Games

Role-playing Mechanics: The Third Way

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Recently Chris Youngs at Wizards of the Coast wrote an editorial pointing out that people can role-play in D&D 4th Edition just fine without any rules actually governing said role-playing:

Fourth edition doesn’t include some of the mundane mechanical elements of character building that 3rd Edition did. For example, certain skills (I’m looking at you Craft and Profession) enabled a player to feel like his character had some sort of grounding in the “real world” of the campaign. Odds were good that you never made a Craft or Profession check in your game, but having ranks in that skill made you feel connected to your character’s background. In 4th Edition, those skills are gone. Why? Because we feel like a character’s statistics don’t represent the absolute truth of a character’s story. That’s right — one of the reasons those skills (and other such elements from other editions) are gone is that we felt they hindered roleplaying.

This elicited some “Hear! Hear!”-style posts from gaming blogs:

Can you survive The Day After Ragnarok?

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In the waning days of World War II, the Nazis awoke the world-strangling Midgard serpent, nearly triggering the Norse end of days known as Ragnarok. Their plan was foiled by the Americans, who flew an atomic- bomb-laden aircraft into the Serpent’s miles-wide eye, slaying it in blinding flash of nuclear fire.

Getting Ready to Storm MEPACon in Fall 2009

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MepaCon LogoMy gaming group’s making a concerted effort to attend MEPACon this fall. The northeastern Pennsylvania game convention is being held November 13-15 in Scranton, PA (exactly where hasn’t been determined yet).

You can find out more about the con by visiting MEPACon’s home page, Facebook page or by joining the MEPACon Yahoo Group. If you’d like to RSVP, you can sign up at on the Facebook event page

We decided to attend in force while we were at Origins, and it occured to us (well, first Bob, then the rest of us) that MepaCon was an awesome opportunity to run the games we always want to play, but never get a chance. Possible events being kicked around the group right now include a Justice Society of America superheroes game, Stargate SG-1 and G.I. Joe (all powered by Mutants & Masterminds). On the board and card game front, we’re looking at Space Hulk, Race for the Galaxy, and Risk 2210.

Initial Thoughts about HackMaster Basic

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At Origins 2009 I had the pleasure of playing in an Introduction to HackMaster Basic session run by Steve Johansson, one of the designers (Dave Kenzer, another designer, was running the other table). Full disclosure: I’m a staff writer for Knights of the Dinner Table but when it comes to HackMaster I’m as much newbie … Read more

Can you survive the Betrayal at the House on the Hill?

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Betrayal at the House on the Hill is a collaborative board game in which players explore an ancient house on a lonely hill, seeking to unlock its secrets … and its horrors.

It’s a dynamic game whose map is randomly generated each game using a series of tiles representing the basement, first floor and second floor of the house, with a new tile drawn every time a player enters a new room. Players take on the role of one of several adventurers tasked with exploring this haunted house. Each adventurer is represented by a stat card representing key abilities such as speed, strength and will. Different adventurers have different strengths — the preacher is strong in will but weak in physical abilities, while the boy explorer has a high speed, but low willpower.

What I bought at Origins 2009

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One of my favorite parts of hitting the big gaming conventions is spending a few hours (or rather, a few days) browsing and shopping in the exhibit hall. Origins 2009 was no different, and while I’m happy to say I didn’t break the bank, I did come back with a goodly pile of product purchased at the show.

I didn’t go into the show expecting to pick up any Savage Worlds books, as our Weird Pulp campaign never really got off the ground, and we haven’t played the game in months. But then I went to the Studio 2 booth, and found the brand new Fantasy Companion supplement for Savage Worlds. Published in the same folio format as the Savage Worlds: Explorers Edition, this book repackages the fantasy species information from the previous hardcover release of the game and folds in a bunch of edges, magic items, and monsters from the various fantasy toolkit PDFs.

I like PDFs, but I’d been hoping that Pinnacle would release the toolkits in a dead tree edition. when I saw the Fantasy Companion on the shelf, I instantly picked it up.

Origins 2009: Afterwords

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The whirlwind of gaming known as Origins 2009 has come and gone. I had little time bask in the gaming afterglow; after I left the con I flew directly to Vermont to meet with my family so we could spend a week on an island on Lake Champlain.

Going from 24 hour gaming to an island with no indoor plumbing, no net access, and minimal power was a huge shift, but at least the lake does have a wandering monster…

So how was Origins? Good. Great even. It didn’t have the same maniac energy that GenCon has, nor did it have the same crush of people all trying to get somewhere at the same time. All of the events were in the convention center, which made navigating the con far, far easier than GenCon.

Going into Origins I’d heard that it had a great gamer vibe — meaning it was a place that people went to play games, rather than being more of an event-style, vendor-oriented show like GenCon. After going, I can agree with that sentiment. It’s a gamer’s con, with a heavy focus on board, card and miniature games. Indeed, while there was a serious RPG contingent, they didn’t have the same sort of sprawling setup that they have at GenCon.

Origins 2009: Day 4

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Saturday began with the North Market waffles that my friend Cory and I had been craving all week. Strawberries and cream topped waffled cosumed, I headed to my Spirit of the Century game.

The game was run by David Moore (@vandermore) of The Gamemaster Show and included Mur Lafferty, Chris Miller of The Secret Lair podcast, and a host of friends from Twitter and Balticon. We spent the last few weeks creating our characters online – which was one of the best character creation sessions I’ve been in – and it was a blast to finally get to see them in action.

We each created 1920s, pulp versions of ourselves, recast as fictional characters. Drawing on my time as a newspaper reporter, I created Clayton Berkshire aka Clayton Jones aka The Constant Sentinel. He was a world famous reporter for the London Times who covered the Great War as a stringer and was so horrified by what he saw that he created the secret identity of the Sentinel.