Role-playing

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

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Blizzard has announced the next expansion to the World of Warcraft. The Mists of Pandaria. "Shrouded in fog since the world was sundered more than ten thousand years ago, the ancient realm of Pandaria has remained unspoiled by war. Its lush forests and cloud-ringed mountains are home to a complex ecosystem of indigenous races and exotic creatures -- including the noble and enigmatic pandaren. Will the mists of Pandaria part to reveal the world's salvation...

Savage Worlds Dice Probabilities

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Updated Aug. 7

After doing the data collection for the D6 Probabilities with the presence of the Wild Die I thought I'd take a look at the Savage Worlds system and see how the probabilities show up for the open rolling of a D6 with a second die worked out.

No surprise, the results show a fairly linear falloff for the initial values (up to around 10 or 12 depending on the size of the second die rolled with the D6) with a lessening of the slope after that point (almost a sharp turning inflection point).


Graphical Visualization as a Gamer's Tool

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One interesting problem I’ve occasionally encountered when doing stuff for various games is visualizing the paths through the game. The simplest one would be the path from one adventure to another for a party. A more complicated one would be an entire campaign with various adventures broken down by either level or some other gauge of experience for the game system.
One good example of the latter was posted to the Triple Ace Games site about the game setting Sundered Skies (a Savage Worlds setting). This graph was laid out in something like Visio by hand. Each of the adventures was clustered and linked to the next adventure in the series or Plot Point.

A Jaunt Into the Darker Side (Adventure Summary)

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I haven't GMed in almost a decade. I was able to get a group of players to try out Savage Worlds due to some time off from a normally running D&D campaign (mix of 1st and 2nd Edition). I put together the basics of the mission in a few days and mostly winged it when it came to the combat stats.
Character creation only took about an hour (players were unfamiliar with the system, so building characters took a little longer plus I gave them advancements after creation so they weren't just basic novices).


Basic D&D Character Sheet

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Updated April 10,

We've been playing a campaign of Classic Dungeons & Dragons. The most recently completed module is the original Temple of Elemental Evil. If I recall correctly the completion of this module by our party brought the total body count for it with this GM up to almost 30 characters. We were also both the largest and lowest levels to complete it with most of the party being below level 7.
Attached is the character sheet that we've been using for this campaign which has started the second adventure. We're skipping the Pit of the Slavelords as that one has been "completed" by another adventuring party in this GM's already existing timeline.
Thanks to feedback from users I've found some ways to help improve the existing sheet.

Shadowrun Promo - A Blast From the Past

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Talk about a blast from the past. I recently came across a copy of FASA's 1990 Shadowrun Promo video. I never realized that FASA had ever done anything like this. In some ways it is much better than the current WotC ads for the "Red Box".

It features everything I'd expect from Shadowrun, and all with that old school late 80s amateur look to the sets. I was impressed by the fact that they actually did have some 3D animation in the video, but, as expected, it was very low polygons (just a few boxes with very few textures or shaders to their surfaces).

FantasyCraft 2nd Printing Test Drive

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I got a chance to sit down with a group this past weekend and run through an adventure using the FantasyCraft system from Crafty Games. The adventure was a simple one with pregenerated characters. With 6 player we had a nice mix of classes to fill out the party.

"Tired from a long adventure the party sought refuge in a fortified inn along the road to their next destination. You enter into a smokey, crowded room with a buxom serving wench dodging grabbing hands while serving drinks. There's a table in the corner she says as she bustles past"... Yep, a nice quiet place to rest... And so the adventure began.

Savage Worlds Probability Trait and Wild Die the same

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An interesting idea was brought up on the Savage Worlds forum about the possibility of adjusting the system so that instead of wild card characters rolling a d6 as the wild die, what if the wild die was the same as the trait die being rolled. This got me thinking, and since I'd already done up the chart and tables for rolling the normal way, how hard could this be.
Turns out, not hard at all. About 15 minutes with excel and voila, here is the chart.

Warhammer Fantasy Character Sheet and Sample Characters

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I've been playing in a Warhammer Fantasy 2nd Edition game with a group of friends and decided to take the Excel character sheet that we've been using and add it to this site's collection for other to use. It handles a lot of the calculations for improving the character as well as replicating that information to the other sheets. To help see it in use I've also added some of the characters that are in the two campaigns that are being run concurrently. The sheets should open in Excel 2003 with the 2007 compatibility pack.

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