Blog Posts

Always Say the Target Number

A player rolls the dice, and the table watches the result, like a roulette ball bouncing about. Rothgar has a +4 to make the jump, but the chasm demands a Target Number (TN) of 12.

Real Time Passing Between Games

RPG Vloggers chatting about Gygax note on real-world time-synchronization have got me thinking about really using this rule. In case you haven’t heard the idea - Gygax demanded that every day which passes in the real-world, one day passes in the game. The troupe starts and ends their games somewhere safe, like a tavern in town.

System Realism Matters

A hundred paces down the dark tunnel, you see dozens of goblins dancing round a fire and singing about eating anything that moves.

I Want Realistic Dragons

Weighing into an ancient (or at least senile) fantasy debate, I’d like to go back a step. The debate usually goes like this:

Fate Points in BIND

Remember that book or film where the protagonist received a nasty wound, then persevered, and won the day? Well that can’t happen in RPGs, and that’s a shame. So my solution is Fate Points (FP).

The OGL is not Open

The Open Gaming Licence (OGL) does not in fact produce terribly open games, so I wish people would stop referring to such RPGs as ‘open source’.

The Open Source RPG Dream

The cynics say that we keep reinventing the wheel. They say we have too many RPGs, mostly doing the same thing, and why bother to write yet another RPG about elves and magic swords? And they have one thing right - we should stop re-writing RPGs from scratch. Instead, we should change them.

BIND is a grunge-fantasy tabletop RPG designed to solve a number of problems: