Spider Queen

Can we stop talking about "punishing" our players? It seems like you don't have to go very far online to find someone running a game of D&D whose players have done something that they think requires "punishing". Or, alternatively, to stumble across a Reddit post or four asking whether they should  "punish" their players for some action or decision, or whether it's too mean, unsporting or whatever. Here's why this bothers me. The concept of punishment, and its counterpart, the concept of reward, are normative concepts. That is, they're concepts we apply to actions we evaluate as either good or bad. More specifically, punishment and reward are applied in the context of training specific behaviours ; we punish behaviours we don't want to see, and we reward behaviours we want to see more of. Now, it may just be me, but I don't think it's the GM's job to train  players in this way. Doubtless the GM is responsible for training...

Daniel Norton of Bandit's Keep beat me to my last post with this video , and I didn't even realise! And sure enough he's beaten me to the punch again - although in fact I managed to see the video first this time. This post can partly be read as a response to his video. It's what you might call a long read, so grab yourself a cup of tea. The topic of hitpoints in D&D is one of those things that seems perpetually to be puzzling. Everyone has a different take on what it is that hitpoints represent: Are they bodily toughness, exhaustion and fatigue, combat awareness, luck, some combination of the above ("hit protection"), or something different entirely? But the setup for this whole debate hides an assumption, and one that we need not make. Let me propose something radical: Hitpoints don't represent anything, actually. That is, there is no quality that your character possesses - be it something as abstract as luck or as concrete as what you might call c...

[To the tune of Paula Cole  "Where have all the cowboys gone?" ] I was a little surprised at the end of my last Swords and Wizardry campaign to find that, among the surviving characters, there were no fighters. I don't think this was because of the survivability of fighters (or fighting-men and -women, or what have you), since the other classes had the same rate of attrition or greater. Rather, I think it speaks to a player preference. However, speaking diplomatically, I think it's a preference that runs slightly against the grain of old-school play. Put slightly more bluntly, I think it's a little misguided, and I would like to try and correct it. 🕷 Frankly, there's a sort of perception that the fighter is the boring class of the available options. This is kind of understandable. Mechanically speaking, swinging a sword in old school D&D is kind of flat; you roll a d20, and if you're a fighter you get a slightly better chance than everyone else to hit...

Let's talk about Traveller. Part of the reason I've not been updating the blog is that I've refocused my energies on a new campaign. I've always wanted to run a Traveller game - something about the setup of the rulebooks just inspires me, especially with regards to the little black books of Classic Traveller. Traveller seems, in some respects to be exactly set up for the on-and-off, open table sandboxes I've come to love (and in some ways not, but that's probably another post). But I've clearly drunk too much of the OSR DIY Kool-Aid - the idea of setting my campaign within an already established setting with lots of details doesn't spark my imagination like the idea of coming up with something of my own, tailored to my tastes (and stealing liberally from my favourite sci fi authors). Building a sci fi setting for adventuring in, though, is a different job of work from building a fantasy milieu. And that's what I want to discuss today. Specifically, I...

Continuing with a mini series of posts, I guess (first one here ) rethinking classic baddies in a way that makes them more interesting than might be assumed. Title is a reference to this essay . [Edit: I actually wrote this post before seeing this related video , but a friend since recommended it to me, and I pass that recommendation on here.] 🕷 Orcs, now... everybody knows about orcs. They're the bogies used to scare children, they're the ones as get blamed or cursed when a sheep goes missing. They're the evil race, as everyone knows, eh? Well, you think you know about orcs. But let me tell you, child, what you think you know isn't half the truth. The evil race... hah! Orcs aren't a race, and they aren't a kindred either - don't you get smart with me, kid! It's understandable folks would make the mistake - reasonable folks don't have a word for what they are. But pull up a seat and I'll tell you. The secret is, orcs aren't born evil, and th...

Bit of a change of pace from usual programming, but fun nonetheless. I recently completed a project that's been brewing for a while: Scratchbuilding a science fiction desert settlement out of junk. Making your own Mos Eisley facsimile seems to be one of those bucket list items for sci fi wargamers - a project everyone wants to get round to eventually. And 'eventually' is the key word here: I've had some of these cardboard boxes and yoghurt pots sitting around in my materials box for years! Reading up on Chris McDowall's The Doomed  and trawling Magpie and Old Lead  gave me the inspiration to finally sit down and start gluing and painting. Witness some of the results below. Some quick notes on methods I used: I built all of this in 15mm scale. I actually started collecting sci-fi in 15mm specifically so I could more easily build terrain like this. And it is a lot  easier - I don't even know how much time and effort it would have taken to try to churn out the same...