I've been enjoying the "Tex Talks battletech" historical overviews and sketches at the Black Pants Legion youtube channel [https://www.youtube.com/user/BlackPantsLegion], and more recently, the playthrough - with commentary - of the HBS Battletech game by Tex as the story of Scrombles the Mechwarrior. It's a game that - despite my not liking the PC dressing applied to the campaign, is a faithful interpretation of a game I've loved for decades. Funny as hell, but it reminded me of what is likely…
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A while back I was invited to a group that was playing Divine Right on VASSAL several times a month - and we went out of our way to not only play the game, but over time, to figure out the ways to break the rules, and to find the edge cases. It is a game worthy of repeated play and attention, with every faction needing a different playstyle to win - and every faction having a chance. As a result, I enjoyed this interview over at Dev Game on the origins of the game and how it was built…
Bradford Walker recently penned an article titled "You Suck at Using Lore in Your Games. [https://bradfordcwalker.blogspot.com/2020/10/my-life-as-gamer-you-suck-at-using-lore.html] " In it, he excoriates infodumps and dwelling on the background the GM created: > Let me tell a truth born of 36 years in gaming: common gamers don't give a fuck about lore. They don't care because those responsible for communicating relevant information to the player(s) routinely fail to do so, and then get surpris…
A few odds and ends of catching up. First - Eric Raymond posted this a while back, but looks at the moral justification of Kyle going out in times of civil unrest [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8752] as not only "not wrong", but a duty. > That is, all males of military age who are or intend to become citizens of the United States are under federal statute the “unorganized militia”, and have the duty of the militia to defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic…
The other day I delved deeper into the T5 rules by showing how to develop a character [https://thelastredoubt.com/traveller-5-thoughts-and-characters/]. Yes, it came out complicated. Or is it? Let's step back a bit. The original classic Traveller character rules came from the era of Moldvay Basic and AD&D, but they had a different focus. D&D is class-based: you rolled your stats, chose a class compatible with those stats, and noted down the associated bonuses. You only had a few significant c…