Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Tools

Universal NPC Emulator and The Everyone, Everywhere List

As I was going through my various creations for the New Year, New Challenge , there were two tools I keep referring to--the Universal NPC Emulator and The Everyone, Everywhere List . Both of these are incredibly useful tools that I use both for my frequent Solo games as well as when I'm running a traditional group game. Neither is terribly complicated, but I feel that both could benefit from a proper, if belated, introduction.

Random Scene Challenges for Vampire

I recently got a copy of the 5th Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. One of its elements that stood out to me was a narrative approach to resolving scenes, often with a single skill check. Basically, the Storyteller describes a scene and the challenge related to it, the player makes the roll, and then together they come up with an explanation of what happened. This is not intended as the primary resolution system, but a way to simplify more basic scenes and to keep the focus on the drama, rather than on the dice rolls. It honestly reminded me quite a bit about how various Solo games handle scene resolution--in particular Libre and Bivius . You use the rolls to define the action, rather than the opposite. In a standard scene, a player declare that they are going to throw a punch; they would then roll dice, resolve the action, and deal with whatever consequences. Often with a lot of back and forth. In this setup, the idea is that you would roll a single combat roll, and that would reso...