“I’m just an average best-archer-in-the-world”

by mansarali on deviantart; it is impossible to find a picture of a *bad* elvish archer

Say you’re designing the character creation rules of a fantasy RPG (pen-and-paper or video game). Nothing fancy, just a few ability scores picked using a point-buy system and improved as the character gains levels. So far so good. But you also want to show off the amazing diversity of your fantasy setting, so you write something like this:

Elves are swift and gracious compared to clumsy humans. Elf characters get +2 Dexterity.

Seems reasonable on its face, and damn near universal in gaming. But what does it actually mean?

Removing colour identity from MtG Commander/EDH

(This post is about the popular Commander/EDH variant for Magic: the Gathering.)

Commander has two rules that prevent players from using cards that aren’t of their commander’s colour(s): a deckbuilding rule and an in-game rule.

• Cards in a deck may not have any colours in their identity which are not shared with the commander of the deck. (The identity of each card in the deck must be a subset of the General’s.)
• A deck may not generate mana outside its colours. If an effect would generate mana of an illegal colour, it generates colourless mana instead.

In this post, I would like to discuss the possibility of removing the first rule, and relying entirely on the second rule to keep decks colour-segregated. I will merely list all consequences I could think of, and let the reader come to their own conclusion.

Harry Potter and the Convoluted Fanfiction

Status

Wrote 20 cards (out of 120 or so). Should have a playable prototype in a month at this rate.

The Pitch

A Once Upon A Time/Aye, Dark Overlord-like storytelling game with Harry Potter fanfics as its theme. Cards with all the tropes we know and love: “the real chosen one”, “muggle with a shotgun”, “storyteller’s self-insert”, “time travel”, “Twilight crossover”, “male pregnancy”… Players interrupt each other with crazy plot points to try to drive a very confused story towards their Ending card (“…and Harry and Voldemort were a family again”).