Codex Robynica

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...