Race as class and back again

I’ve been talking with my old group recently about starting an on-line game of some sort. Naturally, the topic of conversation has largely centered on schedules and game systems.
At the moment, I’m vacillating between Labyrinth Lord and Traveller (the new retro-clone from Mongoose). For the most part, I’m leaning towards Labyrinth Lord for [...]

David Cook made me this way

As a gamer that began playing during the hobby’s birth, I’ve had the opportunity to witness a massive shift in the way games are designed and played. In the early days of gaming, there was still a sense that we were essentially playing miniature-based scenarios, where backstory was only used in order to get [...]

Top Secret’s H2H system

Having discussed the concept of lethality in espionage games, it seems like a good time to bring up the Top Secret hand-to-hand combat system. Like any good old school product, it’s intricate, quirky, and uses a giant chart!
The idea is actually rather simple. Each opponent (secretly) decides what their attack and [...]

Espionage: Lethality

As I discussed in my previous entry, the real problem with modern day espionage games began when we attempted to move over from a dungeon crawling mentality. The early spy games (Top Secret and James Bond, for instance) were certainly designed for a realistic feel, but this was actually what caused the massive body [...]

Espionage: Legacy problems

Thus far, my Raven Con poll is leaning towards Top Secret, which I have to say is not only a bit surprising but also encouraging as that was the game I was hoping to run but wasn’t sure how the gaming-community-at-large would feel about such an esoteric entry. Even though espionage games can work [...]

Which would you play?

I’ve not been to a Con in years but I’m thinking of going to Raven Con this April. In fact, I’ve been thinking about volunteering to run a game (or two). I just haven’t yet nailed down what I might want to run because I’m so out of practice with convention gaming. [...]