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Showing posts with the label Art

NSD's NY2K24

What's that movie line everybody makes fun of again? "Somehow the New Year returned?" Something like that. In any case, as this weary old orb of ours has successfully made another orbital circumlocution of its remote and lawless star system, we thought we'd do as have in previous New Year’s posts , and take stock of how we've grown as gamers (both in the playing and the running) and as storytellers, along with our thinking of where we'd like to go in the next annum. - B A :  The goals I set for 2023 may have been simpler than previous years, but I did indeed accomplish them. That's a key to goal setting:  finding things you can accomplish. They weren’t entirely constructive, but even leisurely and time-consuming activities still require planning and organization when life is messy and complicated . I actually was able to pick up Bully once again alongside Bugsy. This time, while I didn’t 100% everything, I did make a run through the entire game and com

How Can You, Like... Own a Game, Man?

It’s been quite a week in the world of tabletop RPGs, and, while it’s nice to see our little hobby featured in all kinds of media, we would have preferred it be for more positive reasons. Never Say Dice are by no means qualified (or up-to-date) enough to talk about the OGL kerfuffle, but the discussion around it did get us thinking about the nature of ownership when it comes to games. For an activity centered around the participants’ infinite imaginative possibilities, what does “ownership” of a system, setting, or even a session mean, exactly? What aspects of a game are inherent enough to have a brand name, and how much can the people at a table change things up before it starts to feel like something else? - B A : The whole issue seems pretty broad, which is one part of the problem. Even if you only take a quick look at the idea of “ownership of a system,” it gets pretty complicated. Sure, there might be trademarks on specific things like Beholders, Mind Flayers and Displacer Beasts,

Greyhawk: Underworld & Wilderness Adventures

A while back, I was on an expedition in my attic to find my copy of the Bill & Ted comic book as background material for a post... but I found something else, an old roleplaying artifact. The book? Dungeons and Dragons, Supplement 1: Greyhawk (9th printing). A 68-page pamphlet-like book filled with relics of a bygone age. The rules have changed over the years, but taking a dungeon delve into a piece of history can still inform us today. We’ve already looked at the “ Men & Magic ” and “ Monsters and Treasures ” sections in previous posts and discussed a variety of the topics they contained. Now it's time to take a look at the final section of the book, this one entitled “Underworld & Wilderness Adventures,” to find more interesting pieces of history and a little bit of inspiration. What will come from the epic conclusion to the book? A few "new" adventure ideas or an original take on something we now consider to be "classic?" With essentially only a

A Gaming Carol

Preface: We have endeavored in this Ghostly little post, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put our readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with us. May it haunt their tables and consoles pleasantly, and no one wish to slay it. Their faithful Friends and Servants, N. S. D.   B : Despite my painstaking labors in the study of chronomancy, the holiday season is again upon us, and, along with it, its attendant gremlins of stress, confusion, violent clashing over textual interpretations at both household and societal levels, and beverages that should, by no means, be alcoholic, but have nevertheless been made so. Luckily, these are all things we, as gamers, are quite used to dealing with. One story, though, seems to withstand cultural shifts, keeping its basic moral and message intact and universal through adaptation after adaptation, even in an era when media is quite comfortable preaching its exact opposite: Charles Dickens’ “Ghost Story of C

What to Do with "Childish Things"

This Tuesday, I turn 40. I share a birthday with both Lou Reed and Dr. Seuss, a legacy I’m doing my best to look up to. Needless to say, there will be no big birthday bash, no retrogames with friends, no late-night Dio singalongs. It hasn’t exactly been the way I pictured exiting my thirties. But, as I’ve said before, the best thing to come out of the past year is this very blog and the opportunities it gives me to both explore the media I enjoy and to share my discoveries with an audience. For the past few years, it’s been my goal to have something published by the time I hit 40 (curse you, 20 Under 40 story collection!), and, even though it’s in a way I never anticipated, my dream has come true. Never Say Dice has had more readers than I ever could have imagined when Andy and I started this endeavor a year ago, and it’s helped me regain a confidence in my writing that I haven’t felt since college - even if that still seems like it was just yesterday! Nonetheless, the event looming b

Limited Imagination: Storytelling and the Politics of Assumed Perspective

"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. The history of the capitalist era is characterized by the degradation of my people." - Paul Robeson, Speech in Support of the Spanish Republic (1937) The fact that the modern reactionary surge initially coalesced around an angry reaction to video games (and, significantly, how those games are criticized) might be seen as a darkly comedic indictment of our society. "I can't believe that history books will have to start this chapter with something as stupid as 'Gamergate'," goes the refrain, both presuming electronic gaming to be of lesser cultural value and ignoring the history of reactionary elements targeting new media and the voices it elevates. Comparisons between angry internet rants and Nazi attacks on impressionism and Jazz feel much less hyperbolic following the events of January 6. I've even seen "degenerate," the