Free RPGs Available Online

Via EN World, I was just reminded that John Kim maintains an amazingly comprehensive list of free RPGs that are available online.

The full list includes over 500 titles, ranging from well-known games like FUDGE to quickstart rules (like the Alternity Fast Play books) and engaging oddballs, like Wuthering Heights Roleplay.

Whether you’re in the market for a new system, looking for a free engine to use in a personal project or just in the mood to spend an afternoon browsing through more labors of love than you can shake a stick it, John’s list is a handy tool.

Better, Faster Searching on TT

I finally made a change I’ve been waffling about for months: I switched the search box you see in the blog sidebar from WordPress’s crappy built-in search function to a simple script that calls up results in Google.

WP’s native search is awful — it only searches blog posts (not comments, and certainly not the forums or wiki), includes partial matches by default, doesn’t filter common words (search for “the,” get every post in the archives) and returns results in date order. Bleh.

Google, by contrast, is Google: You can now search the entire site — blog posts and pages, comments, forums and wiki — all at once, which gives you access to the full spectrum of GMing advice and ideas from the TT community.

When I sit down to write a post, I search TT to make sure that I haven’t covered that exact topic before (after almost two years, it’s easy to forget!), and to find posts to link in for additional info. It had reached the point where I was visiting Google to do that, so I can only imagine that TT readers have been similarly frustrated.

I’m sorry the search function sucked before — hopefully you’ll get much better mileage out of the new hotness.

Aliens are Going to Kill Us All

Meet the neighbours: Is the search for aliens such a good idea?, an article in the online edition of The Independent, kicks off with this question: “We’ve been trying to make contact with aliens for years. Now the day is fast approaching when we might finally succeed. But will our extraterrestrial friends come in peace? Or will they want to eat us?”

It’s a fun question, and one that’s come up before, but there are a couple of things that set this article apart. For starters, you’ve got this: “Jared Diamond, professor of evolutionary biology and Pulitzer Prize winner, says: ‘Those astronomers now preparing again to beam radio signals out to hoped-for extraterrestrials are naive, even dangerous.’” When the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel weighs in, it’s worth taking notice.

From a GMing standpoint, this is a fascinating concept for a modern-era campaign. You could run it fairly straight, with aliens attacking Earth; you could play that same idea for laughs; the PCs could be conspiracy wonks, a la The X-Files; the “aliens” could really be Lovecraftian horrors from beyond space and time — it’s a wide-open field.

And this is where the article really shines: It includes a bibliography summarizing six books and 10 movies that involve first contact scenarios, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Predator, all of which illustrate directions in which you could take this concept. I’d add Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama II to that list — it’s my all-time favorite first contact story, and it approaches the idea from a very different angle. (Via kottke.)

Deciding Whether or Not to Play an RPG

When you’re given the opportunity to play an RPG — there’s a GM at hand, the game has been selected and you have enough players for a group — what’s the single most important factor in deciding whether you say yes or no to that chance?

This sounds like a player-oriented question, but there are GMing issues at its heart. Knowing why your players are playing in your game helps you make that game fun for them, and honing your craft to the point that more people will choose to play in your games because you’re the GM is a worthy goal.

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Four Types of RPG Puzzle

In addition to offering up the idea for yesterday’s post, Four Key Elements of a Good RPG Puzzle, WeaveWarden (of the PbP site Myth-Weavers) also sent me four general types of puzzle suitable for use in most RPGs. Thanks, WeaveWarden!

He suggests exploitable security systems, things that have broken down, puzzles that aren’t really puzzles and their counterpart, puzzles that explicitly are puzzles. He frames them in fantasy terms, but his advice applies equally well to other genres.

What I particularly like about WW’s suggestions is that they offer ways to include more believable puzzles in your campaign — excellent alternatives to the stereotypical Resident Evil-style, “No one in their right mind would build this thing” variety.

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Four Key Elements of a Good RPG Puzzle

Puzzles in RPGs are a something of a strange beast.

They can be a lot of fun for your players (and for you, as you watch your players work on them), but they can also be frustrating, time-consuming roadblocks preventing your group from having any fun at all.

Fortunately, there are four key elements you can take into account to help make sure your puzzles and riddles are fun, not frustrating.

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Reasons Not to Use a GMing Screen

I’m a longtime screen fanboy, but since I started writing TT I’ve heard plenty of good reasons not to use one at all. I’m going to play Devil’s advocate for a moment, and say that you shouldn’t use a GMing screen because…

If, like me, you’re also a lifelong screen user, have you ever tried running a game without one? (I have for one-shots, and it was kind of fun.) If you don’t use a screen, why not?

What Goes Behind Your GMing Screen?

Assuming you use a GMing screen at all (or perhaps more than one), what do you keep behind it?

My typical GM’s-side loadout looks something like this:

What do you have behind your screen, either for your own convenience or to hide it from your players?

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