By Brent on 30 December 2011
Edit: In the original version of this post, I called this a Kindle 3. Brain fart. Sorry about that! My parents kindly bought me a Kindle 4 for Christmas. It’s the new, small, light one. No touch, no 3G. Simple. I love it for many reasons, but have struggled to turn pages comfortably. My thumb just wasn’t able to press the side buttons easily. (Ah, First World Problems.) Today, I realized […]
Posted in Technology |
By Brent on 29 December 2011
Nearly a year ago, Greywulf posted RPG Solitaire Challenge: 3 Dice, a simple solitaire game of dungeon exploration. In his game, you roll 3 dice for your adventurer’s stats, then for each room in the dungeon, roll 1 die to determine the room’s type, 1 die for a monster, and 1 die for a treasure. I played the game a couple of times, and while I had fun, I found two major issues: The game is very swingy. I played […]
Posted in Role-playing |
By Brent on 26 December 2011
InSpectres is a lot of fun. It’s a tabletop role-playinggame that’s basically Ghostbusters. The lightweight system includes only four attributes per PC–Academics, Athletics, Technology, and Contact–with a focus on one of them. A total of 9 points are distributed among these attributes. The core mechanic involves rollingsix-sideddice–as many dice as you have points in the attribute that applies to the attempted action–and looking up the highest die rolled in a results table. Higher numbers provide extra […]
Posted in 50 Games in 50 Weeks, Role-playing |
By Brent on 19 December 2011
I’ve been playing around with Diaspora*, a new social network that apparently is trying to be an “open” social network — anyone can host a Diaspora* server, for example. In practice, Diaspora* looks and operates so much like Google+ that I struggled to find a difference. Even Diaspora*’s aspects, which it describes as “unique,” seem to function exactly like Google+ Circles: named groups of friends. The main difference appears […]
Posted in Technology |
By Brent on 16 December 2011
I ran a game of Searchers of the Unknown, a simplified and free original D&D rule set, at RyvenCon a while ago. ‘Twas fun, and the system worked well, but we agreed that it could use one little tweak. This way, madness lies. It’s so tempting to house-rule a system because it’s “not perfect.” Soon, a rules-light system grows into a rules-moderate system. Well, this is a minor issue, but a significant […]
Posted in Role-playing |
By Brent on 16 December 2011
As part of DC Gameday, I volunteered to run a game of Everyone Is John. System basics: Each player is a voice in the head of a totally insane man named John from Minneapolis. Each voice has a few skills, an obsession (something they really want to accomplish), and a pool of Willpower tokens. Whenever John is hurt, bored, or falls asleep, the voices all wager Willpower tokens to take control of John. The winner controls John […]
Posted in 50 Games in 50 Weeks, Role-playing |
By Brent on 12 December 2011
Bottom line up-front: Click on the Feed tab, then below the Post a bulletin text box, click the view button and select comments only. Your channel comments now appear. For the record, I like the new design: it’s clean and mostly clear. The information is laid out in a reasonable and logical structure. I like that stats and info are near the top of the page but grayed out. I want that information to be easily available, […]
Posted in Technology |