Dungeons & Dragons Retreats, Goes Back to the Drawing Board?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 11, 2012

On Monday, Wizards of the Coast (WotC, part of Hasbro) officially announced development of yet another new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and the story has surprisingly been picked up by such publications as Forbes and The New York Times. Fourth Edition, we hardly knew you. Why change now (which still feels sudden)? Besides the […]

Filed Under: Dice & Paper - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Game Designer Sentenced to Execution in Iran on Propoganda Charges

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 10, 2012

I  doubt that U.S. born Iranian-American Amir Mizra Hekmati had any idea that being a game designer would target him by the Iranians when he went to the country to visit his grandmother and other relatives (for the first time) last fall. His crime? As near as I can tell from the usual smokescreen of […]

Filed Under: Politics - Comments: 5 Comments to Read

Vote Frayed Knights as Indie Role-Playing Game of the Year!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 9, 2012

RPGWatch is doing it’s annual reader’s choice game of the year awards. This year, in a show of fairness to the mainstream games, the categories were broken up into Best Mainstream and Best Indie RPGs. That’s only partly a joke. But it does mean more categories, more games getting covered, etc.  And it means you […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 2 Comments to Read

Game Development. Cheaper.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 6, 2012

I was going to write this longish piece about lessons learned from working on Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. I still plan on it, but then prolific game-design thinker Raph Koster went and did a write-up about making games “more cheaply” (which can also be interpreted as, “more quickly,” as the major cost in […]

Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 6 Comments to Read

A Real X-Com?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 5, 2012

Okay. Here’s what would be incredibly funny (if unlikely). 2K Marin’s first-person shooter X-Com remake tanks, while Firaxis’s newly-announced X-Com: Enemy Unknown – which sounds to be a straight-up strategy game with turn-based tactical combat – sells near-Civilization quantities. Anyway, we old-school fans of the original may have reason to rejoice… Game Informer – X-Com: […]

Filed Under: Mainstream Games, Strategy Games - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

Bite-Sized Hardcore Gaming Manifesto

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 4, 2012

Cliff Harris breaks things down in a way that I think many of us here feel. The industry these days likes to divide the market into two groups: Hardcore gamers with lots of time on their hands and a passion for realistic violence, high-action, and long games; and the casual gamers, who are almost exclusively […]

Filed Under: Casual Games, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 10 Comments to Read

Frayed Knights: The Independent RPG of the Year!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 3, 2012

This time, it’s not just wishful thinking…   GameBanshee’s “Game of the Year” awards are up!   And Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon took the “Independent RPG of the Year” award for 2011! I don’t know how narrowly we managed to win against Dungeons of Dredmor, the runner-up, but with the amount of respect […]

Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Mainstream Games - Comments: 18 Comments to Read

RPG Design: Skill-Based Systems

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 2, 2012

Okay, I figured I’d chat a bit about the features of skill-based RPG systems – good, bad, and neutral. This is a continuation of my previous articles about the skill-based vs. class-based systems, and the features of class-based systems. When I first started playing skill-based systems, I thought I’d never want to go back to […]

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



top next »