The ongoing conversation
Undo sounds simple until there is more than one person at the table. If I take back a move, whose move was it? Does the other player agree? What happens to the line of play we already explored? Those questions are easier to answer if analysis is separate from the live game. Imagine a chess-like […]
A saved game should let you continue making questionable decisions from where you left off. It shouldn’t give you a fresh board and pretend those decisions never happened. In my Goblin Slayer work in Tabletop Simulator, setting up the cave and loading a game in progress have different jobs. Setup can arrange the cave tiles; […]
Getting a sorceress into a board game involved learning Lua, baking textures in Blender, and explaining to an AI assistant that “Add one kill per Hero Stone” was an important distinction. I adapted Goblin Slayer, a board game by Rich Carlson and Iikka Keränen, for Tabletop Simulator. It gave me a concrete reason to learn […]
This is another self-challenge: the lycanthrope template in Pathfinder allows it to be applied to any humanoid creature within one size category of the base animal. So how big to Pathfinder animals get? There are a couple of Colossals—the great white whale from Bestiary 2, the blue whale from the Skull & Shackles Adventure Path […]
Troll trouble by John Bauer. A fantasy illustration (public domain). As I was knocking around some character ideas and checking out the Prestige Class options, I noticed that the Paths of Prestige‘s Storm Kindler had the unusual prerequisite “Must worship a god of storms.” (This is unusual in that it’s not codeable in PCGen, for […]
So this was, perhaps, my 18th consecutive Gen Con; I believe my streak started in 1995. This year, as last year, I boothed for IELLO Games USA. I had many friends among the nearly 50,000 attendees, a few of which I actually managed to have conversations with, but others whose presence I was only aware […]
Back in August, Reaper Miniatures had an insanely successful Kickstarter campaign to launch their “Bones” line of plastic miniatures. By the end of the campaign, the add-on stretch goals were enough to entice even me, who’s never painted a miniature before, to get in on it. And then the penultimate stretch goal was Kaladrax Reborn. […]
Another of my GURPS books made the jump to PDF from e23: GURPS Monsters can now be yours in instant download from: Warehouse 23 It just went “live” on April 25 and has been selling briskly, as far as my experience goes (which is not very far, admittedly). Enough so that in that handful of […]
Sam: I mean how much for the whole thing? Coach: Oh, six hundred bucks Sam, but the salesman said, the salesman said satisfaction guaranteed. Sam: Or …? Coach: Now, that would have been a good question. I was reminded of that clip from Cheers when reading the rules for The Resistance. They include a restriction […]
Another article resurrected from my previous website. This was intended to be an article for Pyramid magazine, but was too dry or too long for acceptance there. I’ve never updated it for GURPS 4th Edition. (Perhaps playes of that system could tell me what would need to be changed.) for GURPS 3rd Edition rules Witeout was pretty […]