Codex Robynica

  So... every core number on your character sheet (all the stats and skills and attributes and ability scores etc.) is answering a few questions. For the GM, they take those numbers and plug them into some kind of mechanic and get a result that tells them what should happen. (Does a character succeed? Is a character affected by some condition or temporary state? Is a character aware of a piece of information?) Should the GM actually listen to the result of these mechanics is a different question. For the Players, I believe these numbers are answering the following questions: What are my characters strengths and weaknesses? What kind of things can my character do, and how likely is my character going to succeed at a given thing? Now at first these two questions might seem like they are the same question rephrased. But I think the first question is about role-play and the second is about mechanics. To put it another way: The stats are telling the Players how their characters ap...

So different players are going to be motivated to play for different reasons and will want different things out of the game... but regardless of the reasons they might of had when they sat down at the table, they quickly change their tune when they get their first hit of the best drug in table top roleplaying games: XP Carrot and Stick In plain terms when you want certain behaviors out of your players, reward them, and when you want to discourage other behaviors, punish them. XP and gold are the primary ways we reward players. Now the game has a long history of tying gold and xp together. And people have noted that this produces games where the players begin to act like thieves, grave-robbers and scoundrels. And that's great, if that's the kind of tone and genre your after. But that's not necessarily the game I want. I could go for milestone XP, but unless players are intrinsically motivated to roleplay, it usually leads to players who show up and expect a plot to be de...

I recently picked up a full set of Dolmenwood books (minus adventures). And the core campaign book blew me away, and I knew immediately that I needed to run it next. It gave me the same feeling reading the ology books as a child did … Then I opened the Player’s Guide… So… this is my first exposure to the OSE rules and I am not a fan… Now to be fair, I have not played or DMed OSE yet. And maybe I will change my tune when I actually touch dice for real, but there’s so many things that annoy me, that I’m much more inclined to pull the whole engine block out and go from there. Now at first I thought, let’s run  His Majesty The Worm … but I don’t feel like I have a good enough footing with that system to adapt stuff to it… I much more excited to run The Castle Automatic RAW when that ships. But I digress… I wrote my own rpg system once before, I can do it again. (I sadly lost it when my Alma mater deleted my google drive when they ended their google contract) And this time I’m going to ...

So if you haven’t seen the survivability onion, here it is! Its a way of analyzing the layers of defense around you when you’re in an armored vehicle. And I thought that we could apply this to ttrpg combat so we can understand where various parts of combat game design lay. Layer 1: Don’t be there The best way to avoid serious injury or death is to simply not be anywhere near goblins, skeletons, dragons, trolls, or anything else that might want to rip your face off and grind your bones into dust. However adventures are quite foolish creatures and will almost certainly go places they probably shouldn’t. However should the players deem it necessary to engage in the foolishness that is adventure, they should at least have the tools and wherewithal to research, scout or otherwise gather information on where they’re going. Things such as hex-maps, point-crawl maps, rumors and seeded adventures are all tools that are designed to reduce the cognitive overhead on the GM while also provi...