Posted: May 12, 2012 | Author: Dennis N. Santana | Filed under: Expedition, Fluff/Inspiration, Meta, Other Systems, RPG |
I had a bit of a discussion on twitter about this with someone, so I thought I would clarify some of this subject. However I would like to preface this with one of my philosophies when I make my games. I make a lot of elements in my games that are open to tweaking or interpretation. I don’t want to create a game where I’m always an infallible authoritative voice on everything therein – there are games which do that, and which do it much better than I can because they have R&D and Q&A departments and bunches of designers on the project. In Expedition some rules are clear-cut, like what the Perks do. Those rules don’t change or warp from GM to GM or player to player. Other rules are meant to be more open-ended, and to give players a shot at, in essence, writing their own small rules with each character. Potentials are one such rules element that’s open-ended. They’re really flexible because they’re supposed to be traits and skills that define your character. If I wanted them to be a closed skill list, I would’ve written a closed skill list (and I did, as an alternative rule in the same section).
So when you read the following, I hope it makes you think, rather than just immediately take it as the Word of God.
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Posted: May 3, 2012 | Author: Dennis N. Santana | Filed under: D&D, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Expedition, Fluff/Inspiration, Homebrew, Legacy D&D, Meta, Other Systems, RPG |
I’m working on a sample adventure for Expedition soon that will hopefully give you something to start with on creating your own adventures with the system. If you’re already familiar with fantasy games of any stripe, you can use adventures from other systems, and things you’ve learned from building adventures for other systems, in Expedition. I intended Expedition to be a game where these kinds of narratives can be ported over without great shock. Things like Skill Challenges from D&D 4e, or the merciless dungeon crawls of AD&D, or even some of the gimmicks from newer Pathfinder Adventure Paths, can be interpreted as Expedition adventures with some time spent converting the monsters, and a little imagination for porting the challenges.
You don’t have things like definitive spells, so if a module requires a spell to be cast for something then that might seem like trouble brewing, but you can turn those into Favors or just have players engage in Events using their Potentials to solve those problems. I think you’ll find the game can be very flexible about these things.
Expedition’s been downloaded 167 times now. A friend of mine is planning a campaign for his players, and Shaun Welch has created a character on his Gnoll’s Den blog. I’m pretty excited about it all! My time for running my own games is limited so right now I’m just planning to play with some friends, but hopefully I can inspire you to try out the game in your own way.
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Posted: April 25, 2012 | Author: Dennis N. Santana | Filed under: Expedition, Homebrew, Other Systems, RPG |
AS OF MAY 17: ERRATA RED FLAG! THERE BE ERRATAS AHEAD
In the process of making a game, a billion things could go wrong. I could’ve given the Dragon 750 health instead of 75. I could’ve written a non-sentence that rambles unendingly down five pages, thought I’d deleted it, and it’s still actually wedged there. I could’ve misplaced a gender pronoun, and I could’ve suggested that by consuming ganja, characters could restore all of their health as a non-action, leading to pot-smoking hippiezards dominating the game. This post is the traditional errata post, where mistakes are corrected, where horrors are unveiled, where insults are leveled at the author from positions of nigh-impunity. This is where the magic happens. Post all the errors. Post the things that might be errors but aren’t, they’re just that crazy. Post the things that aren’t errors that you still want to see changed in some way.
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Posted: April 25, 2012 | Author: Dennis N. Santana | Filed under: Expedition, Fluff/Inspiration, Homebrew, Legacy D&D, News, Other Systems, RPG |
Well, it sure has been a long time coming, hasn’t it? Here it is. Not much to say – it’s the fantasy game I’ve been making. It’s the fantasy game I’d like to play. I was once a huge 4e fan, and now I’m lukewarm on it, but that introduced me to all kinds of other ideas and games, and inspired me to try to make my own happen. This is the culmination of a lot of work and thought for me. It’s 90 pages, it’s got some goofy ideas. It’s mostly a game for me, but I hope you enjoy it too. And as in every other part of the process your feedback is definitely appreciated. You’ll see in this game vestiges of practically every other game I’ve made and declared fallen over the years – Copper Coins!, High Score, and NAA D6. Not Incongruent Future though. I’m sure that’ll disappoint some people. But you can’t have that kind of power in just every game! Anyway, enjoy. As usual with my limited resources and expertise, this is a rather bare-bones affair graphically, but it does have PDF bookmarks, hyperlinks, page numbers (I didn’t forget them this time!).
MEDIAFIRE: http://www.mediafire.com/view/?zldy90g8gqehabg
HOSTED: Coming soon.
Posted: January 26, 2012 | Author: Dennis N. Santana | Filed under: Expedition, Homebrew, Meta, Other Systems, RPG |
Hey, Expedition is not dead yet! In fact, I’ve gotten a lot of good work done!
(No release date yet, but nearly all the character bits are complete. The GM and Monster sections will, as usual for me, be more complicated to serve. I’m shooting for a spring release of the playtest though.)
A long time ago I wrote an RPG called NAA D6. It was fairly playable if a bit esoteric in places. I liked a lot of the rules of that RPG, and since getting out of that minimalist rut I’d thought to trap myself in, I’ve brought back some of those rules. But today isn’t really about that. Instead, I’m going to post the “tutorial chapter” called “Character Generation Steps” which will summarize the character generation, then post a few examples of what you’ll be looking at in some of the sections. There will be no commentary on it, because I feel I’ve more or less exhausted my design commentary at this point. We sort of know the general goals here by now, and it feels like in each of these post I try to find a fifth leg on a cat for something to say. So here we go.
WARNING: Sword Girls visual spoilers at the end of the post. (Like you care.)
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