Posts by tommi
When did "sandbox" become a popular term in rpg discourse? It has been suggested to me that it came from computer games to roleplaying. Was this the case and when did this happen? This thread at ...
Sorcerer has a number of supplements: Sorcerer and sword, Sex and sorcery and Sorcerer's soul, if I remember the names correctly. How relevant are they when running the game for the first time? Is...
In a con game, or other one-shot with strangers, I often meet the problem that I don't really know how the game master and the other players are going to approach the game, or would like me to do t...
The procedure Ask for what everyone is doing. (Action declarations.) After everyone has declared and thereby initiated their actions, that is, their characters have committed and are starting t...
In D&D 3 (and related games), a spectre can easily kill normal people and spawns other spectres, leading to an exponential apocalypse fairly easily. What reliable means of long-term protection...
Some games, like Call of Cthulhu, have remained pretty much the same from edition to the next (except the newest edition, which has significant changes), while for other games, like D&D the dif...
The first online RPG community I found, after Johnn Four's gamemastering tips email newsletter, was the forum hosted by Wizards of the Coast. This was certainly after the publication of D&D 3.0...
I asked Ron Edwards, the designer of the game and the supplements. He stated that the core book by itself is completely sufficient, and one should be careful not to overcomplicate things with the s...
Rumours tell that Vampire: The Masquerade was designed with purpose to be a trainwreck when it comes to the mechanics, so that people would not use them. Was this really the case? And what evidenc...
As far as I understand, the term is sporadically used in the indie community or former Forge diaspora. I searched for it in the Forge archives, but got no hits. What is the source of the term and ...
I suggest thinking non-player characters, places and objects rather than encounters. Since you write about "dm" and have "dm tips" as a tag, I assume you are running some edition of Dungeons and d...
Monsters! Monsters! is a less known game by Ken St. Andre, the designers of Tunnels and trolls. From what I understand one plays monsters there, rather than adventurers. Wikipedia claims the rules...
Did Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer play together in one more sessions of D&D (or some other roleplaying game)? They worked at TSR and co-authored D&D products. One would expect one of them t...
Keep it easy and trust the players The game is about playing your dream hero, and it is inconvenient for everyone if they die before it is dramatically appropriate. Hence, resurrection. So let...
To my understanding, the Fighting fantasy rpg (and Troika! as a more-or-less retroclone) use the same rule system as the choose your own adventure gamebooks of Steve Jackson, Warlock of firetop mou...
The most relevant question is, why would you not let everyone know. The best way to answer is to consider what are the creative priorities for this group playing this campaign here and now, and wha...
This depends heavily on how you are running the game. For a sandbox I just had each location in its own folder on my computer, with a map or the original adventure I used for that location there, ...
Ignoring the extreme success case for now, and supposing the skill gives a probability p of success, then the probabilities of succeeding on the skill roll and then failing the learning roll (that ...
