A few years back I ran a campaign called Hyperdrift Stories, which combined two different games in effect. You could play as part of the starship Tempest’s crew, or you could play in a strategic game as one of the major factions in Settled Space. We got in about 18 sessions with the Tempest crew and played around 8 turns with the strategic game. Now, I want to do something like this again, but I have some different approaches. I’m running a cyberpunk campaign that is open table - anyone can join. The campaign is set in New Ashford, a mega city with many arcologies, cities buried under cities and powerful corporations locked in a strained alliance.  The abstract map of the city.  What I’ve done with this campaign is set up two systems (for now) that pertain to how you play. Downtime is handled in a very specific “ Citizen Sleeper ”-style gameplay, where each turn lasts a real-time week. In this system you can explore the city, meet new characters and manage resources. This part...

The following is a very simple method I use for roleplaying that is easy to understand and quick to play with. Whenever there is an impactful or important situation with a chance of failure or some sort of uncertainty, I like to ask for a roll. Success just depends on if you roll high or not. Generally, if you roll higher than the average of your die, then that’s a good sign. Rolls of 1 or close to 1 can be intuitively interpreted as “bad”.  Image generated with Midjourney.  With this framework I’ve arbitrarily decided that a healthy and capable human should in most situations roll a d6. It’s the baseline.  If there are setbacks or hindrances, then roll a d4.  With the right equipment, experience or training, roll a d8.  If exceptionally skilled, prepared or generally suited to the situation, roll a d10.  If circumstances are extremely advantaged somehow, roll a d12.  The advantage of this approach is that you get almost instant communication to both y...

I’m preparing to run a Roadside Picnic’ish setting soon using 2400 . There’s one of Jason Tocci’s microgames that already cover this type of setting, but I want to make some additions on top of that. The idea is to run a realtime campaign for a quarantine zone set in the year 1983.  Picture by Tobias Wahlquist , used with permission. I changed the advancement rule to match the pace of the campaign, so the notation for the character creation is slightly different too. In typical 2400 games, the skill level is expressed in dice notation.  Advancement: You can advance your skills by training a number of weeks equal to your Skill Total (add together all skill ranks) + the next rank. Advancing a skill rank grants a better skill die: OPERATORS Choose a speciality.  BUNKER RAT: Advance (rank 1) any two skills from Climbing, Navigation, Running or Stealth. Take one good outdoors outfit and choose between fair camping gear or climbing gear.  FIGHTER: Advance (rank 1) any tw...

This post is my attempt to lay bare how to play a roleplaying game using FKR methods. I will presume no prior experience. Actually, I will presume you don’t even have a roleplaying game. It’s alright, you won’t need one. Mind you, this post is still just a brief overview. Each of the topics I cover here are just barely scratching the tips of their respective icebergs.    Dreams by Rogier Hoekstra via Pixabay. Image used with permission. How to roleplay First off, roleplaying is not acting. It is not stage-play. Instead, it is about saying or doing things that you would do given a role. That’s it. It might even sound familiar, like play pretend. What you and your friends at the table will be doing is using roleplay to set up an ongoing fiction or narrative. When you roleplay, you are basically addressing the ‘facts’ that are in the fiction. Depending on your role, you could change or add facts to the fiction. If you’re in a room with a sarcophagus, you might want to examine so...

I’ve been running and playing in various 2400 and Into the Odd games lately. These are two games that exist in the rules light part of the roleplaying games spectrum. Both games are quite ruthless in their approach to combat. 2400 doesn’t have combat rules per se, but offers a catch-hall saving throw rule. Into the Odd famously has auto-hit with some damage reduction based on armor. I've got some thoughts about both games. Illustration by Richard Duijnstee , used with permission.  

So part of the conceit of Free Kriegsspiel is that the Referee depends on their experience and knowledge of the world to drive the game. That’s great and all, but what about magic? There’s no way to have live experience with that, so there’s only one way out of that. You have to know something about the world you’re running.  Magic! How hard can it be? Image by GraphicMama , used with permission. A typical corollary question of “how do you do magic?” is “how do you handle damage?” which is also a question that keeps popping up. Many newcomers to the FKR way are often already familiar with roleplaying games that quantify damage, and will likely try to find a one-to-one heuristic to deal with that. To help answer this question, I typically ask another question: “What’s the in-world answer to this?”  Many fantasy worlds already present magic systems of various kinds, such as the channeling in Wheel of Time to the element bending featured in Avatar: The Last Airbender. These world...

In the last 12 or so months, I’ve been delving deep into the FKR rabbit hole. It has thoroughly changed the way I play and let me focus more on adventures than ever before. For example, writing things like stat blocks and looking up rules are now a thing of the past. But there are some issues that I think also need to be addressed. In this post I’m going to talk about something I call the “Owl Problem”. How hard can it be? Okay, what’s the deal with bringing owls into this? Well, it’s inspired by the meme above, but related to running rules-light games. In my experience, newcomers to the hobby have almost no issue in joining a session and playing as a PC. However, as a newcomer to running a session, most rules-light games offer little to no guidance.  One central idea to free kriegsspiel is that the referee can just dispense with rules and dice in favor of relying on their experience. This worked out a lot for prussian officers, but a beginner in the ttrpg world doesn't have the sa...