Hello! Things have been a little quiet on the Masks RPG front lately, because the end of summer is bananas for all my players. We haven’t been able to play face to face, but each player is getting a little Play-By-Post action in (which I’ll figure out how to share), and in the meantime I’m […]
Category Archives: Game Design
The Smartwood Children (a Lasers and Feelings hack for my kids)
This weekend has been chock-a-block with face to face gaming goodness with cool kids. Friday was the 14th session of Masks: Phoenix Academy game with Kaylee and the Jamies and, I think, possibly one of the best sessions so far. (Which is good, because we’re not going to be able to play again until something […]
Girl Underground meets the TARDIS?
There’s a game in development called Girl Underground, which focuses on a central Girl (in the vein of Alice in Wonderland, Labyrinth, Mirrormask, Spirited Away, etc) having an adventure in a weird secret world, with her companions. Only The Girl has stats. No one plays the girl. Everyone plays wondrous companions. You roll with The […]
Jonesing to play Zombie World
Enough that I made up a new Enclave option… one I’m surprised doesn’t exist.
The Hollow, by way of World of Dungeon: Turbo
I’m running a game for my kids, inspired by The Hollow series on Netflix, and for said game I’m basically using a loosey-goosey version of World of Dungeons: Turbo. However, the setup for the game doesn’t closely match the original World of Dungeons: Turbo premise, so I’ve already spent a fair amount of time scribbling […]
Fire Goose
Created at the behest of Mark Hunt, for a silly little project on MeWe. Fire Goose Small beast, probably evil Armor Class 16 Natural Armor Hit Points 30 (5d10 + 5) Speed 25 ft., fly 80 ft., swim 35 ft. STR 12 DEX 14 CON 14 INT 5 WIS 9 CHA 3 (because geese) Immune […]
Masks Prep: Brainstorming + Random Situation Tables
MOST IMPORTANT BIT – Problems, difficulties, goals, and victims should all have a FACE (or faces): people that the heroes interact with – (Masks moves are about interacting with people – if a situation doesn’t provide that, character will struggle to engage.) PICK A LOCATION – Pick a location one or more of the team […]
How to Train Your Dragon with Risus hacks
I’ve been playing an RPG with my kids set in the Archipelago of How to Train Your Dragon. As a prelude to writing about the play itself, here are the rules I’m using. Dragons: Wanderers of the Archipelago A Risus variation for How to Train Your Dragon Adventures (Based mostly on Risus Guard, a Mouse […]
PbtA with Little Kids
(I found this in a text snippet, as though I meant to post it, but as near as I can tell, I never did, so here it is.) The Rules Say what you are: a crystal lady, an adventurer, a princess with a big cat. When you face trouble, roll your two dice. If what […]
Pondering FAE Tweaks for Star Wars: Rebel Ops
A few days ago, I publicly mulled over how the game is going. That post attracted quite a bit of conversation, much of it extremely helpful in terms of focusing down on the stuff I didn’t think was working that I think is worth trying to address, going forward. On the whole, I’m pretty happy […]
200-word RPG Challenge submission: Freaks
So this thing is happening: The 200 Word RPG Challenge puts your writing and editing skills to the test! What can you do with only 200 words? I’m studiously ignoring the line: “the game doesn’t necessarily have to be fun”, for reasons that should be obvious, and decided to submit a thing. Here is that […]
Thinking about Spaceships and Star Wars because… well, OBVIOUSLY
First, before getting into the “thinking” part, I’ll just embed this silly song with clips from a bunch of spaceship shows. Pop on some headphones and enjoy yourself. Now then… Yesterday, the Evil Hat guys released a new “World of Adventure”; I’m a patron of the project, and thus far I have not in any […]
Converting Starship Stats from WEG to Fate
Contrary to the evidence from this and previous posts, I am definitely not running thinking about running a Fate-based Star Wars game. I’m not. Shut up. Basic Guidelines: If you’re in a personal ship (where you’re in some way the ‘crew’ – usually indicated by an Aspect), use your skill rating instead of the ship’s […]
Mulling over a Star Wars game
Like (I imagine) a lot of folks, I’ve been thinking about how I’d run a Star Wars game, if I were going to run a Star Wars game. Main problem? Too many viable answers. I loved playing WEG’s d6 game when I was in college. The system doesn’t scale particularly well, but I’m enough of […]
Playing Hero Kids with my Hero Kids
Last night, in lieu of normal bedtime activities (reading Winnie-the-Pooh, Justice League I-Can-Read books, or our new favorite, Bone), Kaylee and Sean and I played some Hero Kids. For those of you unfamiliar, this is an RPG specifically designed for “kids from ages 4 to 10” – says so right on the tin cover. It’s […]
Mulling Over *Mountain Witch* mashups
For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on stuff related to the Mountain Witch, specifically: Prepping for a traditional “ronin samurai” play-through of the game, hopefully on Hangouts, hopefully soonish. Pondering various settings hacks for the game, including Dwarves/Dragon, Adventurers/Castle Ravenloft, Spark Prisoners/Escaping Castle Heterodyne, and so forth. The basic criteria with these settings/setups […]
Fate of the Four Nations (playing FAE in the world of Korra and Aang)
My family’s getting caught up on Avatar: Legend of Korra, which has unsurprisingly led to my daughter broaching the possibility of a Fate “Avatar” game. Normally, I don’t do these sorts of conversions, but… Anyway, here’s some random stuff I’ve come up with so far. I’m seeing, ultimately, a mix of basic FAE stunts and […]
Wildstar Tabletop Gaming, by way of FAE/Jadepunk
“You should do a Wildstar game,” opined my daughter. “Sorry?” Her comment confused me, both because Wildstar is an MMO and because I was distracted at the moment due to the fact that we were both playing Wildstar at that moment. “Like you did with DC Universe,” she explained. “A Fate version of Wildstar. That […]
FATE: The Goddamn Batman
So there are ways to stat out Batman as a starting character. But (a) someone already did that and (b) I need an NPC version of Bats for a game where he’s one of the Big Three and the PCs are playing newly minted players on the super-powered stage. So basically I started with the […]
Fate Core and Fate Accelerated Pseudo-review
So, a few days ago, a conversation I was having on g+ crossposted to this blog. That wasn’t intentional, but I let it stand, because it brought a few more people into the conversation and (also important) let me check out how well the google+blog integration for wordpress was actually working. Anyway, the conversation/question was […]
Life in Eve: You Play How You Practice – Putting the Play into Practice (4/4)
Whew. Okay, let’s see if we can pull all this musing into some kind of coherent plan for missions. There’s a lot here, so let’s boil it down. Here are the parts of the topic already covered: Part 1 and Part 2 talked about the fundamentals of PvP in Eve (as broken down by Ripard […]
Life in Eve: You Play How You Practice (3/4): Stages of a Mission
So let’s continue this conversation about how to create new PvE missions in Eve that are more engaging, interesting, and just generally “better” by applying the fundamental rules of PvP as explained by Ripard Teg over here. This is the last the of “mapping” posts; the final post will give examples of the kinds of […]
Life in Eve: You Play How You Practice (2.5/4) — Answering Questions and Comments
The last couple posts have attracted some good questions and feedback, and raise some points I want to address before I move forward. The questions came in from all over, however, so apologies if I don’t attribute the questions to the right speaker in all cases. Narol Decyg: I would personally LOVE for missions to […]
Life in Eve: You Play How You Practice (2/?)
So here’s the premise: PvE mission content in Eve comprises some of the weakest PvE content in any MMO, and is inarguably one of the weakest, least-fun parts of Eve itself. PvP in Eve is pulse-pounding, adrenaline-dumping, heart-beating-like-sneakers-in-a-clothes-dryer stuff. We can improve the PvE in Eve by adopting some of the fundamental guidelines of PvP, and in […]
Life in Eve: You Play How You Practice (1/?)
When I first started playing Eve in earnest (which does not count the attempt some seven years ago) I went through all tutorials (this was only a few years ago, right after the new avatars, but before Incarna, so the tutorials weren’t as utterly terrible as they had once been), then did the Sister’s Epic […]
Life in Eve: Heavy Hangs the Head
This bit of reflection came out of a (sadly) half-finished conversation with Dave and Margie, where we were talking about my time with Faction Warfare in Eve, and their time playing Ingress. The Minmatar/Amarr faction war zone has been a little crazy the last few months. Amarr units have been on an organized tear, capturing […]
Life in Eve: How I Learned to Love Hating “Safe Zones” in New Eden
I didn’t intend to write any more stuff about CCP and the development direction of Eve; it’s not really what I do. However, I was having a good discussion on Reddit about yesterday’s post (someone put it up there and I dropped in to say hello), and one of the threads of conversation gave me […]
Life in Eve: Life on the Playground
My kids go to a charter school. This may not mean much to anyone reading this, so I’ll sum up what it means to me by saying that charter schools are basically public schools with limited enrollment, where the parents are encouraged if not in fact required to be more involved. There’s an after school […]
Life in EvE: “I’m not a Pirate.”
A few nights ago, members of the militia had banded together to work on retaking an Amarr-held system in the warzone. This was a pretty big undertaking, and to pull it off in a relatively short timeframe required round the clock participation; it wouldn’t be enough for our US-timezone-heavy alliance to do it, because any […]
Life in Eve: Retribution is Coming #eveonline
So last night, I actually found myself online at the same time as Em, and we had time to talk about the changes coming up with “Retribution” — the winter expansion. The upshot of that conversation was that a lot of the stuff that I’d categorized as “everybody know this is coming” was stuff that […]