James Raggi, who is one of the judges for our Design A Dungeon Room Contest,recently posted his outline for a presentation on Old School RPGs. After reading about how some bloggers were feeling excluded from the “Old School Reformation” (OSR) community of bloggers, I thought I’d take a look at how our current game compares to James’ outline:
Random Character Generation — No! Diceless character generation.
Character Backstory Optional, Perhaps Wasteful — Yes/No. A little is needed, a lot is not.

Focus on Player Skill, Not Character Stats — Yes! Or rather …

This is a list of the articles about rules for our current game that have been published so far on the site.
As we continue to add content I thought it would make things easier to have a single page that links to all of the articles I’ve written about the Weird West game, as well as any of the older articles with custom rules we’re also going to be using.
The Weird West game started out with Swords and Wizardry as a reference, although as more material is added the game is …

I like game mechanics which are in some way evocative of whatever they’re trying to represent. In many tabletop RPGs there’s a tendency towards using the same type of game mechanic for everything, which has the advantage of making the game easier to learn, but at the same time gives a ’sameness’ to the mechanics regardless of the type of situation.
Probably the most popular types of dice mechanic in RPGs would be:
2) Find a target number, add modifiers, roll a dice, add modifiers, compare modified target number to modified …

The more I look at the non-combat Psionic Disciplines from the AD&D Player’s Handbook, the more I’m starting to like them. It’s familiar (D&D) but since I’ve never used these rules before they seem new and interesting. What’s more, they have a slightly different feel to them than what you get earlier in the book with the regular spells.
I mentioned in the comments to the Psionics – First Thoughts post that they make me think of Psychics and Bene Gesserit more than Magic Users. Taking that a step further… …

Something I don’t see many people writing about on RPG blogs very often is building on or improving the Psionic system from AD&D. That’s probably because, truthfully, it really is a horrible mess.
Thematically I never felt it fit well with the “Magical Medieval Europe” tone we always used for playing Dungeons & Dragons. Lately though, I’ve been seeing a lot more Sci-Fi, Weird Fantasy, Sword & Planet and even our own Weird West versions of the classic roleplaying game from Wisconsin. I can see Psionics fitting in nicely with many …