Great day today. For one simple reason: After a huge amount of work I’m through with version 1 of my Ph.D. thesis. I just finished writing the last bit of real content this afternoon while listening to Jon Schaffer‘s incredible “High Water Mark” from Iced Earth’s “Glorious Burden”. Great album, powerful track and it just fit the moment.
Here we go. Just a short memo bout the new open source status of SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).
For my latest RPG design I already have decided to use a level based system as explained in another post. I also love skill-based systems because of the variety they IMHO add to characters. One issue I find myself toying with again and again is how (and if) to reward skill checks with experience points.
Usually I do not watch formats like “Germany’s Next Top Model” (the German equivalent of “America’s Next Top Model with our Heid Klum). Today was the final show of the 2009 edition. This time I did watch the show. For patriotic reasons. Seriously.
Now this here is a very cool way to present a web comic. The most enticing I have seen so far.
Just to get a quick tip off: This saturday I by pure chance bought Azincourt by Richard Cornwall. I’m very interested in medieval history and also love a good yarn with medieval background. So far I only managed the first 156 pages but I am having a lot of fun following the adventures of Nicholas Hook, english forester, outlaw, archer and more on his way to the famous battle of Agincourt/Azincourt. Well written, interesting so far, decent characters (by far not as great as in the First Law trilogy though). If you want some pretty well researched medieval storytelling, here you go!
I love dice… have been loving them since I started roleplaying. I love different sizes and shapes and I love the thrill of excitement that random die rolls bring with them. While I’m also enchanted by diceless systems, none have ever worked for me because the lack of randomness makes me feel like once more reading a story… it’s no longer a game. And I want to game. So dice it must be. But dice mechanics and choices shape a game more than any other aspect I can think of – for many reasons. Here is the dice system I will be using for my latest RPG design outlined in my recent blog post.
Tommi Brander asked in a response to my last RPG design post what the goals of my latest RPG design project where. A very reasonable and important question. And it occurred to me that I never really had thought about my goals above and beyond an instinctive and very intuitive level. So I would like to take the opportunity to elaborate a bit more about this – it seems somewhat important…
Occasionally I write articles… one more just went online. It’s a short German opinionated abstract about Spring Roo.
I am playing roleplaying games since about 1983 or 1984 (I started with the german red box version of D&D). Thus I was very early on introduced to the notion of level-based character advancement systems. Later on I also tried quite a few different paradigms, from point-based systems like GURPS, HERO and Mutants & Masterminds in more recent times to more storytelling like approaches like FUDGE, Storyteller or Castle Falkenstein. When designing my own rule systems I also tried all these approaches and at different points in my life preferred different styles. Nonetheless I keep coming back to a certain style and finally seem to have settled on my “perfect” style.
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