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3 Rolls, 1 Check
This is a common occurrence in my game, and it might be in yours too: DM: The Baron tells you, “I haven’t seen the Duke.” Player 1: I roll Insight to see if he’s lying. Crap, rolled low. Player 2: I roll then. Mine is pretty h...
Inq. of the Week: Video Game Playing, 2009
Last week, Bartoneus asked about what formats you watch your movies in. DVDs remain the king, with 86% of the vote. Online downloading/streaming comes in second with 52%, which I personally feel like is the way things are moving, and way better than ...
D&D 4e One-Shots: Putting it into Action
As a result of playing four very different one-shot games at DC Game Day, I condensed my thoughts about one-shots into one simple rule: Everything important on the character sheet should come up during play. It’s an easy thing to say, but not s...
Inq. of the Week: Story Games, Or Whatever You Want To Call Them
How often do you play? Once a week is the most common answer, with several times a month being a close second. I was surprised to see such a showing for several times a week: to all you multi-game night warriors, I salute you! And one lone person ...
Pain of Campaigning: Literature and Adventure Planning
Despite stereotypes that say otherwise, gaming groups are not monolithic in their cultural consumption. Most groups have a few shared interests (anime, sci-fi movies, etc.) and a few niche interests (history, literature, comics, etc.) This can read...
Leveling Up As An Inexperienced DM
I still consider myself an inexperienced DM. the 4th Edition campaign that I'm currently running has just passed twenty adventures and is the longest campaign I've ever run. Hell, it was the longest game I've ever run when it hit ten adventures back...
In Depth: 4E Assassin and Q&A with Mike Mearls
Last week Wizards of the Coast released a new class for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition called the Assassin, an exclusive class only available to subscribers of their D&D Insider service. I was very intrigued by this new class, so I asked if...
I Am A Liberal Gamer
I'm a big proponent of change in game design. If something isn't working, don't just patch it, teardown and rebuild. This puts me in opposition to what I will respectfully call the "Conservative Gamer" contingent, who prefer that games preserve much ...
Congratulations to Obsidian Portal and Kobold Quarterly
The winners of the 2009 Ennies for Best Website, Kobold Quarterly took the silver and Obsidian Portal took the gold. Congratulations to them both: while I would have loved to have won, they both definitely deserve it. I read Kobold Quarterly whenever...
Inquisition of the Week: Your Steam is Punk
This past week saw the release of the Eberron Campaign Guide. While I've followed Eberron since its acceptance into the D&D campaign setting contest but I have yet to run or play in any kind of Eberron campaign. Some of the resistance to playing...
Two Words to Convince You to Buy Kobold Quarterly #10
Gelantinous Cubes. We don’t have to tell you that Kobold Quarterly is great, or that it’s been nominated for 3 Ennies (though it’s going down in the Best Website category!), or that it includes tons of ......
Overt vs. Covert Skill Challenges
As the maintainer of the (now massive) Skill Challenge feature, I read quite a lot about skill challenges, no matter if they're positive, negative, or somewhere in between. I think SCs can be broken down into three main camps: overt skill challenges,...
Inq. of the Week: You Got Science in my Fantasy
We heard a lot of complaints that psionics just don't fit with the D&D milieu. Even for a die hard fan such as myself, it can be hard to justify mental powers (that in other media are often linked to "the next stage of evolution" and other scien...
Product Tie-in Video Games 101: A Lesson in Love and Paychecks
Today we're going to be discussing one of the biggest money makers for video game studios; Product Tie-ins. They are something that we’ve been accustomed to in video games, and all can form a general consensus when we hear their name said. From E.T...
One Page Dungeon Winners Announced
The winners of the One Page Dungeon contest have been announced over at ChattyDM and Old Guy RPG Blog. I was honored to serve on the judging panel, and I’m glad to give a hearty ......
Transformers 2: Expectations?
In what is a rare occurence for my wife and I, we did not go to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at a midnight showing last night. It's not because of the Tuesday night issue, we went to see The Dark Knight at midnight on a Wednesday (though ...
Put the Phone Away: A call to gamers still in the dark ages of handhelds (Part 2)
Although the PSP is selling wonderfully in many other parts of the world, it has struggled in the US market since its release. It would be hard to call it a failure with the many millions of systems sold stateside, but it definitely has struggled to ...
Maverick Cake Hunter
A little over a week ago we celebrated my birthday with raucous partying and the like, it’s always good to get a large group of friends together for communal debauchery. However, what really made the ......
Put the Phone Away: A call to gamers still in the dark ages of handhelds (Part 1)
Gamers have a predicament when they are away from their home base: they have a gnawing hunger for escapist goodness without a good way of appeasing the hungry gaming monster in their bellies. Too many of you are resigning yourselves to badly-made clo...
The 5×5 Method
When working on chapter 2 of my D&D 4e campaign (in the paragon tier, chapter 1 having encompassed the heroic tier), I kept running into roadblocks when trying to map out the next major arc. I had left a number of dangling plot threads that didn...
With Karate (And Psionics) I’ll Kick Your Ass
Monks are Psionic. (Yes, "Martial Striker" was half wrong). As per the Design & Development article that accompanied it, Ki is a dead power source (though some third party products have already tried to use it). Personally, I have no problem wit...
Marvel’s X-Men Movie Mistakes
Stemming from some of the comments on Darth Cthulhu’s ‘controversial’ Star Trek post, I started thinking about the first X-Men movie and its relation to the rest of the franchise now that X-Men Origins: Wolverine ......
Lessons from the Heroic Tier
This March, I placed my game on hiatus so that I could graduate. At that time, some of the players were at 9th level and not too far from 10, so I decided to cheat a little and advance all the players to Paragon to begin the next chapter on the next ...
Fascinating, Captain
As I sat watching Star Trek on Sunday, I was struck with a strong (but familiar) thought: “damn, I really want to run a campaign set in this. “ About 4 years back now, I tried starting ......
Origins Awards Nominees 2009: Picks and Commentary
icv2 has published the list of Origins Awards nominees. The nominees are decided by retailers at the GAMA Trade Show, and then attendees of Origins vote on the winners, and are announced at a ceremony on site (which we've covered two years in a row n...
PDFs Want To Be Free
While I'm a big proponent of open source and creative commons, I've understood past efforts to protect intellectual property. Shutting down the power card sites was unfortunate to those of us who found them to be a big aid at the table, but there wer...
Pain of Campaigning: Actually Planning
After a long hiatus of actively DMing, I was roused from my gaming slumber. The results are a bit unusual and probably not going to be to everyone's liking, but after droves and droves of articles detailing how to run games, I figure I'd do an articl...
War in Low Level Campaigns
Most gamers tend to think of fantasy warfare as a clash that centers on heroes of outlandish skill, immense power, and blistering charisma. Wading through common soldiers to find other champions is equally pervasive in literature and cinema (Lord of ...
PHB2 Roundtable: Races and Other Topics
As with yesterday, I've (virtually) assembled a roundtable of bloggers who have delved into the Player's Handbook 2 (released today). This time, we've taken a look at the Races of the PHB2 (like we did with the PHB), along with two of the other topic...
PHB2 Roundtable: Classes
When the 4e PHB launched, we held a roundtable discussion of the different classes in the book. Well, now that PHB2 is about to be released tomorrow, we wanted to take a look at those races in a similar format. To accomplish this, I contacted several...
