Tag Archives: DnD

The Big-Pile-Of-Skills problem

I’ve been struggling with a roleplaying-gaming design issue. It’s probably just my own pet-hate. It’s something I call the “Big Pile of Skills” problem. When creating a roleplaying character, there is nearly always a section on “Skills”. Most of the time you can choose any Skill you like and invest points into them. Some systems have some concept of grouping Skills like D&D’s Class system and Riddle of Steel’s Skill Packets. But most of the modern day systems I’ve played just […]

A thought on GM versus Player narrative power in indie games

With the few indie games that have entered my bookshelf I noticed that there is a scale of player’s narrative power versus GM’s power. Power is probably not the right word, influence? At one end you have something like Universalis that gives all the players GM powers by removing the GM. Then you have something […]