LivingDice.com

Are You Buying Fewer Games in this Bad Economy?

Gaming is an expensive hobby. Rule books, miniatures, maps and convention travel all conspire to empty a gamer’s wallet. While planning my Gen Con trip budget today, I wondered how much the current dire economic situation is impacting gamers. To satisfy my curiosity, I am running the very first Livingdice.com poll. The poll will run [...]

Gen Con 2009 Hotel Suggestions Wanted

I am attending Gen Con 2009 for the first time and would like some advice from previous  attendees.  I am not sure which hotel I should make reservations at and I heard that you need to make reservations early before the “good” hotel rooms sell out.  My  only requirements are that the hotel be within  [...]

Happy New Year!

Apologies on my recent lack of posts. Blogging has been light recently due to real world commitments and development work on my new  role-playing search engine site (official launch date early next month), but I shall return in full force on January 5th, 2009!
Happy new year and thank you again for reading my humble blog.
Trask, [...]

Gamer Tools Review: The ZÜCA Wheeled Bag

The ZÜCA is quite possibly the world’s best gamer bag for convention goers. Trask has been asking me to do a review for a while. He even featured it in this year’s ‘10 Christmas Gift Ideas for a Role-Playing Gamer‘ due to all my man-love speech.
So, without further ado, I will begin…
Trask and I first [...]

“They Live”– Great Movie, Better Short Story

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I am all out of bubblegum.
–Nada
“They Live” is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated science-fiction movies of  the past 25 years. A working-class hero, John Nada, dons magic sunglasses that filter
out an alien mind-control signal and allow him to see the world [...]

Review: Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Manual of the Planes

I will admit it. In all the iterations of Dungeons and Dragons, I never purchased the Manual of the Planes. Well, until now. I never was interested in different planes, universe cosmology, or portals to another dimension in my D&D games. But in 4E, there was one specific item that made me take the plunge. [...]

Paperback Swap–Fantasy and RPG Books on the Cheap

Hello fellow LivingDice readers,
It is Haaldaar, your friendly Holy Knight of Haruspices!  I thought I would take some of the load off of Trask for the night and tell you about Paperbackswap. Now, this website isn’t solely focused on gaming, but there are a lot of fantasy and gaming books available in this book club. [...]

Great Story, Terrible System–Games that Need a New Set of Rules

Storytelling is at the heart of every role-playing game. Think of the game master as a director and the players as actors in a very dynamic piece of theatre. Though, they are not in total control. Chance plays a part in this play as well. Gamers use a rules system (usually dice based) to determine success or failure and add an element of risk to the game experience. When the story is original an exciting and the rules serve to advance the story, all is well.

Sadly, that is often not the case. Games with amazing stories often endure grossly inappropriate rules that bury exciting worlds in terrible mechanics.

Living Forgotten Realms: Too Much Roll-Playing

Much as I take issue with the design decisions of “4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons” as a rules set, I rather enjoy the “Forgotten Realms” campaign setting.  “FR” always struck me as the more  “mature” campaign setting that
required a bit more cunning and thought than “Greyhawk.” When Wizards of the Coast announced a “Living” campaign [...]

How to Fire a Bad Dungeon Master

The determination that a game group has a bad DM that needs replacement does not happen over night. It is usually the cumulative result of obvious, cliched plots (save the princess!,) poor table management (the last session ended with 2 hours of arguments about Star Wars vs Star Trek,) miserable presentation skills (the DM’s nickname [...]