 June 2016

Warfare in D&D

The Daearn Line

A team of giant eagles fly overhead, masked by an Improved Invisibility spell. Each carries a veteran elven warrior, also invisible.

At a command, the flyers drop their riders, who plummet to earth at enormous speed, halted seconds before impact by a single-use feather fall effect. Landing at a strategic point between enemy units, each elf places a Daern’s Instant Fortress and speaks the command word, springs inside and closes the door. In mere seconds, a formidable strongpoint has appeared in the midst of the enemy. As yet, the elves are still invisible.

Tuesday 7 June 2016

The Hive mind: stealing from Necromunda for fun and profit

So an idea I've had vaguely floating around for a while is to use Necromunda - or rather, its mechanics - as the basis of an RPG.

For those of you not in the know, Necromunda is a tabletop skirmish campaign wargame of bloody battles between rival gangs in the Underhive, a festering hellhole chemical wasteland miles beneath the unthinkably vast future-gothic city-spires of the Hives where the mass of humanity eke out their miserable existence. Let me clarify that working 20-hour days welding shut ration packs in a factory powered by unshielded reactors and filled with toxic fumes that will kill you before your fourth decade, then splitting your miserable wage between religious tithes, flavourless algal slop, a variety of even more lethal drugs to get you through the day, and gambling in mob-run hells in the faint hope of a fractional and temporary improvement in your circumstances or at least an entertaining brawl, monitored all the while by a fascist regime that crushes the faintest hint of worker uprisings with appalling ferocity, and under the perpetual threat of irresistable annihilation by either an incursion of horrific Chaos demons or any of the myriad alien races whose xenophobia is exceeded only by your own, is the cushy life of law-abiding mid-Hive citizens. Your distant, implausible dream is to one day retire there.

Monday 6 June 2016

Provocation in RPGs

So I was listening to the Adventuring Party talk about social combat. There were two parts that particularly struck me. The first was an anecdote of using the Intimidate skill successfully, then realising there was no indication of what that actually meant for the game - "okay, this guy's intimidated I guess?". The second was a recurring point that, even in games with explicit social combat, players are often very resistant to allowing their own characters to be affected.

A third factor was recalling a game of Demon: the Fallen where Dan tried to use a "you are utterly terrifying" power to frighten a guy into submission, but the power very explicitly always makes everyone run away.