Less Dice, More Decisions: Houserules for OSR and D&D
I set myself the restriction that I will only implement a house rule if it fixes an issue without making the game more complicated.
Edge Of The Empire Strikes Back
I ran a very satisfying game of Star Wars: Edge Of The Empire yesterday afternoon. My Son had played it once before and he had told his friend all about it and then he had asked me to run it for the two of them. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t hold their […]
Musings on Beyond The Wall
I wrapped up my Beyond The Wall game on Monday night. It was not only my first time playing Beyond The Wall but also the first time I have run anything D&D-based since the mid ’90s. I am pleased to say that I think the game went really well. We played The Opened Barrow scenario pack […]
OneDice Dragons, A fantasy adventure for kids.
The first thing I wanted to do with my new OneDice Universal game was run a game for my son. He loves the idea of roleplaying but, just like many adults, gets easily turned off by complexity. I showed him the OneDice Universal book, and the Not Trek skin at the back and he was […]
OneDice Universal & Co
With the OneDice family of RPGs Cakebread & Walton have pared mechanics back about as far as they can go without ditching dice and character sheets altogether. It’s a generic system where just about any action is resolved with D6+Stat+Skill vs Target Number. So nothing revolutionary. But at Conpulsion a couple weeks back Cakebread & […]
A playable history of video games
On Saturday I took a trip to the National Museum of Scotland to see their Game Masters videogame exhibition, a collection of just over a hundred playable games from across the history of interactive electronic entertainment. The exhibition starts incredibly well with over a dozen genuine old arcade games all crammed into a dark room. […]
MS Word is cool for kids
I am sorry I have left this blog idle for so long. By way of apology I present you with this unedited transcript written in Word by my son (9) and his friend as they played something kind of Star Treky. I think they typed out all their communications and anything their ship’s computer announced. […]
Design Diary for the Unnamed Card Game, part 4
So I knew what I wanted my game to do and I was fairly sure that I had figured out how I could make it work. Of course the only way to find out was to try it out and to do that I needed to build the deck. Twice. The first build happens on […]
Design Diary for the Unnamed Card Game, Part 3
With the basics in place my still unnamed card game was looking good, it was shaping up to be a match-the-sets game with a Science Fiction theme and a slight twist. Finding an end point was proving a challenge though. There were plenty of possible solutions: I could make a time track that ticked down […]
Design Diary for the Unnamed Card Game, Part 2
I have a small apology to make. In my last post I said that next up would be building the alpha deck and starting playtesting. Well as soon as I started writing this post I realised that I was skipping over one of the most important steps in the process: creating the rules!It may seem […]
Ominosity 