Christian Lindke

1 week ago | geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that one of the ways I paid my way through undergraduate education was as a 21/Craps dealer in a small Reno casino. My time in the profession had two significant effects upon me. It took the interest in statistics that playing role playing games had given me and dialed it to 11. I love examining the statistics of things and examining all kinds of games of chance. It also removed from me any desire to gamble.

1 week ago | open.substack.com | Christian Lindke

I was in the process of my bi-weekly perusal of the Bundle of Holding website, when I noticed that they have Shannon Appelcline’s detailed history of the Traveller roleplaying game available for one-quarter the price in a short term bundle (only for the next few days, after that you’ll have to buy it for full price).

2 weeks ago | geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke

There has recently been a bit of a hubbub in the Role Playing Game social media sphere about whether a person should be giving game mastering advice if they have not read the Dungeon Masters Guide (sic) from cover to cover. I will answer that question in a future post in this series but I want to start from first principles before I answer that question and in process provide parts of my eventual answer to the initial question above regarding reading the DMG.

1 month ago | geekeratimedia.com | Christian Lindke

In my most recent Weekly Geekly Rundown, I mentioned that I worked on a Fantasy Heartbreaker called The Secret Fire and has expressed an interest in learning more about this game. All these years later, I’m still very proud of the game we put together. I think we could have deviated even more from the Open Source Document for the 3.5 Open Gaming License because I think the ways we pulled away from that were the spaces where really interesting design happened.

1 month ago | geekeratimedia.substack.com | Christian Lindke |Mike Morgan |Ryan Howard |Rebekah King

As someone who has played a lot of games, I am always interested in seeing how a game addresses the issue of which player goes first. Turn order and initiative systems are fundamental design choices. Having the ability to act first can give a strategic or tactical advantage to the “first mover” in achieving the game’s winning conditions. Like the first mover advantage in business, this potential is dependent on many other factors.