Samantha Patri's Blog

The other day, I started discussing monster manuals, and their penchant for being filled with enemies, and being woefully scarce on allies. To some extent I get it - you want a book which provides a plethora of opponents you can throw at your group, so they have things to fight. But the thing is ... what about allies? If the PCs want to, for example, go out on some adventure and want to bring some not-hostile creatures with them, then what?  "We want to go out to the forest and team up with one of the local dryads, and help her with this problem". Or, "so there's a silver dragon around here, we want to recruit it to help us with this significant challenge". Or, how about, "this gold dragon has been driven insane by this dark relic, and we need to put an end to it". What if the group isn't entirely 'good', and has to face down an archon or angel? Or a lesser divine Good creature? Sure, there's options. The GM can reskin a monster to suit...

 Solo RPGs. It's a fascinating concept. We used to like books like Fighting Fantasy and the Grailquest series (the tinglerings you get in book 1 and 2 don't do anything until book 3.  Yeesh.) I mean, they were fun, you got to throw dice and go through an adventure - but it's kind of a one and done, you know? Solo RPGs seem to be a big thing now. There's a bunch of expansions for games to play them solo, there's a bunch of games which are built from the ground up for playing solo, and ... okay.  Sure. But for me, it's just another Fighting Fantasy / Grailquest thing. It's a nice little story wrapped in dice, and perhaps a bit more sandboxy than you'd normally get, maybe. But I have a hard time seeing it as a TTRPG. Why? Well. To put it bluntly, there's not much roleplaying there. You kind of go along with the script, see where the garden path takes you, and that's it. But what if you want to hang out with a few NPCs, see what they're up to, an...

Religion is a major interest of mine, and looking at it in roleplaying games fascinates me.  I'm quite prone to making characters with a strong faith, regardless of what the character's chosen profession is.  Rogue?  Faithful.  Magus?  Faithful.  Barbarian?  Faithful.  Vampire?  Faithful.  You get the idea. In a recent discussion, we were discussing the difference between Judaism's God and the Shinto faith and their gods.  Basically, how the religion interacts (nominally) with their chosen people. It came down to this: Judaism People:  We made an exclusive pact with God. God:  Don't do the thing. People:  We did the thing. God:  *SMACK*  Don't do the thing. People:  Okay... but we just did the thing. God:  *SMACK*  Stop doing the thing. People:  You mean this thing we just did? God:  *SMACK!* Look, don't make me come down there. Shinto People:  So, yeah.  We did the thing. ...