The Hunter welcomes me to her campsite, offering me warmth and shelter and the use of her cooking fire. She makes friendly chit-chat as I prepare a bowl of cabbage stew. I politely ignore her. Then she mentions that she doesn’t think that the King will mind her poaching, since she takes so little from […]

Your party of intrepid adventurers bravely explores some shady grotto, sunken temple, or mildew-scented dungeon. The players advance cautiously, their eyes peeled, ears aquiver, nostrils flared. Everything proceeds smoothly until WHAM-O! Without warning, the sound of plastic polyhedrons clattering on the table top. Attack rolls, damage, saving throws. Your party triggered a trap. Traps don’t […]

Last night I played the paper version of Magic: the Gathering for the first time in years. A gracious player at Yancy Street Comics & Games created a draft game using his own cards as the source material, and he invited several people – including me – to play. There was no pressure to spend money (the cards […]

One of the reasons I think the stripped-down, bare bones approach to savings throws works so well in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is that the game designers combine it with a new approach to defensive stats. Reflex, Will, and Fortitude still exist in 4th Ed, but now they represent static target numbers similar to […]

Continuing with my musings from the previous post, I assert that the saving throw rules for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons are superior to earlier iterations. No, I haven’t gone bonkers. Hear me out here: I’m a sucker for the granularity of the clunky old saving throw tables from 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. […]

My experiences at Salty Bay Con last week got me thinking about the conflict resolution systems in roleplaying games. I realized that there’s a problem with games like Pathfinder and the various editions of Dungeons & Dragons that handle combat or skill challenges by rolling a d20, adding modifiers, and comparing the total against a […]

I’ve been working on transcription recently, i.e. the task of getting a stack of typed pages converted into a digital format for future editing. It’s an important albeit somewhat mindless task. I’ve transcribed approximately 33 pages of material so far. I have a tendency to start new stories, shape them until I understand where they are […]

My panels are finally complete. Yesterday I put the finishing touches on Tears of the Robot: Anime Edition, Smoke & Mirrorshades: Cyberpunk in Anime, and Hobbit-free Fetch Quest: Fantasy in Anime. I’m presenting all three at the Florida Anime Experience in Orlando this weekend. I’m also hosting a fourth event which involves a live-commentary of […]