It was a dark and stormy night…what does reading that evoke in your mind? Is there a mental, or even physical and audible, groan when you see or hear that in a story? Perhaps you don’t have such an immediate reaction, but, cliché or not,  the phrase still brings to mind the gloomy and wretched environment it's meant to draw you into. After all, who wants to be out in the rain, and in the dark , no less? It can make you feel like Garbage . That isn’t to say a good walk in the rain can’t be refreshing, but we’re talking about a dark, and likely very cold, night... doesn’t seem like the best of times (though possibly the blurst of times) to be out in a storm. Recently, I came across a quote “'It was a dark and stormy night' - we can do better than that!” It's the challenge that inspired this post, so... Can we do better than that? Well, certainly we can do better than that. It's actually strange to the question asked directly rather than an assumed hypothetical. Whil...

As usual, it wouldn’t be the spooky season here at Never Say Dice if we didn’t dust off some nostalgic childhood memories and use them as gaming inspiration . As we've discussed before, it shouldn’t be too surprising, given how much macabre media molded the childhoods of 80s and 90s children - very much including ourselves. We’ve even already posted about a number of things from Boglins to Beatlejuices , and (probably) some other letters of the alphabet. More than a few of these tiny bits of nostalgia are proudly disgusting, like Blurp Balls or just good ol' generic ooze. ( Everything was oozy or slimy in the late 80s and early 90s! Venkman got slimed , the Ninja/Hero Turtles got oozed ... and I cared for none of that stuff. I can’t be the only one from that era who had this kind of textural issue.) One thing that fits right in with all the strangeness of the era is the bizarre phenomenon known as the Garbage Pail Kids : sets of trading cards produced by Topps, and designed ...

As we all know by now, it's difficult for this blog to not look at popular things and rip them apart and/or break them down. It doesn’t matter if they’re classic tropes from our favorite media or popular videos of stupid rules interpretations that engagement baiters have proliferated. The  trope this particular post covers will be a classic one : You All Meet at an Inn., also sometimes known as You All Meet at a Tavern. While it would probably be enjoyable (and fairly easy), to take this one down a notch this post is going to take a different approach than usual and support the trope's use. You might say this post is "Inn Defense" of the Inn as a starting point in games and stories. So for this week, read along as we fend off the major complaints and extoll the benefits of using the Inn (or Tavern) for your launch.  Where Everybody Knows Your Name “You all meet at an inn (or tavern).” You can probably already hear the players groan as you trot out the time-tested ope...

Typically, you’ll see posts from me attempting to break a particular meme or trope related to gaming and the ways the rules of our fantasy worlds play out . It's rather enjoyable to pick apart the bait content engagement farmers put out there without giving them credit. For this post, I’d like to take a look at a particular trope that involves something very important in our lives today: when the jester makes fun of the King, they're likely to lose their head... something our TV court jesters have felt lately, particularly Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. What I’m talking about is censorship. Which is something that should worry those of us who consume media in all its forms just as much as it worries content creators, both big ones like the Colberts and Kimmels of the world, and small fry like us folks here at Never Say Dice. So for this week, let's talk a bit about censorship.  Funny What happened to Kimmel and Colbert isn’t funny. Of course, there are some that would a...

Hi, I’m one half of Never Say Dice, specifically the cranky D&D and fantasy content-consuming half, and you may remember me from meme busting posts such as: Them Bones , Divine Bovine , and Uh-oh Here Comes the Peasant Railgun . Finding ways to kill foes in the tabletop realms fills the imaginations of players and DMs alike. Finding smart ways to do so within the rules is even more important when we all want to play a game that's fair and reasonable. Then we have the other type of gamer, who wants to have their moment in the creative sun by ignoring, flouting, or perverting the rules. If you think those kinds of people sound fun, you’re wrong! And this post isn’t for you. We call those kinds of people "engagement (or rage) baiters", and they're putting unwise ideas into impressionable player’s heads. So, once again, we here at Never Say Dice are doing our part to break another "meme," and hope nobody buries us alive for trying to stop all the…burying ali...

Once again we wish a Good Timezone to Never Say Dice fans, adventures in Aardia, TikTok and beyond. No, we’re still not the Roll for Sandwich guy (seriously, neither of us), and if your memory's a little crusty, you should go devour our f irst blog post on Roll for Sandwich . The social media show is hosted by Jacob Pauwels, and is exactly what it sounds like. Every episode (nearly), the host rolls dice to determine various items that will comprise a sandwich. The host then consumes his creations and determines a name and point value along with sharing his commentary. It'is a nerdly social media underground phenomenon that has spawned fans following creators, imitators, different mediums such as pizza, and plenty of homages to the original creator. If you enjoy food and gaming (yes, in that order), you might want to dig right into the feast of these short video collections . It still enthralls my children (when we can get ourselves to all focus and watch a few episodes) and my...

The post schedule around this blog hasn’t been the smoothest as of late. Between life’s pressures and unexpected tragedies such as rock legends (and personal heros) dying , it's not hard to imagine how that would impact a regular day. Unfortunately for our dear readers, one of the things that has kept me from writing over the past few weeks is vacation. Though, while one might expect they'd get more writing done on a vacation, the fact of the matter is that taking your whole family on a trip, even limited to those living in your own household, is something of a job in itself. Vacation is what I want to talk about this week, though, so perhaps it works out after all. While I may have previously talked about gaming while on vacation and finding inspirations in your trips , or even taking a vacation from your weekly gam e,  this week I want to look at something a bit different: giving the characters a vacation.  Time to Party Our characters in tabletop roleplaying ga...

I’m sure we don’t have to tell you, and our recent post schedule is a reminder -  it’s been a week. It’s been a month, a year. The crushing horror of the daily news makes our daily struggles harder, more draining… and then it only gets worse, in ways you don’t see coming. One of the ways it came this week was the death of John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne. It’s hit the both of us at Never Say Dice quite hard. Ozzy’s work was a lodestone for both of us, something we’d visit time and again, together and as individuals. We attended multiple Ozzfests together. These “Never Say Disc” posts were begun specifically as a way for us to talk about the anniversary of Black Sabbath’s debut album. Ozzy’s also been family tradition - we both have older siblings who created the space for us to begin our own explorations and from which this one man’s music and, yes, philosophy, would be a constant for both our lives. And now he’s gone. If this medium bears any aspect of who we are, it’s vital that w...

There are generation-defining pieces of genre media, influential works whose presence is immediately felt in everything that comes after it, works in whose facets we can see its peers, its predecessors, and all the many creations it will inspire. And then there’s Back to the Future (1985) , which is somehow the complete opposite. Generation-defining, sure, but also wholly unique to its own vision, an unreplicable artifact, notable entirely for its own brilliance rather than an empire built on its foundation. These actors, these scenes, that direction… there’s really nothing else like it - even the sequels are largely their own things rather than rehashing the original. There were a couple expansions via the short-lived animated series and the much-beloved Telltale adventure game , but on the whole it’s been allowed to simply be - a rarity in today’s media landscapes of constant remakes, reworkings, and rehashes. Back to the Future is a movie that means a lot to us at Never Say Dice, a...

How often do you visit the barber in your electronic games ? It could be as easy as revisiting the character creation screen. Or it may require you to visit a specific contact in the game, spend some of the game’s currency (special or not)  and select your new hair style. Rarely does a game have some mechanic where your hair, and preferred styling of such, needs to be maintained in some way. That's a huge departure for something so eventful and important in real life, and something that's ever-changing... whether we want it to or not. It grows, it greys, it falls out - all mostly out of our control. We style it, cut it, dye it, and get it as close as we can to how we actually want it to look. It's something we spend a lot of time on, and yet in most media, including tabletop games, it's largely ignored. So this week, let's do up your hair and bring the barber shop into your tabletop games with Never Say Dice.  Do the New 'do Changes in appearances for your table...