Roll Some Dice

So in looking over [CLASSIFIED] and thinking about it in terms of this contest, I realized that it's rather... well, needlessly crunchy. There's some nostalgic crunch in there, what with the separation of stats and skills and skill categories, and the way your base rating with a skill is determined by adding two stats together, and the fact that the number of skill points you have available to spend in a given category's skills is dependent on adding another two stats together, and so on. The simplest solution is to ditch the stats altogether, and just have skill categories ( Areas of Concentration , or AoCs -- an obvious nod to Top Secret 's Areas of Knowledge) and skills ( specialties ). The AoCs are Combat , Academics , Technical , Athletics , Subterfuge , and Interaction . Your rating in an AoC is the base rating for every specialty that falls under it, so if you have a 12 in Combat, all of your Combat-related specialties are also rated at 12 by default. I was...

Hola, amigos! I know it's been a while since I rapped at ya, but you wouldn't believe what I've been going through lately. First of all, I lent Ron the Festiva for a beer run last week, but he got pulled over on account of a busted tail light. I'd totally forgotten about it. I'm not even sure I knew about it in the first place, since it's in the rear and I never see it back there. I don't know how it's legal to give a guy a ticket for something he can't even see, but that's the pigs for you. Anyhow, turns out the vehicle registration expired two years ago because I never got around to renewing it during the Christmas rush of '08 when I working at the tree lot, and that plus a few bogus unpaid parking tickets meant they impounded the old girl right then and there. I had fifty bucks' worth of scrap metal in the back seat, too. That's the last time I ever let Ron drive stoned. No, seriously, none of that happened. I'm just a Jim An...

Lately I've been way into tables. I'm not sure why. I used to love Rolemaster , almost specifically for its weapons tables. I dunno -- I really appreciate games where you can just look at the dice and know everything you need at a glance, but tables still have some weird allure for me. I wrote (and have used) a random adventure generator for Legends of Anglerre , Leftovers ' random Horror generation tables are one of my favorite things in the game, S.O.S. relies heavily on a table for all task and conflict resolution, and so on. Anyway, in keeping with that, here's the main table -- the effect table, or whatever I'll end up calling it -- from my in-progress Simian Circle contest entry. I'm not claiming it's totally original (it unintentionally shares some points of commonality with ZeFRS , BASH , and FASERIP , apparently -- not that there's anything wrong with that), and there's certainly more to the mechanics than just this , but I am totally in...

Welcome to the end of 2009! Hope everyone's looking forward to 2010. I'm pretty jazzed about it, because I'm going to put out at least two games next year. I let myself down in 2009 by not making meaningful progress on Twists of Fate , and I don't plan to repeat that in the new year. 2010 will see the release of Leftovers and... something else -- if not Twists of Fate , then one of the other projects I've been working on, like the S.O.S. (Sorta Old-School) RPG . That one's been going on behind the scenes for months now. However, I'm really digging this other game I'm doing for Simian Circle's d10 contest , so maybe that will take precedence. I dunno. S.O.S. is about three-quarters done, barring playtesting, so it's hard to say. I also have a few board and card games in development, which is a little surprising in light of the fact that I hardly ever play board or card games. The point is, stuff is happening, and that's cool. In the meant...