Unnatural Twenty

I've been thinking of a system that lets me as the GM keep an RPG very simple, but still lets the players have the freedom to enjoy the complexity of the rules. I'm thinking of D&D5 here, but it would hopefully apply to any RPG I happen to run. In a combat scene, I might have a big boss monster, a few mooks, and the environment itself. All these elements can move around, attack, get hurt, and potentially be killed or incapacitated. If I can simplify the management of all these elements then I think I can run a more interesting encounter. So first off, I wanted to have a single number that defines the 'difficulty' of the overall encounter, and any element of it. So in a class 6 encounter, the armour class of all the enemies is sixteen (base 10 + 6), the DC of any special abilities is fourteen (base 8 + 6), any attacks do six damage, and it takes six hits from the party to defeat the encounter. If an element of the encounter has to make a skill check, saving throw...

I'm just starting off with a text based Lords of Gossamer and Shadow campaign, using roll20.net. I've never run this system before, and I've never participated in a text based campaign. So I'd better figure some things out. I'll take my old standard, Microscope, as the baseline for getting the game going. An initial round of posts from the players to veto things they don't like, and include things they want to cover, is a great way to get people on the same page, or at least in the same book. Hopefully from the people who expressed an interest I'll be able to identify a group that I think can play well together. As for gameplay, there doesn't need to be the equivalent of a session, like there would be in a live game. I think the round based structure of Microscope will work well again. One player can make a new thread, outlining some new plan, an event, the arrival of a new character, or the arrival of their character in a new place. Other players ca...

A friend recently proposed that we play D&D with as many rules for social behaviour as for combat. My response was to use the D&D 5e rules as a framework to come up with feats and social combat styles that apply when speaking. So there would be social damage, and social fighting styles that mirror the dueling/two handed weapon/two weapon fighting styles. Nobody else seemed to be interested in this, and one player wasn't interested in any set of rules for social interactions. His opinion was mechanics are for combat, which we can't do for ourselves. The social interactions we can just role play, so we don't need any rules there. The thing is, the game still has social skills, that we are using anyway. So it still seems strange that a fight has round after round of checks, but an attempt at persuasion is a single roll. Another idea I had was to reduce the fights from multiple rolls to a single roll, rather than require multiple rounds for social interactions. A char...

I've been thinking about discovery in role playing games recently. A science fiction setting where you can explore new star systems and new planets is pretty topical. A West Marches style fantasy game has become a staple. But there is also discovery of plots, storylines and new characters. A player might even discover new mechanical options among rulebooks and websites, or come up with combinations of abilities that provide more power or more fun. Some players like this, some don't care for it, I guess some would even oppose it altogether. But how to provide it in an RPG? So telling your friends that you're starting a new campaign about discovery might mean different things to different players. They might assume the characters will literally be exploring the unknown, something like King Solomon's Mines. One player might think there will be scientific research going on, like the Xcom games, or magical research and discoveries to be made. Some players might even wonder...

I was annoyed a while back in my D&D game because I felt i was being pulled along by other player characters, and going along with schemes I wasn't interested in. Eventually I came to the realization that it's a game about escapism. Players play to experience things they wouldn't get to experience in real life. I decided that if another player wanted to do something in game I would go along with it, rather than hold them back. At that point I assumed that this would mean that I'd get support when I wanted to do something for myself, and that has generally been the case. So rather than each player having the power of veto to exclude anything from the game, I saw each player as having the power to bring in whatever they like. But this seems to be a problem now too, where many players want to include something that nobody else wants. My go to example of this is a player who wants to play a dragonborn. I generally ask such a player, "Do you want to play a dragonb...

I seem to be thinking about the end of campaigns and character death a lot lately. I remembered the idea of rolling or your character's life expectancy around the time I was using the D&D Rules Cyclopaedia. I just had a look through the Dungeon Crawl Classics book and saw something about wizards burning through ability scores. Warriors in DCC get to perform mighty deeds, and I'm sure there are other aspects to the character classes to make them all interesting and cool, but I straight away found myself coming up with a new homebrew mechanic for getting yourself killed. This whole concept might need to exist in a campaign where the player characters are headed for some great destiny. At the very least there needs to be collaboration among the players to get everybody moving towards the same goal: the end of the story. So, I initially thought that warriors would have an ability to deal a massive blow to a single enemy. Something like "reduce a target to 0hp, and...

If the players agreed to play an RPG based on a TV show, e.g. Star Trek, Angel, or Dark Matter, then it seems logical to structure each session as an episode of that show. I don't know if there would be mechanics to support this, but I can see some benefits in doing this. First is timing. Many episodes last for about forty minutes, but my game sessions can be three to four hours long. Perhaps these sessions actually cover less plot than an episode though, depending on how 'efficiently' we play. I'd like to analyse whatever TV show we model our game on, and count how many scenes there usually are. Then in the game sessions we can actually count out each scene, expecting to get to the final scene in time for the last bus. We might have romantic scenes, exposition scenes, combat scenes, stealth scenes and so on. Second is the gradual revealing of plot. In a show like Supernatural, each season (at least lately) has its own big bad. They are introduced early on, and grad...