[...] In my design work and in my personal games, I like to create opportunities for characters and players to make choices with narrative weight. The best dramatic choices are those made in ambiguous space and whose consequences are equally unclear.
I’ve done this many times, but it has always taken a lot of effort to design for it [...]
A great post on how to put your players between a rock and a hard place, then watch as they squirm. Good discussion in the comments, too.
In preparing for my monthly D&D game, I started looking around the Internet for ways to streamline combat. I don’t mind the length of combat encounters, and neither do my players, but in several instances I’ve found it difficult to track status effects, ongoing damage and such.
I stumbled across some great status effect cards from Mike Wiemholt and downloaded them with the intent of using them next weekend. A few hours later, I was bit by an urge to customize them with some more color. I had been experimenting with shoehorning Ethan Schoonover’s brilliant Solarized color scheme into PuTTY on my Windows desktop (it was drop-dead easy to integrate on my Mac, natch) and was still fascinated with the way the theme’s 16 colors worked so well together. A few hours in Photoshop later, I whipped up my own cards.
Each page is a 300 DPI print-ready PDF weighing in at around 6 MB. The design of the cards I release to the public domain for the enjoyable use (and remixing) of all. The content of the cards are rules from 4th Edition Dungeon & Dragons, so please treat them as copyright of Wizards of the Coast.
Page 1: Blinded, Dazed, Deafened, Dominated, Dying, Grabbed, Helpless, Immobilized, Marked
Page 2: Petrified, Prone, Restrained, Slowed, Stunned, Surprised, Unconscious, Weakened
Page 3: 9 Ongoing Damage Cards
EDIT: I should probably note that my game is original 4e, not Essentials. That’s the reason behind some of the rule omissions on my cards compared to The Weem’s.
People spend their entire lives learning how to write effectively. It isn’t something you can fake. It isn’t something you can buy. You have to work at it.
That’s exactly why people who are afraid they can’t write should be blogging.
It’s exercise. No matter how out of shape you are, if you exercise a few times a week, you’re bound to get fitter. Write a small blog entry a few times every week and you’re bound to become a better writer. If you’re not writing because you’re intimidated by writing, well, you’re likely to stay that way forever.
This is the biggest reason I’ve started blogging again and why you should, too.
I built a little something yesterday around PHP’s mail() function and decided to release my work to Github. I reinvented the wheel a bit (the packages PEAR::Mail and PEAR::Mail_Queue do much the same thing very well already) but I wanted to see what I could do if forced to make my own solution.
As always, forks and contributions are welcome.
For reasons that have been explored at length by people far smarter (and better looking) than I am, comments are and forever will be off on valthonis.net. I am available directly via any number of social networking methods (email, twitter, etc.) if you wish to discuss any post I’ve made here.