Treasure Tables is on hiatus as of December 13th, 2007 -- after two years of daily posts, I needed a break. If you're looking for GMing material, I have two recommendations: the hundreds of posts in TT's archives, and my new project, the multi-author GMing blog Gnome Stew. Happy GMing! -- Martin

Nonstop Pulp Action, HP Piles and Cartography

Mon. September 10, 2007 

Good stuff for GMs from around the web:

• You Could Learn A Lot From Lou Scheimer (Part I): Over on I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow, Dr. Rotwang has a great post about running pulp sessions where the action literally never lets up. His jumping-off point is the 1979 pilot of the animated Flash Gordon series, which features a ludricous number of fights and chases in just 22 minutes.

• d20 Hit Point Piles: Always one to take rules in different directions, ars ludi author Ben Robbins proposes that similar mooks pool their HP, rather than being tracked individually. He’s talking d20, but I can see this applying nicely to other systems, too.

• Cartographers’ Guild: If you like creating maps, take a peek at the Cartographers’ Guild website. They’ve got forums for works in progress, discussing mapping software and more. I’ve never seen a site devoted to mappers before, and it looks like they’ve got a good community going.

More posts about: Approaches and Techniques, NPCs, Worldbuilding

Comments

5 Responses to “Nonstop Pulp Action, HP Piles and Cartography”

  1. VV_GM on September 10th, 2007 11:48 am

    That hit point piles method is awesome! I can see that working for several different systems.

  2. John Arcadian on September 10th, 2007 5:06 pm

    The hit piles are an interesting idea. I can see the drawbacks that they list in the article as being fairly big (like one enemy tending to avoid death, or another one being cut off fresh by a relatively low powered character), but avoidable. Since the Game master gets to just pick one off when the numbers are past their HP level, they can choose to eliminate one over another. It depends on how much control you want to take over the game or not. It might get into a thing like fudging or no fudging. Do you change the course of a game manually as the GM once it is underway?

  3. John Arcadian on September 11th, 2007 7:40 am

    I stopped over by the http://www.cartographersguild.com/ site and their forums. That is a pretty nice place. Not as nice as TT, but few things are. It definitely has the same feel though, but it is filtered through the lens of mappers. I saw a lot of talk on mapping theory, and people putting up their WIP to see how they could improve it. Definitely a nifty resource. Thanks Martin!

  4. Ben Robbins on September 13th, 2007 4:34 am

    “Since the Game master gets to just pick one off when the numbers are past their HP level, they can choose to eliminate one over another.”

    Also take a look at the option for running two piles instead of one towards the end of the article.

    Thanks for the link Martin, as always!

  5. Martin on September 17th, 2007 8:28 pm

    You’re welcome, Ben. Your blog is one of my favorites, and it’s been a must-read for me since I first discovered it.