Be social

Patron advantage

How's everything?

Enjoying your Games Diner meal? Is the wait staff attentive? Is the chef bathed? (Then it must be a Sunday.) You do know that a little eggshell in the French toast adds calcium, right?

If the cramps haven't set in yet, I hope you'll say Hi to the chef or check out the many ways you can contribute to the Diner.

Now eat. Eat up! You're as thin as a rail.

game design

Miscellaneous thought: A Car Wars oddity

Posted Thu, 2012-01-12 18:00 by tbone

Know what was odd about the old Car Wars game? As its weapon-laden autos blasted away at each other with rockets and worse, just about everything would get damaged and damaged good: vehicular armor, engines, weapons, trailer hitches, you name it. Tires got shredded, buildings breached, drivers and pedestrians blown to bits. Everything...

...except the vehicles. There were no hit points or the like for a vehicle itself, and no way to directly hurt it. Sure, with its engine or tires or driver shot to bits, a car was "killed" for purposes of combat. And in one specific exception, an explosion caused by fire did invoke a special "vehicle completely destroyed" rule.

But otherwise: The motorbike with its engine blown up by a tank round? The helicopter with nearly every component shot out by rocket launchers? The car that lost its tires, underbody armor, and driver to mines before slamming a wall at 200 mph? Clear out the bodies and the broken parts, install new components, and the vehicles were as good as new.

Very odd, that was. (But darned fun all the same.)

Hmm, here's something a bit sad: Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars web site has seen exactly two posts since the end of 2003. (Even this site posts more frequently than that.) Ye gods, does no one play this fine game any more?

Momentum or Kinetic Energy: Which One Pierces a T Rex's Chain Mail on a Glancing Blow?

Posted Wed, 2011-01-26 02:14 by tbone

Here's a collection of online bric-a-brac with connections to this site's gaming material:

Dinosaurs and their tails

Having written about both dinosaur design and tail design, I can't help but comment on the Smithsonian blog's report that dinosaurs may have had thicker, beefier tails than often depicted. Sounds fine to me, at least until we get that cloning process working to verify things!

What does that mean for critter design? Read more...

"Magic" Skill for GURPS

Posted Sat, 2009-10-24 17:41 by tbone

GURPS was long funny in that it offered skills for each and every specific application of magic (i.e., hundreds of spells), but no skill to cover a mage's overall understanding of magic itself.

Such a skill – name it Magic for simplicity – both fills that gap and lets you fine-tune magic in your campaign, in at least 10 fun ways. This old article was written for GURPS 3e and its Magic skill is at least partially duplicated by the Thaumatology skill that later appeared in GURPS Grimoire and then 4e Basic Set, but the notes may hold a new idea or two for your 4e games. Read more...

Pricing breadth: Talents and Wildcard skills in GURPS

Posted Fri, 2009-10-16 15:41 by tbone

Here's a quick example of putting the ideas in Game design musing: Pricing breadth in skills to work:

GURPS' Wildcard skills (BS 175) allow purchase of multiple skills for the price of three; Talents (BS 89) allow a bonus to many skills (plus other minor benefits) for a fraction of the eventual cost of full levels in those skills. Both share fuzziness in common: There's no stated limit on on how many skills a Wildcard skill covers (so why stop at 10 if the GM will allow 20?), and you can freely choose the number of skills a Talent covers, within the limits of its group size (gee, should I take one skill or six for the same 5-point cost of a small group?).

There's no big problem in all that, but what if you wanted more varied costs to reflect the number of skills covered? The "Zeno's method" suggestion in those breadth rules offer a solution: Read more...

MERC: Make Every Roll Count

Posted Wed, 2009-10-07 19:26 by tbone

Intro: Keep it interesting!

RPGs evolve. New games don't just invent snazzy new mechanics; they poke deep into questions of what game-table play is about.

MERC stems from author Ben Finney's interest in the innovations of recent games, and ways to strengthen those concepts in the now-classic RPG GURPS. Broadly speaking, MERC is a set of guidelines for placing story first and making the most of gamers' time at the table. More narrowly, it homes in on a key question at the heart of all RPGs: When should the dice be used at all, and toward what end?

From the GURPS perspective, that often equates to "When should we make success checks?" The general answer to that is clear to gamers with minimal experience: "Roll where the outcome is meaningful and interesting. Roll to have the PCs survive a dangerous car chase, not to eat breakfast without spilling the orange juice." We all know that, and MERC doesn't contradict this truism.

But that said, a beginning GM won't hurt for a more contemplative look at when to roll dice; even an experienced GM might freshen his games through a reexamination. More importantly, what MERC suggests actually may represent a new take on play for some gamers: A shift from many games' focus on resolving tasks, to a focus on resolving players' intent (with some crunchy GURPS-flavored dice-rolling guidelines to aid in that). Read more...

RPG science: Character tails

Posted Tue, 2009-09-01 17:26 by tbone

Got a game character with a nice fluffy tail? Those things can be good for more than just Furry decor, you know.

At a recent TED conference, biologist Robert Full presented research into the wonders of the wall-crawling gecko. (The video, embedded below, is worth a view; you'll see both people and robots mimicking the gecko's Spidey-like climbs.) But while uncovering the secrets of the lizard's famous feet, scientists found the creature's tail enabled some amazing acrobatic feats of its own, all with nice character-design potential. Read more...

Game design musing: Pricing breadth in skills

Posted Mon, 2009-08-24 16:35 by tbone

If fluency in a foreign tongue costs your character 5 points, how much should fluency in ten languages cost?

In the midst of recent email correspondence about ESCARGO, I've dredged up a game design topic long of interest to me: a decreasing cost scale for multiple instances of traits.

Wait – is there some reason why ten 5-point languages should cost the PC less than 50 points? And isn't ESCARGO all about increasing the cost for more stuff? Let me explain: Read more...

Mail about mail (and other armor and EP topics)

Posted Wed, 2009-08-19 12:43 by tbone

In this earlier post, I mentioned that I'd been answering email questions about my Edge Protection (EP) rules for armor in GURPS. For those with an interest in EP, here's a paraphrasing of my correspondent's questions (in quotes) and my replies: Read more...

GURPS Banestorm idea: Enclaves

Posted Thu, 2009-08-13 18:19 by tbone

In my review of GURPS Banestorm, I briefly mention one of the points that intrigues me about its gameworld: Unexplored pockets of diverse Earth cultures tucked among Yrth's dominant European-, Middle Eastern-, and Asian-descended cultures. From page 9:

...African, Chinese, German, Indian, and Slavic groups popped up across the continent. Dominant local cultures quickly absorbed most of these smaller ones, but even today travelers can find isolated villages where almost all the inhabitants have black skin, worship Krishna and Vishnu, or speak undiluted German.

This is an opportunity for the GM to create any sort of interesting micro-culture that he can envision, as long as it is well off the beaten path!

While that's pretty much all the book has to offer on the overall topic, it's plenty to set the GM mind in motion. A few non-dominant cultures do get a bit more mention (like low-tech Hindi or Mesoamerican peoples around southern Araterre and Bilit Island), yet others remain entirely up to us to flesh out (African tribes? Slavic villages?).

I like the possibilities, and think there's a great supplement concept waiting to be born: Banestorm Enclaves, books detailing outlying clusters of humanity from non-dominant cultures. (Hmm, I thought I picked up the label "enclave" from within Banestorm, but a quick search shows I must have tacked it on myself. I like it anyway!) Read more...

Game rules aren't protected by law

Posted Tue, 2009-08-11 00:30 by tbone

Jeff Dee, RPG author and awesome gaming artist (T Bone makes Will roll, squelches further fan gushing), is also a semi-regular host of The Atheist Experience broadcast and podcast. The recent Episode #616, titled nothing less than "The Argument from Game Design", let Jeff put his game-design cred to work in discussing certain arcane religious arguments that compare existence to "a game". Straying a bit from that purely religious discussion, he also made some comments of broader relevance to gaming itself, including thoughts on what makes for a good game, and the following bit that surprised me:

... As a self-published role-playing game designer, one of my biggest pet peeves is that game rules are not protected by law... There are two mechanisms in place that you can turn to [in the US] for legal protection if you're a game designer. One is copyright. The actual text of your rules, you can have a copyright on that... The other thing you can turn to is patent. If you have pieces you move around, you can patent what those pieces are and the way you use them. You can do those two things. Buy you can, in fact, legally take, say, Dungeons and Dragons – and people have done this – and completely reword it... Read more...

Build a site!

Cast Seek Spell

THE TAKEOUT MENU

For collaborators, contributors, or the curious. Notice of site updates; project announcements; calls for playtesting; etc.

Previous issues

Get updates!

Roll vs Search

Randomly-rolled content