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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.

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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...

T Bone's Games Diner TAKEOUT MENU #005

Posted Wed, 2008-03-19 15:26 by tbone

THE TAKEOUT MENU: Flyaway Missives from T Bone's Games Diner
#005, March 20 2008

== POSTED TO MAIN SITE MARCH 31 2008== Read more...

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THE TAKEOUT MENU #002

Posted Fri, 2006-12-29 22:22 by tbone

THE TAKEOUT MENU: Flyaway Missives from T Bone's Games Diner
#002, December 29 2006

Hello again, kind readers and collaborators. This issue, slipping in just before the new year: site news, and the previously-promised oddball request. (It's a request for melee weapon data; and if you say "what's so oddball about that?", then you must be a gamer.)

===SITE NEWS===

The new site appearance looks best on Firefox. If you're on IE (bless your patient soul), and you see a tan horizontal line running between the black and green areas at the top of the page, and you'd like to take a crack at the CSS to eliminate that line, please let me know. Read more...

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Game design musing: It's About Time (Part III)

Posted Wed, 2006-12-20 11:09 by tbone

Part 3 of 3. If you thought the articles were geeky before, be warned: it gets worse here. Read more...

T Bone's Rules of Dilettante Game Design, Part I

Posted Sun, 2006-04-16 00:00 by tbone

(See also Part II.)

Friendly site visitor KC sends some all-too-kind words about Games Diner content, and asks an interesting question – that's hard to answer, too, as the good questions always are.

"In your opinion, what aspects of a roleplaying system require special attention in order to avoid major conflicts?" Read more...

An FAQ: your own original RPG?

Posted Fri, 2003-05-23 00:00 by tbone

A common question: "With so much stuff on your site, have you considered making your own RPG?"

The simple answer is contained on pages like these:

http://www.rpg.net/directory/diy.html
http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/freerpgs/fulllist.html

There are hundreds of home-made RPGs out there! I wonder how many ever get read, let alone played...

Any RPG I "invented" would look like... well, GURPS with some changes. I think GURPS makes a great RPG base, and lends itself to tweaks pretty well too... I'm happy to stick with that!

But just for the fun of it: if I were to think up a spanking-new set of mechanics for a game, without legacy ties to GURPS, features might include: Read more...

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