Star Wars has been a part of my gaming experience for a long time. I was born in the middle of the original trilogy releases, and it has certainly had an impact in my life. Whether through lightsaber battles as a kid, my introduction into role-playing, or my large amount of digital games, Star Wars has always been incorporated in my life in some way.  Some of my earliest memories of imaginary play were of Jedi and Stormtroopers. Sure, Pirates, Knights and He-Man may have all been in heavy rotation, but Star Wars was certainly up there. Just picture a young jedi, brown towel slung over his head as a robe, card board tube swung around to self-made sound effects, slashing off the arms of invisible stormtroopers. All kids dismember their imaginary friends right? Or slightly later, with the official Kenner “the Force” lightsaber, hollow green plastic tube and black handle whistling through the air as I charged through the house. It didn’t sound like a real lightsaber, but it was a pri

Let’s start this off by establishing my relationship to Star Wars: I love Star Wars. Love it. I still spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the brilliant storytelling of the Original Trilogy. I should emphasize, however, that I tend to think of anything outside those three films as addenda of sorts. To me, the prequels and recent trilogy occupy a similar space to novels, video games, The Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour , etc. Being addenda isn’t a good or bad thing in itself - in fact, my very first exposure to RPGs was the original West End D6 Star Wars. It taught me a lot about gaming could be, and gave me my first lessons in the methodologies of storytelling.   I also love addenda that stretch the idea of what Star Wars is, especially at the very beginning when the first film’s success took everyone by surprise and imaginations went wild. The early Marvel comics, for instance, are an exercise in playful genre-bending as tropes from  westerns, monster movies, 50s

Freddie Prinze Jr. considered joining my new online D&D campaign this week. No, really. I’m serious! Okay, he was probably just being polite. He was really polite about it, though. You see, one of my old friends/new players had an exchange with him on Twitter a few days ago. Freddie Prinze Jr . had retweeted a post about naming a barbarian. Jeremy (my friend) responded to the tweet with appreciation, noting that he was about to play a barbarian, himself. Freddie Prinze Jr. gave the advice to “Taunt and flaunt, bro. Taunt and flaunt.” When I heard about the exchange, I had Jeremy extend an offer to join our game. I figured “why not,” although I was sure he wouldn’t seriously consider it or even respond... or would he? The offer was politely declined with an explanation that the timing would not work out. Apparently, Freddie handles the cooking in the family and not Sarah ? Or maybe they take turns. Someone needs to make sure the kids eat, at any rate. This is a fact that I'm

Welcome to the blog reader. I hope that you are finding the posts entertaining if not informative. I’m Andy, half of the team known as Disco Stu Never Say Dice. In no particular order I’m: a dad, tabletop gamer, console gamer, amateur musician, community theater tech, aspiring tabletop game designer, and all around nerd. Much like Bugsy, I thought I’d write a bit on why I wanted to start this blog and where I want to go with it. I had a less creative and less interesting answer than Bugsy if you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I was a kid, I would have told you an Architect. I was likely told I should say this because of my enjoyment of legos. Certainly sketching out plans for a structure, or anything else really, isn’t one of my strong suits. However, I have always enjoyed building things, I still enjoy building with legos now and again, and I’ve passed the love of building down to my kids. It can be little colorful bricks, or something else entirely, but buil

Hello, Dear Readers. I’m Bugsy, and I make up half of Never Say Dice. I am a writer, a gamemaster, a musician and songwriter, a scholar, and  most  best of all, a  fool . I’d like to talk about why I’m here, what I’d like to accomplish in this space, some things we might talk about, and we’ll start with the totally not made-up thing I wanted to be when I grew up: a Magician-Detective. Two of my absolute favorite, best-loved books as a kid were The Young Detective’s Handbook by William Vivian Butler and The Magic Handbook by Peter Eldin. Maybe I just liked handbooks, but these two made my most voracious obsessions both practical and real. I wanted to be the knower of secrets: to find them, to learn them, to keep them. The seeker of truth and the teller of lies. The Magician-Detective. Many years later, when faced with the obligatory “when did you first want to be a writer,” this imagined vocation immediately sprung to mind, and I realized that, without knowing, I had fu

Gnomes at Night is a cooperative maze game from the developer Peaceable Kingdom. A detailed description is at the bottom. It is billed as a “quick-thinking communication game,” and I certainly agree. The suggested age range is 6 and up, but one could push it lower by simplifying the game and not using the timer. My 8-year-old received this game as a gift for his birthday, and we play it on a semi-regular basis. Setup and play is fairly simple. A vertical board is held up between two plastic grips that clip to the side of the box. One gnome goes on each side of the board, and connect through it by magnets in their bases. Players flip over treasure cards that they collect while navigating the maze. This is where that “communication” and “cooperation” come in. When one gnome's path is blocked by a wall, the other can take over on its own side and free it by moving within its area. The “quick” comes from the game’s sand timer - you have two and a half minutes to complete your tas

How do you describe a goblin to an 8 year old? Recently, I began reading The Hobbit at bedtime to my eldest kid. We're a few chapters in, not far past the section on the trolls. The topic of goblins has come up as the troop has just raided the trolls’ cave and found the goblin slaying sword Orchrist (note that orc bit later.) "What are goblins, dad?" We of course aren't quite to the point where a good description is given. We will get there at some point, likely just as we are meant to. His interest was piqued though, and so I had to give some sort of response. I could jump ahead in the book and find a Tolkienian description of them. I could go grab one of my many Monster Manuals and find a picture and a description. The latest D&D description is as follows: Goblins are small, black-hearted humanoids that lair in despoiled dungeons and other dismal settings. Individually weak, they gather in large numbers to torment other creatures. This description is what I wo