First of all, apologies for the lack of posting recently. No excuse!
Secondly, a recent thread on rpg.net on things you like that no-one else does reminded me that I really like the 1 Crown = 20 Shillings = 240 Pence system. I’m nowhere near old enough to remember the old money in the UK, but it’s actually a very intuitive system, dividing neatly, as it does, into thirds, quarters, sixths and eighths. Once you’ve got your head round having to calculate in fractions, it’s pretty easy.
There are currently two crowdfunding projects that WFRP fans might be interested in. The first I posted about last week: Triple Ace Games’s Kickstarter for a Thirty Years War sourcebook in its All For One: Regime Diabolique line:
Kickstarter ends Friday, September 15, just before midnight CET.
Last weekend was TobCon, successor to WimCon and, ultimately, TimCon. It’s a great little Warhammer con frequented by long-time WFRP fans, including those behind Warpstone and Liber Fanatica. You can read various people’s reactions to the games they ran and played in (including my games) in the thread here.
Anyway, I ran two games, both Zweihänder, and played two. I’ve talked about the games I played in over in the StS thread I just linked to. Here I’d like to offer some thoughts about the games I ran – the intentions I had, how I felt Zweihänder worked, and how I had to adjust on the fly.
To see in the dark. Obviously.
Magic is a problem in RPGs. On the one hand, it is supposed to be mysterious and occult (literally: ‘hidden’), but on the other hand the game part of roleplaying games requires consistent rules so as to be fair to the players. The result is that magic is reduced in players’ minds to a kind of science or mathematics.
I’ve spent way too long noodling with magic systems to try to solve this conundrum, but now I think I’ve finally come up with a solution.