I used to hear how bad resin was for board game miniatures. Every time somebody mentioned Forge World, they ended their sentence sadly with "too bad it's resin." I had no idea why, just that they were bad. Recently, I wanted some historical miniatures that I just couldn't find from any miniature ven...
In addition to not being a particularly good miniature painter, I also have no fashion sense. Life has taught me one great truth about how to combine clothes, and that's that black goes with everything, especially more black. Left to my own devices, I'd probably just paint every miniature I have Bla...
The Army Painter products are probably the first miniature paints I remember seeing in hobby stores. Before I was fully aware that people bothered painted miniatures, way in the back of my mind I knew that there were paints available for...something. Now that I paint miniatures myself, I still have...
Here's the thing about traps. They're the ONLY encounter in an RPG that players cannot opt out of. Once you encounter a trap, whether your character is physically trapped or you're just being blocked from progressing the story by a really hard puzzle, you basically have no choice but to deal with th...
There seems to be a lot of talk these days about character death in D&D and other roleplaying games. It seems that there's an audience that doesn't want their player character to die. Ever.
Which, admittedly, is the point of the game mechanic. If players don't care about death, then there's no poi...
In a previous post, I wrote about how tracking encumbrance made loot more "valuable" by enforcing a weight-based economy. However, tracking encumbrance can be hard. In theory, it's exclusively the responsibility of each player, but if the game master (GM) doesn't announce the weight of each item t...
Everybody has their own tolerance levels for how much paperwork in an RPG they feel is fun. For some people, updating their character sheet is a milestone system for their character. It's as much a part of the game as NPC interactions, decisions, strategy, solving puzzles, and so on. For others, a c...
I track the passage of time in my RPGs, and so should you, and it's actually easy. This blog post tells you how.
What you need
A deck of cards. If possible, use Pathfinder or Starfinder cards, or something similar. You'll see why.
How to do it
Set your deck of cards on the table. When an...
I think a lot of us gamers think that tabletop roleplaying games are exhilarating at the beginning, but that they tend to taper off toward the end. Commonly, this is expressed as "the problem with high level play." I sense that it's seen as more of a problem in class-based systems that emphasize the...
I've run Sunless Citadel, originally published for 3rd Edition and most recently printed in the Tales from the Yawning Portal book, a few times and thought I'd give my thoughts on running it in either Pathfinder or D&D. In my experience, it's more or less a perfect adventure for almost any purpo...
Many RPG rulebooks start out speaking in the bizarrely theoretical future tense, addressing the reader as if they were going to build a character: "First, you will choose a race, and then you will choose your skills." Then, over the course of the next few chapters, these player guides describe t...
Are you thinking about playing D&D or Pathfinder or some other roleplaying game (RPG) like Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or similar? Of course you need players, and one player designated as the person (usually called the "Dungeon Master" or the "game master") to "play" the game world itself. The best...
Are you thinking about playing D&D or some other roleplaying game (RPG) like Pathfinder, Starfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or similar? You might be confused by all the trappings of such a game. For instance, there's a special important-sounding title for one of the players, like "Game Master" or "Dungeon...
Shadowrun's character build process is explained in the 5th Edition Core Rulebook, but there are a lot of possibilities. This post describes a linear build process for a Shadowrun technomancer, and is designed to help new players.
Note that this post is for Shadowrun 5th Edition, even though...
Shadowrun's character build process is explained in the 5th Edition Core Rulebook, but there's a lot to filter out because there are so many possibilities. This post describes a linear build process for a Shadowrun adept, and is designed to help new players.
Note that this post is for Shadow...
The way I've always played D&D was that when your character was dead with no chance of resurrection, you built a new character and came back into the game at level 1. That's just the way me and my gaming groups have done it. Recently, I've started to pick up on the fact that not all gaming groups pl...