This week in our links roundup, we look at posts focusing on the balance of story elements and mechanics, and why D&D Next may or may not be a holy grail. We also congratulate The Id DM on his Stuffer Shack ‘Site of the Year’ award, as we learn from his self-admitted failures and explore…
Tag Archives: Character
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…
Steal This Idea: Fringe Season 4 “Steal This Idea” is an ongoing series in which an element from the media is examined for use in games. These articles will provide a basic description of the scene in which the element occurs is necessary to introduce the idea for gaming, and hooks to use that idea…
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…
It’s been some time since my first Group Template post, and we’ve had a bit more experience with their use. I’ve watched us use them well, and watched us use them badly. In this post, I hope to provide a few additional words of advice on how to use this awesome tool.
It seems only fitting that I eulogize my first-ever D&D character today, on a Tuesday, given that he appeared in my infamous Tuesday games with Aaron many moons ag0. Ashram Ket was a Druid, and my only character I ever played in AD&D 2nd Edition. It’s been a while since his demise, so I had…
Sometimes, when I’m interested in learning more about a game system before I buy it, I’ll check out “Actual Play” podcasts. These, as you might have guessed, are recordings of people playing the RPG in question. One of my favorite sites for these is rpgmp3.com. In fact, it was one of their community podcasts, that…
Team Intwischa has another cabin trip coming up. This trip will present the post-penultimate (the way folks in academia say “last”) adventure of “The Krystoran Quest for Purity”–an adventure in a Middle East-type setting featuring characters from a variety of castes. The quest has us searching for many things: personal redemption, a disgraced Sultan, and…
The recent case of Jerusalem Jax generated some discussion here at the Intwischa office. Not quite the lengthy philosophical debate that kicked off the White Crown quest, or our ongoing argument about who’s the best Batman. However, Matt’s response to that question of my greedy character’s alignment really brought things into focus for me: Alignment…
Faithful readers have encountered the exploits of the ambiguously-aligned Jerusalem Jax and the born-of-luck Ailmar Ploughman, two of the PCs in our recent Pathfinder campaign. Both these tales mentioned the Rev. Dr. Abraham “Doc” Wallace Kilgore, Esq., although I will note that neither got his name right. What you haven’t heard is how “Doc” Kilgore…