Gamers Need More Game Reviews!

The RPG Bloggers Network has been a tremendous success, sparking plenty of cross-blog traffic and comments. I’ve read lots of great articles and discovered a bunch of new sites, but I think there’s one area where the community can improve: game reviews.

Simply put, there aren’t enough of them. There’s plenty of speculation, analysis and debate but there aren’t nearly enough reviews (or, if they are there, they are quickly lost among the flurry of other posts). The RPG Bloggers guys are working on improvements to bring order to the chaos by adding new categories, but even then I think there will be a need for bloggers to knuckle down and review games.

I have as much work to do as anyone else. It shocked me earlier this week when I looked at my own RPG reviews category and discovered that five months had passed between my Battlestar Galactica RPG review and my new one for Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy. Now granted, my sense of what I’ve written is distorted by all the writing I do for SCIFI, and I’ve certainly posted a bunch of quasi-reviews in the form of playtest reports, but still … there need to be more.

Game Day: Our Last 4th Edition Game

Today is the last day of our D&D 4th Edition playtest campaign. After adventuring across two Alternative Material Planes and Sigil, City of Doors, we’ve decided to leave the game with a bang. We’ve advanced our heroes from 2nd to 9th level to try out some higher level play as they liberate the ancient ziggurat of … Read more

Build an Interstellar Horde with Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy

General Grievous -- a four-armed robot -- stares out at the reader.

Now that it looks like my gaming group’s long-proposed Knights of the Old Republic campaign may actually be coming to fruition, I’ve been stocking up on source books. The first of these is Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy, which I hoped would provide me with a toolbox of non-player characters, monsters and other challenges … Read more

The Three-Page Manifesto

I write too much. This is not a new or sudden revelation. I’ve known since college that I could fill a notebook with ideas when preparing for a night’s game of Dungeons & Dragons. I might write 12,000 words to describe a three-story arc adventure, and use 1/4 of what I wrote. That’s grossly inefficient, … Read more

Game Day: Weighing a 4E vs. Pathfinder Campaign Conversion

It’s appropriate that the Pathfinder RPG Beta would be released while my gaming group’s taking a two-week break from our D&D 4th Edition playtest. During the hiatus we’re tying up some loose ends in our D&D 3.5 Dark City campaign, which is a role-playing intensive, urban campaign set in the World of Greyhawk. Dark City’s … Read more

The Asgard Project: Debunking the Myths of High-Level D&D 3.5

High-level play within D&D 3rd Edition is hard. Whether you’re playing 3.0 or 3.5, the end result is the same: thousands of feats, hundreds of prestige classes and gods-only-know how many spells give rise to complicated game mechanics that slow play to a crawl.  Iterative attacks, in which high-level martial classes like the fighter or … Read more

Game Day: Comparing 3E vs 4E DM Prep Times

This week’s game sees us returning to our Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition roots after weeks of beating up 4th Edition in our Planetorn playtest campaign. The playtest’s not over, just on hiatus because of real-world player obligations, and this pause is giving us a chance to go back and tie up some loose ends … Read more

D&D 4E Playtest: Rituals, Revised Skill Challenges

  After a brief respite in Sigil, where they were attacked by a cunning band of phase gnomes, last Friday’s D&D 4E playtest campaign saw my gaming group venture back out into the wilds of the planescape. This time they traveled to the Dire Forest of Yalzerth, an alternative material plane in the midst of … Read more

Game Day: Halfway through the D&D 4E Playtest Campaign

We’re about halfway through our Planetorn play-test campaign, with the fourth session happening today, and perhaps another three or four to go before it runs its course. This milestone has me reflecting on where the campaign’s been, where it’s going, and what I hope to accomplish before it’s all over. Today’s adventure finds our heroes … Read more