Wizards of the Coast has announced D&D Next, the successor to D&D 4th Edition aimed squarely at unifying the game's fractured fan base. My gaming group is practically a case study for 5th Edition -- we played 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition (both flavors), and 4th Edition, but finally gave up on the game when the group couldn't agree on which version to play. 60% of the group wanted to play D&D 3x or the Pathfinder Beta, 40% wanted to play D&D 4th Edition. We split the difference and played Star Wars: Saga Edition, which addressed many of our issues with both systems, and gave us a much needed break from the fantasy genre.

We've since returned to fantasy ... but not D&D. Instead we're playing the Pathfinder RPG and Paizo's Second Darkness adventure path. I can't speculate on what it would take to bring the Blackrazor Guild back to D&D -- we simply haven't talked about it enough -- but I know that I am looking for.

The Blackrazors’ annual holiday hiatus will come to an end in a hail of laser fire and missile explosions as we play A Call to Arms: Noble Armada. The Fading Suns-themed successor to Mongoose Publishing’s Babylon 5: A Call to Arms starship battle is fast, fun and often brutal.

It faithfully recreates Wrath of Khan-style slugfests between ships of the line, with the initial weathering of the ship’s shields and hull, and then punch through into critical systems. We’ve had fun in our first three playtests, and I expect more of the same tonight.

It's been mighty quiet around here at Nuketown, partly because I've been super busy at work, but mostly because I've been slowly working on the redesign.

My current task is converting the design comps into an HTML/CSS compliant layout. After that, I'll turn those pages into a functional Drupal 7 theme. The challenge has been that going with what I know, I decided to do the entire site in HTML5 and CSS3 ... which means I'm spending a lot of time learning exactly how much I don't know.

It's not that HTML5 and CSS3 are earth-shatteringly different -- a lot of the key concepts (at least with a simple web page) are the same. The challenge comes with HTML5's new semantic markup. These are tags like "header", "footer", "article", "section" and "aside" which are designed to give meaning to your markup.

The idea is that instead of just having a whole punch of div tags with IDs like "header" and "footer", you use actual tags that let your web browser understand that this content is different. This in turn can be helpful for search engines, which know which areas of the site are content rich, as well as for accessibility, as accessible browsers are able to recognize headers, navigation, etc. and present them accordingly.

I did something I've never done before in September: I kicked off someone else's campaign. Ok, technically it's still my campaign, but material belongs to Pazio. The campaign is the Second Darkness adventure path, and if all goes according to plan, it will see our seven freshly-minted heroes face the ancient hidden evil of the drow in an attempt to save the world from a second apocalypse.

I've been running my own campaigns -- for D&D, Star Wars, and Savage Worlds -- for 15 years. Over that time I've made liberal use of material from a variety of source books, including more than a few one-shot adventures, but by and large I was the one writing each week's episode. It was fun ... but it was also tremendously time consuming.

When the time game to launch a new campaign, Paizo's Pathfinder Role-Playing Game was an obvious choice. It preserved the strain of Dungeons & Dragons that my gaming group preferred, and enhanced it just enough to get rid of the things that had been driving us crazy in the 3.x branch. But the challenge with Pathfinder is that it's a crunchy, rules heavy game. When we ran Star Wars, I could easily knock out non-player characters in a night, but going with Pathfinder meant a return to magic and all its inherent complexity.

It took me a longer than I like, but I've finally worked up design comps for the Nuketown. These designs throw flesh on to the skeleton of the wireframes. There are some divergences; the original home page wireframe had a section for dedicated specifically to projects; I've removed that from the current iteration because it didn't really fit as well as I built out the design. I'll likely add a "projects" tab to the final design to replace it.

Now that these are done, I'm going to start working on the HTML build outs, and once those are done, I'll be able to the real meat of the project: creating the Drupal 7 theme and converting the entire site to D7.

I love wireframing. It's like playing with LEGOs -- you can build anything, hate it, tear it down, and then start all over again at a moment's notice. The idea's simple enough -- create the barebones design for your web site, focusing on the user interface without getting bogged down in graphics, colors and arguments over whether the hyperlinks should be underlined or not.

Attached as PDFs to this post are my initial tier one and tier three "evolutionary" wireframes for the Nuketown redesign. These aren't a radical change from what we have now, but they accomplish a number of my design goals, including integrating microcontent into the home page, creating some new advertising options the (the skyscraper ad on the home page, the box add on the tier 3 page), a place to show case projects/features, and columns for exposing content like top rated stories and comments. It also gets rid of the login forms in favor of a login link in the primary nav (the sidebar login is something I hate in the current design) and cleans up the layout.

It's been pretty quiet around Nuketown for the last few weeks, but it's not because I haven't been working. It's just that I have been working, but haven't had much I could talk about yet. The big thing I've been working on is a scope document for Nuketown's redesign.

The idea behind the scope document is to nail down exactly what it is I'm doing as part of the redesign. It's not meant to be a soap-to-nuts document -- I have to sleep some time -- but I wanted to summarize my objectives, create some solid tasks to accomplish them, and then identify goals to see whether or not my plan worked.

It was worth the time it took to write it up -- as I was working on the IA and analytics, I realized that I'd gone to far in thinking about how I would do what I wanted, with out identifying what it was I wanted to do. It's an easy trap to fall into when you're working on a hobby project like this, but it ends up costing you dearly when you get halfway through the project and realize it's a muddled mess. I don't have a lot of free time -- and I seem to have less and less of it as life goes on -- so I can't afford to make those kinds of mistakes.

In hindsight, we played Dungeons & Dragons for too long. Our World of Greyhawk campaign lasted 12 years, included dozens of characters, hundreds of plots, and forays into Castle Greyhawk, the Temple of Elemental Evil and our own homegrown creations. It spanned the 2nd and 3rd editions of the game and saw us buy hundreds of books.

At first glance, it might seem like D&D 4th Edition, with its wildly different ruleset, is what killed the campaign, but that was only part of it. Burnout had struck several other players (myself included), driven by both genre and rules fatigue. Not all felt that way, but after our D&D 4E playtest, it was clear we needed a change.

After 47 chapters, 10 episodes, and 2.5 years, our Star Wars: Shadows of the Force campaign has come to an end. What started with a fight against pirates on the jungle world of Zebulon Prime ended with against grey market salvagers in the depths of a planetary nebula. In between we saw the rise of Binary Transports, the promotion of three Jedi Knights, the training of two padawans, the discovery of an alien holocron , and numerous battles against the Force knowledge cult known as the Sith Ascendancy.

But the campaign was about far more than numbers. Along the way we changed how we play RPGs, incorporating narrative mechanics like skill challenges that created truly exceptional, truly memorable encounters, including hot-wiring a speeder while fending off high plains lizards and bouncing a starship through a proto-star nebula. We also told some really cool stories, including the adoption of a young Force sensitive Twi’lik and his training as a padawan, the epic battle with the fleet of the pirate lord Ral Duris, and lightsaber duels amid alien ruins in the sunward desert of Ryloth.

Nuketown's information architecture has taken on several different forms over the years. At one point there where two major buckets: News and Features. This then evolved into the current, broader buckets that break out the old News section by media: Books (Bookshelf), Games (Game Room), Hoaxes (Hoax Central), Links (Link Port), Music and Audio (Music Hall), TV and Movies (Theatre) and Podcasts.

Cutsy names aside, from my perspective the problem with this structure hasn't been the top level links, but rather the secondary ones. Each section has subcategories, such as reviews and columns. The major sections have sidebar navigation elements that exposes the subcategories, but they are buried in the sidebar, and not readily apparent. They're also not comprehensive, exposing only the first tier of subcategories: there's no easy way to get to finer-grained categories like "Savage Worlds"-related posts.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post when I look at the the existing sitemap, another problem I see is that its hard to tell what's a column, and what's not. There are no buckets for columns, and at a glance its not easy to see that "Off the Bookshelf", "Game Day" and "The Libertarian Gamer" are columns. Adding a parent taxonomy might help.