Thanks to everyone who entered our Design A Dungeon Room Contest, and a special thanks to all the people who helped out with the judging!
It was a lot of fun seeing the different entries come in, and the wide variety of approaches to a “Dungeon” adventure that they represent. Some people focused on Traps & Tricks, others interesting NPCS, and some on challenging combat scenarios. We had entries for a range of different types of games from “Old School” D&D and Tunnels & Trolls, to 4th Edition D&D.
With more …

Before I head out with my homemade RPG book to read in public, I wanted to remind everyone that today is GM’s day. This means that a lot of RPG publishers are having sales, like RPGNow which has 25% off hundreds of different titles. I think I might get the PDF of The Dungeon Alphabet which I’ve been hearing very good things about.
Of course the reason for today being GM’s day is that it was two years ago that Gary Gygax passed away.
In addition to all the books …

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 …