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Send us an email and tell us how awesome we are. You can email me directly at john(at)ruleofthedice(dot)com.

Greatest Hits

Why Clerics (Still) Suck

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There are some jobs that are just terrible. Cleaning industrial septic tanks. Being that kid with the drum at the front line of those old army battles. Even working on a porno set, which one would think is the best employment in the world, has at least one position that downright sucks (pardon the pun). Seriously, would you want to be the guy that has to mop up/towel down/hose off the actors and set afterward? Depending on the genre of movie being filmed, you may have some seriously screwed up stuff to deal with. Know what’s even worse than all of those things? Being the cleric for an adventuring party. It used to be worse. Through third edition, clerics were treated like a walking first aid kit. You were one of those little boxes with a red cross on them like in Wolfenstein or Doom, but with sexy legs that stick out of the bottom (that’s how I always pictured clerics, anyway). Your job was to cast healing spells, and if you ran out of healing spells you got out of the way whi...
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Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaign

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There are many bands out there who like to play loud, ass-kicking, speaker-bursting music with thrashing guitars and pounding drums. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, most of them are total geeks. They may look like hard-ass biker leather fetishists, but in reality they're just D&D and Lord of the Rings nerds who hope that if they sing about dwarves and elves loud enough, people will think they're tough and not pick on them anymore. He was almost cool. Then he opened his mouth. Although I'm sure we could list thousands of bands that could fall into the genre, I'm just going to list The Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaigns. Actually, they're just my 4 favourites, but whatever. 4. Iron Maiden Seriously, how many kids back in the 80s ran home after school to play D&D and listen to Iron Maiden? Well, probably not THAT many, but if you're reading a blog about role-playing games and you're over 30 years old, you know what I'm ...
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10 More Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios

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Last year I shared a list of 10 Random Zombie Survival Intro Scenarios based on my ad-hoc zombie survival/horror game (which is kinda like a DCC Funnel but set in the modern world, and with zombies). It was actually one of the most popular posts I ever wrote on this site (people still really seem to like zombies , go figure) so I thought it was time for a sequel. Last time the set-ups were pretty standard fare. Scenarios you've seen in many zombie movies, games and books. A rag-tag bunch of strangers, thrown together in an every day situation (a crashed bus, locked in a mall, hiding in a cabin in the woods) and they must survive the overwhelming onslaught of the undead. Death is rampant and expected (each player begins with four 0-level characters), and only the best (or more likely luckiest) will survive. This time a few of the scenarios are quite a bit weirder and may take some more prep work. If you don't want them, don't pick them, or if you roll them randomly, ...
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Why My Favourite D&D Class Sucks

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I don't get to play D&D as a player very often. I usually end up on the DM side of the screen, which is cool because I generally enjoy it more anyway. But from time to time it's a nice change of pace to only have to worry about a single character instead of an entire world. It's also fun to throw down and beat the living daylights out of some monsters. My current D&D of choice, for better or for worse, is 4th Edition. The first time I got to run my own character in this edition was at last season's D&D Encounters event ( Keep on the Borderlands ), and I made the damn fool mistake of playing the cleric. ( See here for why Clerics, especially 4E Essentials clerics, suck. And while we're at it, here's a good argument for the suckiness of Monks). Next I tried a Gnome Bard for a high-level Living Forgotten Realms game, but that turned out almost as bad as the cleric. Seriously, what was I thinking? For the new Encounters season, I almost made...
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Love, Sex & Dice

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Because of the special romantic holiday we celebrate this week, I decided to come up with a special romantic theme article. Did you know that February 15th was National Flag of Canada Day? Sexy. Of course, the holiday I'm referring to is Valentine's Day, and the special theme is lovin' and bangin' in role-playing games. For those of you who are uncomfortable with this topic, you can stop reading now, and go here instead. Does love and sex have a place in table-top role-playing games? It obviously has a place in video RPGs, if Final Fantasy VIII and Dragon Age are any indication (WARNING: That second link is probably NSFW). But many players are uncomfortable acting this at the table and I can't really blame them. Sitting around the dining room table with four other sweaty guys drinking Dr. Pepper and eating Cheetos can make it hard to look into your friend's eyes and profess your undying love for him - I mean, his character, Mistress Clitoria Hexblade. It...
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2 Simple Rules for Being a Teenage Game Master

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I don’t claim to be an expert Dungeon/Game Master. I’m not bad, and while I’ve been doing this on and off for years, I haven’t had time to play four times a week since I was seventeen. I recognize that I’m probably behind on those 10,000 hours it takes to master a particular skill. However, I have played a variety of games over that time: some great (Star Wars d6, Most version of D&D) and some god-awful (anything with Kevin Siembieda’s name on the cover). I’ve also played with a huge variety of people: from old-timers who actually played with Gary Gygax (and Kevin Siembieda, ironically) to non-gamers playing for the first time, to WoW addicts going through withdrawal to my 10-year old sister. I’ve probably had a much higher female-to-male ratio at my tables than most, which may have coloured my perceptions (and probably instilled much better manners) and I’ve led groups ranging in size from as few as 1 player to as many as 12. (What did I learn from playing with 12 players? ...
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Introducing New Players to the Game

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Since July I have been working very hard at designing a role playing game to go with my campaign world. Don't worry I have no intentions of becoming a serious game designer and only using this blog as marketing tool for my pet projects. I just really want to create a game that's all. But the process of creation has raised a lot of interesting questions for me.  One of the things I've realized is that a lot of newcomers don't know what they are expected to do in a game. Frankly this is something I've never given much thought seeing that most of my players and myself  have been playing for so long that it's just old hat to us. So I started writing out some ideas so new players could get an idea of how to play a game. This, of course is just my opinion but maybe some other people could get some ideas from it. I might also add that these tidbits are most definitely of an old school leaning. The role of the Player The moving force for any role playing campaign...
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