The Mythosan Grimoire

(Has it really been 10 months since my last post? I really need to post more often! I do have things I can put up here...anyway, I digress). While tweaking my Campaign Guidelines page  recently (though I'm still not satisfied), I realized that I’m not a huge fan of “house rules”. I use them like everyone else, but I’m trying to minimize that. To me, when you sit down to a game at someone’s table and they say they’re playing “Game X”, if you already know that game you shouldn’t have to re- learn a bunch of things you already know. I can’t get away from tinkering a least a little bit, but ultimately I have to ask myself if a change is really necessary. Most of the time, it isn’t. That said, I do consider there to be two types of “house rules”: rules changes and option availability. The former are actual changes to existing rules, like saying that active Perception rolls can’t be lower that a character’s passive Perception score, or that items need to be saves if their ...

I recently read a somewhat old post about world building from the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque blog . I've talked in the past about simplifying world presentation, and the post really resonated with me. Years ago, I definitely was the type of DM who wanted to detail his world to the nth degree (though generally after I over-detailed something I would get tired of it and move on to something new - tells you something about doing that which I didn't catch onto for too long...). But I've seen that, in general, your players really don't care about that sort of thing. Heck, when I'm a player I rarely care about that much detail. Which is the point that the post above makes, among other things. World-building is a fun activity, and if you want to go into hyper-detail mode, go nuts. But don't think you're doing it for anyone other than yourself. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't flesh out anything in your world or just drop it...

While cleaning up some old bookmarks, I found this blog post from almost 10 years ago:  Guiding player movement . It's interesting since what Shamus describes is something that I've started doing recently (with a fair amount of success), though I originally got the idea from the excellent  Hill Cantons blog . Specifically, his first post on  "point crawling"  (and one of the commenters references the other article). I may end up writing up some posts on how I use "point crawling" for my game, but I'm still working the kinks out. In any case, I think it's preferable to using a hex map since it makes it easier to "fast-forward" wilderness travel if nothing interesting is happening, but it still allows for player choice. The choice isn't as great as "which direction of the six do you want to travel out of this hex", but it tends to be a more meaningful choice. Hex crawls have the danger of turning into punctuated slogs, wherea...