Of Communities and Cabals
Posted inD&D Community

Of Communities and Cabals

Dear Internet, I Love You I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about our little community. This slice of the internet that revolves around dice and cardstock and myth…
Review: Drinking Quest – The Original Drinking RPG
Posted inBoard & Card Games Reviews

Review: Drinking Quest – The Original Drinking RPG

Boy am I glad I finally got a chance to check out drinking quest. It's a great game whether you like the idea of drinking games or not you'll love it. Hell, play this game with koolaid, or don't drink at all and it's still fun. Read on for the full review and for some bonus amateur content I created for it!
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.

A Guide to Heroic Tier Parenting: Ages 0-6
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) Humor

A Guide to Heroic Tier Parenting: Ages 0-6

After many a silly yet somehow profound conversations with my wife, I’ve decided it’s time to turn our D&D references to parenting into a post for your reading pleasure. Granted some of this may all seem silly at first but I have hidden some true wisdom within these lines. I’ll be doing a 3 part series of posts each one focusing on one of the parenting “Tiers”. So let’s get this thing started, enjoy.

UPDATE:This got published at Kobold Quarterly as a Friday Funny. Woot!

Heroic (Ages 0-6): This tier of parenting is simple yet dirty business and somebody has to do it! It’s not glorious when you first start out, though after all it is unavoidably the foundation you’ll build the rest of your adventuring career on. You start out battling one dirty diaper at a time and your party has no real sense of cohesion or tactics just yet. It’s all fly by the seat of your pants no matter how well you think you’ve prepared, that cleansing ritual will not keep the diapers of eternal stench at bay no matter how many times or how loudly you repeat it’s canticle. Sleep deprivation is going to sap away most of your healing surges, what’s left may be consumed by that soured milk breath weapon, hope you’ve got a high fortitude defense. Oh and all those torches you packed… they aren’t going to help your reflexes any against toys you trip over when waking up in the middle of the night due to nightmares or having to prepare an alchemical concoction for the little one.

By your “party” I do mean your child(ren), yourself  and your significant other of course, if you’re lucky enough to have one that is. Some adventurers aren’t so blessed and must quest alone. So keep in mind If you’re a single parent the encounters don’t scale down and doing even the most mundane tasks can seem trying at times. You have even less time for short rests but the rewards are fantastic – bragging rights, double XP and hoarding all the loot for yourself! After a while you obtain a rhythm and things seem to get easier, challenges you face are easily overcome with at-will’s and encounter powers. You’ll have to break out the dailies when certain situations arise, such as questions like what happens when you lose all your HP, or what that funny dance is that they saw you doing in bed with mommy/daddy the other night. Not all situations are so trying however, which in this case feel free to use minor actions to make some shit up and those curiosities drop like minions.