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...

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...

The Halloween Episode is a rarity among rarities, a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in wax paper. In episodic shows, the passage of time is generally ignored - it draws too much attention to the artificiality of the premise and questions how the world of the setting syncs chronologically with the world of the audience. On top of that, when holiday episodes do come along, they generally have certain expectations of tone and theme - particularly when it comes to Christmas. Halloween episodes, though, are something different: the only real expectation is that they’re going to break from the normal “reality” of the show. They don’t necessarily have to be scary (or even have the trappings of scary things), but they do have to be weird. In some cases, particularly with more serialized shows, this shift allows for a new perspective in the ongoing story, a different way of seeing the narrative that will put past and future events in a new context. My favorite example of this would be Mill...