Running play-by-post role-playing games online is a kind of hell. Be it by blog, forum, e-mail, or some sort of real-time hookup, sustaining a game can be near impossible. While I have no hard data on this, my guess would be that only 1 in 10 online games succeed, and that’s probably wildly optimistic. The … Read more
My friends and I ran our first playtest of the combat system in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition. It was a productive test, and we learned a lot about the game’s mechanics … and how to design a more effective heroes. Here’s what we learned in the first go round, featuring four battle-suited, Power Level … Read more
Movie geeks can film their way to cinematic glory with the first-ever Dungeons & Dragons Fan Film Contest. The film contest is seeking 5-minute video segments dealing with D&D, with the winner receiving video editing equipment, a computer and a boatload of D&D stuff. The deadline is September 1, 2006, which is unfortunate given that … Read more
A short film, Fear of Girls — about two stereotypical uber gamers — is circulating around the geek community. The ten-minute film tells the tale of two “advanced” gamers who are a cut about your normal geeks, which means they do stuff that would freak out regular gamers, like role-playing sex or dressing up in … Read more
I finally got around to consolidating all of my Knights of the Dinner Table web notes into one big mega file, which now holds about 38 links. Thanks to this endeavor, I’d say I’ve got about two and a half WebScryer columns researched now, so all I need to do is bang out the actual … Read more
My gaming group is comprised of mid-twentysomething-to-mid-thirtysomething gamers who love role-playing, who enjoy delving deep into the intricacies of a plot, running down leads, fleshing out a setting, and generally immersing themselves in the campaign. Yes, there’s hacking, and yes, there’s slashing, but we’re just as likely to spend a night doing nothing but role-playing. … Read more
Looking back through the archives, I was stunned to see that I hadn’t written one of these little gaming wish lists in months, since way back in March 2005. I think that’s do to a couple of factors — for one, I got a heck of a lot of gaming stuff for Christmas, and its … Read more
Paizo Publishing’s announced some major changes to its flagship Dragon and Dungeon magazines. The changes, apparently based on market research and feedback from readers, are pretty major. Dragon is going to become a more broad-based D&D magazine, focusing not only on the pen-and-paper RPG, but on its various electronic spawn as well. It’s also adding … Read more
The thing that Dungeons & Dragons 3.0/3.5 excels at most is its flexibility: its possible to play the same class for years and never play the same kind of character twice. Unearthed Arcana expands that flexibility by adding hundreds of new options to the game. Unearthed Arcana (Amazon) is not the sort of rulebook that … Read more
After four years of playing Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 and its kin , poisons are old hat for most players. Depending on the situation, the rules lawyers, power gamers, and even that guy who spends most of the night exploring the nasal possibilities of his dice know what poison a Game Master is talking about … Read more