Just had what I thought was an interesting insight in the difference between skill checks and saves: With skill checks, you pay cash to get the information or narrative advancement. No success, no info/advancement With saves, you pay credit for it. You get the information, but need to determine whether you were seen, heard, left evidence of your own, dropped or broke a piece of equipment, &c
I hang out with some fine folks who enjoy Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a whole bunch. Equally enthusiastic among its three editions: first, second, and fourth. When Ben Tobbit announced a new Mörk Borg-derived system called Black Power and Brimstone with a Free Quickstart, comparison to WFRP and The Old World was guaranteed to follow. Now, many of our conversations around WFRP center around how much are folks playing WFRP the system vs.
Every game provides a mechanism to determine the success or failure of a character’s actions. Whether testing abilities, skills, saves, attacks, dodges, or senses, all these boil down to: “Do I have better, worse, or indifferent odds of accomplishing what I’m trying to do here?” And so, every roll in a game is a Luck roll. All that changes from situation to situation is the fictional positioning of the character (Luck favors the prepared, after all).
After stewing on the previous incarnation of Journeyman, I decided to strip it down to the bone and build it back up to something I think is a light, extensible, and expressive framework that can support any number of settings and genres. I had a few guiding principles. It needed: A consistent way to resolve tasks when randomness is needed. I wanted to avoid minigames and multiple, sometimes inconsistent, subsystems for different aspects of the game.
I’d like to introduce you to a homebrew system I’ve been working on recently. I call it the Journeyman Engine, and it comprises elements steals liberally from some of my favorite Odd Borg Hack games. I was hoping to create a lightweight system that supported rich and flavorful character concepts with enough knobs, buttons, and levers that interacting with the world would be fun but not a burden. Resolving risky actions Any time your character is going to try to do something risky, you’ll roll two dice, applying any appropriate modifiers, and compare the total against a range of outcomes:
In June of 2020 a group of folks gathered to produce and sell a book of single-spread adventures with the intention of sending proceeds to support a bail fund for protesters targeted and jailed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. My son Lex and I wrote an adventure, and I’m releasing it now on itch as Pay-What-You-Want. It’s a short dungeon crawl through an ancient holding taken over by mysterious verdant growth.
I recently started getting more interested in Ironsworn as the engine for some solo roleplaying. But instead of running in the quasi-Medieval Ironlands setting, I wanted to try a modern urban horror game. Based on some recommendations and feedback, I chose to use the new Starforged system, just removing the starship and exploration aspects, and modifying some of the assets and tables in play. For setting and mood, I chose the modern world of Kult: Divinity Lost 1 and set my story in a fictionalized version of Richmond, Virginia.
In preparation for this blog, I thought it might be wise to talk about some of the games I ran or played in 2021. The year started off strong as we were still in the throes of COVID’s first lockdown and vaccines weren’t yet available. I was playing RPGs roughly five nights a week with a good mix as GM and as player. As summer approached and the world seemed to be waking up a bit, sessions dropped to three or fewer times per week.
New Year, New Blog “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” - Plato “Now is better than never.” - The Zen of Python I know in my work life as in my private life, I’ve caused myself a lot of suffering by overanalyzing the beginning of something. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, my RPG hobby resurrected in a big way. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two years thinking about what makes gaming fun for me and hopefully for the people at my table.