Role-playing

Updated January 10th

"A shattered world. A thousand floating islands. A constant glow of madness. Sundered Skies begins where every other world ends.

The people of the Skies survive, tested by an unimaginable apocalypse, struggling daily against ravenous beasts, sky pirates, and the effects of the inescapable voidglow! But the fate of the Skies is in danger! The magic of the glow is not the only taint in this unforgiving realm. Dark forces conspire to bring the Skies to the brink of an even greater catastrophe. Can you survive long enough to discover the secrets of Sundered Skies?"

So, this problem keeps coming up again and again in various forums dealing with the loved and, for the most part, forgotten system from West End Games, D6 System. The problem is the presence of the "Wild Die" that was introduced in Star Wars 2nd Edition. As usual, there isn't a whole lot of grey space in this debate... or shall we more accurately say "Love/Hate".

I created a small perl script that takes in the number of iterations and the number of dice that are part of the roll and outputs the list of target numbers that were rolled, how many times they were rolled and what % of the rolls do they represent. The script takes into account the result of the Wild Die. I settled on 1,000,000 iterations as it seemed to give a consistent sample response when run several times.

The year is 2060. Welcome to the Shadows. Corporations are now extraterritorial nations in their own right. Deniable assets are the name of the game as corporations lie, cheat and steal from each other in games of oneupmanship. Magic has returned to the world and with it, chaos. Magic's return has reawakened many things, including trolls, orcs, elves and dwarves from amongst the normal humans.

I’m standing on the edge. The brink of eternity, staring out at the vast nothing that is before me and the long and distant nothing of the landscape that extends off to nowhere behind me. I’ve been here before many times, but something about this time feels different. Just one small step forward is all it would take to go from standing on the edge to plunging down into the nothing that yawns open before me. Turning around again, careful not to lean too far in any direction I stare back at the landscape behind me that led to this place. The reddish-tan ground is covered in random patches of low, dry scrub, struggling to eek out an existence in a place that receives little water.

This weekend I got a chance to play in a demo of a new RPG game, Houses of the Blooded. What makes this RPG different from most others on the market is that it is a cooperative narrative RPG with the mechanics designed specifically to allow the players to directly add or alter the game world. That's right, the players can actually narrate a change to the story that the GM can just roll into the game.

Updated October 18 I wanted to get a dice tower/dice boot for use in at least one of my current RPGs (1st Sunday of the month Shadowrun 4th Ed Missions), but I couldn't find one at my FLGS as the item was apparently out of production. I started to dig around on the Net and found a few places that either had instructions for modifying the Chessex Dice Boot (covering the acrylic with felt) or making one from various kinds of wood that one can find at hobby stores like Michael's.

The great thing about having a Friendly Local Gaming Store (FLGS) with a decent game room is that other players are willing to come in and Demo various game systems. This weekend I got a chance to try out Savage Worlds (SW), the current game system from Pinnacle Press. The game system is designed to be a generic/universal type gaming system for use in any number of settings from Old West (ala. Deadlands Reloaded) to Pulp-like settings (ala. Slip Stream).

Updated: Aug. 23, 2008

I got a chance to play in a small tournament of the Star Wars Miniatures this past weekend. I’ve gotten minis from various sets over the past few years for use in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (D6, not D20). I put together an army together (Imperial) and headed off to my FLGS. Eight other players were there that day and we each got to play three matches each with ones success in one game determining who they would play in the next. I lost each of my matches, but still had some fun. The interesting thing was the players that came out on top were all using smaller armies of more expensive and rare (or very rare) army units. This isn’t really surprising to me as that seems to be the case with almost every collectible game (card, minis, etc…).

I got a chance to play in Worldwide D&D Game Day this past Saturday. I arrived at the Game Depot (my FLGS) and went to the table I was assigned to. We all introduced ourselves and then selected our characters from the pre-built choices. I picked the rogue and went looking through the character sheet provided with the figure. A lot of what I saw on the front side of the character sheet was familiar to me from older editions of the game. The same 6 attributes are still on the sheet and continue to use the same modifiers that were first introduced in 3rd Edition. Initiative and AC are calculated the same way as in 3rd Ed, but the saving throws are gone.