To view this content, you must be a member of Black's Patreon at $1 or more - Click "Read more" to unlock this content at the source ..read more

To view this content, you must be a member of Black's Patreon at $1 or more - Click "Read more" to unlock this content at the source ..read more

To view this content, you must be a member of Black's Patreon at $1 or more - Click "Read more" to unlock this content at the source ..read more

To view this content, you must be a member of Black's Patreon at $1 or more - Click "Read more" to unlock this content at the source ..read more

Why is D&D so focused on combat? This is a question that haunts a recent article by Evan Torner about D&D combat (itself an abridged excerpt of a book about the game). Torner says that D&D focuses on combat but does not provide a choice not to engage in combat, or any tools for de-escalating combat. What he doesn’t do is explore why D&D doesn’t provide those tools. I’m going to discuss why I think D&D is that way – which, to cut a long story short, is because of prep. Before I dive into the topic, let me acknowledge that yes, many D&D DMs do permit you to avoid com ..read more

To view this content, you must be a member of Black's Patreon at $1 or more - Click "Read more" to unlock this content at the source ..read more

Hey everyone! We’re still on a pause here while we unstick our creative muscles, but we are working on stuff and we expect to get things going again soon. This is to give you a preview of what we’re thinking about and working on. Before we do though, we just wanted to say thank you to everyone here for supporting us. We were just updating the Black Armada Hall Of Fame, where we record the names of everyone who has ever supported us here. There’s now been 130 people who have given their support at some point. Whether you jumped on for a month and gave us a few bucks, or have been here for the l ..read more

A rule can be a statement of what you can do, what you must do, or what you must not do, and it may also describe *how* you must do a thing. Rules have all kind of uses. In tabletop roleplaying games, one of those uses is to simplify arguments about how things ought to play out in the fictional situations we imagine and describe at the table. This has led to the claim that “rules elide”, and from what I can glean from the froth and din of internet discourse, some people think this is a very important claim*. But I am going to argue this is, at best, a partial representation of what rules do. W ..read more

A year and a day ago I left my office in the UK civil service for the last time. I started a life of adventure as a full time game designer. So far I haven’t looked back! Here’s what I’ve done in my first year: Run two successful crowdfunding campaigns, fulfilled one of them entirely and broken the back of the other one. Built the foundations of a new game system which will form the core of a number of future releases, and commenced playtesting of that system. Learned how to use Roll20 and designed the virtual playroom for Lovecraftesque in it. Created 7 new games through our Patreon and supp ..read more

To view this content, you must be a member of Black's Patreon at $1 or more - Click "Read more" to unlock this content at the source ..read more