Alticamelus

1,299 reputation

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bio	website	glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/…
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Gaming background in D&D (Basic & 1st ed. AD&D), Traveller, Judge Dredd, Call of Cthulhu, Rolemaster but have played pretty much only Glorantha-based games this millenium, excepting games at cons and some other one-offs. I like reading rulebooks, though. I haven't really followed the D&D rules since 3.5e.

	1,299 reputation	bio	website	glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/…	visits	member for	2 years, 6 months
615 badges		location			seen	Mar 23 at 12:23

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May 6	revised	What would you pick as the “four elements” of mind? ps; deleted 45 characters in body; added 28 characters in body
May 6	answered	What would you pick as the “four elements” of mind?
May 4	comment	How do I get the PCs to stop focusing on a red herring? This question gives me a bit of deja vu. Not a duplicate, but the answers there might be useful.
May 4	answered	How do I get the PCs to stop focusing on a red herring?
May 3	comment	What is the statistically superior character creation method, twelve 3d6 or six 4d6? This looks interesting. Three things: with best 6 of 12x3d6, worst scores of less than 10 are pretty rare, while the best score is likely to be over 15. Second, how do you handle outcomes of 19 or 20 (which are pretty rare, at about 0.1%)? Last, the maximum score with this system is quite likely to be under 15 (about 1/3?), which is maybe too middling for heroic fantasy.
Apr 24	comment	Homebrew D&D with only 2 players (plus DM) The great virtue of few players is that the game tends to be more focussed and move faster.
Apr 21	answered	Playing on IRC, getting started
Apr 18	comment	Do role-playing games have to be fun? Superb subjective description of that freeform. Where was it, and has it been written up?
Apr 17	comment	Systems with a dice mechanic that handles very easy and very difficult tasks @Ichoran: You can egg this pudding by having "epic dice": allow certain actors to replace one or more d6s by d12s for certain contests. Each one of these will nearly halve the chance of failure against actors without epic dice.
Apr 16	comment	What are some proven methods of generating attachment to locations/objects in a campaign? Good summary. "Coolness factor": think Terminus Est; it doesn't really do much, but it becomes like a character in the story because of its backstory, distinctiveness, the way it is woven into events, and sense of mystery.
Apr 11	revised	Systems with a dice mechanic that handles very easy and very difficult tasks got number wrong
Apr 11	revised	Are there any games that use dice pools of multiple dice? fix link
Apr 11	answered	Systems with a dice mechanic that handles very easy and very difficult tasks
Apr 5	comment	What are the ramifications of replacing a square based combat grid with a hex based one? +1 Mapping problem is key, without it, I think combat is nicer with hex. Charles de Gaulle airport would fit, I think, much better with a hex grid than a square grid, with all its double toroid layout and linking tubes. So the mapping problem can go either way.
Apr 5	comment	What are the ramifications of replacing a square based combat grid with a hex based one? Great link ... if you have a feeling for Go.
Apr 5	comment	Techniques for communicating setting and campaign information to the PCs? Every player should be able to answer three questions about their character: what community their PC grew up in (e.g., "A now-disbanded entertainer troupe, the Fantasticos"), what their religious beliefs are ("An impious follower of the state religion"), and what political commitments they have made (e.g., "The rumors about Duke Darc are treasonous and my efforts dealing with such traitors has been rewarded...")
Apr 5	comment	Using Arms Law with HARP: does this affect play balance? To agree with this, ICE seem to care a lot about this kind of substitutability. I played a fair bit in an epic Rolemaster/Spacemaster hybrid, where a valuable resource of hi-tec space empires was their uneasy dominion over lo-tec worlds with powerful magic. Balance issues were surprisingly easy to resolve.
Apr 5	comment	Using Arms Law with HARP: does this affect play balance? In case your reaction to this question was "HARP, HARP, I'm sure I've heard of that...", it's the new game by ICE: Shannon Appelcline describes it as "HARP (2004), by Heike Kubasch and Tim Dugger, a Rolemaster-based system which was successfully released as a simpler introductory game" in pt2 of his history of ICE.
Apr 3	comment	Dystopian sword & magic settings @aramis "step up on the food chain" - Not how I see it! HQing isn't, or rather shouldn't be, all about the main heroes who take on the roles of the gods - HQs don't work without the backing of many initiates. I think it's best to see HQ as a history-changing response to a dire external threat faced by a community. Now, the God Learners saw HQing as step up, and see what happened to them...
Apr 3	comment	Dystopian sword & magic settings @aramis: I agree that Glorantha is, in a certain sense, a dysfunctional world - in the game's mythology, the world was broken in the Great Darkness, and Compromise was an incomplete repair of the world. But I take dystopia to mean the communities are corrupt to the core, while Gloranthan communities mostly work very well, as they have to given the terrible external threats they face.