Fool's Moon Entertainment

 I was thinking about  Robotech  this morning, and the old Robotech RPG by Palladium. In the anime, most enemy destroids go down in one, maybe two hits. If you play anything by Palladium you'll know  nothing  goes down in a single hit. A shot might do 2d6x10 mega damage (that's 2d6 x 1000 normal damage), but an enemy destroid might have 500, 600, 1500 MDC, and can tank two or three hits. Not really cinematic, that. And I was thinking, 'how would you make it cinematic, then'? Well, there's a few games that have a really good way of doing that, I think. Mob Rules   In games like  Godbound , or  Outgunned , the entire 'mob' of bad guys have a single pool of hit points. Depending on how big and tough they are, they might have more attacks, do more damage, have extra special tricks, or whatever. And when the heroes attack, you can describe them gunning down 2, 3, 10 opponents in a row as the pool of hit points drops. In Godbound this is especially good...

Q: Good morning, would you please introduce yourself for our audience? A: My name is Christopher LaHaise, CEO of Fool's Moon Entertainment; and incidentally the lead writer for most of the projects there.   Q: How did you get started with Fool's Moon? A: A friend was interested in one of my game worlds, and helped start the company to see that game get published. Funny enough, it never did -- the project was just too big, so I wound up writing other projects instead. I still want to get back to it though, just need to break it down into smaller chunks.   Q: What was the first game you got published? A: Technically , my first game to ever sell was a wrestling game I wrote in the 1980s and sold off to a friend for $10. I've considered writing a third edition of it some time, maybe when I stop trying to write every other game under the sun. However, my first actual published game was Fox Magic in the early 00s.   Q: Tell us about Fox Magic, and what inspired you. A: Fox Magi...

 So, what's stronger?  Corruption or Purity? A trope I've seen often is that a region gets corrupted, the heroes come in, they destroy the corruption, but there's always some 'seed' of corruption that gets overlooked, and it spreads, and you have to deal with it all over again (Fern Gully's an excellent example).  Or, you defeat the corruption, and someone carries it within them.  Or whatever. It's like ... you can't just have purity. There's always got to be something . Which makes it feel like corruption is stronger than purity. (Another trope is 'I've cast this zone of purity, but the corruption's too strong, I can't keep it up!') I want to see the flip side of this.  Proof that purity is more the 'natural state', and as such the natural state always wins out in the end.  Without having to use outside influence. A corrupt zone with the manifestation of purity someplace, that slowly drives out the corruption and overtake...

I don't believe any given class should be inherently 'evil'. Sure, a majority of the people who take the class can be evil - I get that, but the class itself? Let me give you a pair of examples. 1) An Assassin. They only kill the corrupt and vile. They won't take a job to kill someone who doesn't deserve it, and they won't inflict 'collateral damage' (such as staff, guards, etc), unless it's in self-defence (and even then, prefers non-lethal methods). Their purpose is to ensure those who believe they're above justice face justice. They're doing the same thing hired adventurers might do, only with a lot less death involved. So, evil? 2) A Necromancer. They act as a go-between between the living and dead, act as a psychopomp, helping the dead find peace, eliminating undead, helping families grieve, and helping the ill or frail to pass on without pain. They're not raising undead, defiling graves, sucking the life force out of people, or an...

I'm going to begin with the following statement:  One is not inherently better than the other, they are simply different, and I have my preferences. This is not an attack on either style of RP, but just my thoughts on the subject matter. That out of the way, I like crunch. I like detail. I don't write games with a lot of crunch, because I'm casting a wide net - I want to write games that are easy for children and adults, and which allows you to put as much detail into the game as you want. The ASPS engine can be a streamlined, simple game with a focus on narrative play, or it can be resource heavy and detailed if that's your preference. The soon-t o- be-released Keepsakes (was Widdershins ) is incredibly simple, because it's supposed to be an all-ages game. But yeah. I want a game where poison is lethal, you need to keep track of that stuff and prepare for it. I want a game where if you're out in the wilderness, there's things like exposure , and you could ...

Because of a new RPG coming out that (if I recall) has a wheelchair available for PCs, the entire discussion about wheelchairs in a fantasy setting has come around again.  Here's my stance on it: It isn't a problem. People are making excuses, though.  Who'd want to adventure with someone in a wheelchair? How would they navigate dungeons?  Why do they even have wheelchairs, when magic can fix everything? Here's the thing. Not everyone has the ability to choose their course in life.  Not everybody has access to 'magic' that can fix everything.  And it's amazing what one can do with good friends who are willing to give them a hand. Dragonlance is a good example, in fact, with Raistlin.  Why didn't they dump his anemic ass and get a 'real wizard' to help them out?  They didn't.  Because he's a friend.  Oh, how about Charles Xavier of the X-Men.  You know there's skads of people in the Marvel Universe who could fix his legs - but he doesn...

Greetings! Let's talk about world building. While the mechanics of an RPG are important ('how the world functions'), the world building -- the setting and all its moving pieces -- need to be just as solid for immersion. There are plenty of 'generic' RPGs out there (Tiny d6, GURPS, Fantasy Age, FATE, Savage Worlds, etc) which can lay out how the world functions through mechanics, but most such games lack when it comes to building the world you're going to be playing in. Then you have games which lay out a world, but it is perhaps the most vanilla world that you'll ever see -- there's nothing fresh and unique about it.  Or it's just shallow, and any differences are superficial. (Of course, Dungeons and Dragons is a huge example). So what makes a setting interesting? Here's a few things to consider: Culture -- what cultures exist? How do they interact? How long have they been there? Religion -- what pantheons exist? How do they interact? How do they...

  Magic and Technology Don't Mix I've heard this many times, and I don't believe it. The conceit is that, since magic exists,  there's no reason for technology to advance. After all, magic does it better, does it easier, does it faster. Sure. Except that's not even remotely true. How much teaching does it take to get even a modicum of skill in magic? How much does it cost to get trained? Where do you need to go for that training? How many years to get good ? What are the restrictions on spell casting? Do you need to register to be a mage and be allowed to cast certain spells? How long to learn the proper spells? Sure. Developing certain technologies may take time, but the thing about technology is that it builds upon itself. And once something's been developed, it's not too hard to learn the foundations. For example? Steam technology existed in ancient Greece. They started doing all sorts of interesting things with steam. Given time and peace, who knows wher...

One of the greatest books (in my opinion) to come out of 3.5 was the Tome of Battle (aka the Book of Nine Swords). In essence, it destroyed the idea that martial classes should be perfectly mundane, and put them solidly in line with the spell casters of similar level. If you were from one of the classes in the ToB, you were giving fighting techniques which allowed you to do more than go 'I hit it with my sword'. Because in most circumstances, regardless of how you describe a fighter, it all boils down to 'I hit it with my sword'. No amount of poetic license is going to give you any real benefits beyond, 'I roll to hit, I do damage'. ToB fixed that. You had stances, which did different things, and you had maneouvres, which augmented your attacks and gave you nifty things to do. This was sort-of brought over into 4e, and while I never played 4e, I could see the DNA of the ToB in it. The thing is, they didn't put it into 5e.  Not really.  And they really should...

Here's a hot take for you. If a game ends with a TPK it doesn't necessarily mean... the game was bad. the encounter was 'too tough'. the GM was a bad GM. the players were bad players. that someone made a mistake. that the GM should have fudged. The nature of gaming has changed significantly in the last fifty-five or so years, and the nature of the games themselves have changed with it. While you have those people who insist that D&D is a 'wargame' because of its roots, you'll see them in the same breath talk about how the story is important, and how GMs should fudge dice rolls or ignore results (or even monster blocks) for a good story. I find it a touch hypocritical, but whatever. It seems the expectation is that a 'good campaign' is one where the characters go through it, grow and evolve, have their dramatic moments, and typically see the story to the end -- they face the bad guy, there's a conclusion, plots wrap up, etc. Me? I see that as ...

Balance Balance might be the #1 thing talked about in gaming when you go into game theory and play. We talk about balanced rules, balanced parties, balanced encounters... Here's the thing. Mechanical balance isn't possible. Not really. Not without harming the game itself. Because for true 'mechanical balance', you need to have the mechanics control the decisions that the players make - right at character creation. It needs to control the choices players can make in an encounter. It needs to control the choices the characters make in the setting. It needs to control the choices the characters make as they level up. What gear they get. What bonuses they get. Who they encounter. What they can get from each encounter. What they can gather out in the world. The characters get pushed into smaller and smaller boxes, with less and less choices, all in the name of 'balance'. And what this does is make the character sheet really bland, and the mechanics really bland. You ...

One of my favourite things about roleplaying games is that as a game master I will never be able to predict where the campaign will go. The players are quite good at surprising me -- they decide where to go, they decide what to do, and because I give them free reign, they can go on tangents I never expect. For example? I had the PCs encounter a young green dragon disguised as a bandit - she charged 'protection' from anyone who goes through her area, and utterly destroys anyone who doesn't pay. So what happens? One of the PCs negotiates. They pay the tithe, but he offers to make her business 'legitimate' with the local city paying her for the safe passage of anyone going through, and the utter destruction of any threats that are coming through. Being an artificer, he's offering to craft her some things to help her, and to keep in touch with her in case she ever needs help. ... not something I'd expected. In a friend's campaign, the group is supposed to be...

Saw a post on FaceBook today, by a GM asking other GMs how to get the PCs to actually engage in combat -- the GM was upset that the players were going for non-combat solutions to their encounters. Personally? Let them have their non-combat solutions. If the PCs are anti-murder hobo, why not let them? Another GM wondered at hearing the players drive the story, and responded with, "what, I should just suck it up? My desires don't matter?" That's a pretty raw take of the situation, so here's my thoughts: 1) The GM's desires matter at the table. However... 2) The players drive the story. And their desires matter to. And what you need is equilibrium. You want combat? Sure, put in combat. There's some people who just don't listen to reason - they're there to have a fight, and trying to talk them out of it pisses them off more. Go for it. But if the players don't want combat? Then hold back on the combat -- let them have their roleplay. This is a role...

You've heard the stories many times before. The land is corrupted and foul things rise up to torment humanity. A dark god rebels and spawns evil beings across the land. An evil sorcerer crafts an artifact that twists all who use it. Cool, fine, we've been down this path thousands of times. But why not the other way? A land blessed and divine things rise up? A god of light descends and spawns angelic beings across the land. A good priest crafts an artifact that guides others to the light? Consider the Story of Garg and Moonslicer But how would this be a 'bad thing', you might wonder? Where's the conflict that will drive the story? Well, that it needs to create conflict isn't a given. Not everything has to cause people drama and angst. But if you absolutely must -- it's unbalancing. A land with such an abundance of prosperity draws the attention of nations that don't have such benefits, and that can lead to war. Or you have a population that think they kno...

There's a game called Kuro   that was released some time back. It's a futuristic posthuman J-Horror game. It's got cybernetics, genetic engineering, and the kind of horror you can only get from Japanese films. It was a very interesting setting for a tabletop roleplaying game. And it stopped at three books, because 'the story had been told'. Except it hadn't. It ended the story when the PCs came into their full capabilities, and then stopped. It told the game master about how the event could have spread to other countries -- but didn't go into any detail.  Sure, you know what Japan is like within this time frame and setting, but it tells you nothing about what the rest of the world is like. This has often been my beef with RPGs that focus on a culture or country and tweak it into something new. They either ignore the rest of the world, or simply allude to it and leave it alone, so that if you want to have the characters go elsewhere, it's up to the GM to ...

"I'm not here to coddle my players." "I'm not here to protect their feelings." "I'm not here to be their therapist." To me, that's shorthand for I don't have empathy, and don't care about my players. A good game master wants their players to have fun. Which means being acutely aware of what a player can and can't handle. Which means listening to the players, listening to the tone of their voice, and watching their body language. The goal is to make sure the players are enjoying themselves, and that means being acutely aware of your table. Does that mean the game master has a bit more work? That they need to put a bit more effort into the game? Yes, it does. But those steps should be automatic for the game master - it should be second nature to be aware of your players and how they are feeling at the table. And it means knowing your player's triggers. There's a reason there's a lot of talk about safety and lines and v...

A group rides down a road.  On either side is farmland, peasants working the fields. There's an inn near the village, and in the distance is a walled city, with a castle in the centre. The group sees wagons with barrels, or hay, there's carriages carrying those of status, and people lug around wheelbarrows, ploughs, and farming tools. Yep.  That's medieval fantasy. But where's the fantasy part? A lot of world building for fantasy games completely ignore the fantasy aspect when it comes to actual civilization. Sure, there's elves, and dwarves, and dragons, and orcs, and wizards and priests. But ... civilization doesn't seem to acknowledge that the very presence of magic and monsters would fundamentally alter how civilization would be changed. Some anime are taking this into account now -- magic items to mimic things we'd see in the modern day and age (the 'magic microphone to broadcast in arenas' being a good example, flying podiums, teleportation gat...

Let's talk Superman. And as part of this discussion, let's look at it through the lense of roleplaying as well. Because I think that the issues people have writing for Superman are possibly the same issues game masters have with powerful characters. A bit over a decade ago, I wrote a piece concerning Superman on io9 (back when it existed), and I think it's still relevant in this day and age -- and especially when it has to do with gaming. Which any number of game masters complain about power gamers and min-maxers, and yeah, it's the same issue.  First, I'll post the article (with a little editing), and then I'll get back to this.

So, story for you. TL;DR: GM has to deal with two players who are hyper-prepared, take pages and pages of notes, and actively uses everything at their character's disposal to get their goals accomplished in a way that crushes any thought of opposition by the sheer force of temporal power they can bring to bear to satisfy their schemes. I was at a table with a group of hard-core players, and a GM who didn't know what he was getting into. Two of the players kept extensive notes on everything that happened in the game: names of NPCs they met, deals and oaths made, people they saved, and damn near wrote a portfolio on these people. If we wound up going to the same town / city, they'd touch base with these people, cement ties, do favours, etc, etc. Me? I was like 14. I was not ready for this either. I was just along for the ride. Well. One day, the players tell the GM 'we're going to stage a coup'. The region we were in had a tyrant ruling it, and the PCs decided the...

Sometimes, the Heroes lose. Sometimes, the Heroes lose horribly. Not every threat encountered is meant to be defeated with violence - or is ever able to be overcome with violence regardless of how 'good' the group is. Not every threat can be negotiated with. Not every threat can be avoided. And this doesn't mean the GM is being malicious, or 'out to get the players' -- yes, there are game masters like that, but that's a different problem to discuss another time. No, this is the game master showing that - no matter how good the PCs are, there is always something out there bigger than them. A good GM gives warnings -- signs that things aren't right.      You come across a village - one that's not on any maps. The colours are grey, the people fidgety and you see strained smiles when you walk in.  One comes up to you, all smiles.      "Think happy thoughts," he says. "Only happy thoughts. Keep any angry thoughts or sad thoughts or anything els...