“For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.” – Edgar Allan Poe
This is my gaming blog, where I share my thoughts on roleplaying games; partly in the hope you may find them useful, partly because doing so helps me frame them clearly. It may help if I explain why I run games the way I do…
Neither my players nor I have a lot of free time, and we prefer to use it gaming the exciting parts of adventures rather than in reading background information, learning new rules, or taking inventory of characters’ possessions. This means I have made a number of deliberate design decisions to reduce the learning curve for everyone.
- We use simple rules, most often Savage Worlds. The acid test: If you can’t fit a viable Player Character on a 3 x 5 index card, the game is too complex.
- We stick to the core rules as far as possible.
- Settings, monsters, and NPCs are stereotypes, drawn with broad brush strokes.
- We gloss over time spent travelling or resting up between encounters – we jump-cut from scene to scene without even a montage, just a caption that says “The Ruined Temple of Anubis, three weeks later.” This makes maps relatively unimportant; the characters may spend hours poring over them, but that doesn’t mean we have to.
- Characters are assumed to carry, use and replenish mundane supplies like torches, trail rations etc. as necessary, in the background. You don’t run out of ammunition or water unless it’s dramatically appropriate. (I spent 40 years managing resources for a living, and I've had more than enough of it.)
- Players are encouraged to focus on developing their character rather than accumulating equipment; the true hero needs only his weapon and his wits to prevail.
All of this leads to a pulpy, action-adventure feel to my games; in videogame terms, they are more like co-operative First Person Shooters than RPGs a console gamer would recognise.
