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	<title>Robertson Games</title>
	<link>http://robertsongames.com</link>
	<description>Board Games, Role-playing Games, Miniature War Games</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:57:19 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>The ABCs of Why Things Are Added To Games</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Yesterday&#8217;s post about Designing Game Addiction in the 21st Century brought up some interesting discussion around ways in which people find games enjoyable and when something is fun, work, or just a mind-numbing distraction.
This got me thinking about why game designers choose to add elements to a game.  What makes someone decide adding some new rule, system, or component will make a game better than it currently is?
Here are some of my thoughts on the topic. Despite the format, I&#8217;m sure there are other reasons I haven&#8217;t included and ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/the-abcs-of-why-things-are-added-to-games</link>
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		<title>Designing Game Addiction in the 21st Century</title>
		<description><![CDATA[In a recent interview with The Escapist, Andy Collins and Liz Schuh from Wizards of the Coast talked a bit about how their game designers looked at a variety of other types of games for lessons, the &#8220;most obvious&#8221; being online games like World of Warcraft.
This seemed like a reasonable approach to take, after all a lot of people who&#8217;re playing a D&#38;Desque MMORPGs might enjoy a D&#38;D RPG as well. Doing things to make the game more familiar to someone with a background in playing online games would seem ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/designing-game-addiction-in-the-21st-century</link>
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		<title>Design A Dungeon Room Contest Winners</title>
		<description><![CDATA[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 &#8220;Dungeon&#8221; adventure that they represent. Some people focused on Traps &#38; Tricks, others interesting NPCS, and some on challenging combat scenarios.  We had entries for a range of different types of games from &#8220;Old School&#8221; D&#38;D and Tunnels &#38; Trolls, to 4th Edition D&#38;D.
With more ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/design-a-dungeon-room-contest-winners</link>
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		<title>Today is GM&#8217;s Day</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Before I head out with my homemade RPG book to read in public, I wanted to remind everyone that today is GM&#8217;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&#8217;ve been hearing very good things about.
Of course the reason for today being GM&#8217;s day is that it was two years ago that Gary Gygax passed away.
In addition to all the books ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/today-is-gms-day</link>
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		<title>School&#8217;s Out</title>
		<description><![CDATA[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 &#8220;Old School Reformation&#8221; (OSR) community of bloggers, I thought I&#8217;d take a look at how our current game compares to James&#8217; outline:
Random Character Generation &#8212; No! Diceless character generation.
Character Backstory Optional, Perhaps Wasteful &#8212; Yes/No. A little is needed, a lot is not.
 
Focus on Player Skill, Not Character Stats &#8212; Yes! Or rather ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/schools-out</link>
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		<title>Weird West Rules Reference</title>
		<description><![CDATA[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&#8217;ve written about the Weird West game, as well as any of the older articles with custom rules we&#8217;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 ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/weird-west-rules-reference</link>
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		<title>Holtzman Shield Generator</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I like game mechanics which are in some way evocative of whatever they&#8217;re trying to represent.  In many tabletop RPGs there&#8217;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 &#8217;sameness&#8217; 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 ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/holtzman-shield-generator</link>
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		<title>Bene Gesserit Sisterhood</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The more I look at the non-combat Psionic Disciplines from the AD&#38;D Player&#8217;s Handbook, the more I&#8217;m starting to like them. It&#8217;s familiar (D&#38;D) but since I&#8217;ve never used these rules before they seem new and interesting. What&#8217;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 &#8211; First Thoughts post that they make me think of Psychics and Bene Gesserit more than Magic Users.  Taking that a step further… ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/bene-gesserit-sisterhood</link>
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		<title>Psionics &#8211; First Thoughts</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Something I don&#8217;t see many people writing about on RPG blogs very often is building on or improving the Psionic system from AD&#38;D. That&#8217;s probably because, truthfully, it really is a horrible mess.
Thematically I never felt it fit well with the &#8220;Magical Medieval Europe&#8221; tone we always used for playing Dungeons &#38; Dragons. Lately though, I&#8217;ve been seeing a lot more Sci-Fi, Weird Fantasy, Sword &#38; Planet and even our own Weird West versions of the classic roleplaying game from Wisconsin. I can see Psionics fitting in nicely with many ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/psionics-first-thoughts</link>
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		<title>Aiming and Evasion Reloaded</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Thanks to everyone who posted comments on yesterday&#8217;s article on Aiming and Evasion!  They seemed straightforward, but Jeff Rients and Kensan Oni rightly pointed out that it didn&#8217;t make statistical sense to give up an attack one round to make a single attack with a greater chance of hitting in the following round. It would always be a better idea to attack in each round.  While I think situations like a sneak attack could use yesterday&#8217;s aiming rule, you aren&#8217;t keeping track of combat rounds before combat begins ...]]></description>
		<link>http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/aiming-and-evasion-reloaded</link>
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