For the past week I’ve been hearing faint whispers around the edges of my radar about E3 going on, but it feels like this year everything is far more muted than it has been in previous years. The only thing that I’ve really heard a lot of excitement about is the new Star Wars: The Old Republic trailer, which does look extremely badass and the changes to the MMO style really intrigue me.
Archives for 2009
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 clones of golden-era games on your tiny little cellphone screens. Stop it.
Critical Bits for the week ending 2009-06-06
Big news in DDI: Assassin coming in September w/ new power source, revenant undead race in June, Psion in July. Character builder now includes: “classic heroes such as Drizzt Do’Urden, Raistlin, and Jim Darkmagic (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics)” The writers of Star Trek talk about “The Shatner Scene” and why it was cut. (Contains […]
Friday Chat: Roleplaying with Children
On Wednesday afternoon, I found a email by Chris Sims in my inbox. Chris works for D&D insider but I knew him for having worked on quite a few D&D books, my favorite being the D&D 3.5 Rules Compendium and having briefly chatted with him at Gen Con last year. As I read the email, […]
The Dungeon Reality Show, Part 4: Let’s Play!
Okay so I busted my deadline for posting the whole thing in one week. However I am going through with the project! Part 1 and part 2 of this series introduced the Dungeon Reality Show. Part 3 was where I started to describe an example of DRS based on Blood Bowl and presented the 1st […]
Juggling Some Awesome Stuff!
I’m working on a few things tonight which won’t allow me to post RPG stuff. First and foremost, I’m writing an article for Kobold Quarterly which I hope will make it into the fall edition. Wolfgang Baur was nice enough to greenlight my article proposal about creating Combat with embedded Skill Challenges. Chances are ChattyDM […]
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’t feel right to abandon (that the players were just getting into, as well) so changing gears majorly didn’t seem like the right thing to do. At the same time, I wanted to give the arc a bigger scope than the specific mission-based adventures that I had been sending them on, as well as giving them more freedom to roam about the world I had spent 9 levels introducing them to. I also wanted to let them take more direct control of where they wanted to go next, but still script things out enough to let me plan ahead (i.e. not go full-on sandbox quite yet).
YouTube Tuesday: Instanced Drinking Edition
A very funny video of a Chinese man’s life seen through a WoW lens. Even though it is in Chinese, it’s still funny and well done without knowing what is being said.
Inq. of the Week: One Year Later for 4e
Starting with the initial announcement at GenCon 2007, we polled reaction to the coming of a new system and found most to be cautiously optimistic. Then shortly after release, we polled about everyone’s favorite edition of D&D, which at the time showed a preference for 4e, and late voting has only increased that lead. It seems only natural to follow up with the following, after 1 year of release, the question on many minds…
Primal/Within Chronicles: Say Yes and have Fun! Part 2
See part 1 here. The word of the Spirit After the Ritual was completed and the elemental monsters were vanquished, Dworkin announced that he was now the spokesperson of the Kodiak spirit. Franky and I had worked out the relationship between his character and the potential spirit beforehand so he explained that from now on, […]
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