RPGaDay 2016: So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen Goodbye

30. Describe the ideal gaming room if the budget were unlimited. 

My fantasy gaming room is about the size of a large meeting room, with a long table and 6-10 comfortable chairs around it. One of those expensive custom-made gaming tables would be lovely, of course, especially with all of the built-in drawers for storage, but a straight-forward utilitarian table would be fine.

RPGaDay 2016: Tahiti is A Magical Place

26. What hobbies go well with roleplaying games?

I guess the traditional answers to this question are crafty things, like painting minis and scenery. Those don't have much of a presence at my table, though.

Cooking is much more important for our group. We try to have dinner together every time we gather, or at least dessert and a nice cup of tea. That makes a difference; social groups bond over meals, and they create a space for those catch-up conversations that have to happen when people gather. If you're not friends with your fellow players, your game group is going to have a hard time achieving "High Trust, High Drama".

RPGaDay 2016: Can We Talk About Something Else?

22. Supposedly random game events that keep occurring?
23. Share one of your best "worst luck" stories.

These don't really apply so much to the games we play at my table, so I'm just gonna move on rather than wrack my brain for something that happened in a game ten or more years ago.

24. What is the game you are most likely to give to others?

I assume we're talking about a game given as a gift. That depends who it's for.

RPGaDay 2016: 50 Mission Cap

17. What fictional character would best fit in your game?

Assuming that we're talking about NOT FADE AWAY, my game about reincarnated genderfluid warriors battling shapeshifting enemies (and themselves) across the centuries, Connor MacLeod from Highlander would probably have some stories to swap with them.

Here Comes the (Invisible) Sun

The big thing in roleplaying this week -- at least, in terms of people talking about it -- is the Kickstarter for the new Monte Cook Presents game, INVISIBLE SUN.

RPGaDay 2016: The Questioning

13. What makes a successful campaign?

Any collaborative art form -- I'm thinking of theatre and film here, especially, but there are others -- is unpredictable. I've seen lots of terrible movies that had a great cast, crew, and director behind them. Some things just don't gel the way they should, and not by anyone involved not doing their job. So it's hard to say exactly what makes good things come together. It feels like magic.

RPGaDay 2016: Potpourri for $600, Alex

8. Hardcover, softcover, digital? Which is your preference?

All of the above. It's hard to beat the advantages that a PDF version of a rulebook give you -- portability, the ability to easily add annotations and bookmarks, the ability to port text into your own handouts, and that lower price point don't hurt -- but some things will always be better as a physical copy. You can pass a physical copy to someone else and let them leaf through it, when you're trying to get them hyped to play a new game. And I'm also a big fan of books as a sensual object. Books have a weight and a smell to them. Books age like a fine wine, and a well-loved rulebook has a lived-in feeling that PDFs do not. How many old-timey gamers like myself remember knowing where to find things in the original DMG based on the different illustrations and tables?

The Very, Very Late to the Party RPGaDay 2016

Huh, well this August has been a nightmare so far, putting me waaaaay behind on RPGaDay. I'm not going to try and catch up in one post, but this will get me closer.

3. Character Moment You are Proudest Of

There are lots of ways I could go with this question, but the first answer that jumped to mind was a scene I played with my wife a few years ago. This was in my friend's super-villains fighting The Man game, and our characters had been attracted to each other throughout the story without actually getting together. We planned to have a scene together in the finale, and totally expected that the scene would head in a romantic direction.

RPGaDay 2016: Dice

Yep, we're doing this again this year. I will probably fall behind and do posts that cover several days' worth of RPGaDay 2016, but you'll see all my answers here eventually.

1. Real dice, dice app, diceless - how do you prefer to 'roll'?

I've written in these pages before about my love affair with dice.

I think a lot of gamers of my generation have always loved them, and that is partly down to them starting out as an obscure and secret thing that no one outside the nerdy confines of D&D knew about. To begin with, they were brown and poorly-formed things that you needed to colour in the numbers with a crayon to understand. Those were the fabled "mud dice" that came with early iterations of D&D box sets.