Fool's Moon Entertainment

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 ...