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  1. MGibster

    Gaming Cons Have Changed (I'm Old)

    Even when I was younger, I never attended cons on a regular basis, and before this last weekend, the last con I had attended was the final Roc*Kon here in Little Rock way back in 2004. Last year I made it part of my New Year's resolution to go to a con this year and I settled on Gamehole Con in...
  2. MGibster

    Redirected to "Google" Site When Browsing EnWorld.

    Starting last week, I am periodically redirected to the website listed below when I am here at EnWorld. This does not happen when I'm browsing other websites, and I've checked to make sure my system was up-to-date and free of viruses and malware. It occurs to me that I should have gotten a...
  3. MGibster

    Violence and (Geek) Entertainment

    This thread is inspired by Stephen King's recent comment regarding the violence of Marvel movies being almost "pornographic." In a nutshell, King's criticism is the movies show all sorts of destruction to a city but very little on how that impacts the people there. i.e. No blood. It's a...
  4. MGibster

    Things Said That Stop the Game Dead in its Track

    So there we were, playing our 5th edition Greyhawk campaign, when we veer off topic and start chatting about fantasy movies from the 1980s. Player #5: I liked Conan the Destroyer better than Conan the Barbarian. Player #4: Agreed. Me: What the $#@%? Player #1: Yeah, what the $#@%...
  5. MGibster

    Attributes Should Be a Guideline for Personality

    In the early 90s, there was a little magazine published for Cyberpunk 2020 called Interface. It was a quarterly magazine that introduced new cyberware, weapons, drugs, NPCs, organizations, etc., etc. to use in your Cyberpunk game. In 1991, Peter Christian wrote an article for Interface called...
  6. MGibster

    D&D General What to Do with a Dragon Corpse?

    In my last session, the player characters defeated an adult black dragon and it was a lot of fun. At the end of our session, I told them I'd figure out something fun to do with the corpse. And by fun, I mean let's make some magic items. So think of what parts of the dragon you might use to...
  7. MGibster

    Are Game Lines Smaller Today?

    Inspired by the threads What Does a "Successful" RPG Look Like and Jason Carl on White Wolf's Return, Mage: The Ascension Plans, @Ruin Explorer got me to thinking. Just looking back and the sheer number of books published for various games in the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s, my perception is...
  8. MGibster

    D&D 5E (2024) Is Combat Tedious on Purpose?

    Yeah, it's a contentious title, but we're living in a post-social media world where click bait titles are how you get views. But let's start from the beginning. Is combat in 5th edition tedious? After a few weeks of running it with the players moving from levels 1 through 4, I can safely say...
  9. MGibster

    D&D 5E (2024) Do We Really Need Levels 11-20?

    I've seen various sources saying most D&D campaigns end by the time the characters are between levels 7-10. Assuming this is true, why bother with levels 11-20? Okay, I get it. Assuming most campaigns go no higher than 10, there are still some people who do have campaigns that go that high...
  10. MGibster

    D&D 5E (2024) Druid w/ Pet Dinosaur - Help Me Build Character

    I have a player with a character concept a bit outside the norm. He's playing a Druid, and his intention is to have a pet animal that does the direct fighting while he sits in the back and casts supportive spells. If you've ever played World of Warcraft, this sounds an awful lot like one of...
  11. MGibster

    In Praise of Engaged Players

    My long term group has faced some challenges the last few years with two people moving to another country and one moving into hospice. Player A went ahead and recruited two of his board gaming buddies, players B and C. Players B and C weren't bad people, but they really weren't all that...
  12. MGibster

    D&D 5E (2024) Help Me Hate Monks (Less Than I Currently Do)

    I am to Monks as Snarf is to Bards. And just so we're clear, I have an intense dislike for them in the context of most D&D settings. I rather like them in places like Legend of the Five Rings or Kar-Tur. It's like someone tried to shoehorn Kwai Chang Caine from Kung-Fu* into D&D and it's...
  13. MGibster

    D&D 5E (2024) Rewarding PCs with Unbalancing Power

    I'm about to start a 5th edition Greyhawk campaign. In the first scenario, the PCs take on an organization, the Ordo Ventricula Sanctus, a group of villainous monks dedicated to becoming one with the universe through gastronomical exploration. The PCs should run across one of their storage...
  14. MGibster

    D&D General How Do D&D Adventurers Dress?

    Let's get this out of the way. Of course it depends on the setting, the PCs culture, and what they do for a living. But how are they dressed compared to the average person in the campaign? In the default D&D campaign, the player characters are adventurers, or weirdos as I like to call them...
  15. MGibster

    What Happened to RPG Outreach/Ambassador Programs Run by Companies?

    So back in the 1990s and the early 2000s, there were a few RPG companies who had their own outreach/ambassador programs. This was basically a system where volunteers would run a company's games at store events or conventions and in exchange they'd get free stuff or other considerations. There...
  16. MGibster

    Effective Communication Outside of Game Play

    I ran a campaign recently that was not to the liking of one of my players. Instead of talking to me about it directly, he had his character behave in a disruptive manner just to stir the pot, he made passive aggressive complaints, and when he had to replace his character introduced a new one...
  17. MGibster

    Best Horror Role Playing Game

    We've currently got a thread going ranking the best horror movies of all time. Let's talk about the best horror RPGs of all time. Criteria? Look, I don't really like to get bogged down in discussions of what is or isn't horror. If you want to tell me Burrows & Bunnies is a horror game...
  18. MGibster

    D&D 5E (2024) Treasure in D&D 2024

    D&D has almost always had an adventure treadmill. Characters go adventuring, they gain experience and treasure, become more powerful, and go out to repeat the whole process until they run out of levels. Good times. Way back in the old days, you you needed to spend your hard earned gold to...
  19. MGibster

    D&D General Help Me with My Pathological Aversion to Third Party D&D Products

    I have a pathological aversion to third party products designed to be compatible with D&D. When I go to the local game store, if I'm considering a product for use with D&D I won't look at anything that hasn't been published by WotC. I say it's a pathological aversion because my most favorite...
  20. MGibster

    D&D General The Disappearance of D&D from Mainstream Retailers

    I'm old, but I'm not that old, so I don't really know where people were buying D&D back in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, AD&D products were available through mainstream retailers. You could go to the mall and find AD&D books at Kaybee Toy, B. Dalton Booksellers, and I don't know if Sears...
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