A Little Me and Pips

I'm a D&D guy since back when my dad tried to teach me the game from the Moldvay B/X box (and now that I think of it I cannot imagine why he ever bought it actually...weird).  Although back in the day I played Gamma World, Star Frontier, Car War, and even some James Bond, Star Trek (meets Aliens), and Twilight 2000, really I was a D&D player at heart.  I was infatuated with anything to do with Camelot, magic swords, and dragons.

Today, real life almost always keeps me from playing.  I spend a lot time reading blogs and buying up products to keep myself involved.  I love the plethora of games out there and I'm fascinated by all the various ways people play.  One of the things I want to with this outlet is to document (review?) stuff, mainly D&D but also rules and mechanics.

I'm also a Kickstarter junkie, but that's for another day...

One of the things I was thoroughly impressed with from the Lamentations of the Flame Pricess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing Game (LotFP: WFRPG, or just WFRPG) is the skills d6 mechanic.  By itself, its a great little simplification to Thieve abilities with the addition that everyone gets a shot at it.  However, I was also enamored by the graphical representation of the skill by using dice.  Shade in the pips to represent your skill level.  Brilliant.

Now jump over to Sham's Grog & Blog and the Art of Delving.  Here is a nice mechanic for adjudicating tasks that allows for improvement (using pips).  I like this because (extrapolating) you don't all of a sudden get better at picking locks when all you've done lately is kill monster and take their loot.  Here your lock-picking only gets better when you actually pick locks.  Nice.

Tsojcanth from Lost Pages has taken this a step further and created a whole new game around the idea: Adventure Fantasy Game.  I waffled a few days but finally bought it.  I hope to do a more thorough review soon because I really like the concept applied to skills for OSR games.

Ooze Pits

Just finished reading through The Ooze Pits of Jonas Gralk and oh my gosh this Purple Sorcerer is amazing!

This adventure has it all, pig-stealing mist-men, bizarre cults, castle raids, freakishly huge trees, ooze out the wazoo, and tons and tons of PC death in pure DCC RPG style.  The best part though is that there are so many plot hooks and side adventure ideas a lazy GM could spawn off all kinds of setting-defining threads.

Remember, the Funnel is your Friend

Father's Day & Free RPG Day

So today is Father's Day!!!  Happy Father's Day all you Dad's out there...

Yesterday was Free RPG Day and here is a little picture of what went down at the only local store participating this year (within reasonable driving distance):

I'm not even going to pretend to be all Above All That concerning the edition wars - you play what you want and have a blast - I consider myself firm in the OSR camp but I'm a charter subscriber to everything Paizo publishes (except the maps and minis).  It warms my bitter old shriveled heart to see three different Pathfinder adventures being hosted on the big 8-seater table while the 4e games was on the little 4-seater.

I know, I know, that's not nice.  Sorry.  The 7-8 guys playing Slavers of the Sunken Garden game was noisy and laughing and generally sounded to be having a good time.  The DM was pretty animated and paced around.  The 4 guys playing 4e were more serious and subdued as they listened to their DM talk about damage with the cold descriptor or something.

Oh, well, it was awesome to get out and see everyone role-playing, really.  All the hating aside, I spent most of the morning talking to 10-15 years olds about the power of hanging out with your friends, drinking Dr Pepper, eating Cheetos, and rolling dice.

Day Two Didn't Happen

Well I didn't post anything yesterday because I was too concerned about trying to sound all high fluted and fancy with a relevant point and whatever.

Ok, that's not me and I have no point so what the point?

Something is better than nothing so I'll just hope that I'll find my voice as I go along.

First Post

This is my first post...

I've been lurking around the OSR blogosphere for many years but I've never really felt the urge to have my own blog.  ...still not sure it's really necessary, but eh, why not?!?  If nothing else this will be an excellent spot for collecting links to my favorite blogs and their more interesting bits.

I rely on sites such as James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Stuart Robertson's OSR Links for getting to the blogs I like to keep up with.

Over the next few days I'll be trying out various layouts and formats, trying to get this site to look more like me.  In the mean while, bare with me.  I plan on talking first about all the cool stuff going on right now - namely Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns I've contributed to.  And I'll explain the site name and other random bits.