It happens in all sorts of media that incorporates music: movies, TV, plays, audio dramas... a few notes play and, at least if you’re a fan, you know who's about to show up even before they actually enter. It even happens in other live activities such as sports - that song starts, the crowd gets pumped,  and you know exactly who's coming out onto the field or into the ring. While we’ve had posts about music in the form of Never Say Disc , and even a few posts that mention choosing music to set the scene in your tabletop games, we’ve never focused on music for a particular group or character. Something to bring you into the game, get you pumped, put you in the right mindset and/or set you up for a good gaming session. So this week, let’s do just that - discuss using music to bring you into the game and increase your immersion at the tabletop. - A A : Picking intro music for a group can be an easy task, depending upon what you’re playing. If you’re sitting down to a Star Wars se

Twenty dollars?! I wanted a peanut! Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts. Explain how. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.   When we talk about tabletop roleplaying games, one thing often featured prominently (usually via tables) is all the things you can buy in-game. You’ve got standard adventuring gear such as rope, backpacks, and bedrooms. You have arms and armor from rapiers and plate mail to blasters and jumpsuits. You can find specialty consumables such as scrolls, potions, ammo and energy packs. You might even have magical, or mystical, items such as bags of holding or kyber crystals. There are also the purchases that almost split the difference between "good" and "service" - for example, the meal you might eat at an inn includes the not only the food itself, but also its preparation, having it served to you, and the clean up. So for all the talk about purchasing goods, you ever hear about other services far less often. (And no, we’re not talking a

We’ve talked previously about the various holiday specials that may make their rounds at the Never Say Dice households on a yearly basis. We’ve even looked at gathering inspiration from a few of those specials with dives into How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer . Lately at the blog, perhaps due to the passing of Jules Bass last year, our collective minds seem to be gravitating toward Rankin-Bass 's holiday productions. Fortunately, there are a number of these holiday stories to choose from. As a child, one of my favorites was Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town . Maybe it had to do with being exposed to Fred Astaire movies at an impressionable age, as he serves as narrator here. It could just be that it's another Rakin-Bass classic. Perhaps, though, it's more about the magic they included in the story. (No Bugsy, I'm not talking about the yo-yos.) While you can take "magic" in a more generic literary sense to describe the supernatur

There are many ways to play a TTRPG solo. There are many ways people solve this , and you can see some of these ways in previous posts - all with their own pros and cons. What we’re doing in this series, though, is use AI to create a solo RPG experience that's less bound by the limitations of pre-scripted offerings. While AI has been around for awhile, we’ve really only recently started to see big advancements become available to the general public. In our last discussion, we decided that we’d begin our experimentation using Google's AI Bard . It even gave us suggestions on the ways it might help us: setting the scene and describing the environment, creating NPCs and their interactions with the player character, narrating the story and providing feedback on your actions, generating random events and encounters, and giving you prompts and questions to help you brainstorm ideas and develop your character. Though this wasn't one Bard's suggestions, in this post we’re goin

Playing TTRPGs solo has been around almost as long as TTRPGs have been a concept. While a traditional TTRPG is a social group activity, solo roleplaying games can be more like a journaling experience or guided storytelling through a gamebook (some of which involve dice and stat-tracking, and even modified versions of rules from group-centered games). We’ve talked a bit about solo-tabletop RPGs before - the trouble with solo gaming when want to go beyond the limits of what's been written into a gamebook or published electronic RPG is the GM/DM. There are, of course, many ways people have attempted to solve this . There are the Mythic Game Master Emulator books . There are storytelling dice if all you need is a nudge in a direction. There are even systems that attempt bring in a few different approaches into a single package like RPG Solo . While these are all fine solutions, they all came out before we had AI, or at least before we had what we currently refer to as "AI"

Orange gourds and their kin are popping up all over. Halloween decorations are starting to dot the North American landscape. “Basic" people (we're told) are rushing to the shops to get themed lattes. The smell of the fall season is in the air, and the time has come to bring that fall feeling into our tabletop games. And I’m not just talking about the Risus Pumpkin Spice Edition ... no, this week we’re talking about the pumpkins themselves! From the smallest squashes to the greatest of orange fruits (yes, pumpkins are a fruit, not a vegetable!) pumpkins dominate the fall season. And what better way to bring all that autumn-ness into our games than by incorporating this old favorite. And just how will we do that? Grab yourself a slice of pumpkin pie or bread (or maybe some pumpkin soup? Roasted pumpkin? You pick!) and join Never Say Dice as we do a little picking at our pumpkin patches. - A Flavored Text The quickest and easiest way to get fall, and pumpkins, into your game is t

You’re watching a classic scary movie with some younglings and that one scene you think might be a little too much for them is about to come up. Do you cover their eyes? Make sure their ears are covered too? Use the remote to quickly skip past it? Or maybe you let them take in some mild horror and deal with the psychological fallout afterward? It would be so much easier if you had just a little more control of what's going on, some way to dial back the scares a tad or curtail the number of killings. Lucky for you, your spooky entertainment isn’t limited to TV specials, movies, and books. You can take the great artform of the scary ghost story and bring it to your own tabletop games, even when you have a younger audience. If fantasy gaming is more than your thing than horror (monsters like werewolves and vampires notwithstanding), there are still settings and adventures that mix the spooky with the sword-and-sorcery, such as Ravenloft and Ghosts of Saltmarsh for Dungeons and Drago

Access to social media (well, media in general) has only increased over the last several years. You can subscribe to (or pirate, I suppose) numerous streaming services for music, television, and movies and watch/listen to them almost anywhere. This is even true for books, comics, and games - they’ve all become increasingly accessible. And that's even before we  start considering that “social” media.  Having such a deluge of media available at our beck and call means we're likely to consume a wider variety of things, and also to have a wider variety of media “spoiled” for us. Busy watching the latest Marvel dump? Then you probably haven’t caught up on the most recent Star Trek entry. All caught up to Star Trek? Then you likely still need to see the latest Star Wars or other nerdly offering. While your tastes might not span all of these items, you get the picture…and these are just "small screen" examples, so far. Even "niche" media isn’t safe, depending on t

Good timezone to Never Say Dice fans, adventures in Aardia, TikTok and beyond. No, I’m not the Roll for Sandwich guy (neither of us is), but if you haven’t heard of him already (or especially if you have), this week I wanted to talk about the TikTok/YouTube show Roll for Sandwich hosted by Jacob Pauwels. The premise is exactly what it sounds like: every episode, the host rolls dice to determine the various items that comprise a sandwich (except when the episode is about s’mores). He assembles the sandwich, then actually eats and critiques his random creation. If it sounds pretty niche to you... it is. You should  probably be both a bit of a foodie and a TTRPG fan in order to truly appreciate both the strange layered creations and the roleplaying references. My eldest son has been so interested in the web series that he decided he wanted to try doing it for himself. So, for the last week of summer this year, we took stock of our cupboards, made our own charts, and proceeded to consume

Game shows were a huge family favorite when I was a kid. I’m pretty  certain that my mom still watches them.  We used to watch everything that was available: Classic Concentration , Family Feud , Jeopardy , Let’s Make a Deal , The Price is Right , Wheel of Fortune , and all the rest. And then there were the game shows for younger audiences - it isn’t any wonder that kids, including myself, would gravitate towards this media when it was targeted directly at them. Shows like Video Power , Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (which, in its various incarnations, will probably get its own post on this blog at some point) and Finders Keepers found eager viewers in  homes everywhere they were available. Of that era, the most famous was probably a little show called Double Dare . Originally running from 1986 through 1993, with revivals in 2000 and 2019, Nickelodeon’s Double Dare grabbed the attention of kids from all over, a group that expanded even further when it entered broadcast syndi

And so we come to the big one in terms of showing advancement and development in your sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting, one that touches, and is touched by, all others: government. Kings, Emperors, and other monarchs are an inevitable element of any setting based ostensibly primarily on medieval Europe, but beyond that, things tend to get… sketchy. But those sketches are a great place for imaginative creators to fill in details , and shifts in governmental structures are some of the clearest signs of change in any civilization. And, if your setting includes more than one location, you can try out different, competing approaches and see the way they interact… often with the players/protagonists in the middle. So from barony to republic, from kingdom to anarcho-syndicalist commune , let’s explore how you can use government and politics to move your fantasy forward! - B A : For deeply political tabletop campaigns, it takes a special kind of group and a special kind of game. Just the sou