I love coming up with an elaborate character backstory. I suck at remembering it in play. Thus, my character sheets end up a study in marginalia: scrawled near the top of the sheet is the reminder that this character is characterized by a wise laziness and always seeks the most effective path of least resistance….
Tag Archives: FATE
I didn’t realize this until reading a review of Tomb of Horrors, but a problem I’ve had with D&D 4E (and, to a lesser extent, 3.5E) is “overlapping skills.” In other words–the phenomenon of two or more characters both trained in the same skill who get in each others’ way during skill checks. This was…
My name is Charlie. I’m a mechanoholic. It’s true. My disease compels me to pursue the best mechanical benefit in any situation, regardless of whether my character would actually do the thing or not. I can resist mechanics-driven impulses when playing games like FATE or old-school D&D knockoffs, but when I start playing 4E, all fiddly…
This is the second post in our series on The Value of Systems. Each post will look at a different RPG system and evaluate it based on what it does well, what it doesn’t intend to do, and possible tweaks to extend the system to cover what it doesn’t intend to do. We are not…