Rule of the Dice

Now for some kick ass Santa pictures...


Have a safe and happy holiday and all the best in the new year from everyone here at Rule of the Dice.

One of the greatest things about our hobby is its progressive nature. And I'm not talking about elven politics or any such malarkey. No, I'm talking about how the hobby thrives as more and more options to play are made available.

Whether you play face-to-face, or via email or forum, or even through a service like Google+, there are more ways to get your roleplaying fix than ever before.

And now you can add play-by-blog to that growing list.

For the last couple months, I've been in a play-by-blog game run by the packmaster of the blog A Pack of Gnolls, called The Ruins of Empire and running Microlite74 in 4E's Nentir Vale setting.

Playing by blog means setting up a blog specifically dedicated to the game in question; the gamemaster makes the main posts that drives the game forward, then players post their actions in the comments section of the blog, and generally it acts a lot like play-by-forum. It's slow, but since it doesn't require a massive time sink, it's …

DIY RPG/D&D people, you need to read this. 

In case you missed it, it's Teach your Kid to Game week, an idea that I 100% approve of, even if the idea of an entire week to it seems a bit unnecessary.







What's next? A week to remind us to breathe?

However, on its intended purpose, I can lavish nothing but praise. I've had the opportunity to run games for young kids before and, let me just say, that it was highly rewarding and actually quite fun. Very imaginative children will think of solutions to problems that no rational adult could ever conceive, whether or not said solution is physically possible.

There are plenty of tips and advice out there for running games with kids, but let me just reiterate a couple of points I feel need mentioning as often as possible.

#1: Don't play for hours. Kids get tired, have shorter attention spans, and basically will burn out faster than you will. Limit the game time to two hours at the max, maybe even cut it short to an hour-and-a-half. You can get in a little adventuring and try to …

When I was fourteen or so, I discovered my dad's old collection of paperback men's action novels and spent an entire summer reading them, from the adventures of American super spy Nick Carter, to the sardonic violence of the Destroyer, I devoured them all with a fresh zeal, with my favorite being the violent adventures of the Executioner, who would later serve as the basis for Marvel's Punisher. Soon I'd continued on to classic pulp adventure series like Doc Savage and the Shadow, but the men's adventure novels of the 70s and 80s have always held a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf.

So to find a game supposedly patterned after those novels filled me with excited trepidation. Dogs of WAR, by Simon Washbourne, is based around the Bolanverse series (the long running series consisting of the Executioner, Mack Bolan, Pheonix Force, Able Team, and Stony Man, three series of which are still being published as of today: www.mackbolan.com ) though any actual know…

A few weeks ago I raved about how great Old Skool D&D is.  At first glance, you may infer therefore that I believe Nu Skool (and 4E in particular) sucks.  While it's really easy to make fun of 4E, I don't actually believe that it's bad. The two games are very different and fill completely separate rolls and niches.  I love them both in different ways, like my iPhone and my wife.


The cool thing about old versions of D&D is that's it's simple, random, and open to endless interpretation and tweaking. That's also one of it's greatest flaws.  The reason many people make up their own house rules is because the rules, as written, don't make a heck of a lot of sense.  And they're stupidly unfair.  Sure, having a wizard with 2 hit points who gets killed by a stray cat is funny the first time, but after dying 8 times in two sessions, that shit gets old. Especially when a significant portion of those deaths were caused by the same f***ing cat.

Simila…

BRAAAAAAAINSSS!!!!

In honour of Halloween and the second season of the Walking Dead (not to mention the soon-to-be-released Issue Three of d6 Magazine featuring material by yours truly), I thought it was time to revisit d6 Horror and share with you some of my designs for everyone's favourite brain-devouring, drooling masses of near-human monstrosities... ZOMBIES!!!


I love zombies and horror survival games.  So much so that I broke my own rule to never buy another Kevin Siembieda game and picked up DEAD REIGN when it came out a couple of years ago.  It was a ton of fun, though admittedly I had to tweak the hell out of it to make it playable (when my players realized that the zombies had the strength of Superman, and kept coming after being shot in the head four or five times, it really killed the excitement for them).  All that tweaking eventually led me to the d6 system, which I also mangled to create a custom d6 Horror games (some of the rules of which will be appearing in the a…

I was walking past a FLGS* last week and noticed a new Resident Evil board game in in the window. Now, I am a huge Resident Evil fan, (at least of the original and RE: Zero for GameCube) so I had to check this out. Turns out it wasn't a board game so much as a card game, but it was reasonably priced and I was intrigued so I picked it up.  I got the "Alliance" intro set because it specifically said it had rules for single-player, which is always a plus for me.

*Quick Aside: It actually not "my" Friendly Local Gaming Store.  I was downtown visiting my real estate lawyer (man, that feels weird to say, but we bought a house, so I had to get a lawyer) and I walked past Fandom II, a popular gaming store here in Ottawa.  The shopkeeper wasn't particularly "friendly," but they have a good selection and a strong customer base.  My FLGS is actually the Comic Book Shoppe, which has some of the best prices on gaming stuff in town.  One of these days I will ha…