Well, if you’re seeing this, you, too, have made it through. What does it mean when the introductions to New Year’s posts sound like the last surviving notes of long-gone pirates? It’s a format I expect we’ll be seeing more and more frequently, as the collected accumulation of stress and tragedy continue to shatter any sense of time… or shared reality. Still, as they say, the horrors persist, but so do we… even when there’s a cost. So if our New Year’s Resolutions seem smaller-scale this year, it’s because it’s all we can do to keep going - a feeling I’m sure you, too, know all too well. Furiously scratching at the walls in panic, we tumble into 2026… but at least we’re doing it together. - B A : Before I sink into the state of what we’ve thrown this particular post entry into, I want to go over resolutions, past and present. Though, as noted last year , we can’t really dwell on what we didn’t accomplish, even if they're just bits of media we meant to attend to. My goals weren’t lo...

Recently, I've been undertaking a task that I've been putting off for... literal decades, now that I think about it - retrieving and sorting the books that went into bins in my parents' basement when I first moved out of their house. As we've talked about plenty of times, you can glean a lot about person from their chosen media, and our selves are no exception. While a lot of books I uncovered were from my teens and early twenties, there were a few favorites going back to when I was much younger. One of the most beloved books that greeted me for the first time in nearly twenty years was  The Book of Lists ,  accompanied by two of the follow-up volumes. They're the kind of book that, thanks to easy-to-access internet, seem downright quaint now, but there was a time when they, especially the first volume, were my constant companions. At the time, I think I was more focused on the sheer amount of knowledge (some of which was rather... spicy for a kid my age) available ...

A phrase that's probably most associated today with the Marvel What If…? animated series, the concept predates it by some time. Before the phrase even came up in comics (Marvel's original What If series started in 1977), the concept was over all sorts of media. Not necessarily in a What if "B" happened instead of "A", but certainly in a sense of “what if you took a vigilante detective series" (already a popular genre at the time) "and made it bat-themed ?” Often, the answers are very satisfying. They scratch some sort of brain itch we may not even be aware we had. You see it come up in comics, TV shows, movies, even our old favorite Choose Your Own Adventure  books, which are essentially founded on the question. One place where you typically don’t see it, oddly enough, is in our tabletop roleplaying games. So this week on Never Say Dice, let's explore the concept of “What If” sessions in tabletop gaming. - A Book(mark) It! A : In the original ...

Regardless of its bafflingly incoherent use today, for most of its existence the term "woke" had a very different, and specific, meaning. Coming from Black civil rights movements of the 1920s and 30s, it referred to becoming cognizant of the systems of oppression that exist in every aspect of Western culture, to "wake up"  from the sleepwalk of the blind structural acceptance, and, eventually, involvement in movements to undo those systems. It's a powerful term, implying the sudden collapse of everything one has been taught and accepted as a dream, an enforced fantasy. Coming face-to-face with the brutality inflicted by today's society and acknowledging the centuries of cruelty and destruction it took to build that society is terrifying - often the best we can do is try to push it to the backs of our minds simply to get through the day. Another concept was starting to make its appearance in the 20s and 30s, even if there wasn't a name for it yet: cosmic ...

Like it or not, the electronic gaming landscape is dominated by long-running series, and has been since its early days . No matter when you read this, if you take a look at the current best–selling games, you’ll see a list that’s almost entirely sequels, off-shoots, reboots, or remakes of any of the above. This is something the medium inherited largely from the comic and cinematic industries it’s modeled after, but also reflects a certain risk-aversion as development costs skyrocket and mere success is insufficient to keep a studio afloat : name recognition is a safe bet. Publishers can assume some baseline of sales from dedicated fans who will always buy the latest installment of their favorite series. We at Never Say Dice can’t say that we’re totally immune to established gaming franchises , but for the most part we don’t stay on top of series with numerous installments like Assassin’s Creed , Final Fantasy , or Call of Duty . (Not that this will keep these games from filling out ...

B : There’s a term Doctor Who fans use to describe the period from 1990 to 2003 when, with the exception of the US-made 1996 TV movie, there were no new “official” installments of the series: the Wilderness Years. The reason they have a specific name, as opposed to simply referring to this time as “when the show was off the air” or simply a lack of new episodes, is that the Wilderness Years were anything but devoid of new Who material. Entire series of novels, comics, audio plays, and even “ serial numbers filed off ” fan movies starring the original actors proliferated during this period - many of which were made by people who would be involved in resuscitating the “official” franchise in 2004. One thing that characterized  Wilderness Years years works was a willingness to expand far beyond what had been seen in the original series, both thematically and tonally, taking the franchise in wildly different directions. Without having to worry about tying things back to the status q...

How much time have you spent on a particular game? How much time have you spent in that game? While modern electronic games present your total playtime with a prominence making it almost impossible to avoid (especially if you're using a service like Steam), it hasn't been that long since the former question was entirely on the player to keep track of and the latter simply nonsensical. While some of this is a function of the way the Almighty Algorithm tracks us and our gaming habits, it's also a result of games having endings - something else that wasn't always present. Not that the ever-running clock exists solely to feed the gnawing hunger of a monstrous inhuman marketing machine, but it really is a useful factor in how we select games and try to fit them into our busy lives. Likewise, time passing within a game's setting is the result of the medium's development in general. The passage of time in Pac-Man 's nightmare world of flashing lights, powerful (i...