DIY RPG


DIY RPG/D&D people, you need to read this. 



 

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D6 Zombies

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BRAAAAAAAINSSS!!!!

In honour of Halloween and the second season of the Walking Dead (not to mention the soon-to-be-released Issue Three of d6 Magazine featuring material by yours truly), I thought it was time to revisit d6 Horror and share with you some of my designs for everyone's favourite brain-devouring, drooling masses of near-human monstrosities... ZOMBIES!!!


I love zombies and horror survival games.  So much so that I broke my own rule to never buy another Kevin Siembieda game and picked up DEAD REIGN when it came out a couple of years ago.  It was a ton of fun, though admittedly I had to tweak the hell out of it to make it playable (when my players realized that the zombies had the strength of Superman, and kept coming after being shot in the head four or five times, it really killed the excitement for them).  All that tweaking eventually led me to the d6 system, which I also mangled to create a custom d6 Horror games (some of the rules of which will be appearing in the a…
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Why My Favourite D&D Class Sucks

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I don't get to play D&D as a player very often. I usually end up on the DM side of the screen, which is cool because I generally enjoy it more anyway. But from time to time it's a nice change of pace to only have to worry about a single character instead of an entire world. It's also fun to throw down and beat the living daylights out of some monsters.

My current D&D of choice, for better or for worse, is 4th Edition. The first time I got to run my own character in this edition was at last season's D&D Encounters event (Keep on the Borderlands), and I made the damn fool mistake of playing the cleric. (See here for why Clerics, especially 4E Essentials clerics, suck. And while we're at it, here's a good argument for the suckiness of Monks). Next I tried a Gnome Bard for a high-level Living Forgotten Realms game, but that turned out almost as bad as the cleric.

Seriously, what was I thinking?
For the new Encounters season, I almost made a Slayer(…
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Why Clerics (Still) Suck

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There are some jobs that are just terrible. Cleaning industrial septic tanks. Being that kid with the drum at the front line of those old army battles. Even working on a porno set, which one would think is the best employment in the world, has at least one position that downright sucks (pardon the pun). Seriously, would you want to be the guy that has to mop up/towel down/hose off the actors and set afterward? Depending on the genre of movie being filmed, you may have some seriously screwed up stuff to deal with.

Know what’s even worse than all of those things? Being the cleric for an adventuring party.

It used to be worse. Through third edition, clerics were treated like a walking first aid kit. You were one of those little boxes with a red cross on them like in Wolfenstein or Doom, but with sexy legs that stick out of the bottom (that’s how I always pictured clerics, anyway). Your job was to cast healing spells, and if you ran out of healing spells you got out of the way whil…
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Monks Suck

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Continuing the idea of sucky character classes from C.D.'s last post, I humbly present the Monk.

Monks in D&D suck. They sucked bad in 1st Edition, they sucked bad in 3rd Edition, and even now they suck more than a little. The only edition they didn't suck in was 2nd Edition.

But that's because they weren't there.

I suppose my beef against the Monk class is not so much in its intended function but in the players who choose to try and play it. Never has a class been more rooted in a heightened form of reality than the Monk. Except maybe the Thief/Rogue, but I can't say anything bad about them or they'll steal my coinpurse.

Now see, I've always had this understanding that a monk was a fairly religious fellow who didn't care much for the company of those that didn't share his belief. Or, so I've gleamed from various PBS documentaries. I'm sure things are a little different in real life. But I've yet to encounter a player who understood how …
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10 Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

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Can you smell Halloween on the air? Smells like non-toxic face paint and burnt pumpkins.

In case you weren't aware, I've been playing around with a zombie/horror game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel system - basically you send in a gang of 0-level schlubs, hoping that at least one survies to become a level 1 character in an on-going post-apocalyptic survival game. It uses basic d20 rules that everyone is pretty familiar with.

To keep the game as chaotic as possible, in our first playthrough I just rolled the scenario out randomly as we went along - determining encounters, locales, etc purely by a toss of the dice - and I plan to continue doing the same thing. Partly this is to keep my prep work down, partly it's to keep the tension and suspense high as the party never knows what to expect. Sometimes the group meets 1d4 stray dogs, sometimes they meet 1d4+1x100 roaming zombies. I've been using the many tables in Palladium'sDEAD REIGN™®© books (about the …
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