Blog Posts

BIND's Story Point System

The Problem

While I’d hope to rock up at the gaming table and just game with friends, the DM had other ideas. Everyone had to write a character back-story. Having three jobs at the time, I didn’t feel enamoured with my homework, but a while later, I had read enough about the campaign world to begin writing something that could fit into it.

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.

Weaving Stories

Classic RPG adventures suffer from chronic flaws. When PCs should to go somewhere, they don’t. When they should take interest in an item, they ignore it. Any NPC who will lead them to a secret cave in Chapter IV gets stabbed in Chapter II because the players thought he was up to something. After all the carnage, they decide to flee to some random area they heard of from last session, leaving the DM totally unprepared. No amount of preparation seems to stop the random b-lines the players make.