19th Level

Money is no obstacle... I've been primarily a virtual gamer over the past few years so my tastes will largely skew in that direction. We've got a nice desk with three monitors on it - want to make life easy for me on the virtual tabletop setup. We've also got on the walls a lot of shelf space for books, boxes, etc. I'd also like to be able to support a physical group as well, so we've got a nice large table, with room for books, papers, munchies, recreational beverages, etc. Lots of power outlets to charge up laptops, tablets, etc. And since I'm not big on miniatures, I'm thinking in the center of the table a nice, large, touchscreen monitor with active stylus support - even if we're all together a virtual tabletop can make for a nice tool. And a refrigerator for those all-important recreational beverages.

That's a bit of an odd question. Generally speaking, if I'm thinking of travel, there's other things I'd want to do besides gaming. However, let's suppose I'm thinking of a place to live for the gaming community there. Obviously, since gaming is not my profession and I have a family here in the Boston area, I'm not going to be doing such a relocation. But there are a few "gaming scenes" I'm curious as to what it would be like to be a part of... New York City - I'm a Brooklyn boy originally, so it would be nice to go home. Being a huge city there's a lot of gaming taking place there as well as part of the Autarch team being based there. Atlanta - Original home of White Wolf, I'm told it's a good place for some World of Darkness Gaming. Seattle - A lot of gaming companies in the area plus culturally I'd probably fit right in there with my latte-drinking, liberal secular lifestyle...

Actually I've had this happen to me recently... Given my group has some folks younger than me, I've gamed with people who have never seen Star Trek  in any incarnation. That's not too shocking once I gave it some thought. Star Trek: Enterprise  debuted in fall of 2001, some fifteen years ago. And it was not a particularly popular Star Trek. Someone who is thirty now would have been around fifteen then. And Voyager debuted in January of 1995, so you're talking being under the age of ten for that! There's certainly a things I've not read or seen that are on other people's "I can't believe you've not read/seen that" so I've no judgment. With that caveat, there's a few other things I'd be surprised a gaming friend hadn't seen - Butcher's Dresden Files , the classic Star Wars trilogy (I know a number of people who swore off the prequels), Lord of the Rings (whether in film or novel form), and A Song of Ice and Fire (...

Probably when I first started gaming there were some unusual circumstances and places. My first gaming group met at the Howard Whittemore Memorial Library in my hometown of Naugatuck, Connecticut. I was in middle school at the time and they hooked us up with a meeting room located near the children's section of the library. Of course we always got yelled at for being too noisy to the point we were pretty sure the sound of dice rolling would earn a "shhhh". Admittedly, it was  a library... It did get a little bit awkward when part of the room was dedicated to storage and we had to maneuver our way to the table. I did make some friendships which lasted for many years. I also remember occasionally being granted permission to play in study hall back at City Hill Middle School. By then we'd mastered the technique of rolling on hardcover books to muffle the sound of the dice rolling. Back in the day we had to have book covers on our textbooks. Fun fact - a Dungeon M...

Really any when you think about it. Just looking at some of my own: As a software engineer/data scientist I'm awfully good at using and making digital tools As a history geek, I've got a wealth of information that gets a good outlet As an amateur cartographer, I can make a reasonably good map Though I've not hiked much since having kids, once upon a time I spent a ton of time up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire - something which gives you an appreciation for wilderness movement rates... I've gamed with people skilled in art, always an asset in RPGs. Alas, my drawing skills are limited to purple Risus stick figure dudes...

Once upon a time I might have a long-winded answer to that. Nowadays my answer is as follows: Someone you want to play Someone that fits in with the group Someone that can be used as a launching point for adventures I don't need a forty page background story. On the other hand, if you've got a forty page background story, cool, we'll be sure to use some of it. Just please don't write that background for a pre-funnel Dungeon Crawl Classics  character...

I really hate giving gifts when I don't know the recipient. Does he or she own a ton of games and I want to present something unusual? Or do I want to break someone into gaming? And is money an object? Is being in print one? However, I'm going to make a few assumptions. I'm going to assume this game is a gift for someone who is into some moderately geeky stuff but isn't a gamer. And I want to get him or her hooked. With that in mind I'm going to go with a game that I've used to introduce lots of people to gaming - the West End Games incarnation of Star Wars . Back in the day, I'd have a new player, usually a friend of someone in the group, show up for a game at my apartment, and within about fifteen minutes I'd have explained the rules and had a character ready for them. The D6 incarnation isn't flashy and it does have its flaws, like any game, but it is incredibly easy to grasp, slides out of the way, and feels appropriate for the genre. It ...

Probably the best piece of advice I was given in gaming was in college - it was actually a criticism and I'm not certain if it was kindly meant or not. The criticism was that my adventures had a funnel-like quality - whatever course of actions the players took there was a preordained outcome. Probably a fair criticism, though given it was the early 1990's it was the era of plot-driven adventures, going to such an extreme in the Forgotten Realms Avatar Trilogy that the players got to watch gods fighting and escort mortals who were the real protagonists. What I've learned to do over time is let adventures get "wrecked" by my players. In last night's Ghostbusters game the players followed their rule - of the three equipment cards each character takes, one has to be "useless". In last night's game a player took alpine gear as their equipment as they went into a middle school gymnasium to investigate a possible Mesoamerican demon visitation. ...

Ghostbusters has a "ghost die". It is the predecessor to the West End Games Star Wars RPG's wild die.  In Ghostbusters the ghost die is rolled as part of all tests. If your skill gives you five dice, four will be normal dice and one is a ghost die. On the ghost die the six is replaced by a ghost. If you roll it something unfortunate happens (and the roll counts as a zero). You still might succeed, but if you do something went wrong. Now the odds of something unfortunate happening being one in six is actually rather high, but since Ghostbusters is a humor game, it is appropriate for the genre... With that in mind, in our most recent Ghostbusters  game the characters had the ghost cornered in the basement of an apartment building. Zap. Success, but with a ghost die. OK, the ghost is caught in the trap but... a fire has broken out. We'll just use the water tank to put out the fire... Oh dear, a failure with a ghost die. The fire is now an electrical one... A...

A robot in our Icons game had a limitation that it could short out after any usage on a 1 in 3 chance.  I don't believe there was a single instance where it did not short out. Now 1 in 3 is something that we should have seen with some frequency certainly, but not every single time...

I've got nothing. I guess that means we're all perfect in my current group. Honorable mention would have to be our epic attempts at understanding just what the hell speed factor was. We had incidents of daggers striking a gazillion times when facing two-handed swords due to one attempted ruling. It wasn't until the 2000's when I finally understood what it was used for in AD&D 1st edition. That said I think AD&D 2nd edition had a great rule for that, where speed factor was added to initiative (where low rolls were preferable).

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him. I'll chase him round the Moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom and round Perdition's flames before I give him up!  One thing I've learned about my own gaming style is for me, simpler seems to be better. I talked about that yesterday  in a non-#RPGaDay post. While that's been a trend, that's not to say it'll always be the case. Some day I'll master Champions . That said my current white whale is the Fate system of RPGs. Truthfully the rules aren't that complicated - Fate Accelerated is a glorified pamphlet. But the application of those rules represent a bit of a shift in thinking that I'm still working on. It reminds me a little bit of when I had to learn the Lisp programming language back in college. It was so different from the other languages I knew that in many ways I had to start anew - it was almost as if my previous knowledge was a hindrance. I feel that way about Fate - I'...

Obviously playing is the best way, preferably with someone who has some familiarity. That said, I'd have to say that there's definitely an advantage to actually reading the rules, even if in a condensed or simplified form. When an entire group is learning a new game I also find it helpful to slowly role out rules where possible.

While there's a number of technical innovations possible, one innovation in the legal space I'd like to see is a revision of copyright law. Currently US copyright law appears to be based around the proposition that "Steamboat Willie" can never enter the public domain. Though it'll never happen, I'd love to see a major reduction in copyright law. Once upon a time the term of a copyright maxed out at 28 years. If that were the case today, any RPG written prior to 1988 would be in the public domain. This wouldn't stop Wizards of the Coast from having a copyright to new incarnations of D&D but it would allow ancient versions to enter the public domain. While that's a dream that'll never come true, hopefully copyright term will not be extended again as 2019 approaches (when the copyright extension act begins allowing works to enter the public domain). Moreover, the works of HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard have a fuzzy copyright status. All...

Let's see... We'll want someone who is not supremely intense - able to have a laugh while gaming. But not someone who is a total goofball. (Hey spellcheck accepted the word "goofball". Good to know.) No hateful beliefs. Someone who isn't shy but also doesn't need to dominate everything. Plus if he or she is already a gamer... I'm thinking for my first choice I'm going to go with Harry Copperfield Dresden of The Dresden Files . Dude is a gamer already. Despite being a supremely talented wizard in "real life" he is perfectly comfortable playing a barbarian. And I'd love to try some of the brew from McAnally's Pub. The only caveat is he is remote. Chicago is only an hour behind us so in theory Roll20 would be an option but in actuality, he seems to have a negative effect on any technology much beyond that of the mid-20th century. I'm guessing he and a virtual tabletop would not get along very well.. I suppose if he couldn...

I gotta be honest... There's a lot of historical people I'd love to meet. But I imagine after sitting down with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Augustus Caesar, etc. I'd probably be talking about stuff other than gaming. So for gaming I'm probably wanting to be with someone more from the arts. I'll stay clear of recent figures... I think I'd really love to play in a game with Jules Verne as the GM - can you imagine the settings and adventures he'd build. That man had such an imagination. Verne was definitely a simulationist type of person - he was definitely a believer in the possible. I don't think he'd go for a narrative system like Fate. I'm thinking the man was definitely a GURPS gamer... We will not be playing steampunk though - I suspect he'd roll his eyes at that. We will be playing 19th century technothrillers of course. We'll close with Robin Williams hanging with Jules Verne...

Generally speaking, for me the best inspiration is books. I'm definitely a bibliophile. One of the best parts of my commute is the ability to listen to an audiobook for an hour - a half hour on the way to work, a half hour on the way back. Between walking and running during the day I can usually get another hour in easily. Plus I'm often reading digital books as well - more for pleasure between semesters, as during the academic year I'm busy reading books about data science... I read from a variety of genres - history, religion, horror, science fiction, nautical, classic literature, fantasy, etc. Sometimes what I read winds up being "research" - learning about the Prohibition era comes in handy for Call of Cthulhu games. Other times the inspiration will strike tangentially - a science fiction short story providing an idea for a Star Trek adventure, a villain's mannerisms providing inspiration, etc.

This is one of the questions from this year I'm not all that crazy about. I really like my current group and in all honesty that's what I'd go with. Given we're a virtual group, I'd love to have a transporter room so we could get together every two weeks... It is worth noting that I do miss the gaming group I had before my friends and I began having kids. Like I said, I'd not use the term "dream team" as I really enjoy my current group, but I'd be lying if it wouldn't be fun to get that gang back together. I'm a bit curious as to whether I'd get along with the me of the late 1990's and early 2000's. Don't misunderstand - I wasn't a jerk or anything - I'd like to think I've always been a reasonably pleasant person. But the Dan of 15 to 16 years ago was a different person. We all change, when you think about it, we're all different people; all through our lives, and that's okay, that's good, you...

I'd say the biggest component of a successful campaign is compatibility. The players get along with each other and everyone buys into the rules and the assumptions of a genre. I suppose this seems obvious, but I've been part of campaigns that didn't meet these requirements. Players not liking each other is probably the most destructive to a game.

I just recently posted  some of the shininess that's calling to me but I'll try to narrow it down a bit. For at least a little while we're going to be playing some Ghostbusters. Given the number of times I've mentioned thinking it's a short-term game, I'll be rather amused if we're still playing this a year from now... However, in all honesty I do think this will be more of a mini-campaign, though perhaps one that can be revisited from time to time when we're in the mood for something on the goofy side. I've been thinking a lot about Lovecraftian horrors a lot of late, which makes a game of Call of Cthulhu  or Delta Green  up there in possibility. I really like some of the additions that Delta Green brings to the table - beyond your sanity being at risk, it maps out the way your whole life can fall apart. Cheerful stuff. Playing Ghostbusters  has really brought back my appreciation for the D6 System and with that in mind a Star Wars  campa...