Comments on: Back to the Primordial Swamp of RPGs

By: J Parr

J Parr — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:57:46 +0000

Rolling for a race is not a great idea, it’s not even a particularly mediocre idea, but it does have one element of usefulness. It can encourage people to expand their horizons a little. The “I’m always an elf mage” or “I’m always a dwarf fighter” kind of thing. OK, odds of 1 in 10 are pretty poor in this case but it it the only thing I can think of that is positive.

As for Traveller, you could always ignore the death roll part. It was only a mechanism to try and stop you getting OAT’s (Old Age Travellers) that were skilled up with everything going. Imagine it:

“I’ve got Pilot-10 but I can’t take off because I can’t find my glasses.”
“OK, gauss gun – check, battle armour – check , zimmer frame – check.”
“I’d like my OAT starbus pass please.”
etc.

By: Michael Orton

Michael Orton — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:51:14 +0000

Well, that certainly doesn’t float mine either.

Careful though, your own character generation system feels very like “Traveller” at times. Except of course that in Traveller your character might not survive to start the first real game session.

GMs who forget that they need players more than the players need them end up without a campaign very quickly.

By: Daniel M. Laenker

Daniel M. Laenker — Sun, 06 May 2007 20:51:26 +0000

So apparently the lesson they learned from White Wolf wasn’t that characterization matters to a lot of people. No, it was to use a d10.