Infocyde's RPG Blog

Option Four: Revising Hit Points Inspiration :  Games with a lot less hit points Reason :  Simplification Rule Description: Having a lot of hit points causes a lot of unnecessary number crunching in my humble opinion.  It prolongs combat, often in high levels turning fights into slog fest.  Also have a large amount of hit points puts things out of scale in my opinion.  There should be a vast difference between a well seasoned night and an untrained peasant in how well they do in a fight.  But having a level 20 knight be equivalent hit point wise to 50 zero level peasants I think might be over kill.  By reducing the range of hit points in the game things speed up, combat is quicker, and the fear of death increased a bit for players.  It also changes the game to be a little bit more low fantasy instead of high fantasy due to real threats of death (which I like, high fantasy in my opinion is just supers with magic). Most zero level characters s...

31 Questions about your RPGing Experience.  The idea comes from the Crypt of Rabies blog [ LINK ] which in turn got the idea from [ HERE ].  I say we a lot because most of my gaming was when I was younger with a certain group of friends. I'm old now but getting back into things. I hope you read mine and Crypt's answers and then answer the questions yourself! 1. What was the first roleplaying game other than D&D you played? Was it before or after you played D&D? For me that would be Gamma World, which is pretty much D&D in a post apocalyptic setting.  Gamma World was the first game I ever bought with my own money as well.  We played it off and on when I was younger, but never seemed to get much steam with a campaign going.  Starting up again now that I'm older and loving it. 2. In what system was the first character you played in an RPG other than D&D? How was playing it different from playing a D&D character? For me that woul...

You didn't think this blog was going to be exclusively about pen and pencil RPG's did ya?  I still harbor delusions in life about making online games some day, so I like to keep my finger in the pot. Tobold's Blog had an interesting read on the two types of subscription models used for online RPG's, Free to Play and Subscription [ Link ] The skinny: Go free to play...get 'em in, get 'em hooked, get 'em road blocked every so often, and then get a few bucks from 'em to get just enough to get around that road block.  Have compulsory buys everywhere...but leave a little hope that someone can still be successful in the game w/o dropping any cash in...the carrot on the stick.

The poster on facebook is running the above type of campaign, and wanted some ideas on how to include Kaiju (giant monsters like Godzilla) in the campaign and how characters could best be empowered to deal with Kaiju.  I didn't answer the question per-se, but came up with a plot seed that I thought might be of some use to some so I'm sharing it.  Due to time constraints I'm just going to copy/paste my responses for now...have fun! Nuke them while they are in the undersea caves and most vulnerable...but be warned, sometimes there are unintended consequences. Just look what happened with the White Rose Yakuza op to take out Rodan that happened off the Coast of Fukushima on 2011/03/11...you can never be too careful. Consult with nuclear and geological experts first, and not just the local hacks down at Chozan University!! Always!!!! Worst is Rodan got away too...and now the [whatever organization the characters secretly work for] is going to have to do the job themselv...

I've never used this software, but it looks interesting. http://pcgen.org/2013/12/23/pcgen-6-02-00-released/ PCGen looks like it mostly supports D20 type games, but is modifiable.  It looks like PCGen is just starting to add in character generation for non D20.

Bad Santa: An Adventure Concept for your Mutant Future or Post Apocalyptic Game So I *might* be running a game session tonight, I'm kind of the back up guy.  We will have possibly three GM's present, and I'm probably 3rd in line.  But as one looks like will be a no show and the other is new, I figure I better have at least a concept of an adventure setup.  So for a quick and dirty set of ideas I used the Beast & Barbarians Golden Edition adventure idea generator to generate some broad concepts for an adventure, and then applied them to a Mutant Future setting.  I also wanted to have the adventure Christmas/Holiday themed.  So here goes. Back Story The party is friends with a mutant settlement that relies on a semi-working robotical farm for food.  Some kind of robotical unit snuck into the village and stole the nuclear power cell from one of the main CPU that controls the farm.  A scout from the village tracked the bot's path into the ru...

Steve ran a campaign in the D20 supplement known as " The End ".  It is the Biblical apocalypse with a twist.  "The meek shall inherit the earth" means that some people will be left behind after the tribulation and the sheep and the goats are separated to their eternal destinies.  Those left behind are the "meek" and have to deal with an earth transitioning from the past to something new...and the apocalypse elements are still present...supernatural beings, animals that have lost their fear of man, and a rapidly changing landscape.  Human survivors are few and not always friendly. Here is just a recap of what has happened so far. Our party meets at at the remnants of a local gun store and plunders it Our party sends a few people to scout out a local supermarket that is mostly looted. Some food is found but an unfortunate altercation happens and two people who may have been just looting like we were for survival end up being killed by a member of our...