Dungeons and Dragons Next
Posted inD&D Community Interviews The Hobby

Dungeons and Dragons Next

Recently I was given some interview questions for an article about the next edition of D&D for the CNN geek blog. I really enjoyed answering them and put a lot of thought into them, considering today's news I thought I should share my full transcript just to see how you guys felt about the whole thing. I feel it is relevant, and rather than writing an entirely new piece I do believe it sums up things rather well. Agree or disagree, I'd like to see how your thoughts compare to mine. Below is our full exchange, along with my plea to the community.
Booth Babe Culture, I Abhor It.
Posted inThe Hobby

Booth Babe Culture, I Abhor It.

[info_box]I have updated the article's title via a suggestion by @GeekyLyndsay of DragonChow Dice Bags who pointed out it's really the culture surrounding booth babes, and not the girls themselves…
Turning my wife into a gamer
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) The Hobby Updates

Turning my wife into a gamer

It’s an every day occurrence for some of us lucky ones, but a pipe dream for others – gaming with our better halves, that is. “Quality Time” with my wife is often spent rolling dice or shuffling cards at the kitchen table, cloistered up in our bedroom in front of our PC’s playing a game or vegging out in the living room around the xbox with the kids. Speaking of kids, mine are much the same (though in moderated and monitored amounts). We are a family of gamers, and I couldn’t be happier about it but for others even so much as convincing their loved one(s) to sit down and game with can be like pulling teeth.

Mind you, getting my wife into gaming may have been a bit easier for me than others, but it was no cakewalk by any means. She grew up playing Sega and Playstation games, board games and the like but always had reservations about the “D&D Nerds” her older sister hung out with in high school. Computer games were not really a thing in her household either, aside from maybe The Sims or flash games online, so when I met her and told her I was a ‘gamer’ she vastly underestimated what I meant by that.

A few years ago, during the first few months of our relationship and several days into the first of many reactivation/cancellation cycles of my World of Warcraft account, she got her first glimpse into what true ‘gamerdom’ could be.  At first WoW wasn’t even something that really appealed to her, and I was definitely going about it all wrong in attempting to show her what the game was all about.

At one point she was finally about fed up with me playing the game, so I decided it was time to re strategize my approach and explained the elements of the game that I thought she would enjoy most, as opposed to my own gaming-malformed brain. So I marketed it as a game where you get to create a little person, buy her fancy clothes, blow things up with fireballs, go shopping and ride pretty animals – and somehow it worked. She had said [paraphrased] “Okay, show me how to play this game if you’re going to be spending so much on it” and then, not before long – Dibbles the gnome mage was born.

4e D&D Plays Like a Video Game, and That’s Awesome.
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) The Hobby

4e D&D Plays Like a Video Game, and That’s Awesome.

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve spent a decent bit of time here inside the D&D hive mind. After 26 years, 20 of those so far have been well spent playing a myriad of video games. So in turn my views on gaming and more specifically Dungeons and Dragons may be of the minority within this community. I’d like you to lend me your ears whilst I show you my side of the story.

I started playing D&D with 2nd edition during high school and have played every iteration since then, just recently I have widened my RPG horizons a bit by trying both Dragon Age and Gamma World. That being said I am no newcomer to RPG’s and do at least have a solid base understanding for what “old school” and “classic” are considered to be within our realm of hobby entertainment. However at the same time I have multiple definitions for those words and find it a bit unsettling that so much disambiguation often goes into defining these terms. Is only one definition of ‘classic’ allowed to fit into tabletop RPG’s?

Though not all always, there are plenty of blogs and personalities out there on the internet that claim that video game elements inside D&D are a bad, bad thing. Some do it boisterously, and some not so much. Though I won’t go too far into detailing these thoughts, I’m sure most of you are familiar with them. I don’t see the problem with D&D emulating WoW or other games, in fact I embrace it.

A Bit of History

Let’s keep in mind I didn’t’ grow up with red box, He Man, or incense choked rooms filled with graph paper, lead miniatures and dominoes forming makeshift dungeon walls. I grew up with Xbox, Mega Man, Nintendo and the Internet. I grew up with movies that had high production values and awesome special effects, so I suppose my imagination has been ‘spoiled’ by things I’ve already seen in these places.

To my generation our gaming “roots” are 8 bit Nintendo controllers, keyboards, and the horrible screech of dial up modems. Games like Hexen, Zelda, Diablo, Half Life and dare I even say World of Warcraft have all contributed to potential girlfriend loss and late nights of unhealthy binge eating/drinking/smoking while gaming – just like our pencil & paper gaming forefathers.

The GenCon Experience, some final thoughts
Posted inThe Hobby

The GenCon Experience, some final thoughts

I’ve had a couple days to reflect now on this years trip to GenCon, mind you it was my first convention of any sort ever so I probably have a different and perhaps more romanticized perspective on things than others but hey, gimme’ a few years and maybe I can start being jaded….nah probably not.

I found GenCon to be a completely wonderful event, it’s a carnival of oddities and eccentricity while at the same time an organized event with something in mind for nearly every type of gamer. Even for those who aren’t even gamers , there are things to do and see and they should find plenty to intrigue themselves with. The presentation at some of the booths was just great but what really got me was the overwhelming friendliness of everyone I managed to bump into (often times literally) my son would trip and fall over countless people and not once did I get a scowl or a ‘damn kid” or anything like that. Perhaps it’s the common ground and understanding shared between gamers that made for such a great vibe, either that or miraculously the human race has started becoming more kind for unknown reasons which I highly doubt.

It’s great to be able to meet folks with a common thread and genuine desire to just get their game on in any way they can, the costumes are loud and fun and those who were performing in the hallways were phenomenal. You see costumes from video games and other things not nescessarily RPG or board game related but that’s because whether you play RPG’s, board games, video games, card games, TCG’s, hopscotch (the list goes on) you still have a place at gencon – because you’re a gamer!

Another thing I’d like to make mention of were the girls there at GenCon, particularly the ones in costume – there were a lot of girls that by societies shallow and ‘conventional’ standards were a bit too “thick” for the costumes they wore and my hat goes off to all of them (I don’t wear hats). I find it inspiring to see so many girls there were comfortable with themselves and perhaps even damn proud. Knowing that there is more than one size for beauty is something a lot of folks don’t have, but it seems those at GenCon did, which I think is awesome.

The 4th edition hot button
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) The Hobby

The 4th edition hot button

I was introduced to D&D by a friend early in high school who at the time played 2nd Edition AD&D (this book still adorns my shelves as we speak) and I wasn’t really sure what the hell was going on at first. Sit at a table and pretend to be someone else? Do I dress up and change my voice? I heard about all these crazy adventures that had taken place, powerful magic items and all the cool stuff they did and in my mind all I could think was “Awesome, but I wonder what all this looks like” and in my minds eye it was some sort of elaborate video game/VR simulation. I found myself daydreaming about these scenarios I’d been told about, or overheard them talking about “So I took the oil from my lantern and poured it all over the dungeon floor and lit it ablaze with my torch just as the orcs burst through the door and Andy’s character got clobbered” wow, what the hell were these guys doing after school and why hadn’t I gotten in on it sooner?