Hey, Where's my Cash?

A new version of "Hey, That's My Fish" is coming out, with these beautiful sculpted pieces instead of the little wooden "meeple" penguins of the previous edition. Very slick, but unless they've changed something about how the game plays (which is very good!), I'll be sticking to my old set. I'm a big fan of wooden pieces, anyway.

Dem bones, dem bones....

Went to the ORAL SURGEON today to see about getting the wisdom teeth out, at the urging of my dentist. I was REAL HAPPY to be going too.

So imagine how happy I am to hear that they (the teeth) are probably best left alone. The doctor, who was very nice, explained how he might cause more damage going in to get them than to leave them be.

So guess what option I went with?

So yay for my mouth and me!

New Blog!!

Since I've started doing a little freelance illustration, I thought I'd put up a new blog to talk about it a little and promote some of my stuff. So, go on over to Curmudgeons & Dragons and check out my latest drawings! Hopefully, I'll be a bit more punctual about putting up new posts than I am over here. But, then again, I do have "nothing to say"!

Hey, I'm on the cover!

I recently started doing a little freelance illustration work. One of the projects that I'm illustrating is "Original Edition Characters" from Goblinoid Games, who put out Labyrinth Lord. I was very surprised and delighted to see one of my images being used as the cover, especially since I only drew the thing yesterday!

This may not seem like a big deal , but it is to me. When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time copying illustrations out of my D&D books, and I always had a hope that someday my drawings would be in those books. Well, it took me about 26 years to get there, but I got there.

So, I look forward to "Original Edition Characters" being released, not only because it will have my drawings in it, but because it sounds like a neat product I would have bought anyway.

Feeling loike ye Olde Gamer

I've been reading a lot of Old School style roleplaying games lately, namely Swords & Wizardry as well as Labyrinth Lord, which I've mentioned here before. I've also been reading some fantastic Old School RPG blogs, most notably Grognardia and Jeff's Gameblog.

I am also a big fan of Chad Underkoffler and his PDQ game system. I've been a big supporter of "Truth & Justice" and "The Zorceror of Zo", and have ran them both numerous times at game clubs and conventions. I have had a lot of fun with this system. So, you'd think that when Chad puts out yet another tweaked version of PDQ (called PDQ Sharp or PDQ#) I would be all over that.

Oh, I downloaded the free supplement with glee. I happily adjusted my bifocals and started reading. Then I frowned. "Why does this game seem so complicated?" I thought. I was, just last year, calling this game system "rules-light" and "elegant". Now it just seemed cumbersome. How had this happened??

The answer, it seems, is the "Old School" becoming the "New School" for me. "Swords and Wizardry" has shown me that having a "universal resolution" rule set (One in which a single rule can be applied to nearly any endeavor a player's character may undertake to produce a clear result) can not only be undesirable, but also a hindrance to creative play. S&W really only has rules that govern combat. The rest is up to the players and the GM to work out in play. It is no longer a matter of "My character tries to make peace with the hobgoblins. What do I roll?", but more of "Okay, Rufus shows empty hands to the hobgoblins in a sign of friendship and then slowly reaches for his money purse. Maybe I can bribe these guys into going away. What do they do?"

See the difference? The first example has the player merely rolling dice and moving the pawn, much like Monopoly. The second, the player is engaged into thinking of what to do and how to do it. The player is solving the problem, not a dice roll. Plus the Gamemaster is also more engaged. Now instead of just setting target numbers, he is really having to think "Okay, would that work?" and "What could happen now?".

This all seems so simple, yet I have been caught up in rulesets for years, and for what? Only to discover that the first rules I learned to use were really the ones I liked the best. If that doesn't make a man feel old, nothing does.