by George H. Baxter & Larry W. Smith, Ph.D. Yes, I do play the game. I first saw it being played at MileHiCon in Denver in 1992, and I kick myself for not buying cards then (that would have been...
Continue reading "Mastering Magic Cards:
An Introduction to the Art of Masterful Deck Construction" »
Along with reports earlier this week that Wizards of the Coast are cancelling the Chainmail brand, they also seem to have sold off their two magazines. What makes this somewhat strange is that these magazines are basically house organs that...
Continue reading "Wizards sells off Dungeon and Dragon" »
Neverwinter Nights has a lot of promise as a "next generation" of online RPGs because it enables people to build their own worlds and allow others to play in them. With great promise comes great heartaches, one of them being...
Continue reading "World Building 101" »
Widely reported today is the news that Sony/Verant are taking EverQuest to the Macintosh. So far the Macintosh has been left out of the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game phenomena, with only the Korean-based Lineage supporting a Mac client. Neverwinter...
Continue reading "EverMac?" »
A few weeks after I started this job as Online Community Coordinator for a major health association, one of my co-workers who was even newer to the office than I, whom had been introduced to me in one of those...
Continue reading "Keeping Promises" »
Before Jill left for her biology class in the Bahamas, I gave her an early birthday present--an eTrex Vista GPS. I'll admit that the gift wasn't entirely selfless. We had already talked about getting a personal GPS unit and get...
Continue reading "Where in the world?" »
This is an unusual board game in the sense that instead of playing against each other, the players (who take the role of the Hobbits from the books) work together to avoid Sauron to destroy the ring. It faithfully recreates...
Continue reading "Lord of the Rings Board Game" »
The fun thing about playing D&D is, of course, the roleplaying. Sometimes the roleplaying happens in the game, and our group has some players who really do a great job of playing their roles. I think I started out roleplaying...
Continue reading "Dying in Faerun" »
Here's The Big List of RPG Plots (via Cory). Okay, they're all cliches, but the whole damn D&D game is one big cliche after another. The fun in playing D&D is working to make the cliche individualized to you, the...
Continue reading "Hey, this could be useful" »
I've just added Greg Costikyan's weblog to my blogroll list, discovered through his listing on my friend Timothy Burke's weblog, Easily Distracted. Costikyan is an expert game designer and commentator, and should prove a mature and sane voice to a...
Continue reading "Greg Costikyan" »
Oh, the interactive tests you can take on the Web just continue to multiply. I can't resist them, either. This one (via Perverse Access Memory, which I had to add to my blogroll not only because it's often about games,...
Continue reading "I should be a BARD!" »
We played a four player game of "Mage: the Ascension" today with characters who had yet to be awakened. It was interesting going from the D&D 3rd edition rules to the White Wolf "storyteller" system. D&D is much more rules-...
Continue reading "The Fallen Tower (Mage)" »
There's a new plaything filling the blogosphere and it's called Blogshares, a fantasy "stock market" simulation that uses blogs as the basis for the "companies" and links as the basis of how much a blog is valuated at. On the...
Continue reading "Why I Won't Play Blogshares" »
I find it amazing what people can do with Flash animation these days. Jill's a big fan of Mark Fiore, who filed a really cutting piece for the September 11 anniversary. Then, while surfing around last night, we stumbled upon...
Continue reading "The Crusade Quest for the Oily Grail" »
I've been busy investigating and participating in three interesting and new interactive communities recently, including:Zoetrope Virtual Studios - Zoetrope is the name for the production company, studio, and various other interests of the Coppola family, including all of their films...
Continue reading "New Online Hangouts" »
In my day job, I'm the online community coordinator for a fairly large non-profit association of health care professionals. I spend a large part of my day on the association web site reading messages posted by our members to see...
Continue reading "Moderation in Everything" »
I'm friends with a number of academics and developers who have been eagerly following the emergence and growth of the massive multiplayer online computer game (typically shortened to MMOGs). As a computer gamer since I first laid my hands on...
Continue reading "The Dark Sea of Massive Multiplayer Online Games" »
I wrote a couple of weeks ago during the comment spam debacle that my wife had pointed her graduate school advisor to my blog to show off the software (where, unfortunately, he was greeted with a note on the side...
Continue reading "Another One Blogs the Smog" »
I love games, especially well-made games. I understand why most board games come with plastic pieces and flimsy cardboard, but I'm willing to pay a little bit more for wood pieces and some heft to the board (so it will...
Continue reading "Avast ye mateys, that's not piracy but highway robbery!" »
I'll be away today for a session of Call of Cthulhu with my gaming group. I'm not sure I've ever played a full session of this game, although I've been familiar with it for years, as well as the entire...
Continue reading "Cthulhu Calling" »
It's been awhile since I've played tennis, but last weekend my regular tennis partner, Alex from Literary Bargainville, and I agreed that we needed to get our regular Sunday matches restarted. So today we hit the court for one set....
Continue reading "Tennis 2004: Wins 1" »
The second match this year between Alex and I happened on this cold March morning, as winter tries to retain a little grip on the area before the cherry blossoms bloom. As such, the courts we normally play on were...
Continue reading "Tennis 2004: First Loss of the Season" »
Another frustrating tennis match, where I once again had the upper hand (at 4-3) then went on to lose 4-6. I chalk it up to the one point that went on for nearly 15 volleys which winded me and proved...
Continue reading "In the negative column for the season" »
Timothy Burke elicits guffaws with his version of the first chapter of Lord of the Rings as seen as a massively multiplayer online game (of which, you should know, there is one in the works). Several moments of hilarity and...
Continue reading "Lord of the Game" »
The National Budget Simulation is a game that you can play from the privacy of your own web browser, and really should, just so that you can see how easy it is to reduce military spending just a little bit...
Continue reading "Balance the Federal Buget" »
I didn't join in with Ginger Stampley's Game WISHes because, well, I was late to the party, and all the cool kids were already at the table. I got my beer and ate chips, instead. But Ginger quit with the...
Continue reading "Game Dream 1: Voice" »
I've been reading Mike Sugarbaker's comments on the Origins game convention that's going on right now and reminiscing about the one and only time I got to visit Origins, in the summer of 1984 between high school graduation and starting...
Continue reading "Origins in 1984" »
This week, Doc asks about deals with the devil. One of my favorite plot complications that I like to introduce as a GM is to create an environment where the players are forced to deal with unsavory characters that they...
Continue reading "Game Dream 2: Dealing with the Devil" »
This little flash game to promote the new album by the Polyphonic Spree is quite enjoyable--as good a way to encounter this new music as any of today's music videos. Actually, I love the idea of using games to promote...
Continue reading "Take a Trip with the Polyphonic Spree" »
We rode downtown on our bikes to watch a polo match hosted by the Madison, "the only 5-star hotel in DC" (which the announcer had to keep repeating). The most annoying thing about it was, for a hosted polo match...
Continue reading "Polo on the National Mall" »
Been meaning to get to this one for awhile: a list of 15 questions about your personal interaction with RPGs, as posted by the 20by20 room: What is the first RPG you ever played?Dungeons and Dragons, the blue boxed set....
Continue reading "Fifteen RPG Questions" »
I've followed Bruce Sterling Woodcock's graphs on the subscriber bases of Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) since he's been doing it (I think), and generally conceed that it's a useful bit of information regarding relatively popularity and possible longevity of...
Continue reading "MMOG Growth" »
It's game night tonight (the finale of the Deadlands game which I'm the gamemaster for, which means I get to be a player again soon!) and in the back of my mind for the last couple of days have been...
Continue reading "The Ultimate Gaming Tool" »
Spent the evening running through a playtest of a scenario that my buddy Matt has written for Savage Worlds based on his own setting creation. Pinnacle has expessed some interest in the scenario and the setting, but they wanted him...
Continue reading "Playtesting Savage Worlds" »
It was quite a number of people filling our little house last night for the "NEW YEAR'S HOLIDAY BURN THE HOUSE SALMON BAKE COCKTAIL PARTY" that we hosted. Since we moved into this new abode in June, we hadn't had...
Continue reading "New Year's Eve Party" »
I had the opportunity today to play an introductory session of Dogs in the Vineyard, following an invitation posted by Jim Henley on his site. I had heard of the game third-hand before but didn't know much about it, and...
Continue reading "Dogs in the Vineyard" »
It seems that everything these days is a subscription: magazines, newspapers, cable TV, cell phone service, blog feeds, music downloads, massive multiplayer online games. With the new year, I've been trying to cut back on those things that take so...
Continue reading "Poem a Day" »
(thanks to paper napkin for the image) Those of us who write these blog things are entirely vain creatures, who do this just to get attention, you know. And, since most of us aren't in the A-list who are...
Continue reading "A futile shout into the void" »
Some legends never die, they just get incorporated into new technologies....
Continue reading "There's a joke here" »
Hrmph. I missed National Games Week (4th week of November), although I guess I can't say I totally missed it, because I likely played a game that week, I just didn't know I should be playing and celebratin'. However, I...
Continue reading "The Games of 2005" »
I don't totally understand this "Search Engine Optimizer" contest thing that seems to be running once again, but I can follow enough of it that I support this entry, V7ndotcom elursrebmem, by ye olde watching paint dry, mainly because he's...
Continue reading "Optimize This!" »
In the battle against comment spam (which I fight daily here at immediacy), a lot of attention was placed on blog owners like myself who have lots of posts that remain open for comments, thus facilitating the bots that search...
Continue reading "Google AdSense? Nonsense!" »
We lived for seven years in a condo, and before that we were out in new suburban division of a very small town, so we really haven't had much experience with visiting trick-or-treaters. Last year, I wasn't even home for...
Continue reading "Home for Halloween" »
I wasn't the earliest adopter of the Newton, as I didn't get one until the 2100, but that still made me a fairly early adopter of the electronic handheld computer. I thought it would help my writing, as I could...
Continue reading "Apple Newton vs. Nokia N800" »
One of the things I love to receive is mail, email or regular. But I mean mail that means something to me, not just unsolicited advertisements. It's bad enough in my email, which takes me time to clean through, but...
Continue reading "Junking Junk Mail" »
For most of this decade, I've been playing role-playing games off and on with a small group of friends. I took a break from it for the last four months or so because I was feeling a little burned out...
Continue reading "Dead Again" »
The first indication I had that something was wrong with my 43things account was that I couldn't log in. I can't remember now when that first occurred, although it was probably last September or October. I have so many logins...
Continue reading "Web 2.0, Glen 0" »
Two separate items of note this week related to gaming. First off, I have to mention the passing of E. Gary Gygax. I can still remember when I first discovered Dungeons and Dragons and role-playing gaming with the first edition...
Continue reading "Notes on Our Gaming Hobby" »
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