So, with the (not too) recent posts of mine mentioning the future of D&D, you might ask what's actually going on with the play test. I haven't been able to play it too much, particularly the more recent iterations of the rules, but I will describe some of my impressions ( Read more... )

So, I start this blog back up again and by last spring I'm already too lazy to do it. But today inspires me ( Read more... )

The big news over the last couple of weeks in D&D-fanboyland has been a potential wrench thrown in the machinery of the latest design efforts for the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game. Former TSR and WotC employee Monte Cook, one of the designers of the 3rd edition of D&D, had been hired back by WotC to help work on the 5th edition project. ( Read more... )

There are times I think the gaming hobby has far too many prima donna types participating in it to be healthy. I really hope that I just encounter them with higher frequency on the gaming message boards than they exist in the general gamer population.
Today, I encountered someone who actually thought his personal integrity would be tarnished if he ( Read more... )

There are days in which the media, and the people who seem to crave its attention, crack me up. I didn't watch the segment, but there was something on Good Morning, America about a teacher who left his family to shack up with an 18 year old former student. Here's a link to the story as it appeared on Yahoo:

http://gma.yahoo.com/california-high- ( Read more... )

Now that Ryan Braun's suspension from playing baseball has been overturned by a panel of arbitrators, the feeding frenzy begins again. And I confess that I get a chuckle out of it. I find it entertaining to watch everyone work themselves up into a froth over doping in sports because I find it all so ridiculous. Yes, I think it's terribly short-term ( Read more... )

I've lately been reading Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by historian Max Hastings and enjoying it. I've been an aficionado of World War 2 scholarship for many years now and have read several histories by Stephen Ambrose, Ian Kershaw, and Antony Beevor (one of my favorites) as well as numerous others. Right now, I'm really enjoying Hastings's ( Read more... )

Yesterday, my wife and I went to our Parent-Teacher conference for our 2nd grader. We were very pleased to hear some great news and that got me thinking ( Read more... )

Based on the enthusiasm some of the gamers in my Thursday night group have for Torg, we decided to give it a whirl. I had heard some pretty good things about its use of cards to add narrative elements to the game. The game system has some interesting elements to it. A single task resolution system based on rolling an exploding d20 and a wide ( Read more... )

Van Halen has recently reentered the record-making music world with a new album titled A Different Kind of Truth. David Lee Roth is back on lead vocals, the Van Halen brothers are in their positions. The only difference with the classic lineup is Eddie's son Wolfgang is playing bass instead of Michael Anthony, whose relationship with the Van Halens ( Read more... )