Friday, October 1, 2010

Rubrick

My primary focus in reviewing is whether a book is a interesting read since game mechanics are not my strong point or at least not the mechanics of whether they are balanced or broken.  It's my belief that any system is playable as long as the person running has a sufficient understanding of the rules to be able to manage and balance players characters however broken they may try to break them.  I will still try to comment on the rules as I see them but if you want a mechanical breakdown please let me point you to the community over at RPG.net who have a vaster understanding of game mechanics then I will ever aspire to.

So aside from the content of the book at hand and what I thought of it I will provide:
  • a link to the company website (if one exists and I can find it, usually direct to the book being talked about)
  • is the book out in pdf/print/both and what version(s) I have indicated by a *
  • links to Amazon and/or Noble Knight
  • links to DriveThruRPG if applicable
  • A numerical rating (1 to 10) to give a general overview, I will tag the review with its numeric rating
  • Tag each review by rating, gameline, and company

Premise

Welcome to the Oxford Reviews.  This will be an attempt to review the rather large collection (472 different books currently) of role-playing games that I and my wife own.  I largely collect gaming books so this review is largely due to a desire on my part to actually have fully read much, if not all, of my collection even if this takes the rest of my life.  The reviews will have something of a standard format so that their usefulness does not vary from review to review.  As to frequency I cannot promise a consistent once a something approach.  But follow along anyways if you will!