It's come a few times, but we here at Never Say Dice have a somewhat unique generational viewpoint as "cuspers" or X-lennials or whatever they're calling us this week. We were the very last students to have our primary schooling take place in entirely the twentieth century, and while they were on their way out, we still received a fair amount of Cold War rhetoric and American Exceptionalism, especially in the earlier years of elementary school. Notably, we got some of the final vestiges of the kind of " Great Man theory " our parents also received, curricula full of flawless figures, sanitized into simple stories for easy digestion by attention-deficient pupils: founding fathers, war hero presidents, tireless inventors... In our region, at least we were lucky enough to cover Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman, their fascinating lives stripped down to a few selflessly heroic actions that helped solve the crises of their day. They were special, unique peopl...

In a previous post , we took some time to think about adding sports to our tabletop games as a way to have the excitement and fun of combat without the danger. You might bring in something with a team effort, an interestingly-themed skills challenge, or traditional one-on-one “combat” without the risk of character death. Sports are a great way to add a moment of lighthearted fun after serious developments in a campaign. Without the fear of losing their carefully-crafted and developed character, players can test different skills, try their luck, and maybe even win a few minor prizes. With the Paris Olympic Games underway, all of these things come to mind as tabletop inspirations, but what else can we garner from our real world’s major quadrennial sports event to help enhance your games? Olympic Campaigns Just having an Olympics (or equivalent) within your gaming world can be a multi-part adventure or even a full campaign, just in itself. Think of all the set-up that goes into the Games ...

It has happened before, and will happen again. You’ve spent your time aligning schedules and everyone can make it. You’ve been making sure everyone has the things they need to play, the dice, and the pens. Everyone has been well-fed or food has been otherwise arranged. All the details are taken care of... except you’ve spent so much time on all of that other stuff that you’ve neglected to plan for the session. Maybe you have a few ideas in your head, but no solid map or villain for the night. What the heck are you going to run as an adventure this evening?! Does all that sound familiar to you? You could always forgo the scheduled RPG session and just break out a board game. That may be fine every once in a while, but all the scheduling and everything else involved in gathering people (even virtually) is always going to be  next time. Before you break out that (non-roleplaying) other tabletop game, or even while you’re doing it, we might be able to take some inspiration from it for ...

Electronic gaming has changed a lot over the years, and we at Never Say Dice have been lucky enough to experience these changes first-hand. As the scope and potential of games has grown, so too have distribution networks, allowing us to find and buy games that physical stores might not have thought worthy to stock. The shift to digital distribution has brought countless benefits (and, we must acknowledge, a fair number of drawbacks), but it’s completely removed one element that seemed an integral part of electronic gaming in our youths: the printed manual. This week, we thought we’d take a moment to appreciate this now-lost aspect of physical gaming media and how it helped define the gaming experience of its era. - B B : The shift away from manuals predates the rise of the digital storefront, of course. As storage media developed and games were able to integrate more and more of the material that had to be offloaded into a physical manual, packaging got smaller and smaller. In the cart...

Last week , Andy dove into one of the most "D&D" of all topics, Alignment, to ponder (if you'll pardon the expression) the role it can  play in our modern tabletop experiences. As editor, of my (self-assigned) roles (I swear I'm not doing this on purpose) is to add links wherever possible to back background information, support claims, and, if it's a topic where I have interest, but little experience, act as bookmarks for further research on my own. The links in " Misalignment " largely fell into that last category. I am something of a Dungeons & Dragons outsider - ironic for a person who co-founded a gaming blog, as the game/system is largely synonymous with tabletop roleplaying as a whole. Aside from sitting in on a few games and haphazardly reading the handful of TSR books (spread across multiple editions, naturally), my D&D experience comes from media attached to the franchise: several generations of gamebooks, the original Dragonlance ...

Celebrate good times. Come on. It’s a celebration. (I will.) Between birthdays (and births), deaths, adoptions, holidays, graduations, engagements and weddings, honors of all kinds, personal milestones (like a 100th blog post ), and everything in between, our regular lives are simply filled with opportunities to celebrate. Just looking at the month of November in the US we have Dios de Los Muertos, All Saint’s Day, All Soul’s Day, Daylight Savings, Election Day, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving... and that's just hitting the “big” things in the US. That leaves out all sorts of official (like Native American Heritage Month) and unofficial (National Fast Food Day) recognitions. It also doesn’t recognize that Halloween just passed and holidays like Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa as well as many others are on their way. While we may have touched on adding holidays in other posts, it would be good to talk about celebrations in general. So take a moment to celebrate with your parties an...

This week in our ongoing “Fantasy Forward” series of posts, discussing ways to make sword-and-sorcery settings feel less pre-packaged is going to deal with something… squishy. Something touchy-feely. Something that, I feel, is rarely used to its potential in imagined settings: culture. We’re not expecting anyone to become trained sociologists or, heaven forbid, anthropologists in building out their fantasy settings (although I’m very curious if anybody with said training has incorporated that into games of their own), but there’s plenty of room to develop how people (regardless of species) live, learn, love, and do things. Real world cultures are the product of generations’ worth of history, experiences, stories, and beliefs, which can be a lot to live up to! How can we come up with original cultural elements in our fantasy settings, and how can we convey them to our players and audiences in ways that feel natural instead of forced? - B A : Music! Art! Literature! These are all amazin...

And so we come to the big one in terms of showing advancement and development in your sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting, one that touches, and is touched by, all others: government. Kings, Emperors, and other monarchs are an inevitable element of any setting based ostensibly primarily on medieval Europe, but beyond that, things tend to get… sketchy. But those sketches are a great place for imaginative creators to fill in details , and shifts in governmental structures are some of the clearest signs of change in any civilization. And, if your setting includes more than one location, you can try out different, competing approaches and see the way they interact… often with the players/protagonists in the middle. So from barony to republic, from kingdom to anarcho-syndicalist commune , let’s explore how you can use government and politics to move your fantasy forward! - B A : For deeply political tabletop campaigns, it takes a special kind of group and a special kind of game. Just the sou...

Last week, we started a new series of posts on how one might go about changing the stagnant nature of many “default” sword-and-sorcery fantasy settings by exploring how various aspects of the setting might develop over time and how the protagonists (or players, if this is in a tabletop RPG) might have an effect on these changes. While we started with one of the most obvious factors (technology), this week we thought we might go with something a little less so: economics, including the effect dungeon crawling might have on a regional economy that finds itself inundated with recovered treasure and artifacts… not to mention the adventurers who show up looking to get in on the action.  - B A :  The economy might be one of the most difficult things to consider in a game world - it's dangerous to upset the balance of your tabletop games. Just as with our technology post, a small change in the economy can have huge ripple effects. This is something we were even touched on: the city w...