Posts

On Character Backstories

So, this is an eighth grader's first character ever, first time considering a role-playing game.  The character is a human wizard, and she chose a criminal background. Katrina Heather was born to Jane and Joke Ho, professional assassins.  When she turned 8 she started to be hired for her family's profession.  She thrived and was wealthy.  At age 13, she took a job from an evil wizard.  His wife was murdered by her parents.  He offered wizard training in return for her parents' lives.  So she took the job.  Ever since she has been training and killing. It's not the  best  backstory ever, no... but I was impressed because it was her  first  backstory; usually a beginning player is struggling to cope with "I'm a wizard" and "what do 'race' and 'class' mean" and so on. Here's what I like about the concept: She's blurring lines; she's an assassin by trade, but a wizard by class. Damn, girl killed her parents to ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Some Current Favorites

Image
What am I playing now?  Well, honestly, less than I'd like... adulting sucks, kids, and it sucks time more than anything else.  So enjoy not having to do be an adult while you can. Still, with that said... we moved pretty recently, and we moved knowing we had a renovation in our near future, so I pruned the game cabinet down to a much smaller shelf than it used to have.  Here's a few that made the cut, with some very brief notes on each.  They aren't full reviews, but should give a flavor of what I like in each. Ticket to Ride This is probably my current favorite "board game," although it's not a board game in the move-your-token-around kind of way.  The basic idea is that you have a hand of tickets by which you promised to build trains from A to B and C to D; you then have to buy tracks to connect those destinations, with bonuses for the longest track, for completing more tickets, and so on. I like the network build effect---if you're clever with y...
Post a Comment
Read more

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is still the go-to

Image
To get started, the PHB is the only one you really need I used to play a lot  of different role-playing game systems... but I keep coming back to AD&D, and it's the one my kids bit for, and bit hard for.  D&D isn't even my favorite  system... but it is the go-to. So what makes AD&D the right one, four decades and five editions later? People know it. This might seem silly---why does it matter what other people know, if they maybe aren't even playing?  Turns out it actually helps a lot.  If I, or my kids, want to talk about this cool thing that happened in their last adventure, and we're playing Call of Cthulu or something like that, we're likely to end up talking about what the game is, or explaining what Cthulu is , or at least what a role-playing game is---and at that point, we're going to drop Dungeons & Dragons' name because it lets people understand what we're talking about .  And we don't want to have to spend 5 to 20 m...
Post a Comment
Read more