“The first living creature is like a lion, having six wings, and full of eyes around and within it.” “You behold a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns on his heads.” “Locusts rise out of the smoke; their shape is like horses prepared for battle. On their heads…
Category Archives: Commentary
For about a week now, a document containing what appears to be a forum conversation has been floating around the web. It purports to be a discussion by people who have had access to the Wizards of the Coast D&D Next initial playtest. I thought I’d weigh in on this thing. However, since most of…
I’ve been doing some research for a future post. In the meantime, though, I thought I’d make available some of what I’ve gathered so far. There are a few interesting things to find in the data.
A caveat for all readers of this post: I haven’t read Monte Cook’s blog. I don’t spend much time on forums. The majority of my knowledge of “D&D Next” comes from seeing an ad on Wizards of the Coast’s website, and the editorial spew covering much of the gaming blogosphere. It’s my turn to spew.
Most of Intwischa’s best traffic is sent to us by other gaming blogs, and several bloggers have been kind enough to provide commentary or links to one of our articles (and, by extension, grant us a traffic bump). With that in mind, I’d like to share with you five articles that I bookmarked from the…
There seem to be two opposing tendencies in role playing game design. Some games choose to add lots of mechanics for crunchy bits of detail. Others try to simplify the rules by making them more abstract. Unfortunately, the same tensions that seem to pull games in one way or the other also seem to be…
Between the three of us, we’ve probably written about Bryan’s cabin trip game ad nauseam by now. However, I’m going to risk another reference here, because it was a great example of an important aspect of story telling: the character arc (or “character growth”). Unfortunately, I think it’s one that often gets overlooked in our…
Most of Intwischa’s best traffic is sent to us by other gaming blogs, and several bloggers have been kind enough to provide commentary or links to one of our articles (and, by extension, grant us a traffic bump). With that in mind, I’d like to share with you five articles that I bookmarked from the…
Adventure stories that fuel roleplaying games often focus around people who can change the world. From the starship captain to the prophesied return of the king, we like to tell and participate in tales of epic proportions. However, this competes with the egalitarian concept of player balance. RPGs generally try to balance player ability according…
When I talk to non-gamers about role playing, it always strikes me how mystifying role playing games (RPGs) are to them. Thinking about it from their point of view, though, RPGs really do seem pretty foreign if your current concept of a game is chess or Monopoly. Just about every role playing game book has…