| April 18, 2013 | Posted by Scott Martin |
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” (Leslie Poles Hartley) The Invisible World I found a recent post at Datastories.in very interesting. It’s a post titled, Of Visible and Invisible Luxuries. There’s another distinction here that’s useful – between what’s ‘visible’, and what is ‘invisible’. We treat some of the infrastructure of our daily life as so important, as so critical, that we barely notice it – it’s like the air we breathe and we don’t think of these things as…
| April 18, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
We’ve entered the Stew for consideration in the 2013 RPG Site of the Year Awards, and if you’ve got 10 seconds to spare I’d like to ask you to vote for us. There’s no registration required; just visit this page, scroll down to the poll, select Gnome Stew, and hit Vote. Today is the only day Gnome Stew is eligible for votes. The way the SOTY Awards work several sites are posted each day for voting, and the single highest vote-getter advances to the final…
| April 15, 2013 | Posted by John Arcadian |
My last article was about the trope of mind controlled characters. Reading through the comments and seeing the many diverse options and attitudes towards mind controlled PCs, I can realize where there are narrative moments where it can work but that it is still a very tricky subject. So here are 5 tactics I wrote up (or grabbed from others’ ideas) that can help prevent mind controlled PCs from causing issues. 1. Limit Damage One of the biggest complaints that I’ve heard…
| April 12, 2013 | Posted by Phil Vecchione |
I hate to kill characters. I am not opposed to it in the right dramatic circumstances, but for the most part I do not like killing characters. That flies in the face of my old school upbringing, and likely came about by the arbitrary deaths of some of my favorite D&D characters in my youth. Regardless of the reasons, I don’t like to kill characters. When this problem came up with a well placed rocket attack in my Underground game, it made me think that…
| April 11, 2013 | Posted by Don Mappin |
It recently occurred to me during the course of play in our current Hunter game that one of my Disadvantages–much to my horror–had not been used after roughly 8 sessions. My character is “Unlucky,” which is to say that once per session a roll–at the Storyteller’s discretion–should have its difficulty increased by one. So who’s responsibility is it to remember these character facets? Honestly, I had forgotten, but I’d certainly put the onus upon the GM of the game in question. So, here are some…
| April 10, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Jesse Butler of Calico Games offered me an advance copy of Short Order Heroes, his combination light RPG, character creation supplement, and spontaneous NPC creation aid, and liking how it sounded I accepted his offer. It’s on Kickstarter for $20, with more cards possible if stretch goals are met. It’s that last use — NPC creation — that interests me, and that I think is most likely to interest Gnome Stew readers. I’m a sucker for anything that lets me quickly develop characters, like our…
| April 9, 2013 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
Ever notice how, in RPGs that grant PCs advantages and disadvantages, PCs tend to use their advantages all the time while rarely being hindered by disadvantages? Most games I’ve run that use some version of disadvantages (or drawbacks, flaws, negative feats – you get the idea) implicitly give creative players ways to ignore them. Some players may select disadvantages that aren’t really disadvantages at all (e.g. the impulsive, overconfident bully) while others select disadvantages that rarely affect their characters (the one-eyed barbarian that has a…
