The Viking Hat GM

Honi C844789-7 Ag S "The Coin" With both sci-fi and fantasy games, we Hex On Up and generate a random setting. Because the dice are always right.  As with the fantasy setting, we go  deep rather than broad . You don't need a starmap of a 12,000-system Galactic Imperium - the players will never visit them all. At most  they will visit one world each game session, typically weekly. In a year that's at most 52 sessions, and given holidays and life happening, 40 is more likely - plus if a world's interesting the players might spend a few sessions there. Probably a dozen worlds will do before someone says, "Look, I just wanted to play Mechwarrior."  Here's the summary. select a starting world, and using  this random generator , create a system for it.  develop this world in detail, using Zozer's Universal World Profile  (UWP), and not forgetting its starport , if any. and its system create a subsector, using random generation. You may choose to do th

  Among my house rules is, Character generation : roll 3d6 down the line, choose from fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief. Regardless of rolls, characters may be of any of fighter, magic-user, cleric or thief, but will suffer a 10% malus to XP if they lack a prerequisite attribute. You character may not commit suicide, but if they happen to die, you can roll another character.  Remember that we have an open game table , which means we constantly have newbies coming - which we want to encourage. Any game has some combination of choice  and chance . Chess is all choice, snakes & ladders is entirely chance, roleplaying games are a mixture of the two. The more choice  you have the slower the game, as each choice takes time to make, with its own pros and cons and considerations and so on and so forth. If there are a large number of choices during character generation, then it takes a whole session to make a character, and casual players won't give it a go. Newbie players will also

In the most popular and well-written system using 2d6 for task resolution, Traveller , typically 8+ will achieve success. With no modifiers either way, that means a 15/36 = 42% chance of success. In Conflict , we have made it 10+, which is 6/36 = 17% chance of success. This is deliberate. We are not trying to reproduce Rambo, Jack Ryan, James Bond or Ethan Hunt, but the small unit actions of modern conflicts - teams  of people who plan . We have allowed more bonuses to the throw, to encourage teamwork and planning. Part of this is assistance .  Someone else's familiarities may improve the odds; throw 10+ for the first person, 12+ for the second, and 14+ for the third; there may sometimes be limited to less than 3 assistants, but 3 is always the maximum useful.  If the throw succeeds then the primary may add +1 to their throw, at the first failure they must go ahead and use their expertise as it is, so for example a shooter may get their +3 for Firearms expertise to hit a distant ta

Traveller gets around a bit as a system - editions up to the telephone book "toolkit" (aka "we designed it for gearheads who never play") - as well as d20, GURPS, Hero and so on and so forth. If Traveller were a date you would definitely use a prophylactic. But as with so many game systems, the authour got it more-or-less right the first time. And so we play Classic Traveller .  Classic Traveller , most especially Books 1-3, like AD&D1e , RuneQuest 1e and the like, is a good system because not despite the fact that it is incomplete. You fill in the blanks.  Fill in the blanks Many a pointless argument has been had because all communication was by brief text, and without the use of many carefully-chosen words, text lacks tone  - and without a clear tone to the next, people fill in the blanks with their own mood at the time. This happens in romance, too: without regular communication from someone they like, a person will fill in the blanks with their own desi