Recent content by Xphile

Carcassonne and Forbidden Island would be at the top of my recommendations. I introduced both of them to my non-gamer family members this Christmas and we were able to play through both games in a few hours. Nanuk is a fun party game, but tends to rely more heavily on luck and card counting...

I so agree. I think the problem is with almost all RPGs once you get to high levels. High levels usually mean more options, especially in combat. So it will take players longer to figure out what they want to do, especially if they have "one shot" powers that they won't be able to use later.

I think you handled this well. I think the best way to give your players information and let them choose. They have then accepted those consequences. My question is what do you do if your players were in that same scenario (goblins, race against time, etc), but blew one of the earlier...

As a mainly 4e player, this product did pique my interest. Mostly because I think my group would be rather intimidated if I (not literally) threw the core rule book at them. I think this product would have a shot at getting them into Pathfinder. I will say though, that the thing that I did...

Great job. Even though I play 4e and Savage World's, the adventure and the side rules seem interesting enough that I might pick this up and just use it in a different system.

Overall it looks like RPG sales as a whole are going up, which is good for the industry as a whole. Of course I wonder if this a large increase in people who play RPGs, are have we as players started to diversify our portfolios of RPGs that we play.

On a per employee basis, I would agree. Programmers are more expensive than game designers. No matter what though, you have to pay your game designers, otherwise you don't have a game. The question is, what is cheaper, those programmers or printing your material on dead tree? How many books...

Really? Programming is expensive? I work as a software engineer professionally. There is very little about the DDI stuff that I couldn't do with maybe a team of 10 programmers. Seeing how I just spent the past few months working on a much more complex Flash application with only a team of 3...

I wonder how much of Pathfinder's sales are based upon the evangelical nature of its player base. I'm a system neutral type of guy. You can convince me to try out any system and there is a high chance that I'll find something about that system that I like. This also means that I tend to visit...

I'm sure they are ahead in digital book sales as well :D Of course I do wonder how many D&D players just use DDI now. As a GM, I buy new monster manuals and settings (once and a while an adventure, if it peeks my interest). I know plenty of players though, who scoff at the idea of buying...

I don't know about better, just different ;) Treebore Thanks for the link, looks like I'll have to add this to my list of SW games to run this summer

I would be more interested in it if it was system agnostic. Mostly because I tend to play a lot of the RPGs not on that list, such as Savage Worlds, Dragon Age, Bounty Head Bebop. I don't mind doing some work to define how to calculate initiative, but I've yet to find a program that allows...

I'm excited. I tried playing around with some other encounter helpers recently, but I keep coming back to this. The other ones just don't have the simplicity and array of nice easy to use features that this does. This follows the KISS principles and I love it. While I prefer java for back...

Tis quite fine, mostly was posting it for informational purposes. I'll try out of the 7.0.4 version on my Win7 and XP machines and see if I have any problems. I do love this program. I've looked into other encounter programs from time to time, and this is the one that I always come back to...

Tried upgrading from version 7.0.3 on Windows XP. Got the following error: System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Index was outside the bounds of the array. at DMEncHelper.frmMain.chkUpdates() at DMEncHelper.frmMain.CheckForUpdatesToolStripMenuItem_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) Also the...