Tag: theory
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GM Toolkit – Central Place Theory
Sometimes something hits your brain like a pile of bricks. I lurk on mastodon far more often than I ought to, but this post actually paid dividends. Now, thanks to ACOUP I was already familiar with the idea of cities needing hinterlands (and those being often omitted in modern media), but I was struggling to…
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Against the Universal Skill Check
I have a love-hate relationship with skill systems in RPGs. On the one hand they provide several systemic benefits and allow for more character customization than class-based games. On the other they can often feel underwhelming and don’t always work well as typically implemented. I would like to examine the downsides of skill systems, and…
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Multiparty Processing
Let’s suppose that a GM wants to run multiple parties in the same world. They have two parties A and B which play on different days weekly. Let’s say Tuesday and Thursday for the sake of example. Everything goes well until the following scenario happens: Party A goes to dungeon X and ends the session…
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Anti-Canon Worldbuilding
Anti-canon is a response to the Tolkien style of worldbuilding typically emphasized in fantasy fiction. It is a rejection of the creation of a world with a complete history, rigid geography, and rigid boundaries. Anti-canon instead sets out to create a world which changes as stories are told in it. While the world is consistent…
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Character Components
Over the last few months on break from running campaigns, while tinkering with homebrew and pawing through games I have come up with a theory that a TTRPG character can be broken down into four-ish essential components: fiction, statistics, perks, and items. Fiction is the part of a character which has no connection to the…