Samantha Patri's Blog

I might be a bit old-school.  I started gaming in 1984, give or take. Cut my teeth on Palace of the Silver Princess, picked up Call of Cthulhu as my second ever RPG, and then ended my AD&D experience with Throne of Bloodstone before I moved on to other games in another part of the country. I understand the idea of "fail forward", and I understand the intent. The GM wants the PCs to make it to the BBEG, and doesn't want the road there to be blocked. The GM doesn't want the players to fall to 'accidents' and crappy dice rolls along the way.  No, I totally get this. And in some games, sure.  Okay. But not every game. Here's the thing for me. If the hazard isn't actually hazardous, then there's no point to it being there. Some GMs may talk about 'tension' or 'dramatic scenery', but I'm fine with doing that as background, not as a 'threat that isn't really a threat don't worry about it'. If you're in a swordfi...

One of the strangest curses I ever gave to a PC was the "you succeed" curse. The specifics of this went something like this: If it's a Dexterity/Constitution/Strength Check, you succeed. If it's a Saving Throw, you succeed.  If it's an attack roll, you hit, and the target dies. Immediately. If it's a game of chance, you succeed. What it didn't cover:  Social Skills and Abilities.  Those do not succeed automatically, and the player needs to roll. The player, of course, loved this. Initially. You can dungeon crawl, and evade every trap, pass every saving throw, and slaughter everything in a single go. Hey, what's not to like? Except that the other characters start giving the character the stinkeye. Go into town, gamble, win everything. The NPCs start giving you the stinkeye. You get into a fight in the tavern - every single blow you land kills.  Whether you want it to or not. The bodies pile up, and the city guard are called. You can evade them easily. O...

 ... we're here for the giant monsters fighting Was watching the new Godzilla anime on Netflix (Singular Point), and briefly had a talk about the fact that the first few episodes were about the people, without a single kaiju battle taking part (well, okay, there's something adjacent to it, but you get the point). Much like how Godzilla vs King Kong had a strong human element before the kaiju battle, or the human element in Godzilla: King of Monsters, or Pacific Rim having human drama. There's a reason for all this.  It's the same reason J-Horror is the way it is. And a big part of this is how Japan does storytelling on these subjects.

Moving Parts     A roleplaying game can be described as a 'body' (a body of work, even). As such, it can be broken down into different parts of the body as well.  As an example:     The bones of a game (the frame): This would be the core mechanic, the rawest part of the game engine.  The simple thing you do to govern all aspects of the game. For example, you would go with d20's "roll 1d20, add modifiers, compare to the number you want to meet or exceed."     The meat of the game is the setting and lore.  'This is where you are'. For example, with Legend of the Five Rings, you're looking at Rokugan, its history, and the major events of the setting.     The connective tissue is the mechanics that connect the game engine to the setting and makes them work together. These would be the "moving parts" of the game, the decisions a player makes to build the character and how those choices influence the game itself and present a cohesive 'ho...

Character Creation Over the Years I've seen a lot of game systems. I've seen a lot of RPGs come and go - we're talking well over a hundred here. This means we've seen a lot of ways character creation can be done, and has been done. The 'roll, assign, choose race, choose class' kind, with D&D, Palladium, etc. We've seen skill-heavy games (Call of Cthulhu), we've seen games with no skill lists at all (4e Kult). We've seen point-buy systems (Big Eyes, Small Mouth and Mutants and Masterminds come to mind), and we've even seen a few hybrids (Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea) where you make selections, then you spend points for rounding the character out. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, but one trend I saw come up in the last few years was ... sort of a 'pre-package' deal. You make a limited number of choices, and those pretty much make your character for you. Masks come to mind, but so does the 2nd edition of 7th Sea and TORG, an...