A Brand New Rule Of The Dice

I finally got around to updating the site. I was never really satisfied with any of its previous incarnations, I found them, well, kinda ugly. Not that aesthetics should take away from content, but a nice design certainly makes for a more enjoyable writing and viewing experience. Man, I sound like an interior designer, which is only half as bad as a graphic designer, which I actually am, and is what I do for a living. So as you can guess there is absolutely no excuse for shoddy design work here.

I also dumped the Jack Crow moniker, because I realized I'm not in grade 10 and people won't steal my soul through the internet. So from now on I will be known as "Super Cool Arch Awesome Amazing Monster Slaying Game Mastering Master of Disaster Dude of Awesomeville", or John L. Williams (my actual human name. My Elvish name is too cool for anyone to know) for short. I also had to drop the Jack Crow moniker when I realized it was James Woods character in this awful movie.

I will be posting regularly starting next week. I hope everyone likes the new site.

Comments

  1. JayDecember 08, 2009

    Like the new site BTW! Very clean and easy on the eyes!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting at Rule of the Dice.

Greatest Hits

Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaign

Image
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&#
Read more

The Walking Dead Role-Playing Game

Image
The Season 5 premiere is not until late October, but news broke this week that The Walking Dead has just starting filming the upcoming season. In a few short months our favourite band of post-apocalyptic undead-fighting misfits will once again grace our TV screens, but until then we have to entertain ourselves somehow. And since going around pretending people are zombies and stabbing them in the head is frowned upon (for some reason), we'll have to find some other way to get our zombie-killing fix. Why isn't there a role-playing version of The Walking Dead yet?  There are numerous board games, none of which are very good . The video game by Telltale is excellent and very story- and RP-based, but it's one-player and pretty linear (Don't kid yourself - the multiple-path narrative is just an illusion. It always ends the same). A property like The Walking Dead is simply begging for an open-world, sandbox-style RPG. You have a group of survivors working together
Read more

Why Clerics (Still) Suck

Image
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
Read more

Revisiting Star Wars, the Greatest RPG of All Time

Image
It's been five years since I started writing for Rule of the Dice, and a lot has changed in my life since then. Having two kids is certainly the biggest event(s), and publishing my first novel was also cool. But of particular interest to this blog is how my outlook on and taste in role-playing games have changed. One of my first posts here was fawning over my favourite game of all time, the old D6 Star Wars RPG by West End Games. Recently I've started running a Star Wars campaign again for the first time in many years, thanks in part to the buzz and excitement provided by the first good Star Wars movie in many, many years. Yet playing this game again regularly for the first time since I was a kid has struck me with an odd thought: I'm not sure if I still like it as much anymore. In honour of my new game, the new movie and my five-year anniversary with Rule of the Dice, I thought I would revisit my previous argument and touch on the five reasons why I originally stat
Read more