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Eow Links 41 |
| 2021-10-09 |
Eow Links 41
"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 41.
For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.
Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a RPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.
My favourite post is The Elusive Shift: A Review in Quotes, my second favourite is Death And Dismemberment Table just below. Not many words this week, I'm on the road, in some Laconia.
. The player rolls 1D6 to determine the location of the wound.
. If the character has a hit point total that is negative, then the negative score modifies the severity roll.
Not just a Death and Dismemberment table, but also rules for healing.
To this end, I have an expedited process for new PCs for my games: (...) This reliably takes less than 5 minutes and is very simple to deploy
We're here to adventure not to build.
Does it make the game more interesting than simply using the System Zero instead?
I did this translation of an article by Jérôme Brand Larré that I found super interesting about TTRPG System Zero and the Shadow System. It's now up on Lapin Marteau's website (Jérôme's TTRPG publishing company).
HP bloat in old-school systems
So, maybe the problem is not HP bloat, but everything bloat; HP is higher, but damage is also higher, and more powers are available.
Making Hex Flower Game Engines? Tell me about them?
I’m always interested to see what people are doing with Hex Flowers (HF)
So versatile.
NPC mannerisms: d66 animal-folk attitudes
Sparked by a twitter poll by Macca the DM asking "Do you include anthropomorphic animals in your #ttrpg games?" I was surprised to see such support for animal-folk.
A Review of "Dave Arneson's True Genius" from the Internet Archive
The name of Dave Arneson is not as well known, though, and that is a shame. I knew of him, but not as well as I perhaps should have.
Even if you charge for your work, or perhaps especially if you do not, the feedback is often worth more to creators. Simply knowing that you breathed something into existence and someone, even if only a few, found it worth or simply said a "Thank you" can mean success to creators.
Go watch Secrets of Blackmoor, might learn a thing or two.
Zero to Zero – running 1st level D&D one-shots
It’s really not that deadly, if done right, and while players don’t have quite as many options as they do by 3rd level, they do have options in the right place. For me, 1st level one-shots come down to three things – Support, Survivability, and Stakes.
The Elusive Shift: A Review in Quotes
Let’s take a short walk through the text in quotes I found fun and flavorful.
My pick:
“I don’t object to role-players as much as I object to the use of role-playing as an excuse for not thinking, or worse, thinking of ways to do the wrong thing.” -Slimak, 1977
Over time, way too many feats. This happens to almost all RPGs though. People want more options and eventually those options ruin the game. And they're hard to ignore.
Why not? Time wins, everything goes old.
skill specificity; in which I come full circle
See, Mickey sucks. He’s below average in every stat but intelligence, where he’s perfectly average. He’s not gifted by birth at anything — he’s weak, he’s slow, he’s got a nasty cough that won’t go away, he dropped out of high school, and his parents were nobodies. But on the other hand, that’s a lot of information!
Mickey will have to do.
FKR posts on Darkworm Colt: orientation
For those of y’all who are new to FKR and/or to my blog, I’d like to provide you with a few links to blog posts of mine that I think are helpful to understand what FKR is.
See "Arneson Gaming".
Those Xaosseed 2-24 Tables, could they be used for modulated scar tables?
I had some good fun creating this table based on last week's Hidden Depths Table by Xaosseed that I'm linking it here anyway. Forgive me this second self promotion link.
There are two ways of playing Burning wheel; one relies on consensus-based decision making and respecting the sanctity of the characters, whereas the other has more focus on challenging the core concepts of the characters and unpredictable, perhaps unwanted, story outcomes.
