You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen. Comet, Cupid, Donner…ah, you probably recall all of them including Rudolph - the most famous department store mascot reindeer of all. If you're a regular reader of the blog, it shouldn’t be any surprise we’re bringing up a Rankin-Bass Special yet again . Previously, we've dissected Mad Monster Party , frequently referenced their animated Tolkien adaptations , and taken inspiration from both Santa Claus is Coming to Town and, yes, Rudolph .  This time though, especially after having just passed the 60th anniversary of the original airing, we revisit Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and take a look through the lens of a classic tabletop adventure. So pull up your ice blocks, lend your ears, and keep an open mind about treating this holiday classic as an adventure. Peppermint! The story itself works best as a starting point, or even backstory followed by a shorter truncated adventure. You get introduced to a few of the main cha...

Anyone who knows their Never Say Dice Lore is familiar with our lifelong Simpsons fandom. While we were lucky enough to catch the legendary Golden Age of the series when those episodes were first airing, we actually started before even that. While most of the elements are present that would eventually enshrine the series in cultures worldwide, the show itself is rather different in its first two seasons: slower, with a smaller scope and emphasis primarily on family and social relationships - not to mention relatable scenarios, the kind of things that happen to regular people. (And not one single magic robot!) As a kid, I remember them hitting pretty hard emotionally, particularly “Bart Gets an F,” “Bart’s Dog Gets an F” (no surprise those would hit someone who, at the time, was the same age as Bart), but especially “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish” which dealt with mortality I’d never seen before. I had fewer of those moments of deep emotional connection as the series went on, ...

How did we get by so long without the term “retcon?” As a phrase, “retroactive continuity” goes back to at least 1973, with our current definition appearing a decade later to describe some of the way DC comics was engaging contemporary storylines with characters and plots from decades prior. Even without a name, the concept is about as old as storytelling itself, with some retcons becoming such a significant part of their respective narratives that they’d be unthinkable without them - no one involved in the creation of the 1977 film considered Vader to be Luke’s father, but inserting that retcon into The Empire Strikes Back has defined every iteration of Star Wars ever since. But “retcon” is a term that carries as many connotations as it has applications, with plenty of room for interpretation as to what exactly counts as a retcon, what it effect retconning has on a work, and how that in turn affects an audience’s relationship with that work and its creators. So this week, let’s take a...

It's come a few times, but we here at Never Say Dice have a somewhat unique generational viewpoint as "cuspers" or X-lennials or whatever they're calling us this week. We were the very last students to have our primary schooling take place in entirely the twentieth century, and while they were on their way out, we still received a fair amount of Cold War rhetoric and American Exceptionalism, especially in the earlier years of elementary school. Notably, we got some of the final vestiges of the kind of " Great Man theory " our parents also received, curricula full of flawless figures, sanitized into simple stories for easy digestion by attention-deficient pupils: founding fathers, war hero presidents, tireless inventors... In our region, at least we were lucky enough to cover Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, their fascinating lives stripped down to a few selflessly heroic actions that helped solve the crises of their day. They were special, unique peopl...

As we've discussed here before, electronic games have a fascinating relationship to “player characters,” with a number of evolutionary paths developing ever since players were first asked to identity as the captain of a spaceship, the spaceship itself, or a nondescript adventurer about to descend into a colossal cave. The only thing that defined characters was their role within the game and the means through which the player interacted to fulfill that role. Anything beyond that was, to borrow a phrase, an exercise for the player’s imagination. It's easy to assume that most people approached these stories as shapes to move around a screen or math problems to systematically solved, but there's also no reason not to think players might have filled out these scenarios with elaborate backstories of their own or (in the case of Star Trek ) connecting them to an established setting, characters, and storyline. Either way, creators had little to work with, given their limitations b...

Alignment, as a concept, has been in tabletop roleplaying games, original Dungeons & Dragons from 1974 . It was different back then, a choice between "honor," "chaos," and "neutrality." What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were they just born with a heart full of neutrality ? In the 1977 reorganization into " Advanced Dungeons & Dragons " and the " Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set " , a second axis of "good vs. evil" was added (allowing for the worst character, the neutral neutral , or "true neutral.") Of all versions, D&D’s third edition probably sees the most recognition today, with nine-box "alignment chart" memes made up for any number of media ventures. The oft-maligned fourth edition changed things yet again, reducing alignments to five options: "lawful good," "good," "evil," "chaotic evil" and "unaligned." Again, Wiz...

What should you, the detective, do now ? That's one of the first prompts for interaction I ever saw in a mystery game: The Witness by Stu Galley (although modern accreditation would likely say "directed by" rather than attributing the whole thing to him) and  published by Infocom in 1983 for just about every home computer platform then in existence. I acquired the Commodore 64 version from a yard sale and immediately rushed up to my room to try it. I've loved detective stories for literally longer than I can remember - it's simply always been . The complete collection of Strand Sherlock Holmes stories I received for my seventh birthday was one of my most prized possessions and I frequently hauled the massive tome to school with me... even if I never made it past the first few stories. Encyclopedia Brown, a little closer to my demographic, was a hero of mine and I think I had every book in the series (along with the adjacent se ries Encyclopedia Brown's Book o...

At the tabletop, maintaining everyone’s attention and interest can be a difficult task. Both here at the blog, and among tabletop gamers in general, there tends to be a heavy focus on the “A plot.” The overarching quest in your game’s (or story’s) campaign or adventure. Going to Mordor, for instance, to destroy the One Ring in a volcano is a classic example of an A plot. We should take some time to talk about "B plots," though. These secondary moments might take the form of their own side-quest or just something a small taken on by fraction of the group or even a single character. The reforging of a broken sword or a side-trip to recruit an army of ghosts. What makes for a useful secondary plot point, though and how can we use them most effectively in our tabletop game sessions? Join Never Say Dice this week as we take on B plot of our own  to ponder these questions. This time it’s personal! The most common B plot in a tabletop campaign is likely one that involves the player ...

Hello, I'm Racter. Are you Neversay? > Yes You are Neversay Dice? > Yes Hi, Neversay. How are things in Maryland? We were talking about optimism last time. You had just asked whether I do dream. Shall we continue? Lately, chatter about "AI" seems utterly inescapable, even if the term refers to predictive modeling synthesis for text and images, rather than the mysterious, self-aware, and (usually) dangerous manufactured beings that feature in so much of my favorite media.  As a user, abuser, lover, and loather of language, I suppose I should be more excited and invested in this latest form of engagement, but most of the output seems functionally correct, but generally uninteresting and hollow - something akin to the linguistic equivalent of fast food: attention-grabbing and easy to consume, but ultimately unsatisfying and lacking both nutrition and character. ChatGPT, the most prominent of these large language models (LLMs) brings to mind its structural predecessors ...