A Butterfly Dreaming » Philosophy and Rants

Adding Fear to Your Game

Scott — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:45:15 +0000

…Okay, obviously, my last plan didn’t quite work out. So, rather than tempt fate again, I’ll just say I’ll post when and as I’m able, and leave it at that. Moving on… Happy Halloween. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday, I thought I’d say a little about fear in your game. Maybe you’re [...]

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Adding Fear to Your Game

Pathfinder Sells Out

Scott — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:45:51 +0000

According to Paizo, as of Monday, their Pathfinder game’s core rulebook has sold out its first printing. Now, this is mostly distributor orders — not actual sales — and there’s no indication of how large the first print run is. Still, it’s a pretty impressive accomplishment. I suspected that the initial sales would be very [...]

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Pathfinder Sells Out

What are the Best 4e Ability Score Arrays?

Scott — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:20:35 +0000

I’ve been following an interesting thread about 4e ability score arrays at ENWorld. Poster 77IM calculated all of the possible arrays on a 22-point buy, and posted the list. Turns out there are 121 unique arrays, in case you were wondering. Then the analysis began. Poster Jurph isolated the arrays that give the best overall [...]

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What are the Best 4e Ability Score Arrays?

“No, Wait…”

Scott — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:34:37 +0000

There’s an interesting thread at the Giant in the Playground forums that deals, in part, with retracting an in-character action. (As a side note, if you’re not reading the Order of the Stick comic at GitP, you really should. There’s a lot of terrific gaming humor there.) Among the questions the original post poses is [...]

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“No, Wait…”

Deep Psi

Scott — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:27:56 +0000

Side note first: I fixed a problem that might have been keeping comments from working correctly, so if you’ve tried to leave one lately and failed, you should be able to now. On to the main post. Recently, I decided I’d try a subscription to Insider. Although I didn’t see a lot of purpose to [...]

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Deep Psi

4E from One Year In

Scott — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:55:39 +0000

Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons is a little over a year old now, and I’ve been playing or running it for almost exactly a year today. On the whole, I’m finding it a pretty robust system. It’s not my favorite system, or even my favorite D&D (that would be Cyclopedia D&D), but it’s become my [...]

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4E from One Year In

Foxbat for President: Sacred Cows and Hamburger

Scott — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:00:40 +0000

Sacred cows make the best hamburger, or so the saying goes. When it comes to RPGs, they tend to provide grist for the mill. There are sacred cows aplenty in rules systems, of course. That’s one of the reasons why we have edition wars: change anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it might be, [...]

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Foxbat for President: Sacred Cows and Hamburger

The Rules Gap

Scott — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:06:57 +0000

In my experience, people who play D&D — and roleplaying games in general — have two ways of looking at the rules. Some try to make their games fit the rules. Others try to make the rules fit their games. Tales of the Rambling Bumblers touched on this in an excellent post about two months [...]

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The Rules Gap

Developing Roles

Scott — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:23:46 +0000

Last July, I originally published a piece about how classes in fourth edition D&D now serve to define a role, a set of abilities, rather than a specific archetype including flavor text. In other words, how the Ranger, the class, is not necessarily the ranger, the guy who runs around in the woods making friends [...]

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Developing Roles

Defining Roles

Scott — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:35:29 +0000

(This is a reprint. This post was originally published on July 30, 2008. I’ll be touching on the subject again — and on how it’s changed thanks to the new books that have come out since I first wrote this — in the near future.) Over at All Your Dungeons Are Belonging to Us!!, Donny [...]

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Defining Roles