Building a One-Shot By The Warden I’m thirty-nine years old and have been playing roleplaying games for half of my life. Unfortunately, as with many current hardcore gamers, there was a falling out period with my original group and a long gap in between where dice were never rolled, but I continued to read and re-read my existing collection. So like most roleplayers my age, I tend to reminisce...

Reading Dice By The Warden To everyone who uses playing cards, poker chips, tarot decks, Jenga, or chugs beer to determine the success of your actions, this week’s edition of Under the Hood is not for you. Today, we’re talkin’ dice. I LOVE THESE LITTLE GUYS!! It’s safe to assume we all do, even those who talk about their dice being cursed or having nothing but bad luck rolling...

En Mass By The Warden War. Ugh! What is it good for? Collecting lots of minis! Say it again! Now that you have that song stuck in your head, let’s talk about mass combat. It’s been rolling around in my head for a while and has come to light in response to the Centurion Kickstarter stretch goal (we get to choose between an additional timeline/setting, magic rules, or mass combat rules...

A Game of Turns By The Warden I used to go to the movies alone. It was during my early attempt at film studies in Toronto and I was filling time between classes (or skipping them when it became apparent this was not what I wanted for my life) by going to the movies. I was often alone. Everyone else had places to be and responsibilities or some crap. Many of my trips to the theatre were during early...

The Perfect Fight (Part 1: An Introduction) By The Warden Violence is by no means a beautiful event; nothing close to the delicate balancing act like the choreography of a dance we portray in fiction. As a fan of the action genre since I was a kid, I’ve always marvelled at fight sequences, shoot-outs, and car chases in films as sheer brilliant deliveries in planning and implementation. To make...

What’s in a Name? By The Warden Part of trying to achieve a dream career in a passionate field is coping with the rules and regulations of reality. There will always be a limit to success and potential based on extenuating factors as written in stone as the laws of physics. In the land of creativity, copyright is one of them. I’m sure many of us are aware of the whole “space marine”...

Moving Out of the Basement By The Warden As I write this, it’s Saturday night at the Game Summit con in Gatineau and there are games covering every square inch of the floor. It’s an impressive collection of nearly every tabletop game you could imagine with fans and curious newcomers alike wandering around checking out what’s what. Even the mass number of vendors, ambassadors, and...

A Level Playing Field By The Warden Hmm, what is the biggest thing that’s happened this past week in the world of roleplaying games? C’mon, how many of you figured out there’d be something about the old D&D modules, supplements, and settings returning to official PDFs would be the focus on this week’s Under the Hood? If you were hoping to find a break from every other...

Move It or Lost It! By The Warden Last week, we talked about the importance of clarity in the rules and it dawned on me during that first phase of this discussion how movement can be one of the most misfired concepts of any game, particularly those using miniatures as a fundamental tool. The more I thought about it, the more this particular branch of rules clarity needs clarity. Yeah, that’s...

Right Writing By The Warden Rules clarity requires multiple revisions and a rather large trashcan. By sure one the big concerns in RPG design is presentation of the words. You no write sentence good and make things clear, them going to make lots of differences. Relax, gentle readers, I didn’t bang my head again. That first paragraph was poorly written to grab your attention and start off this...

John and Jane Doe, Human Fighters By The Warden Welcome to the two-thousand-and-thirteenth year of the calendar, gamers! Wow, has it really been that long? Seems like just yesterday it was the nineteen-hundredth-and-seventy-fourth year… and before that was just a void of nothingness. Funny how times flies when you’re not around for the majority of it. All jokes aside (yes, that was a...

Year of the Fans By The Warden Less than 48 hours from now, the year will come to an end and with such endings comes the tradition of looking back at the previous 364 days of 2012 and writing up a summary of how this year fared for roleplaying games, publishers, and their fans. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been going over old columns, news posts, and other tidbits of saved data, aiming...

Stress Testing By The Warden A game is not a game until you’ve broken it and put it back together. Amen. It’s a remarkably true sentiment and represents the blood, sweat, and tears of the game designer’s art, much like the trials and tribulations suffered by painters, directors, and musicians the world over. All games, good or bad, begin with an idea and evolve through a progression...