RPG Industry Products and Projects Of Note (Sept 2017)
I get far more invitations to review products and Kickstarter campaigns and the like than I could ever hope to satisfy. Every few months I gather several of these together for a round-up set of...
View ArticleA Role To Play
For the last two days, what was an intermittent telephone and internet problem caused by excessive line noise has become no telephone and internet service at all. So I will be posting this via an...
View ArticleFinalizing the Mechanics for the Zener Gate Campaign
Introductory Recap This is the third post on the development of a bespoke game system for use in my latest campaign, which is now scheduled to start play on October 21st – so finishing this has become...
View ArticleThe Past Revisited – Nov 2017 Blog Carnival
This isn’t the post I expected to put up today. The other one’s ready, and will appear later in the week. The reason is because it’s almost November – and that has a significance that will become clear...
View ArticleThe Utility of Average Rolls: A Guest Article by Clinton Hillman
If you need to save time or mental bandwidth, consider using dice roll averages for rolls of more than 4 dice. Disclaimer: nothing in this article should be considered prescriptive. You know your game...
View ArticleLet’s Do Something Radical…. More House Rules for D&D
This idea came to me while watching the fifth and final Ashes test on the television. At first, I didn’t quite know exactly what I had, which is why this post has landed in the “short but profound”...
View ArticleIQ and Intelligence in RPGs
You learn something new every day, and today’s example was a small factoid: IQs are increasing so rapidly that the average person today would have scored an IQ of 130 a century ago, qualifying as...
View ArticleCombat System Design and Understanding The Rules
I get asked questions all the time. Those coming at me through twitter I usually answer extremely briefly; if the 280-character limit (was 140) is not enough, I will either add more replies or set the...
View ArticleConditional Modifier Magic: Combating Power Creep in RPGs
One of the banes of RPGs since time immemorial has been been the seemingly inevitable drift toward out-of-control character capabilities at high levels. It’s something that afflicts almost every...
View ArticleSurvivors Of The Underdark: A New Dwarven Paradigm
Long-time readers of Campaign Mastery will know that I love concepts that re-imagine standard game elements like races and classes through the prism of a completely new context. During a conversation...
View Article(In)Human Survival: The Biology of Elementals and More
I’ve been reading a fascinating book lately: “The Biology Of Human Survival” by Claude A Piantadosi, M.D. This relatively hard-to-find book from Oxford University Press deals with the biological...
View ArticleWild Pathfinder 2.0 Speculation
Being invited recently to participate in play-testing for Pathfinder 2.0 (or whatever they are calling it) – an invitation that I had to, regretfully, decline – has, nevertheless, fired my imagination....
View ArticleIf Wishing Made It So
Last week’s post was (technically*) the 1000th here at Campaign Mastery. Appropriately for such a number, it dealt with big-picture abstractions and the fundamental principle upon which the blog is...
View ArticleRandomness In RPGs
Anarchy. Chaos. Flexibility. Uncertainty. Control. Challenge. Unpredictability. All of these words can be used to describe the influence of Randomness within an RPG. Every GM uses randomness in all...
View ArticlePrinciples of Randomness
701 492 537 313 432 835. 191 489 361 702 127 659. 723 296 032 553 407 934. Those all look like fairly random strings of digits to me. How about: 333 333 333 333 333 333? Or 022 022 022 022 022 022? Or...
View ArticleCombining Abilities: Teamwork and Synergy between RPG Characters (updated)
One problem. Two characters with the same Skill. How do they combine abilities to make the problem easier to solve? Or are two heads no better than one? This is the Dual Competence rules problem....
View ArticleThe Language Of Magic: A Sense of Wonder for the Feb 2019 Blog Carnival
The February 2019 Blog Carnival is being hosted by Sea Of Stars, with the subject of Making Magic Wondrous. This wasn’t an easy subject, because I’ve already done so much in this area regarding magic...
View ArticleCombining Style and Substance
Style without substance is a soap bubble, all surface glitz and no depth – and just as fragile. Substance without style is utilitarian and contains no room for fun. For anything – including RPGs – to...
View ArticlePredictable thoughts about Improbable Outcomes
If you want to start a conversation with a tabletop gamer, all you have to do is ask their opinion on GMs fudging die rolls. Everyone has an opinion, a theoretical best-practice policy, and everyone...
View ArticleFundamental Tactics For GMs: A Field Guide
0. Preliminaries Combat is a central aspect of almost every RPG, but most GMs are not as familiar with Tactics and Strategy as the forces they command within a game would be. That’s a problem, but the...
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