Sunday, May 15, 2011

Encumbrance

I hate Encumbrance rules!

It's not that I think players should get a totally free ride, not at all. Its just that most of the time - at least in the systems I am familiar with - encumbrance is, well, an encumbrance. It's book-keeping, accounting and math. Adding up the weight of each and every little thing the character is carrying is boring and takes too long.

Generally I don't bother. The games we play we assume that the characters have anything they need for most situations. I assume rope, iron spikes and the like (or whatever.) If they have been doing a lot of stuff or they have lost their packs, then they have problems.

I also assume they can carry all the stuff they need.

Mind you, they are not allowed to specify that they are carrying 100 iron spikes, or 10 coils of 100' rope, but the basic load they get without any issues.

Yesterday, after my post about waiting for the Flame Princess to arrive, I went and downloaded the free stuff from the site, including the character sheet which, BTW, is one of the better ones I've seen. I don't know if the way the encumbrance is done is unique to this system, but it is certainly elegant and - to my mind - is another way of getting rid of the book-keeping.

The method used seems to be (I haven't read the actual rules - I'm just going by the sheet) that one simply marks off the descriptions that match what you are carrying, starting with the least encumbrance. Total the dots marked and that gives you a line on a table which summarizes the effects of your encumbrance on your speed, etc. A step above what I advocated earlier, but still more simple and elegant than most encumbrance accounting systems.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Vornheim & Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Not Tékumel as such, but I am still looking forward to Vornheim and Lamentations of the Flame Princess which I ordered after seeing mention of them on Grognardia.

What really made me want to buy Vornheim is this MAP. I mean - Wow! All maps should be like this!

Sunday, May 8, 2011

The Art of Barsoom

I found and interesting Blog yesterday entitled: The Art of Barsoom. Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars stories (along with Venus and Pellucidar, in that order) are some of my favourite science fiction settings. This blog is a collection of the published art for Barsoom by Artist - I spent a good bit of time yesterday looking at the various artist pages.

I can plainly see how many artists have [IMO] been influenced by Frank Frazetta. I would like to sort out who influenced him!

Saturday, May 7, 2011

With Great Power

This is what I am listening to right now!

Future World Music


Great Stuff!

Check out Two Steps from Hell and Thomas Bergersen (Ocean Princess) as well!

Spaceswords and Glory

The playtest PBB game has started, albeit slowly. Which in some ways is good. I am not sure where everyone is - meaning timezones - but I get the impression that many are on the West Coast and so I think I go to bed before many of the posts are made.

I'm also having a bit of problem with Blogger - from my computer at work especially, where the anti-spam text takes several refreshes to get it to even display properly. I have already lost the first version of my first input - which was quite long. The version posted is similar, but I am sure not worded the exact same way, and stuff may have gotten left out. Since then, I now type the comment/response in word and paste it into Blogger!