I’ve been randomly hacking things in my head for Cortex plus and it’s produced a few usable widgets that I figured I’d share. Cracking Dice – This is a pretty simple concept, but it struck me as something that might streamline any dice distribution system, especially in the case of something open ended, like super […]
Not every Cortex game uses opposed rolls, instead relying on difficulties for handling some simple situations. Leverage does not, but that is in large part because Leverage’s mechanics depend on some very specific interplay among the dice. It’s easy to see why some games would do this: it’s certainly less work to call for a […]
Fandom snagged the rights to the Dragon Prince RPG which is awesome in its own right, but Fandom is also currently home to amazing things like “Cortex” and “Cam Banks” so my expectations are at 11. Washington Post article on the rise of tabletop gaming in the pandemic and some of the issues facing D&D […]
Spirit of the Century had 3 different chapters on skills – one on what skills did, one on how you, as a player, could be awesome with that skill, and one on how you as a GM could make that skill awesome in play. To this day, while I regret how much bulk it added to the […]
The roles seem well received so, at some point, I may need to write those up a little more. I suspect there’s also a player version to be had, but that seems like a daunting task, so we’ll see how that shakes up. But I’m still chewing on the underlying Santorini issue, and have ended […]
Play started in Kirkwall (aka “Kurkle”) with the players having a few points of wealth from their dealings, but a ship whose damage would take twice as much money to fix. So, before things got started, we took a moment to flash back on Captain Quinn. Quinn is a Glamour practitioner, and we hadn’t really […]
I’ve remarked on a few occasions that an essential decision in Fate is how big aspects are. That is, should aspects be the big, important signifiers of what really matters, or should they be more of a language to express the moment in mechanical terms. As Fate has evolved, it has gone more down the […]
I’ve been talking a lot about how much I like 5e’s advantage and disadvantage (adv/dis) rules[1] for how smoothly they flow from the fiction. It seems like a state that you can describe verbally or in text, and they simply have it reflected in the mechanics. It does not hurt that the die mechanic is […]
The atomic model of action in RPGs has implications outside of when to roll the dice. Most notably, it has a profound impact on adventure design. Skills make adventure design much easier, because they provide a pre-existing list of challenges to draw upon. Yes, there is still art in arranging them in an entertaining fashion, […]
Had the opportunity to play Pathfinder Adventures at Escapist Expo, and it was immediately obvious why this game is going to do well, but it was equally obvious why I probably won’t be picking it up. I won’t delve too deep into the mechanics, but the gist of it is that you have a pathfinder […]