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The Decade of Blogging Nerdily: Critical Hits is 10
In early October of 2005, Critical Hits launched using the WordPress platform (version 1.5!), both to bring the nerd conversations I was missing with friends as we all had moved to different areas and...
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Rate My Quests: Quest Givers, Bards, and Asymmetric Information
Bootstrapping the Party Consider a typical situation: a new party, relatively low-level, searches for adventure. They want to kill some things, roll their bodies, take their stuff, keep the magic...
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You’re Gonna Carry That Weight
Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight Carry that weight a long time – Carry That Weight, the Beatles Murder Hoboing is largely a cash business. Sometimes the cash gets converted into something tangible:...
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Bribery and Corruption Most Diviner
The Murder Hobo economy is pretty frictionless. A Murder Hobo hands over a hard-earned gold coin from slaughtering some goblinoid creature and she receives an expected good or service. Mages craft...
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Shadowrunners and the Theft of Crypto-Corporate Data
On the Physicality of Data In some ways, this tidal wave of data is the pollution problem of the information age. All information processes produce it. If we ignore the problem, it will stay around...
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Shotgunning
This entry is a little scattershot. I have a few things to let you know before I delve back into meaty essays on specific topics. Speaking of topics, I have plenty. However, in my first post, I asked...
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The Decker and the 10M of Fiber Optic Cable
The Market Markets run in nanosecond time slices. Computerization ruined the interpersonal dimension of stock markets. Once networked computers could make trades faster, smarter, and more efficiently...
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Surviving
Let’s go for a ride! Always wear your helmet. I’ve been playing Fallout 4‘s beta Survival difficulty mode. It’s good. The mode certainly meshes with my normal play style, but Survival also improves the...
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Game Design by Example: Introduction
Hey all, I’m Tracy. I’ve posted here at Critical Hits before, but it was a long time ago so I’ll re-introduce myself. I’m a writer and game designer. I co-own a game company called Exploding Rogue...
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The Game Behind My Serial Novel
Taken on its face, football is a bad game. An NFL football game has 60 minutes of “play.” It takes roughly 3 hours to complete this period of competition. And in that time, only 11 minutes of actual...
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Corporate Contracts in the Far-Off Future Dystopia
The Shadowrunners quote a 40,000 Nuyen price for the job to the corporate middle manager. In the grand scheme of corporate accounting, this is not nothing. One the one hand, it’s more than a new box...
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Review: “Captain America: Civil War”
This review contains spoilers for Captain America: Civil War. I thoroughly enjoyed Captain America: Civil War, but watching it with my wife, I was struck by a few major compromises the film made. The...
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Magic Patents, Trolls, Scabs, and Open Source Spells
Crafting a +1 long sword is a pretty straightforward process. The crafter – a mage/blacksmith – takes an order from some rich adventurer. She reaches out to Dwarven suppliers somewhere in the Black...
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Game Design by Example: Making an Idea into More
Valkyries Logo by Brian F’n Patterson “I have this great idea for a game.” Have you ever seen or heard someone say that before? In creative circles, it’s a phrase that gets joked about because it’s...
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A Study in Collaborative World Building
Recently, our gaming group got together to start planning a new D&D (5e) campaign. My gaming group is currently composed of a core set of players that have been with me since 1999: Math, Yan and...
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World Building: Roots
Barsoom (2) I said a while ago that I wanted to talk about world building (maybe worldbuilding or world-building, as you prefer). That I do. Doing so seems likely to take more than a couple entries...
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The Franchise of Evil
Murder Hobos expect the enemy’s structure to look something like a corporation: Multitudinous low-level scrubs on the bottom are scrubs who do scrub things and produce scrub-like XP; The scrubs have a...
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Realism vs. Genre Emulation
Some folks are very concerned with the idea of “realism” in RPGs. The Argument for Realism goes like this: We need rules that model realistic physics, because they guarantee that the world works in a...
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The HR Problems of Evil
The deal was going down. The illegal shipments of Underdark-crafted high-grade weaponry sat in crates on the docks ready for delivery to the Iron King. The Iron King’s minions packed gold bars into...
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Company Men
Sometimes, neither the noble impulses to avenge a peaceful peasant village nor the fight in the employ of the King spurns adventure. Adventure starts with more base impulses. The quest for trade, the...
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