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 ...

The Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. Is there another fictional (or even real-world) mixed drink as well-known to geeks and nerds everywhere? Like much of the larger Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy universe, it doesn’t make much of a direct appearance in the story itself, but establishes the character of the setting and the people who occupy it, especially given how early it appears in the story. The original 1978 radio play text ( unchanged in the 1981 television version ) is a great bit of writing, but it’s expanded upon greatly in the 1979 novel with the actual recipe for the “best drink in existence.” Each ingredient comes from a different planet, each with its own story or tradition, and, even though we never get to see any of these worlds (or their contribution to the Gargle Blaster), the sequence does a massive amount of worldbuilding and tone setting. And that’s one thing that’s interesting about cocktails - unlike most real food, they’re specialty preparations that stand out on ...

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 ...

Given the power they exert over film and other visual media, it's no surprise that some editors think of themselves as gods... and when it comes to turning raw, disorganized messes of raw footage into complete narrative products, they might as well be. Not to mention the advice that a (possible) god once told (wannabe god) Bender, that goes doubly for editors: "when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." Not to say there isn't flashy editing, of course, the kind of cuts that demand a viewer's attention and acknowledgement through sharp juxtaposition or shifting from one part of a story to another in a manner reminiscent of a page being turned or curtain pulled. But these examples are notable because they're standout exceptions - most editing has the far more mundane, but no less miraculous, task of turning a three-walled set filled with lights, cameras, microphones, and all the people running them into the illusion of...

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...