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About the register
alphaomegathegame.com is an independent enthusiast blog about how tabletop roleplaying games work. It is written under the name The Third Die, and it has one method: take a single mechanism, show the arithmetic that drives it, and say what that does at a table.
Every entry is a mechanism examined on its own, with the arithmetic shown and the table consequence stated. No system is treated as canonical. Where a rule is described here, it is described in our own words — this is not a rules reference and it will not tell you what any published game says. It is an argument about what parts do.
A tabletop roleplaying game is a machine, and you can see the workings. What is hard to see is how the parts push on each other.
The register runs to 29 entries in five sections: Randomness, Numbers, Encounters, The Sheet and The Table. Each carries a reference number so entries can point at each other, and most of them do.
01Who writes it
Mara Ellison
Randomness · Numbers
Writes the probability entries. Came to the subject through statistics rather than through games, which is why the arithmetic tends to arrive before the anecdote.
Tobias Crane
Encounters · The Table
Runs two long campaigns and has kept notes on both for years. Most of the entries about pacing began as complaints in those notebooks.
Rowan Pike
The Sheet
An interface designer by trade. Reads a character sheet the way you would read a form: by asking what it makes easy and what it hides.
02What you will not find
No reviews, no news, no storefront and no dates. An entry about a mechanism does not go stale, so nothing here is filed by when it was written. Supporters are named on the homepage and nowhere else, and they have no say in what is published.