Playing Over Google Documents

Posted: May 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Campaigns, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Fluff/Inspiration, Homebrew, Legacy D&D, Meta, Online Gaming, Other Hobby, Other Systems, RPG, Warhammer 40k | 1 Comment »

I have had fairly strange interests in RPG games. My first roleplay experience was when I was ten at a freeform play-by-post forum. When I learned D&D 3.5, I was 14 and had nobody to play with. So I played it over MSN Messenger with some friends. Since then I’ve played a lot more maptools, chat games, and play-by-posts than real life stuff. I’ve always liked running the game with text. I think it lets you do some fun story stuff that you couldn’t do around a table because people don’t have the text they can go back to, manipulate, or take their time with. The way I play takes more time than a normal game, but I enjoy it, especially because I have limited time to allot to running games over Maptools or Google Hangouts. I can play more leisurely. Google Documents has been a big help hosting play by post stuff for me. So I thought I’d briefly discuss how I play on it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Expedition RPG News and a bonus

Posted: May 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: D&D, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Expedition, Fluff/Inspiration, Homebrew, Legacy D&D, Meta, Other Systems, RPG | Leave a comment »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Expedition Beta: Errata Post

Posted: April 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Expedition, Homebrew, Other Systems, RPG | Leave a comment »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

RELEASE: Expedition Beta

Posted: April 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Expedition, Fluff/Inspiration, Homebrew, Legacy D&D, News, Other Systems, RPG | 2 Comments »

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.

Deathwatch House Rules

Posted: April 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Dark Heresy, Deathwatch, Homebrew, Houserules, Other Systems, Rogue Trader, RPG, Warhammer 40k | 1 Comment »

I’m running a Deathwatch campaign for some of my friends. While I really love the Deathwatch system, there is a set of rules that have always bugged me about it – the Medicae rules. You see, to apply Medicae, you roll a skill roll and then heal your Intelligence bonus worth of Wounds from an ally. This is simple enough, but then it gets weird. At the end of each battle, you are treated as having one Injury worth the wounds you took in that battle (basically). You can only use Medicae once, against each “set” of battle-wounds. Whatever you don’t heal in that battle, goes into a category of treated, yet unhealed wounds, that my friends call “phantom wounds” that sticks around, unhealable, for a while. It’s really clunky, and it doesn’t heal enough. You could be taking some pretty nasty wounds from enemies – there’s tyranids out there doing like 1d10+18 damage with every normal, ordinary attack they make. And they can be making tons of attacks too.

Given that my friends and I dislike (and barely understand) these Medicae rules, and that we love the Space Marine video game, and the Dawn of War series, where Space Marines are more heroic and tough, we decided to house rule healing in Deathwatch to be more like these games, particularly Space Marine (the third person action game from Relic). Here’s the houserules I came up with, and which they approved of, and that we’ll be using in our game from now:

Read the rest of this entry »

Expedition Design Diary: Let’s Make Magic (Together)

Posted: February 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Homebrew, Other Systems, RPG | Leave a comment »

Expedition has a magic system. It’s a little bit more complicated than the rest of the system is, in order to add flavor and variety, but not by all that much. In the last post I generated a character using (preliminary) versions of certain Titles and Perks. That character ended up with a Magic Level of 3. In Expedition speak, that means:

Magic Level

Magic Points

Max Spell Circle Known

Benefits

1

5

0

+2 to Willpower checks.

2

6

1

You can Surge spells once.

3

6

2

Learn 3 Spells immediately.

Hey, free spells! Isn’t that nice. Let’s take a brief look at magic and spells in the new Expedition.

Read the rest of this entry »

← Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 584 other followers