I recently set out on a quest to run a player narrative game.  (You can read about it here and here.)  While I have yet to actually sit down and run one, I am coming awfully close.  It seems that every time I get the gumption to try it out, I think too much about it and begin to doubt either myself or the format of play.  The self-doubt is a question of sustainable creativity and energy and thus is a personal problem.  The format of play, on the other hand, can be addressed.

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4ed does pulp fantasy well–which is good, because that is what the game is about.  What happens if you want to play a pulp fantasy game where players constantly fear for their resources and mortality of their characters?  The first answer would be, “pick another game system.”  (And there are many fine systems to choose in that regard; All Flesh Must Be Eaten plus the Dungeons and Zombies supplement is the first that springs to mind.)  But what if you like the offerings of 4ed?

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I found a very interesting article over here about the effects of an unprotected human being exposed to space.  The short answer:  you won’t blow up, and you have about a minute and a half for someone to come save your free-floating, unconscious space-booty.

I’m positive that I’m not the first person to think of this but here’s a great way to protect your character sheet from the constant assault of your eraser.  Plastic sleeves and a dry or wet erase marker or even grease pencil. read more »

I am of the opinion that 4ed would make an excellent system for running a Warhammer 40K game.  I realize that there has been a table top game (titled Inquisitor, free for download here) and a bonafide RPG called Dark Heresy.  The former had some convoluted rules that I was fine with, but I don’t think all my players would warm up to.  I haven’t seen much of the latter, but I understand that it is very specific in running games where the characters are inquisitors hunting down heretics and dealing with xeno infestations.  I want to run a game about pulpy, roaring combat with a thick slathering of gothic scifi sauce.  (Despite how gross it may sound to put something like that in your mouth.)

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Let’s face it. Aid Another, as written in 3ed or 4ed, kind of sucks. If you are helping your buddy out, you roll a check against a DC 10. If you succeed, you add +2 to your buddies check. This rule, while nice and simple, does not scale well with levels and does little to reflect the actual difficulty of the task. I have ideas to address this.

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Rather than have thousands and thousands of monsters laid off from their duties as wandering monsters due to 4e, I thought I should come up with a few ways to keep them relevant without (necessarily) requiring a full length combat encounter.

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The party, accompanied by a Dwarven expedition, made their way into the abandon underground city of Dwarvenhearth.  Their primary goal for this session was to secure the the Commerce district as HQ for the expedition.  After this, they were free to decide how to tackle searching the rest of the massive city.

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This skill challenge was designed for five 4th level characters.  A fountain stands in the center of a city square, a massive statue as its centerpiece.  The statue has been enchanted to animate and attack intruders.  The stat block for the statue:

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Mearls scores big with this post, which suggests how to play 4ed without minis.  While this almost exactly maps to how pre-3ed D&D would handle this situation, I feel like there is room to new-school the old-school.  (If the following idea sounds terrible to you, just blame all those indie rpgs I’ve been reading lately.)

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