Recent content by robowieland

Stalker and Roadside Picnic are both mentioned as inspirations by the creator. I didn't mention them because I am not familiar.

One of the long standing pearls of wisdom about role-playing games is that there is not a winner. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey in these games we love. The point is to tell memorable stories of heroes, villains, triumphs and tragedies. Designer Raph D’Amico’s The Zone focuses on a...

It’s wild to see how far computer games have come in my lifetime. Modern RPGs can be like a Hollywood blockbuster full of realistic graphics, branching storylines and romanceable characters. When I was a kid, most of these games were text adventures where half the challenge was figuring out the...

If they work like they do in more recent 2d20 releases, traits can raise or lower difficulty by one if they affect the die roll. So if the scene has the darkness trait and you're trying to shoot someone, it's going to be a higher difficulty. But if you're trying to hide from someone it will be...

I will not miss the challenge dice. I've only ever liked them in Fallout and Achtung Cthulhu which are games that are much more tactical. A lot of these systems were part of Dreams and Machines. I like how stress is a flip on how Fate does it: it assumes you are out if an attack hits you. You...

There's not much in the way of direct alternate hooks in the text. That space is taken up by fostering discussion between the players about their character's childhood friendship that summer and how everyone was connected when Ossie died. The idea here is to let the players figure out why they...

I think this is all part of the session zero discussion if you are using this as the campaign kickoff. Plenty of time for players to voice railroading concerns and the table to figure out a setup that works for everyone. If it's a con game, well, you only have so much time to play and you are...

Convention adventures are built to highlight the cool parts of a role playing game. In theory, they are made to make the players wander over into the dealer hall and pick up the main rulebook. They have lives beyond this original purpose. They can be taken home and played with friends as a break...

The core book and the Kang campaign are also available via Kindle though I can't speak to how they look in that format. I think that we will see a shift as more players use digital tools like DDB and Nexus that phones will be part of the experience rather than distract with cat videos.

Nobody's prefect. My main beef with the no PDF policy is how it hamstrings one of the game's main strengths. I should be able to ask everyone at the table who their favorite Marvel character is, print out those profiles and jump into a game.

They did recently release Revenge of the Super-Skull on PDF. Hope springs eternal.

It’s been about 10 months since the Marvel Multiverse Role Playing Game officially released. It seems to be doing well with a ranking on ICV2’s 10 ten sales chart and a hotly anticipated X-Men Sourcebook hitting on the heels of a revamp of the classic animated series. While Marvel Heroic...

Game worlds like Warhammer 40,000 operate under a double edged sword. On the one hand, the world of Warhammer has decades of lore and history to discover. On the other hand, mountains of information can be intimidating for new players to figure out where to start. The key for an introductory...