Category Archives: RPG Sketches

Half baked RPG ideas, served fresh.

Steve’s Combat Skill Challenges for D&D4e

Posted on December 6, 2010 by admin

So tonight, we faced the red dragon that’s been our behind the scenes antagonist for the last year of the campaign. The dragon was really too powerful for us to defeat; the idea was that we were going to hold…

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4e Hack: Power Points

Posted on November 29, 2010 by admin

Today featured a kickass fight in my buddy Steve’s D&D4e game. My warforged ranger, Cinnabar, is 10th level and rocking some nice power combos. But if you play 4e you can’t help but look at your sheet toward the end…

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Fast Darkness

Posted on November 23, 2010 by admin

Found this perusing my old Livejournal. If I remember correctly I threw this together in response to the Microlite craze. It’s a a neat game sketch; some of its ideas eventually found their way into the Mage Chroniclers Guide. Anyway,…

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System Sketch: Console Dice

Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin

I love The Force Unleashed series because I like Star Wars, superheroes, and video games that cater to people bad at playing video games. So I whipped up a quick game system based on a console controller layout:

  • d6es are

…

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Old School Dice Pool Class Sketches

Posted on July 30, 2010 by admin

So, more sketches related to the Old School Dice Pool concept I’ve been playing with. (You need to read those to understand this.) Designing character categories is neat because you break out subsystems, see their common trends and end up…

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More Old School Dice Pool Shenanigans

Posted on July 28, 2010 by admin

I’m still thinking about that OD&D and Chainmail inspired dice pool system from the other day. Let me add a few rules:

Exploding Dice: I resisted it, but it looks like I’ll need it to help characters deal with long…

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Gary Gygax Invents Dice Pools

Posted on July 25, 2010 by admin

Over the past week I’ve been thinking about Chainmail and OD&D, as well as the late Gary Gygax’s mention (in an old ENWorld thread) that he used an opposed hit dice rolls to resolve grappling. I’m an Old School skeptic…

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Here, Have the Alpha of the Supers Game I’m Running

Posted on June 20, 2010 by Malcolm

This is the superhero game I’m going to run. It owes a lot to S. John Ross’ RISUS but with enough modifications to be its own thing because I have no sense of humour.

Creating a Character

Purchasing Traits at

…

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An Impractical Idea: Cyberpunk via Hard Drive

Posted on February 20, 2010 by Malcolm

I was going through some old hard drives with an IDE/SATA to USB converter (thanks to Stew and others for advice on this) and the feel of it — seeing/hearing/feeling a chunk of weighty metal rev up thanks to the…

Posted in Electronic Games, Online Games, RPG Sketches | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Mage: The Dirty Version

Posted on September 2, 2009 by admin

You got me.

Mage: The Ascension still seems to have some legs in fandom. I haven’t done much thinking about it for a while. I haven’t played it since running “Judgment” for the Ascension book and have been pretty happy…

Posted in Mage: The Dirty Version, RPG Sketches | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments