Quarterling’s Corner

1. You want wealth and power, fame and glory! It's hard to "be a fan of the player characters" when their only distinguishing motivation is "get rich." This is a feature if you want the PCs to be empty vessels who could die without the players being seriously disappointed. The bigger problem is: what do you actually do with the treasure? It's not much of a power fantasy if there's nothing to spend your heaping piles of gold on. In the olden days when D&D was an MMO (massively multiplayer off line), this wasn't a problem, because the point was just to be more powerful than all the other players. Money was endlessly useful because you always wanted to be at a higher level with a bigger army than everyone else. Nowadays people try to make domain-level play work in dedicated-table play, but without the competitive element of fighting other players (not to mention setting up your own dungeon to tax low-level players who want to explore it), it tends t...

This short post builds on three prior posts that I’m going to summarize as best as I can so you don’t have to read them: In “ Congas 101 ,” I laid the foundation for Crunch, Grit, and Stick Theory.  Crunchy games  focus on tactical combat.  Gritty games  focus on exploration and lateral thinking.  Sticky games  focus on keeping the story interesting. (This is basically the same as Brad Kerr’s “door D&D, fight D&D, and sticky fingers D&D,” but it’s more flexible: a game might be “sticky crunch” or “crunchy grit.”) In “ The Four Channels of Creative Constraints on RPGs ,” I defined four kinds of constraints that shape the way we play RPGs, three of which are relevant here:  Rules (what rules are you following?), Content (what have you prepared in advance?), and Principles (what advice does the GM follow when running the game?). In “ Dead Theory Necromancy ,” I analyzed different styles of play using the threefold model, which is a tool tha...