One of the mixed blessings of the OSR movement is that there are SO FRACKING MANY good gameblogs churning out interesting and useable information that a) reading them can seriously eat up my time much in the same way that Wikipedia can spark a Wiki-Walk or TVTropes can devour an entire afternoon; and b) if I don't immediately copy-paste said good information into a Works document and actually close one of the twenty-some tabs on one of my many web-pages, I'll completely forget which of the hundred or so blogs out there posted the article I was keen on.
Case in point: within the last week I read a post someone made about how to represent a D&D thief's Pick Locks skill (the old percentile-based version, not the 3.+ skill mod version) by using playing cards. It was something like this: the thief can choose one of four ways to move his pick (something like push, pull, jiggle and, I don't know, twist?), and each of the cards' suits represents one of those maneuvers. The DM picks a card, and the thief's player says which of those maneuvers he wants to try; if he chooses the maneuver that the DM is holding the card for, the pick breaks. The thief's skill rating is connected to how many times he does this, or something. I can't remember, but it struck me as a really fun way to represent what would otherwise be just another skill roll. And after playing Skyrim, this notion currently has extra appeal to me.
But I can't find which blog this article was posted on. I went through my browser history and can't seem to find it. Trying to do a Google search only yields website after website about real-world lock-picking, even though I put the words "D&D thief" in there.
Anybody know where that was?
5 comments:
This might be what you're after
http://recedingrules.blogspot.com/2011/04/procedural-lockpicking.html
http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/04/making-picking-locks-fun-disarming.html?zx=35b97cbffa67c7b8
Those aren't the article I was thinking of, but they look pretty good, too. Thanks!
This is why we should be using the Links to Wisdom wiki!
http://rathergamey.blogspot.com/2011/04/dead-simple-lock-trap-mini-game.html
This is how I found it:
http://osrsearch.blogspot.com/
Query: lock-picking playing cards
Search engines beat manual curation 95% of the time. You just need one that is appropriately domain-specific.
:-)
That's the one! Thank you, Brendan.
Richard, you remind me that I need to update my links on this blog. I ought to have the Links to Wisdom link here, too.
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