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Paper Pills – A Different Kind of Red Box

I've started a new category for ideas that sound really neat, but I don't really know where they lead. Sometimes, like today, it may be a really bad idea. It's posted because it contains a certain "What If?" quality that for whatever reason feels compelling or fascinating.

So here goes:

What if you combine a different arrangement of RPG rule books with a box that contains the perfect Newbie DM kit?

The first thing that pops into my head is "A Box for GMs and separate boxes for players? What the? Are you nuts?"

Then the second thing is "It's just like the Red Box except that you have more than two books."

Somehow, I'm thinking of something that is not either of those two ideas. I would like a perfect newbie GM kit *and* a perfect newbie player kit. It's just that the newbie player kit would be focused enough to be a few pages and limits choice in a way.

Maybe the GM kit features a four page handout that provides an overview of  various races and classes so that players can pick which newbie player kit to use. Then the player kit has everything needed to play that specific race and the classes available to them.

What say you?

Looking at OpenD6 Spells

I had mentioned a long time ago that I was looking at the Spell Building system in OpenD6 Fantasy and OpenD6 Magic for Andras. The main reason was that I wanted a spell building system in Andras that wasn't too cumbersome, but offered some real choices.

It's true that doing this makes magic quite scientific. Instead of bemoaning that fact, I will create a Mage class that takes a scientific view of magic. While the development of the Arcanist class has hit a couple roadblocks, I believe it will work a lot better now that this investigation of the OpenD6 spells is complete.

For those looking on with interest, anything shaded green is something that I corrected. For whatever reason, some of the calculated difficulties in the original pdfs are not correct. In a couple cases, there is a missing spell attribute or the wrong effect value.

One worksheet sorted all the spell by difficulty, another presents them all in a format similar to the OpenD6 Spell Design Worksheet. The "raw" or original values and descriptions are on pages called Raw.

I hope this spreadsheet will be useful to D6 fans. For me, now I can make analysis, pick spells and work out values that are closer to retroclones. I may end up sticking with meters and kilometers, but we'll see.

Here is the spreadsheet in M$ Excel Format:

D6 Spell Spreadsheet

Here it is in LibreOffice or OpenOffice Format:

D6 Spell Spreadsheet

Soon, I hope to add it to the Downloads page.

Happy Birthday to Me

I'm 40 today. I don't feel any kind of middle-age crisis or anything like that.

Andras crawls as it is a busy time of year. I hope to have an alpha level PDF soon for Om Magike.

Meanwhile, if you follow me on Twitter, you'll see that I've become more of a curator of things geek and RPG. If you enjoy the links, let me know. One day, I hope to be a human on Twitter as I miss the interaction.

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