When I started playing Dungeoneer back in 2014, I correctly assumed that you were meant to add your Movement attribute to Movement Threat checks. I made this assumption because you added your other 2 attributes (Melee and Magic) to checks related to them. This blog post exists exclusively to rei...
I design dungeons in idle time, and sometimes I even run them. I also run lots of dungeons other people have designed. In both scenarios, there are times when I encounter a thing in the design of the dungeon that makes it suddenly complex to run. I tend to be mindful, now, of this when I create my o...
Many mechanics in D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2 are exactly the same. There are a few, however, that differ substantially, and oddly I don't see much discussion about it online. This blog post is my effort to remedy that.
Proficiency isn't global
In 5e, you have exactly one Proficiency Bonus. It start...
I was introduced to Flesh and Blood (FaB) a few years ago when a card merchant included a freebie FaB card in my order of RPG books. The card seemed interesting to me, so I bought a small starter set with 2 pre-constructed decks. I didn't know how to play and I had no one to play with anyway, so i...
No matter how you measure it, I'm a late-comer to tabletop Warhammer 40,000. I've been a reader of Warhammer fiction, and a casual player of Warhammer video games, since the early 2000s but I didn't start playing it on the tabletop until 2020. Because there are no indications that I will not inven...
I was talking to a friend about KapCon, an annual Wellington RPG conference that's been going for 35 years or something ridiculous like that, and he told me that he didn't think he would attend. It didn't occur to me at the time, but my friend's social anxiety was the main blocker. He thought that t...
Flesh and Blood is a trading card game in which you play a hero battling to the death against a powerful enemy. It's mostly a melee game, in the sense that its fighting style tends to feel direct. You don't summon creatures to do your fighting for you, and instead do your own dirty work. You're not...
It's something of a formal fallacy in gaming: If some pen-and-paper game systems are too complex for some players, then physical representations of game components must make a game easy. Of course it's not entirely wrong. In a way, this is why miniatures exist, and why [theoretically] useful product...
The term "roleplaying" has been long an overloaded term. You can play a Lone Wolf or Fighting Fantasy game book, or a campaign of solo Tunnel & Trolls adventures, or play an RPG with a gaming group, or a computer game, and we call it "roleplaying". Just as people think of "D&D" when they hear...
When I've earned enough XP in Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant, or Requisition Points in a Warhammer 40,000 Crusade, or victories in Mansions of Madness, I convert those game points into real-world currency. The only bank that takes game points in exchange for cash is me, but exchanging ga...
In a wargame, you frequently have 20 or 30 or even 100 miniatures in your army. This can be confusing for a few reasons, not the least of which the sheer number of physical objects you have to keep track of. Each miniature generally gets to move and attack, and may also be subject to morale checks o...
I've written about roleplay and roleplaying in reverse in wargames, but the only reason I have the luxury of waxing poetic about additional options for wargaming is because it's such a flexible system. Roleplay can fit nicely into a wargame, just as much as a wargame fits nicely into an RPG (tha...
Some time ago, I thought that it would be nice to have spaceship miniatures for Starfinder space battles. I developed a simplified system for Starfinder ship combat, which is currently a Copper Seller on DrivethruRPG, so I do actually do run ship combat pretty frequently. So I got some (more about...
I've been playing Mansions of Madness a lot lately, which is a game I love but also one that inspires a lot of thought about strategy and roleplay. In a tabletop roleplaying game, like Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder or Shadowrun, you often make up a strategy based on how you think your...
I've been running a Tomb of Annihilation campaign for about a year now, and I can't honestly say it's been quite as nice as running a good module like Expedition to Castle Ravenloft or Rise of the Runelords. It's my fault, because Tomb of Annihilation is actually a sandbox. I understand the...
We humans seem to really enjoy miniaturized versions of real world objects. We have doll houses and action figures and model trains and miniatures for gaming. I'm new to the game miniature world, and being new means I get the privilege of making a bunch of mistakes. Here's what I've learnt about the...