Design
Articles and posts that include any RPG mechanic designs or hacks.
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Using questions to start a roleplaying game session
For myself, engaging with roleplaying games means engaging with a conversation. This conversation typically focuses on a central question to be answered. At a mechanical level this could be something like “can I use this skill in my roll?” or “what is the player willing to sacrifice to succeed?”, and at a narrative level, questions… Continue reading
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An Alternative for Skill Challenges
Collaborative and narrative play are more my jam when it comes to roleplaying games. I like to leave breathing room for the players to be creative and inject something into the narrative within the confines of moral dilemmas and hard choices. Back in my Dungeons and Dragons days I made heavy use of skill challenges… Continue reading
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Kaiju Generator
Kaiju is a fixation of a student of mine. Every time this student is given the opportunity to create something, it is always about a Kaiju and he will talk to me non-stop about them. I love it! A new project was started this week which means more discussion of Kaiju for me, so I… Continue reading
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Using Tanglegrams for Dungeon Crawling
Dungeon crawling has been the standard game structure for many roleplaying games for a long time. During this time people have presented all manners of preparing them from a series of randomly generated encounter tables for every room or corridor to entire algorithms that generate the dungeons and its mundane contents. Some game masters run… Continue reading
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Introducing Grimoire: A Solo Roleplaying Game
As discussed, I have been developing a solo roleplaying game that has the player take the role of a wizard. By the end of the game, the player will have several randomly generated spells in the form of a grimoire and a brief journal detailing the life of the wizard that created it. It is… Continue reading
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One-Page RPG: Collaborative Taskforces
Collaborative Taskforces is such a tacky and cumbersome title but that is the exact reason it is so fitting for my first attempt at a one-page RPG. My day job has been throwing around some buzzwords of late and in spite of my shown cynicism in this one-page RPG, I believe it is leading to… Continue reading
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Fantasy Spell Generation
Spells that are esoteric, wizards that are deranged and corrupted by magic, and mysterious magical symbolism are all features of some of my most enjoyed fantasy in roleplaying games. For this reason, I have been working on a solo RPG that, by the end, will have the player in possession of a grimoire of spells… Continue reading
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Using Tanglegrams for Planning RPG Sessions
As I facilitate more roleplaying games, I find myself leaning more towards sandbox experiences with a large cast of NPCs. I establish a starting scenario to introduce these characters over the first few sessions without much of an idea of what the narrative is going to be. This is not to say that I do… Continue reading
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Playing Dread Remotely
Dread was the first roleplaying system that I used as a game master and I recently had the pleasure to be a player of it remotely. My friend wrote a scenario that was inspired by an SCP article and it was an excellent time for all involved – I even died horribly to some freaky… Continue reading
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Random Table: What’s in Their Pocket?
The use of random tables in my games are still predominantly focused on the before aspect of the game – the preparation. However, in my most recent campaign of Mutant: Year Zero I did return to utilising random tables during a session and I found that I very much liked the random aspects they can… Continue reading
About Me
An ARPIA award-winning Australian tabletop roleplaying game designer.
Find MY GAMES on itch.io or DrivethruRPG.com
Recent Posts
- How to play a solo RPG (Ultimate Guide)
- Caught in the Rain, a Solo Mystery Roleplaying Game Playtest v0.2
- I Tried Node-Based Design in my Mystery TTRPG Campaign, Here is What I Learned
- How to Write a Backstory for a DnD Character
- How to improve player engagement in roleplaying games using questions
- Cognitive Load Theory in Roleplaying Games
- GOLEM 0.5 Release
The Bardic Inquiry 