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The Bar Is Open!

Welcome, my lovelies. Welcome to the TaleSpin Tavern. I am Leland, called the Waywright, and I will be your host and guide as we stumble between tables and tales and worlds. Yes, I'm also known as the Silent Bard, but that's only a joke; text is pretty quiet, but if you see me in person all bets are off. In the meantime, feel free to call me Lee, though I must admit that I've answered to worse. So what are we doing here? As a teller of tales by trade I make no promises, but I'll try to keep the digressions to a minimum. My purpose  here  is to talk less about the tales we tell and more about the games we play to spin  those tales. As a character in a more than few of those games I have a better perspective than some... so I'm going to take you back to the kitchen for some taste-testing, and to discuss the recipes. I want us to get an understanding of how these gamescwork, where each excels and falls short, and what we could maybe do better. Well, whatever we like, ...
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Health Systems

As I've said before , I was originally conceived and implemented as a D&D character. First Edition AD&D, to be precise, back when Bard was an Appendix that had me start out as a Fighter. The upshot is that I've always known my way around which end is pointy and where to put it, and I've always been pretty sturdy. It also means I was there, many times , as our players stopped the game and left us, the characters, frozen in time with a weapon just reaching its target  so they could discuss what it meant  that seven more "hit points" were going to be deducted from our amorphous bag of Life. The blob of HP has become so ubiquitous that many don't even question it any more. Video games just blithely take it for granted, as do many TTRPGs. Yes, it's absolutely possible for someone to get shot and keep coming, but seventy-four times in an afternoon?!?!? People, Bactine isn't that good. Wrapping a little gauze around it isn't going to make it all b...
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A Teaser Release for the New Year!

I did a  review . You read it, right?  So it should be ok to at least talk about our own game a  little ...maybe even release a "game jam" version? Behold!  Level One RPG This is a minimalist derivative of the soon-to-be-released  OneRPG ! We don't generally like class and level systems, so we built our rules not to require them, but Level One uses those rules to implement a class and level based game that works. 😁 It's totally playable, and I'm gonna get Paul to open up the Discord so folk can ask questions and discuss, maybe run some games over Twitch to demonstrate.  Here's what he put in as the blurb on the release page: A simple, flexible, ENIOTS ( E verything N eeded I s O n T he S heet) game using any dice you like . Freeform Classes, spells and magic items. Custom advancement and metacurrency.    Uniform system for resolution of actions that sets effects such as damage in the same roll. Yes, with any dice you like . Don't believe it? Try...
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Concise Elegance: Dash RPG

Today's post is just a review of an RPG system. Well, the title says it all. That's a wrap - good night everyone... Ok, obviously it doesn't say it all. As a professional jongleur and wordsmith, we all know I can say a LOT more than that, and just saying a game is "elegant"  doesn't really mean much without some elaboration, does it?  So let's unpack. Dash  RPG is, according to its own website, is "a condensed version of Charge that fits on a half fold brochure." This is true - you can get the entire ruleset from its itch.io page  as a "Name your own price" download, and print copies of the the formatted character sheets each with the whole reference on the back of that single sheet to hand out to your players. There's even a one-page SRD guide, formatted to fold, to help if you are making your own game based on these rules ("Both Dash and Charge are released under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY." -- the Licensing pa...
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Something Besides D&D

Ok, let's get this out of the way... I don't like class and level based systems. There, I said it. Yes, I know I was originally a D&D character, and yes, I know it's still over half the market. I'll admit that it can be a lot of fun. Hey, I rocked every version of me, and all of the originals were D&D. It absolutely has its place, but it's like that first girlfriend you had as a kid when your hormones finally started making you think you knew what love was. You tell people she broke your heart, but really, more often than not, you just grew apart. You know it's true. And ladies, you really just figured out you could do better, right? So consider this. Samuel Clemens, known to most of you as Mark Twain, wrote - “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one...
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