Roleplaying
I have been roleplaying for quite a while now (about 15 years if you must ask)!
During that time I've played in a vast number of settings using a large
number of systems. My favourite settings are:
- Glorantha, Greg Stafford's
mythical literary creation.
- Pendragon, Chaosium's Arthurian setting.
- Star Wars, created by George Lucas.
- Tekumel, by Prof. MAR Barker.
All these worlds have a fairly strong mythical theme with two openly
admitting inspiration from Joseph Campbell. However, while having
a good setting is vital the rules can ease or hamper the enjoyment.
All the above use systems tailored to the settings, however in the case
of Tekumel this supposed fine tuning has resulted in a convoluted,
over-complicated mess which scares rather than invites and hinders
rather than helping play.
Systems
Like many before me my disatisfaction with published rulesystems
has led me to design my own. This started with a tweaked version of
RuneQuest and then a system for playing in Julian May's Many Coloured Land
(the system had some inspiration from Role (Rule) Master and suffered
from the same draw-backs). Recently, I have been experimenting with
a more streamlined, generic, system
ODES (One Dice Epic System).
ODES which is more widely known as
BODGERS
(the Glorathan variant) is designed to produce results that feel right
using a minimum of rules and especially tables.
Page last amended: 8/1/1998 LFJ