Courtney at Hack & Slash has a nice post called On the Top Ten Tactics for Hostile Dungeons in which he lists off some old but vital strategies to keep players alive in a nasty dungeon.
Brent, a Glass Boy, at Glassbird games has a post called Humanizing monsters. He talks a bit about an encounter in Tomb of the Serpent King which is interesting enough, but the real gold is the table at the end with Humanizing Trait and Monstrous Trait columns (I'd ignore the Monster column and roll every monster independently) designed to make beasts more interesting to talk to. The entrees in the table aren't the normal personality things but seem more gamble than usual and nicely applicable to intelligent monsters. I'll be using this, or cooking up something similar.
Along the same lines d4 Caltrops has done something similar with Monster Meins by type which looks to be super-useful. I'm thinking of naming beasts using the adjective. For example Odius Hill Giant and Smug Hill Giant are better than Hill Giant #1 and Hill Giant #2. No additional description are needed, the personality is in the name and sort of implies these are folks to talk. For folks that are unlikely to be talkers I'd go with a description: Big Nose Hill Giant and Bearskin Cloak Hill Giant for example.
The Last Redoubt has a post called Just Say No to Ragebait which makes a good point that people forget. That sort of link would disappear if people stopped clicking the stupid things. I'd expand this well beyond ragebait to the plaque of the internet, those lists that use a false thumbnail to suck you in and then spread a tiny bit of content over three dozen linked pages.
Long ago Apple mail had a feature where you could right-click on spam and send back to sender as if your email address wasn't correct, which had the result that the spammers removed your email address from their spam lists because they don't want their own mail servers filling up with useless email. This had the result of eliminating nearly all of my spam, for awhile, then Apple removed the feature and the floor returned. I'd love someone to create something similar for links. Allow you to mark a link so that whenever it appears on any webpage it is crossed out with a little red X, perhaps with a note from you on why you blacklisted that link. Fake thumbnails, millions of links, ragebait, whatever. I think the internet would rapidly become a better place as those sites stopped getting hits (and hopefully improved their content). I'm probably being overly optimistic, they'll probably just buy up a new address to fool everyone once again rather than change.
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