Being a fan of obscure holidays, they tend to serve as inspiration for my games from time to time. This time around, it's National Archery Day which has been celebrated on the second Saturday of May since 2015. I wouldn’t want to shaft this particular holiday, so in this post we'll take aim at an aspect of gaming that can sometimes get ignored: ammo. If you’re going to be playing a tabletop game involving combat, there's a good chance it will feature some sort of ranged weaponry. In a fantasy setting, this will likely take the form of longbows, crossbows, and slings (and perhaps even the occasional flintlock), along with their respective ammunitions: arrows, bolts, and bullets (or "ball" if you're a Flintlock Aficionado). Of course, you might have thrown weapons such as spears, axes, and knives, as well. A more modern setting might use grenades and any number of guns with a variety of projectile types. Something in a sci-fi or futuristic genre will probably

Close to the start of the pandemic, we talked a little bit about playing RPGs alone . However, we all know that TTRPGs tend to be a team sport. It doesn’t matter if you like to meet in person, or at a virtual tabletop, this is typically a game played with friends. Where do you start though? If you’re a newcomer to the hobby, either as a player or someone interested in running games, the number of options can be overwhelming. What game do you start with? Who should you play it with and how do you find them? Do you need your own dice? What are you not even thinking of? Help! Hopefully we can answer a few of these questions and put you at ease, even if you’re only hopping out of your current familiar game genre and into a new one. So here are our tips for those of you just starting out, and for you veterans of the table who are trying something new.  - A A: Whatever your reason, you’ve decided to try your hand at a tabletop role playing game. Maybe you have a story you’re interested in te

It doesn’t matter if your games are at a tabletop or one in the digital realms of consoles and PCs, at some point in your role playing adventures you'll wind up interacting with a Non-Player Character. Unless you’ve a really weird game going on, you’re probably dealing with multiple NPCs regularly.  Non-Player Characters are the denizens of our imaginary worlds that bring them to bustling life. Even the most mundane outline of a person rounds out the settings we create in ways we don’t often consider. As the blog has discussed before, a lot of storytelling can come from the environment , but we shouldn’t neglect the people that dwell within the places we present and play in. Non-Player Characters are our vendors, our adversaries, our allies, our victims and our quest givers. At times they may just be part of the background, but without them our roleplaying games simply wouldn’t work. Interactions with NPCs can range anywhere from a brief visual description to a full-out member of y

Happy Pi Day everyone, and Happy 3rd Blogiversary to Never Say Dice and all of you dear readers. It's hard to believe that we’ve been putting out posts every Saturday morning for two years now. As mentioned last year , we wouldn’t be able to keep doing this without the support of all of our readers. So, for our Pi Day Post this year, we’ve decided to do something different. You may remember our pie-pun filled adventure hooks in the previous years posts Happy Pi Day and Pi Day^2. This year, we’ve decided to slice up some character concepts that should serve as great  filling for your games. Before we serve those up though, we have another roundup of some of our favorite posts from the past year, and we’ll top it all off with a dollop of what you might see from Never Say Dice in Year 3(.14). - A Andy : It is hard for me to not select " The Matt Mercer Effect " as my favorite post that I did this past year. It's been the most popular post on the blog by far. Was it serio

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

This week marks an auspicious occasion for the Never Say Dice blog. Although Bugsy and Andy have been having these sorts of conversations in person, in text, and even in song far longer than they should probably admit, this post marks number 100 for the comic blog. For a monthly comic, that would work out to almost 8 and a half years! While we’re just shy of our 2 year Blogaversery , we’d like to do something special. After all, 100 weeks of content without fail is a pretty nifty accomplishment, we feel. While we don’t have a special crossover event (but if you’re interested in writing for the blog, feel free to reach us by email ), or a character death planned (by Lucifer's beard, Bugsy, please stick around. I can’t edit this thing by myself), we did have a special idea in mind. So dear readers, grab a snack, get in a comfortable spot, and enjoy making fun of our predictions of what gaming might look like over the next 100 years. Assuming any number of pending worldwide disasters

Something that has become ubiquitous in digital roleplaying games, and even video games in general,  is the side quest. In previous New Years Resolution posts, I’ve mentioned skipping side quests (specifically in Breath of the Wild and Marvel's Spider-Man ) in order to complete the main game. After all, at worst, they're something that's easy to ignore. That doesn’t mean we should be ignoring them though - I’ve really only been doing it because of time constraints. Sure, the main story is what moves the game narrative along, but the side quest is where a lot of the gameplay is. That's where your character makes their money, gains experience and powers, learns about the world, and maybe even gets some clues about the main plot. At the very least, side quests add to the world making it feel more vibrant and real - the sort of useful and enjoyable context that we like to see in our stories. This is something that I’ve neglected in the past, and maybe you have as well. W

It doesn’t seem that long ago when we were making our 2021 New Year’s Resolutions ...a year that, unfortunately, didn't end up being too dissimilar from 2020. Fortunately, Never Say Dice are fully vaccinated, boosted, and staying as safe as we can. Before we get to our resolutions for 2022, we thought we'd check in on how we did last year, maybe keeping a few of those for the coming year, and set up some new goals. If you’re setting your own along with us, remember to keep them simple and specific. If you set your sights just low enough right, you can accomplish your goals and still be slightly proud of it. How did Never Say Dice do with our Gamer Resolutions from last year, and what are we anticipating for 2022? - A A : I set a few goals for 2021: the first one in our previous post was to actually play in a TTRPG, apart from just running a regular campaign. I have a few updates this year, and I’ll start with an assurance that my regular campaign is still running with the sam

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