The methods of Claus, the Great and Powerful are universally known, told, quite literally, in song and story. (Much of the established canon comes from one particular poem , in fact, making it both a song and a story.) Long before the Elf/Shelf Surveillance Network was set up, we were assured that Santa simply knew if we were "bad" or "good," and admonished to be the latter if we had any hope of receiving the presents we were expecting. The punitive lump of coal is an interesting holdover from an era when the stuff was commonplace - but it persisted long after most children had ever seen a lump of coal, let alone had to help carry it or feed it into home furnace (there also being an implication of punishment and drudgery for those benighted children unfortunate enough to find themselves part of an anthracite yuletide). But... you never actually hear about those, do you? That's a side of St. Nicholas rarely seen. Some regional traditions pass these duties off t

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

Thanksgiving really is one of the most American of holidays (if you ignore that weird Canadian version , anyway). Even more than, say, Independence Day, there's a clear disconnect between the celebration itself, the story it's commemorating, and the actual messy history. It is, in its own way, an origin myth of (white) American identity - of Europeans fleeing persecution to a new land, which welcomes them through both a bountiful harvest and the kindness of a native population willing to share it with them. It's the pilot episode for Manifest Destiny , blatantly ahistorical to even most elementary school students, and, weirdly enough, genuinely accepted as such. Most depictions of the holiday, at least prior to the rush of Cold War hagiography that presented American history as a theatrical attraction with a "NO COMMIES" sign at the entrance, was focused on the imagery of food and family. Specific foods at that, making this one of the few ritualistic meals to surv

April Fools! You know it’s a good holiday if an important part of it is shouting the name at an opportune moment. But who, and what, are the fools, exactly? The fooler, the foolee, the act of fooling, itself? The fools inside us or the fools we fool along the way? April Fools is somehow all of these and so much more. Rather than do a leg-pulling post of disingenuous nonsense (not to be confused with our regular… “genuous” nonsense?) that doesn’t read as well between April 2 and March 31, we thought we’d talk a little about how you can go about bringing some of that April Fools’ spirit into your games. Maybe even the spirit of the original April Fool, Dickens-style ? - B     B : Working out what makes any kind of joke “work” is always going to be tricky, if not impossible (a “fool’s errand,” one might say”, but pranks have the additional complication of needing the prankee to “buy in,” and accept something as presented to them, while also making the reveal accessible to them in some way

The second of March is important to this blog for a number of reasons. First, and foremost, it marks the beginning of life for Never Say Dice co-founder Bugsy... who happens to share a birthday with the author Dr. Seuss. While his legacy may have seen some controversy over the years, especially these last few, it's spawned another thing important to this blog: Read Across America Week . While that particular holiday week isn’t something we at NSD had in our formative school years, reading is a pursuit that's been important to both of us throughout our lives and continues to be. After all, we couldn’t ask you to read this blog every week, or even have the background in TTRPGs and other games it takes to write this blog if we didn’t support  and appreciate reading  for its own sake. Reading is fun and mental. - A A: I can go anywhere. I can be anything. These lyrics are part of the Reading Rainbow theme song. The show was a way to bring children into the world of reading and a m

In light of the weather making the holidays particularly stressful this year, we at Never Say Dice thought we would simply share a few gifts we've received relevant to our remit (say that three times fast!). May your own haul be as bountiful - even if you're just buying for yourself this year. Stay safe, warm, and adequately electrified out there... and happy holidays! - B   Send comments and questions to neversaydice20@gmail.com or Tweet them @neversaydice2. Header image borrowed from ournerdhome , give it a try yourself!

The season has come once again for the Home Alone movies to make their run on our viewing devices. There's something powerful when you’re a kid about seeing children your age in media take on and defeat adults. Perhaps that's one of the reasons that this movie worked for me so well when it first came out. After all, Kevin/Macaulay and I are around the same age, and not only does he run the house for a few days, but he also defends it from the wet bandits. The movie(s) even entertain and inspire my own children. My older son can often be found studying and making his own battle plans, and my younger guy is usually making traps around the house - just in case bad guys show up. Somehow, though the premise laughs louder and louder at the suspension of disbelief the older it gets , the movie still stands the test of time for holiday entertainment. Maybe it will survive for future generations out of the nostalgia of parental figures, or maybe it will slowly fade into obscurity. For n

Being "Heart Healthy" is something I’ve been concerned about in the past few months. It's not just for fun and games - after my incident with emergency gallbladder surgery (see our previous post " To the Pain " for more on that), my doctors have been encouraging me to adopt a heart healthy diet. Why am I talking about this at all though? As you may have realized, this is the season where you tend to see hearts everywhere. Valentine’s Day has snuck up on us once again. (I blame Groundhog’s Day for stealing some of the attention.) We’ve written about the romance aspect of the holiday and how to include them in your games before, but all these hearts around have had me thinking a lot about how we deal with health in our games. Both electronic and our favorite tabletop games have various ways of dealing with characters' health. So for this Valentine’s Day, take heart! And also take a look at health in games with Never Say Dice. The Valentine's-style heart i

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

If you read our post about media selection a few weeks ago, you’ll know that my household traditions include the various holiday specials that tend to grace the airwaves this time of year. While a number of different things get annual viewings, one that gets particular attention in our home is the 1964 Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer . Saccharine holiday specials might not seem like a match for tabletop gaming, but we’ve found tabletop inspiration in shows like How the Grinch Stole Christmas before. Rudolph is all about the journey, and that makes it a great fit for roleplaying games. It's a story that's almost entirely about misfits. Rudolph, Hermey, Yukon Cornelius - there's even a whole Island of Misfit Toys! Until recently, and possibly even still today, people who play tabletop RPGs can be considered misfits by peers and elders. So, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the lovers of the hobby tend to gravitate towards this holiday special in particula