If you want to parody, explore, deconstruct or otherwise do some meta-level examination of a particular work of genre or theme from fiction then love it first. All of the best parodies are done by people who obviously deeply love what they are parodying. The level of dedication it takes to do it well simply doesn’t …
Continue reading “What You Need to Write a Parody or Spoof Well”
D&D 4E did not have any mechanical problems that caused its relative failure. As I said above, its problem was not mechanically inept design: it was a failure to understand the allure of the older system, and an attempt to fix it that instead aggravated a lot of players. See, playing a Fighter in D&D …
The fundamental problem with 4E was that it increased player burden/complexity. Because all the complicated thinking and decision making was moved to actual play rather than character creation. You create a Pathfinder fighter and it’s a very complex process. But in actual play it’s “I move to closest enemy and hit with (preferred attack method inserted here)” …
Fate works great… for theatre students. It’s a narrative game focused on narrative tropes. So it works great for people who have studied stuff like writing, storytelling, advertising and other fields of creative expression. In other words, people who are already trained to think critically about narrative and character, people who think in tropes. The problem …
The problem is that getting there is not a journey you will survive intact. It’s brushed over in the text, but getting Yozi Charms is going to change your outlook. Look at stuff like Murder is Meat or Witness to Darkness and so on. By the time you are capable of going Devil-Tiger, whatever you …
My rule was similar except it was based on the Magnitude Chart. So if a shortsword costs 1 dot, it costs 2 to equip a Magnitude 1 unit and so on. Made it very easy to track expenses since you just went (Magnitude + Resources cost). Oh, and there was some stuff in there about …
Saying a game should be fun is like saying food should taste good; it’s trivially true but effectively meaningless when you want to discuss how to make food. Just like you have to prepare different foods in different ways depending on the experience you want the dinners to have, you have to design rpg mechanics in …
How do you describe a Lethal attack that inflict damage on the enemy but have it turn into Bashing ? I’m talking about Crane Form converting all your attack damage into Bashing at step 10, easy to imagine if you already use Bashing weapon like your bare-hands, kinda weird if you use the Style’s weapon …
I know a lot of nerds and geeks worship at the temples of Gygax or Arneson, but for me, it was this man who was more important than any of them. I came into actual role-playing in my high school years. But for Choose Your Own Adventure books? Those things have been part of my …
I really don’t care how realistic your work is so long as you don’t suddenly try to have it both ways. Frex; Civil War in Marvel. You can have spandex-clad heroes having city-block-leveling fistfights in the middle of downtown Manhattan and I will cheer and whoop. I will never question how they could have these …
