One of my favorite house rules is the Silver Standard. The concept is simple; silver pieces become the primary unit of exchange and treasure in lieu of the gold piece. There are a few other modifications required to make it work. Making a few extra tweaks to the system had some interesting and desirable effects …
Continue reading Grumpy Wizard’s Swords & Wizardry House Rules: Silver Standard
A few weeks back I wrote about the Dramatic Question and how it works in games. In short, The Dramatic Question is what a scene or encounter is about. Will the characters achieve their objective? The biggest difference between stories and games is how they resolve the Dramatic Question. In stories, the story teller creates …
Continue reading Using The Dramatic Question To Solve Problems With Tabletop Role-Playing Games
The original fantasy adventure game was built on the sandbox campaign structure. Sandbox campaigns can take many forms but remain the best structure for OSR gaming.
I played in a few campaigns of Amber Diceless Role-play in the mid-1990s. The experience was formative. It opened my eyes to the incredible possibilities that role-playing games hold. The many roads of my thinking about role-playing games lead back to Amber.
Game masters use the tools of storytelling to create a dramatic question but use game mechanics and rules to resolve it.
Rob Kuntz shares some thoughts about RPG systems.
I'm flailing around with trying to understand what the word "system" means in a role-playing game and the implications of it for game design. Also, I've been flailing around for something to write about this week and here is what my demons decided. This is a bunch of incomplete thoughts that I'm trying to give …
Grumpy Wizard 