Don’t get me wrong: I love fantasy roleplaying games. After all, I do write a blog about Dungeons & Dragons. But I also believe that fantasy, and D&D in particular, is not without its problems, some of which can be fixed, or at least mitigated. In this article, I plan to run through four issues … Continue reading Four Problems with Fantasy
Ubisoft I have recently been playing through some of the Far Cry games, and it occurred to me that much of what makes the series distinctive could also be fun in a D&D campaign. On the face of it, this might be surprising. The Far Cry games are first-person shooters: D&D is a collaborative fantasy … Continue reading Far Cry in D&D
How do you determine your character’s ability scores? According to the Player’s Handbook (page 12), the default is to generate them randomly. You roll four six-sided dice and record the total of the highest three, six times (‘4d6 drop lowest’). Other options are point buy (technically a variant rule) and taking the array: 15, 14, … Continue reading How to fix 4d6 drop lowest
Monte Cook Games Yesterday evening, my friends and I played a Cypher System one-shot. None of us had played the Cypher System (or Numenera) before, although all five of us have experience of roleplaying games generally. Two days previously, we had agreed to try a post-apocalyptic genre: dystopian London in the near future, with a … Continue reading Review: the Cypher System in Play