An Abominable Fancy

The Kid woke me up this morning with an idea for his own version of D&D: Creatures and Classrooms. Monster-Teachers try to bore you (costing you Fun Points), and the students try to wear down their teachers with pranks until they retire. Follow up: The kid took his rules into school, and has started up a game during "Centers" time. Three days in, and it sounds like things are going well—the players have discovered that the Teachers are aliens with a vulnerability to water, and have armed themselves with water guns. "I think I'll take them to Mars, today," he said at breakfast.

Attributes Roll 3d6, assign as you wish. 3-7:      -1 8-14:     0 15-17: +1 18:      +2 STRENGTH: How strong you are. Useful for fighting, climbing, and carrying treasure.                 +/- to melee attack and damage DEXTERITY: How fast you are and how accurate your aim is.                 +/- to ranged attack and Armor Class. CONSTITUTION: How healthy you are.                 +/- to Hit Points INTELLIGENCE: How much you know, and how good you are at figuring things out.                 +/- to Spells learned with leveling as a spell-caster WISDOM: How aware you are of the world around you, including the spirit world.                 +/- 10% XP CHARISMA: How good a leader you are, and how well you can get along with people and animals.                 +/- Pet LUCK Add up all your attributes to determine how many Luck Points you have. Total               Luck 78 or more        0 66-77                1 54-65                2 48-53                3 42-47      

I've been noodling with a ruleset for playing with my kid. He wants to play D&D , so it's basically Holmes on training wheels, customized towards my kid's particular proclivities. Here's a table for determining your character concept: A few notes: 1. The results of this chart do not convey any mechanical effects. Just because you rolled "Wizard" doesn't mean you are any good at wizardry.  Maybe you were raised by wizards, but your true talent lies in... uhm, dinosaur racing? 2. There is no info established for any of the Realms. They're just evocative names. Totally up to the kid what it's like to be from The Corridors of Time. 3. My intention is that, after rolling the above tables and generating stats, the kid draws a picture of their character. For my kid, at least, this seems to be a shamanic moment, calling forth a new soul and fixing it to the material world.

The Long Slow Flight of the Ashbot   on Vimeo An ash-collecting robot witnesses the collapse of the universe as he slowly drifts beyond outer space. See PART II, "We Were Not Made For This World" here: vimeo.com/112673745 Directed by Colin West McDonald [ cwestmcdonald.com , twitter.com/CWestMcDonald ] Based on "Long Slow Flight of the Ashbot" by award-winning and -losing cartoonist Joel Priddy [ joelpriddy.com ]—that's me! Ashbot Voice: William Knight Additional Foley Artist: Felix Blume [ felixblume.com ] Graphic Design: Jeff Brush [ jeffbrush.com ] Production Assistance: Tina Matthews [ tinamatthewsdesign.com ], Megan Wollerton Thank you: Jonathan Matthews, Peter Brown, Cailyn Driscoll Learn more about The Robot Scriptures here: cwestmcdonald.com/the-robot-scriptures Isn't this exciting? I'm excited! Let me know what you think!

My kid asked to play D&D, and I went into a panic. Be cool; don’t screw this up! Which of the hundreds of possible versions of D&D at my fingertips do I introduce him to?  He wanted the name Dungeons & Dragons and he wanted a physical book. So no retro-clones or pdfs. I picked up a Holmes boxed set and mentioned that it was how I learned D&D. That was it. He rolled up a Magic-User, and I rolled up a Halfling. It was a strange thing going through the Holmes rules after so many years. There are a lot of peculiarities of the game that I’d thought were my own childhood misinterpretations of the rules. Like, there’re very few derived stats in Holmes. I’d assumed I had just glossed over them, but, nope. They really just aren't there. And the way Magic-Users start with a whole passel of spells. And of course, it’s pretty disorganized. I had to go through Blueholme after the kid’s bedtime to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. But I think Holmes was a prett

I love to read and fiddle and hack all sorts of different rule sets. But the game I actually play is Beyond the Wall. It’s pretty great. Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures is set up for quick, low-prep games. You can sit down with your friends and some dice, and soon have rounded, interrelated characters, a detailed-enough base Village, and an adventure knocking down the door. There’s no reason to limit such an appealing system to one-shot sessions. And a big new supplement is here to take the strategies that worked so well in Beyond the Wall and apply them to long-term campaign play: Further Afield. I want to go to there. I’ve been playtesting Further Afield content for several months. Here’s my take: Collaborative Sandbox Design Beyond the Wall makes play out of chargen, generating not only character abilities and history, but also relationships, significant NPCs, and the Village that serves as the base. Further Afield uses this same collaborative approach to