This week features a rather obscure holiday honoring something that was a surprisingly large part of our collective youths: National Shareware Day. It can be hard to imagine now, but in the days of dial-up BBSs, disk swapping, and a pre-web internet, there was an entire file sharing ecosystem supporting independent software, which included a wide variety of games. From the “Episode 1 is Free” model to the “Breaks Itself After a Certain Period of Time'' approach to "Too Weird to Release Commercially” examples, shareware was the primary way PC users got to experience new games on the . As Andy and I both grew up at the tail end of this era and were denizens of local BBSs, we got to see a lot of this firsthand, and thought we’d discuss  this strange relic of our collective past, why it’s still intriguing, and how it relates to current publishing models for both electronic and tabletop games. - B B : Andy, what were your earliest shareware experiences? A : To talk about that,

Those of us in the United States just completed the annual feast of gluttony as opposed to our normal everyday gluttony this week, and here at Never Say Dice we are no different. Wait. Thankfulness. I meant "here in the United States we just completed our annual feast that celebrates thankfulness (and gluttony), and here at Never Say Dice, we are no different." While we're still not coming together in a normal fashion, due to the raging pandemic, we’ve still celebrated and brought our thankfulness to the table. So, this week, Never Say Dice would like to share with you, dear readers, what we are thankful for in the realms of games, storytelling and general nerdery. Feel free to let us know what gaming things you are thankful for on our Facebook page and Twitter ! Andy : One thing this wretched pandemic has given me, as it has for many of us, is significantly more time at home. This has allowed much more time to spend playing video games. While I have no intent to get a

 "This holiday is yours, but we all share with you the hope that this day brings us closer to freedom, and to harmony, and to peace. No matter how different we appear, we're all the same in our struggle against the powers of evil and darkness. I hope that this day will always be a day of joy in which we can reconfirm our dedication and our courage. And more than anything else, our love for one another. This is the promise of the Tree of Life." - Princess Leia Organa Andy : The Star Wars Holiday Special is something of a dark legend in nerd culture. Airing only once, November 17, 1978 on CBS, it was a quick attempt to cash in on the popularity of the original movie, released a year prior. Almost universally, it's agreed that the special is a horrible abomination. Copies of it have been historically difficult to find, as it was never rebroadcast or officially released. However, you might track down a copy on a torrent site or streaming video. Personally, I’ve seen enou

October 15th was World Math(s) Day. No, not the math day back in March, you’ll have to read our very first blog post to see our appreciation for that holiday. Even if the world can’t agree on calling it Math, Maths, or any other variation, I think most of us can agree that math is extremely important. While it's sometimes called the "universal language," math doesn't have a single agreed-upon definition. Part of this is likely due to how much the term incorporates: space, structure, quantity, change, even time. Humans tend to be obsessed with math, using it to explain their world and bring order to a chaotic universe... even attempting to mathematically define chaos itself. For many tabletop gamers, math takes on the physical form of dice, and while RPGs are relatively new to human history, dice are not. The traditional cubic D6 goes back thousands of years, with examples of stone and bone dice appearing in many cultures. Even the now-famous D20 goes back all the way

Greetings, Citizens! For scheduling reasons Due to Commie sabotage, the benevolent and exceptionally well-prepared individuals in charge of Never Say Dice have chosen to follow up the recent Paranoia post with another, this time about what you need to do before the game. Readers unfamiliar with Paranoia should take this opportunity to educate themselves before their ignorance is discovered and punished, and any readers uninterested in Paranoia should join the line for the nearest Termination Booth forming here . Please fill out the Citizen Satisfaction Survey before stepping into the booth. Have a pleasant daycycle! When we last spoke, I had covered the setting and talked a little about my first (successful) Paranoia session, but closed without sharing the lessons I had learned from my years of running the game. Players: Welcome to Alpha Complex, Six Death Minimum I must admit to having a certain advantage in my pool of available players that other Gamemasters might not: I live in

On an expedition through my attic the other day, searching for something completely different, I came across a treasure. It was Dungeons and Dragons, Supplement 1: Greyhawk (9th printing). What delights might this wondrous pamphlet of a book hold? Certainly, the rules have changed and evolved over the years from 1st Edition to the 5th. We’ve seen the fall of THAC0, wandered the strange road that is 4th Edition, and seen the  3rd turn into 3.5. Can we still pull nuggets of wisdom from an ancestor of the games we love? Absolutely! The following are some thoughts I had while leafing through this 68-page tome of (nearly) forgotten lore. In this post, we’ll stick to the "Men & Magic" section and leave the sections for "Monsters & Treasure" and "Underworld & Wilderness Adventures" to a future post. For the Intelligence stat, they’ve included a "% Chance to Know a Given Spell" chart along with the minimum and maximum number of spells a wiza