#RPGaDAY 2016, Day 18: Using Relationship Maps

by ThomasNo Comments

This question is spawned from the IndieGameADay thing, which pokes fun at ((I’m being charitable.)) #RPGaDAY with questions such as

  • What kind of shit-fit did you throw the last time someone tried to schedule your convention game in a ballroom like you’re playing fucking Pathfinder or something?
  • What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card? and
  • What is your fondest memory of a game you thought was fun before you knew better?

But they had a really interesting question for day 2 — once you take out the snark — about relationship maps which was What game created your most elaborate relationship map? How much of it did you actually use?

Well now!

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#RPGaDAY 2016, Day 17: Preferred Method of Character Advancement

by ThomasNo Comments

Character advancement feels like an arms race: as our protagonists get uniformly stronger with cooler stuff, I’ve got to start bumping up the opposition. We start off in a cyberpunk dystopia battling biker gangers for turf and — if we want to stick with that storyline — soon we’ll be seeing go-gangers that just happened to be flesh-form Wasp spirits, jacked up with move-by-wire 2, using dikoted monofilament whips, just to provide a hint of challenge.

This leveling up of skills and abilities and attributes, in my mind, comes from the early days of D&D play. Remember wading through six levels of suck until we could do anything? And then the next six levels were all scope creep: instead of wearing burlap and waving pointy sticks at goblins, we’d have to be dealing with much more powerful villains to vanquish.

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#RPGaDAY 2016, Day 16: Keeping Track of NPCs

by ThomasNo Comments

Another question from Tracy Barnett, “How do you prefer to keep track of your game’s NPCs and characters?”

When I’m in a face-to-face game, I use index cards (which should be on sale right now at the beginning of the school year), but I used to use a binder. For online games, I use a word document.

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