Please Welcome The New Guys

At the beginning of the new year I posted that I was looking for additional writers to join me here at Rule of the Dice. This is partially because I want to expand the blog and have some different contributors post cool articles. But it's mainly because I'm a lazy and don't want to have to write or work very hard (and I also need time to practice my cage fighting). Luckily some real great chaps volunteered their services as henchmen. Now I'll just sit back while they do all the work and I reap the benefits of being an RPG blog tycoon... it's a thing, it's a real thing.

Please give a very warm welcome to...

The New Guys

C.D. Gallant-King

C.D. Gallant-King has been playing and GMing role-playing games for 20 years, but he would still describe his skills as “fair to moderate.”  He has been a game designer even longer, his first game created in honour of the 1988 Calgary Olympic Games, which featured players racing across the country with torches.  There was also an option to slow your opponents down with oil slicks.  He still doesn’t quite understand how the Olympics work.

He has written eight novels you’ve never read, and has fuzzy d20s hanging from his rear-view mirror. Though it may come as some disappointment (or surprise) to all the ladies reading this, he is happily married.

Joseph Nelson
Joe is still an acolyte among the gaming elite and his sense of wide-eyed wonder has not been crushed (yet) by the harsh realities of the gaming world. He deeply enjoys the old-school games and the new wave games, considering them both part of his dysfunctional little RPG family.

He lives in the Northeast United States, where even the Frost Giants fear to tread.


Andy (aka. Carpe Guitarrem)

Andy, a regular poster at The Player's Side of the Screen, is a relative newcomer to RPGs. He picked them up a few years ago, with a few sessions of D&D, and now he's diving into the world of RPGs with a voracious abandon. He likes studying different game mechanics, and how they shape players' experiences. On top of that, he's multiclassed into a billion different things, like music and art and computers and...a lot more.
So please give these guys a very warm welcome, and most importantly check out their posts.

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Greatest Hits

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 talkin…
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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 whil…
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My Biggest Issue With The Force Awakens is Not What You Think

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Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed The Force Awakens. It was familiar and just felt like an updated version of something I loved as a kid, paying homage to it lovingly while adding enough new touches to open up a new world for future stories.

But therein lies the problem, at least from a gaming perspective.

A day or two after I saw the film, I sat down to stat out the characters and ships for use in a game.

(Everyone does this right? You see the world around you in terms of RPG statistics? For instance, I know my boss has a really high bureaucracy skill, but a middling command/charisma. My Hyundai Elantra has a pitiful maneuverability and movement score, but it has decent cargo capacity for a vehicle its size. My kids have amazing saving throws - all kids do, otherwise they would never survive all the dumb stuff they do.)

Anyway, I started statting out the material from the movie in a system I know (Star Wars D6), comparing it to existing material in the system as a baseline. Th…
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Revisiting Star Wars, the Greatest RPG of All Time

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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 stated tha…
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