By Brent on 5 January 2012
In truth, I hate “tip culture,” the idea that you can achieve balance, harmony, and rightness in life with a few painless steps in 5 minutes a day. It’s never that easy. Also, I don’t want to tell you what to do. Who am I? So, these aren’t tips as much as they’re pieces of advice that I’ve taken, which have powerfully affected my productivity and efficiency. 1. Keep a list of projects […]
Posted in Self-improvement |
By Brent on 2 January 2012
Man, I loved Fiasco. Fiasco is a tabletop RPG that approaches die rolls from a radically unorthodox angle. The players roll the dice at the beginning of the game, and those rolls tie into various elements of the setting (the book comes with several starter settings). Once those dice are rolled, they’re never rolled again. The first half of the game involves describing and explaining the elements rolled, as well as their relations to each other. […]
Posted in 50 Games in 50 Weeks, Role-playing |
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 |
By Brent on 23 November 2011
Catego is an abstract dice game in which several players (about 2 to 5) each roll dice, and slowly fill in a scorecard, jockeying for position. The scorecard looks like this: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Player 1 Player 2 Player 3 Player 4 Every turn, each player rolls two six-sided dice, adds them, and places that result […]
Posted in 50 Games in 50 Weeks, Reviews |
