At first, I looked at "Power" and could not resist grimacing. It conjured up images of "super powers" and the like, and that's not really appropriate. But if I thought further, and tossed away my inner 14 year-old Spiderman reader, Power is actually very appropriate. It's like S...

I can see where you are coming from. Consistency is a good goal. I've seen this problem in other people's game design. Some games make a great effort to either go with adjectives as much as possible ( Quick, Strong, Charismatic, Nimble, Clever, and so on) or with nouns ( Quickness, Strength, Charism...

Sorry if I came off condescending there. :oops: I wouldn't say that you were condescending. Everything's fine. Witchcraft is, I think, one of the very best chances you have to put the smack-down on a loaded-for-bear opponent. It can be about as bad as the problem, but it does even those odds. :wink...

Hi Clay!

Please don't forget to e-mail me or PM me on time once you have the new tactical rules, or anything else, to playtest for OVA Mecha. I can hardly wait for them. I will have friends here with whom I can run a quick tactical game.

Thanks for the updates. Stay in touch.

I like the Cheat Sheet myself and may soon use it for various groups, if needed. It seems to really have all the core rules properly in one place. I checked how it fits onto an MS Word page, and it easily fits there if you're using the European A4 page format and not too large fonts. Very cool. Keep...

I keep seeing a slight problem in the OVA rules every time I make characters with a combat ability as well as Quick. If I read the rules correctly, you can add your dice (levels) in Quick to your dice in Combat Skill or Hobby (fighting style). Does this apply to all fight scenes? More importantly ma...

Anything bought at +5 deserves to have a major say in how situations get resolved. That being said, my suggestion for this situation is to not allow beginning characters to sneak anything up beyond +3 or so. +5 is one of those rarefied airs of power levels and should be fairly rare. A guy with Time...

One of my pals in my regular RPG group is quite a mathematician. He's an electronics engineer by training, very pedantic (kind of what I am like when it comes to spelling etc.) and very interested in tables, probabilities, formulae and so on, so I think he'll appreciate the charts by FoD as well. I ...

Good news for Clay. :D Last weekend I game-mastered two more sessions at a con in the town of Dreieich, Germany (www.dreieichcon.de). The second session was for OVA, a fantasy adventure this time, one that I had to completely improvise. It's amazing what you can do with only the rulebook, character ...

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the English edition is a translation of DSA Fourth Edition. Is that correct? It is indeed 4th Edition, which I understand to be the only edition to make it into a commercial English translation. True enough that art in games is often very different between ...

Was it Das Schwarze Auge ? It's been over a decade since I last played that, but it's what got me into RPGs (which led to illustration later on) at the tender age of 12 or so. Ah, the memories... The English Language version of this is "The Dark Eye" (of course, "Black Eye" is m...

Thanks for the recap, Jandar! I appreciate you taking the time to write it out. Was a fun read, and best of luck on your next con venture! Hopefully there will be more gamers and less 14 year old girls! ;D It was a long recap ... and there will be more material about my impressions of both Shiroi C...

I later learned that there were actually a few people running pen & paper RPGs, but almost all of them (I think all of them except mine) were "sanctioned" company demos for the respective line ... There was one for D&D, one for Vampire, one for a German fantasy game . Was it Das S...

Hello Clay, Last week you asked me for an update on what I experienced at the gaming convention in Augsburg, Germany. I figured that most of what I wanted to tell you can also be posted right here on the forum. As I told you, I went there early last Saturday and spent most of the weekend there. I ha...

To Eisenmann: OK, I see. Thank you for explaining. Maybe I should adopt this method for my own plans here. With one of the giant mecha I recently wrote up for OVA (technically an implementation of "Vehicle, Lvl. 4"), I was faced with a tough decision: Am I going to really put everything in...