Atlas Games has released an Open Games License version of WaRP, the mechanical part of Over the Edge. (For those who haven’t heard of it, Over the Edge was a tremendously influential role-playing game released 20 years ago. And yes, there’s an anniversary edition.)

The PDF included in the download package is so horribly formatted that I had to ( Read more... )

Not certain, but I’m guessing that this has something to do with this.

Idea 1: Alignments as trust networks

Ben Robbins on D&D alignments, over on Story Games:

Detect Evil doesn’t make someone glow red. The paladin or cleric just says “trust me, that person is evil, kill them.” And why do you believe that guy? Because he’s lawful good? How do you know he’s lawful good? Because he says so, and he’s part of some ( Read more... )

A dice mechanic looking for a game:

Assume an RPG where you roll a die, or dice, of varying size to check for success. Like, the dice range from d4 to d12, and you’re looking to get a high number or sum. I think the Cortex system uses something like this - roll a few dice, keep the best two, add them.

So, what if there’s a mechanic that lets ( Read more... )

According to someone on RPG.net, Margaret Weis Productions is discontinuing their Battlestar Galactica and Serenity RPGs, and you can get the PDF versions massively discounted on DriveThruRPG.com, but only if you buy today. I see that the Serenity main rulebook, for example, is now $10 instead of $40. (Isn’t $40 kind of a lot for a PDF?) Anyway, I ( Read more... )

Oh, man, y’know what’d be awesome? Fate-based Car Wars/Mad Max-style setting using Diaspora as a base. Some kind of simple point-based vehicle-building system (based on Diaspora’s ship-building rules), and a road combat mini-game.

Anyone out there looking for some lightweight role-playing rules, but not up for all this newfangled indie hippy gaming stuff, might want to check out Mini Six, a stripped-down version of the Open D6 rules. (Open D6 itself is an open version of the rules behind the old West End Games Ghostbusters and Star Wars games.)

The Mini Six rules are ( Read more... )

An idea that came to me in a thread on Story Games about card-game design: Fate’s Aspects could be reworked using cards.

I figure each player gets a deck of Aspect cards, with each of that PC’s Aspects written on one card. At the start of the session you shuffle your deck, place it face down, and draw (say) five cards. These are the Aspects you ( Read more... )

Hey, indie role-playing game designers! I love many of your games, but there’s this one thing’s been driving me nuts, and I think you could maybe do something about it: When you’re coming up with a name for your game, could you consider that people interested in it are going to do Google searches, not just for the game’s home page, but for online ( Read more... )

Rope in Fate

Watching the latter part of Hitchock’s Rope, it seems to me that you could run that whole long psychological and investigative cat-and-mouse game in Fate, with most of the movie consisting of Investigation, Empathy, and Deceit rolls, trying to assess and declare aspects, leading up to a big Will conflict at the end.

Also, that scene ( Read more... )