Timewaster's Guide Archive

Ok, I'm going to start doing the "staff picks" articles. Probably do them bi-weekly. See how that goes. Make them more or less frequent depending on response.

So email your picks to [email protected]

The picks this time around are for Paper and Dice RPGs. I want one or two sentences on SYSTEMS (not rule books, not setting, mood, or genre, SYSTEMS) you would recommend people try. They can be common systems or unknown, obscure ones. In print or out of print. But I want system recommendations for our readership.

Rules:

• No more than three recommendations
• Limit your explanation for WHY we should play the system to 50 words or less.
• email them to me at the above addres. Don't post them.
• Deadline is 11:59 PM (that's 23:59 for you military folks) on September 12, 2003. (Though realistically if I have it before I submit the article I'll probably still include it).

I'll compile the list and make it presentable. Let me know if you want your real name or your TWG forum display name attached to it. If you don't tell me, I'll assume forum display name.

So I was at the mall (rant to be posted elsewhere), and I saw Kemp Mill Records was going out of business, everythign 50% off.

So I look for a few bands, Mark Whitfield, Bela Fleck, The Cure, The Kinks, Hepcat, and Bad Manners were all gone, naturally, all being too popular and/or obscure for there to be any stock left on these. Only the latest U2 album was left, adn I wasn't sufficiently motivated to purchase.

However, I did walk away with 4 CDs.
A Matthew Sweet compilation of his early stuff
Rush, Vapor Trails (yeah, it was about time I got around to that one)
Sheryl Crow's latest
And a TMBG CD. I can't remember the name. Not even sure why I got it, as i think I actually purchased most of the tracks from some website on mp3. <shrug> It's a good 'un at least.

As I left the mall I only regretted that I didn't grab a copy of Eric Clapton's "Riding with the King," a duet effort with B B King which I know to be excellent. But I'm poor and shouldn't have really bought the 4 I got, so I'll live.

Just going to renew my bi-monthly gripe that the AUTHOR byline should really be on the main page of the site, as that is a much more handy piece of info for visitors than the person who posted the article they didn't write.

well, i have a functional computer at home. Need to do a couple tweaks, and it's slow. But at least it functions, and I may even be able to play NWN.

Course, cable's still not out here so I have this crappy dial up which gives me years to download the NWN patch....

Netzero is interesting. You have to use this stupid crap nav bar that just takes up screen space, but it costs 5-10 less a month than their competitors, so I'm sticking with it. I just hope the uninstall goes well.

I really hope I like this game

because Green Knight Publishing just sent me 8 books for the game.

Ok, ever since we talked about using CoC for other genres, and I complained about how it didn't offer enough choices I've been thinking about modding d20, D&D really, into a "build your own class" sort of thing, and I finally started working on it. I have most of the class features rolled into feats, many of which are obviously prerequisites for others, and others which like "Uncanny Dodge" which have stackable, progressive natures that you can get multiple times.

So basically, you gain a level, you get a certain number of points to spend on either saves or attack bonuses, and you get feats to buy either regular feats or class features. It's sort of like taking the fighter class to a new extreme. I'm thinking of rolling the "points" into a feat as well, so you can be 20th level and still have +0 to hit, and +0 on all saves, but you'll have a heck of a lot of special abilities.

The problem is how to handle spells in this set up. It's very complicated. I originally assiged point values for how many spells a class gained each level, but you have to do that for both learning a spell and gaining the ability to cast spells per day. I'm trying to find a way to equalize this. It's taking a lot of time and analysis (comparing to attack bonus and save progression, etc to see relative power increases).

Now I spout all this to see if any of you have opinions or feedback on either the value of what I'm doing or the way which I could go about it. What say ye?

So my coworker and I were talking about differences of opinion, and he said "Whatever whirls your dervish" which I thought was particularly odd. But then we started coming up with religious ones.

For Mormons, there's "Whatever baptizes your ancestors"
For medieval Christianity there's "Whatever burns your heretic."

Feel free to add to the list.

Ok, I'm sure I don't understand what you're getting at here