Bugbears and Ballads

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The God of Magic is an Outcast

In most fantasy tabletop role-playing games, the most impactful decisions surrounding the structure of your character are made at the moment you decide on your class. Maybe later you’ll pick up feats that afford the opportunity to enhance abilities outside the sphere of “druid” or “fighter” or “wizard”, and of course throughout the game you will be granted items of power and significance that help you unlock previously restricted options. But by and large the bulk of the character’s mechanics both immediately accessed, and promised at future levels, are set in stone the moment you select your class. There are of course many schools of thought surrounding this paradigm, some of the more oppositional ones have led to the creation and adoption of “classless” systems. Despite that offshoot of playstyle, classes have been a fundamental part of Dungeons and Dragons since its inception, as they facilitate a diversity in abilities among party members, and allow each character/player to fill a

Crunch-Optional – a design philosophy, and how Traveller does it well

One game design philosophy I’ve started to ponder is the “crunch-optional” philosophy – that is, the amount of crunch (e.g., the straight mechanics, rules, and numbers) one experiences from a game is based only on player investment. Those who wish to simply sit down and enjoy the game only need the base mechanics, while those who want to delve into the meat of a game have the option to explore the different rules and subsystems. Most importantly, however, is that players who do decide to “do their homework” and explore the crunch of a game are not objectively superior to those who did not – system mastery does not make player skill irrelevant, it just allows those who are interested to find more fulfillment in the rules. Enter Traveller I believe Traveller does this well (at least, the versions I’m familiar with; I have only played Mongoose Trav 1e and 2e, and am nominally familiar with Classic Trav), and this is why I play it frequently with both people who are new to RPGs

Festivals: The Case for Relaxation and Levity in D&D

Let's face it, D&D is intrinsically a dark game. The acronym doesn't stand for Daffodils and Daylight, and for a good reason. While a system with that title would be fun to play*, it isn’t what most people want from a game as it doesn’t sound very challenging. Daffodils smell nice, and daylight makes them grow! While that is just delightful, it doesn’t set the scene for something that is captivating and dramatic. Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, paints an image of dark, dank corridors, that bend out of sight, terminating in the lair of something great, powerful, mythical, and horrifying. That image breeds a feeling of fright and anticipation in a player, but also one of excitement and engagement. There is real possibility of failure; a chance that you might not make it out alive…or at least whole. The name Dungeons and Dragons suggests that there is something to be vanquished, and while there is a price for failure, there is an equally alluring prize for su

Booker Starcrash must die: a scenario for the Traveller RPG

Here's a bonkers scenario I made for my Traveller Campaign set in the Sol System. The party is contacted by an enigmatic corporate contact by the name of Tegan Rosek. Raised on the low gravity of Mars, Ms. Rosek is tall and unnaturally thin, with jagged silver hair and bright opalescent eyes. She wears a black suit and has a neural interface, kind yet sociopathic. Her mission is simple: Board the luxury star liner Renegade Spirit while in transit to kidnap Booker Starcrash, the front man of the ThrashPunk group Gory Starcrash. Rosek wants Booker kidnapped for reasons she is unwilling to disclose (Her boss, the SuSAG megacorp, has fronted him millions of credits worth of an illegal narcotic called Gentixent. To pay back this debt, they want to acquire him to study his biology on how he is able to take so many of the damn drugs.) His band is on a tour of the Sol system and the pay is 2MCr, with a bonus of 2MCr if the kidnapping is incognito and nobody is killed.

The Fundamental Rights of the TTRPG Player and GM

Sometimes I get on Reddit in the wee hours of the morning and scroll through my D&D and worldbuilding sub-Reddits, drooling at people's gorgeous hand-drawn maps, or stifling my laughter at hilarious accounts of poor decision-making in-game. It's those stories of epic success and failure, sprinkled with comedic relief, that I like to read when I really should be sleeping. But every time I browse these forums, searching for a smile or a laugh, without fail I manage to click on a post detailing someone's absolutely horrendous experience at a table the previous night. Either a player attempted personally to assassinate the GM's arduously-prepped story, or a guy spends an entire session making jokes about a female character's boobs, or a GM introduces an NPC that is at once an Adonis, with the body of a Titan, and a genius at everything, that swoops in and always seems to get the final blow, and can't be killed, and is named some variation of the GM's a