19th Level

I've already seen a bunch of people post their thoughts on this and I'm going to be boring and echo what I've seen. For me, the best thing to come out of gaming not related to gaming is the people I've met through it and the friendships I've formed. I've not become friends with everyone I've gamed with - heck I've gamed with a few people who I'd prefer to not associate with again. And there's some who are great people but we didn't quite click outside of gaming- which is human nature. But I've also made some lasting friendships through gaming which I greatly value. People I can talk about families, careers, movies, sports, religion, and other stuff with. People to hang out with. Oddly, as my gaming has become more online in the 21st century I've found that I'm able to form friendships with people whom I'm never met in person. I've experienced a similar phenomenon at work, where though I work near Boston, I associate regu...

This is a bit of an odd topic that I'd not normally give  a lot of consideration to - gaming celebrities. There's a number of celebrities who have been known to show up in World of Warcraft  online but I'll stick to traditional tabletop games. I did some googling to see if there were any surprises - turns out actress Dame Judi Dench is known to be a gamer which I'd had no idea. I also discovered conservative columnist Michelle Malkin to be a gamer. Actor Vin Diesel is known to be a huge D&D fan and is always a delight on film (the man managed to deliver the line "I am Groot" with like a gazillion variations in Guardians of the Galaxy ). I'm going to to give the nod to Stephen Colbert who over the time of Colbert Report slipped many D&D references in. He clearly has some serious geek credibility, easily exchanging lines about Tom Bombadil with Neil Gaiman. Get More: Comedy Central , Funny Videos , Funny TV Shows

I'm not certain I have a must-visit RPG website anymore. I still do the occasional peeks at rpg.net and yog-sothoth.com . Oddly I probably visit Google+ for most of my gaming collaboration. I've got a pretty broad group people in my circles and am a member of numerous communities. I know Google+ gets dinged a lot as a social media site, but I find it excels in bringing people of common interests together. The only negative is if you are a member of many similar communities, you often see the same post multiple times since Google+ does not allow for a single post to appear in multiple communities. Google+ is also a nice play to meet people for online gaming. Some of the people I've met that way I've had a single or a few games with, others I've been gaming with for several years and talk with them outside of gaming.

For this post I have two criteria: It be a game I used to play a lot The odds of ever playing it again are small I'd mentioned the Last Unicorn Games incarnation of Star Trek when discussing my favorite science fiction games . Those games  have a special place for me. Coming out from 1998 to 2000 they mark the point when I began regularly gaming again. Star Trek was at a high point of its popularity in the 90s and I feel Last Unicorn Games was a great complement to the Star Trek television shows. There was a great community which formed around these games, centered around the still existing trek-rpg.net site. Gamers discussed ideas, house rules, etc., the writers of the RPGs were regular posters, etc. In 2000, shortly after Wizards of the Coast acquired Last Unicorn Games, the license went to Decipher. Much of the team involved in the LUG incarnation went on to create the Decipher version, which was itself a fine game that I got a bunch of mileage playing, but I do fi...

A few days ago I'd mentioned how my perfect game would be some variation of Pendragon, adapted for a setting I preferred over Arthurian. When I wrote that I was thinking how very much I'd love to see some variant of Pendragon used for playing in the setting of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. The passions and traits rules are perfect for modeling the interesting yet flawed characters of the setting - Ned Stark's stubborn honesty, Tyrion's inability to keep his mouth shut, etc. Moreover the system for large-scale battles, managing houses, etc. would fit the setting very well. I'd also not throw out Green Ronin's effort in their Song of Ice and Fire RPG. The house creation rules are very appropriate to their setting, with the possibility that all characters are part of the same house as opposed to Pendragon's default assumption of each character being a landed knight.

As far as my gaming inspirations go, I think I've a number that are pretty normal. I like listening to music while I'm prepping for a game, with my choice varying wildly from jazz to industrial. I like jotting ideas down, sometimes electronically and sometimes in a high quality notebook, armed with my Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pen - yes, my technology varies from old school to the latest and greatest. One thing I really rely on is history. I love learning about the past. Sometimes about the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. Sometimes Colonial and Revolutionary America. I've read much on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The post-World War I period, the Great Depression. I especially enjoy learning about how people lived their lives in different periods. I pictured people similar to my great grandparents when I visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan. I've had a blast getting into debates with character actors in Colonial Williamsbu...

I've been gaming long enough for that I remember when a lot of now normal game mechanics were first taken for a spin. Though as I gave some thought to today's entry there's one game that kept coming to mind - and it's one I've not mentioned in my #RPGaDay2015. And sadly I've not had a chance to try the game out yet either, though it remains on my bucket list. I think the best criteria for such a mechanic is that it indeed be revolutionary but also seem obvious - a sort of "gee, why didn't someone think of that before now?" By that criteria, I'm going to nominate the action system of Cubicle 7's Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space . We'll examine a problem that emulating Doctor Who has and then we'll discuss how Cubicle 7 resolved this. The Doctor, in his over fifty year history, has never regularly carried weapons. On occasion he's been forced to make use of them, but generally speaking he defeats his opponents by out...

This posting, I think, is a quick one. And it's not even a house rule anymore though at the time it was... Back in the 90s, I think in the Usenet group rec.games.frp.dnd though it might have been in Dragon magazine, I read about the idea of allowing first level D&D characters to start with maximum hit points. It's normal nowadays but at the time the official rule was at first level you started with random hit points. This was an idea I really liked and made use of, though I'm trying to remember if we really ever allowed first level fighters to go adventuring with just one or two hit points. But the rule did protect magic-users from angry housecats. Simple, easy to implement, and greatly improving the game, everything a house rule should be.

Geez all this obsession with perfection... Perfect game for me. I'm going to answer this one partially and revisit this one when it comes time to mash-up two games. My perfect game would be a modified version of Pendragon. It has a number of things that I really like about it. First of all, it has a rules set I really enjoy - though it is d20 instead of d100 based, it is still a BRP system. Very easy to understand and visualize. I also really like the generational play of the game, with each adventure presumed to take place over a year and your character not expected to make it to the end of the game, whether dying of natural causes or of violence. Related to that, Pendragon treats wounds very seriously, harkening back to the state of medieval medicine, in a way that few games do - it is possible to be victorious in battle and then die of your wounds. There's a few things which prevent this from being a "Perfect" game for me. First of all, I have to confess wh...

This is kind of weird for me since it's been several years since I've had a regular gaming group physically present. That's not to say that I've not been gaming, rather I've been doing my gaming online. So let's start with physical environment - really what I need for that is a reasonably big table with enough seats for all the players and some space for character sheets, maps, munchies, etc. Now that I have kids I've grown to appreciate being able to isolate that space a little bit to give the group some privacy (and since our humor would often not be suitable for kiddies). Gaming online has come a long way. Our first effort was when a player moved away and continued to game with us. We used a webcam, a video messaging app, and aiming the camera carefully at any maps we might be using. It worked reasonably well. Our next experiment was with Fantasy Grounds. It's worked well - it's a Windows Application designed to integrate character sheets, m...

I'm going to narrow this down a bit to cover settings just created for a game and exclude licensed settings and slightly modified versions of Earth. As someone who gamed back when old school stuff was new, I remember the original versions of settings like TSR's Forgotten Realms. My default game setting was usually World of Greyhawk. I'd still gladly set games there. That said, I really enjoyed Wizards of the Coast's Eberron Campaign Setting, especially in its original incarnation. It really hit a lot of criteria that I enjoy. It didn't feel like a world that had no room for the players to do important things. It took place in the aftermath of a major war with a strong feeling another one is coming, giving a bit of the feel you get in 1920s/1930s Earth with high action, airships, and lightning rail trains. It had an awesome fantasy city, the city of Sharn, something like a miniature medieval Coruscant. It did a great job creating realms with interesting rulers,...

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die. "The Call of Cthulhu", H.P. Lovecraft Call of Cthulhu , being my favorite RPG, easily fits into this category as my favorite horror RPG as well. The odd thing is I don't recall having played another horror RPG - I suppose playing Vampire: The Masquerade  might count but it doesn't seem to be a horror RPG in the same way that Call of Cthulhu is - in that game the characters are the monsters. I've also played Eden Studios' Angel  RPG but that's a bit more a monster hunting RPG than one of horror. Before I talk about the feel of Call of Cthulhu , I'd like to take a look at its rules. There's been a major revision with the 7th edition, but in all honesty, a 1st edition adventure could still be used with conversion on the fly for 7th edition characters. A major revision for Call of Cthulhu is still fairly minor compared to most games. It's a nice simpl...

When it comes to Supers RPGs I've not had a ton of luck. I think it is largely because there's a number of genre conventions in superhero stories, primarily in comic books, that don't translate well in an RPG. Getting captured, letting the villain get away, etc. These are things that don't just sit well with most gamers. With that in mind I've a bit less experience in supers gaming than in other genres. Off the top of my head I've run or played in: Marvel Superheroes (TSR, original and advanced games) Champions 3rd Edition DC Heroes (Mayfair, 1st and 2nd editions) Mutants & Masterminds (own all 3 editions, played 2nd) Wild Talents As with a number of earlier entries, it comes down to two main games. I played a ton of the old TSR Marvel Superheroes game. It really seemed to capture the Marvel Universe of the 80s and early 90s rather well and was fun and easy to play. I have also done a brief Wild Talents game, using the Kerberos Club...

Geez this one is really tough too. For a fairly long period the great bulk of my gaming was in the science fiction genre. I'm going to limit this to only games I've played or run - there's a number, like the Firefly RPG  that I'm really looking forward to trying at some point. Even limiting it to that gives a pretty broad range of RPGs. Off the top of my head, that'd include (in rough order of my first time playing them): Gamma World (2nd Edition) Star Frontiers Star Trek (FASA) Doctor Who (FASA)  Star Wars (West End Games) The Babylon Project (Chameleon Eclectic) Star Trek (Last Unicorn Games, various incarnations) Star Trek (Decipher) Star Wars (Wizards of the Coast, various editions) Serenity Star Wars: Edge of the Empire I'm pretty sure there's one or two missing. Interestingly, I've never actually played Traveller, though I have often borrowed from it for many games. There's two there that really rise to the top, though I...

Eek there's like too many of these... I'm going to go over some of the games I've played before zero-ing in on a favorite. Once upon a time I had a blast with a D&D 3.5 game in the Eberron campaign setting. I'm going to say that D&D 3.5 was a blast to play. However, in terms of running the game, especially with regard to prep work, I found it a bit cumbersome. I played some D&D 4e and generally enjoyed it but it felt a bit different from other D&D games and we did run into the dreaded "grind" where the outcome a combat is clear several rounds before it ends. I've also done some RuneQuest - the second incarnation of the Mongoose version. It's pretty similar to the current incarnation. I enjoyed the give and take of RuneQuest combat and the straightforward skills system. I've only done one full campaign with that, a rather enjoyable fantasy Vikings meeting Lenape in Manhattan. In more recent games I used Dungeon Crawl Classics...

Daniel needs his sleep... To be honest, I'm not a veteran of super-long game sessions. After I moved to Massachusetts and began regular gaming again after a break of several years. there were a number of sessions that would run from around 7 until midnight or 1. But that's not like the twenty hour sessions I know some folks have... Nowadays, with kids and the fact I'm several years into my forties, even that's a dream, with sessions in the 2-3 hour range. I've learned to use hour-long television drama as a model for planning a game session. Part of me misses the ability to keep a game going deep into the night and into the next morning, but to be honest I'm glad to have people I enjoy gaming with on a regular basis. A player in my group and I have jokingly suggested opening a retirement community for gamers.

The next campaign is always the best one. Some of us, like yours truly, are easily distracted by shiny things. I'm rather pleased that my recent Dungeon Crawl Classics "campaign" ran to completion with a total party kill in its second adventure... My longest overall campaign is probably a game my brother and I would do off and on throughout the late 80s to the mid 90s, working its way through a variety of classic AD&D adventures along with a number of home-brew adventures. The Temple of Elemental Evil fell, the Slave Lords were defeated, as was Lolth, Demon Queen of Spiders. Great times were had on the Isle of the Ape as well as a visit to modern (1980s) London to retrieve the Mace of St. Cuthbert. In a more traditional group I'd say the longest game I played in was a Star Wars campaign I ran from 1999 through 2004, with a few breaks for some Star Trek and D&D 3rd edition. It was a Rebellion campaign, starting off with a Jedi in Training former Imperial ...

I've seen a lot of RPG accessories posted today that are not related to gaming products and it got me wondering what sort of item along those lines I'd go for. I'm a techie. I don't have the absolute latest and greatest toys all the time but I do like my toys. And one thing that makes my life easier is to easily get data on these toys. I tend to prefer digital products nowadays. I have two excellent devices for reading digital gaming products - a Google Nexus 9 and a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. To store all these pdfs and related files I make use of Google Drive. And I also keep my own personal gaming notes - random notes, adventures, maps, writeups, etc. on Google Drive. I run my games using Roll20 embedded in Google Hangouts. I have a Google+ community for my current and past game groups. And I like the collaborative nature of Google+ in general, which has put me in touch with lots of interesting people. So oddly, my favorite RPG accessory of this nature is the tools...

Discover all the technical and natural wonders of the fantastic Star Wars saga. Here are sleek starfighters that clash with mile-long Star Destroyers, tilling the void with streaks of laser fire and blazing wrecks. Here are armor-clad stormtroopers battling desperate-Rebels across the galaxy. Here are detailed descriptions of the bizarre aliens, devastating weapons, amazing Droids, courageous heroes and cunning villains of the Star Wars universe. - Back cover text for West End Games' The   Star Wars Sourcebook [Note I'm going with this post I'm defining an accessory as an add-on to a game - I see a number of other people are going with non-gaming accessories- I might make a supplemental post along those lines.] Shortly after 1983 Star Wars as a franchise began to rapidly dry up. The Marvel comic continued after Return of the Jedi  but limped to an end in 1986 as a bimonthly comic. There were cartoons about Ewoks and Droids. And some absolutely horrible live-action ...

Well this is a bit odd since I'm not a huge podcast listener, though a number of players in my group are and I've listened to quite a few on their recommendations. I think my favorite would have to be The Good Friends of Jackson Elias .  First of all it's a super-awesome name, referencing the fictional writer whose fate triggers the classic adventure Masks of Nyarlathotep. Moreover, I really enjoy the way they do their podcasts - the interaction of the hosts is enjoyable, it's not updated at such an insane rate that trying to keep up is impossible (though I'm pretty awful at keeping up), and you can definitely pick and choose episodes to listen to. They've a nice variety of subject matter - focused on the Call of Cthulhu RPG but delving into similar RPGs (like the excellent and underrated Hot War RPG ) and discussion of various Mythos fiction, horror films, etc. The topic matter varies but it tends to match extremely well with my own interests. (So thanks gu...