Paizo’s GameMastery-brand item cards are a great accessory. They used to come in boosters, which are fun for random treasure hoards.Now and again, we said we’d throw some praise around to products we personally dig. Considering the number of them I’ve got floating around the house, accumulating after every Gen Con, I should really drop a link to Paizo’s GameMastery collection of products.

Specifically, I want to draw some more attention to the underwhelmingly named but otherwise excellent Item Cards. I’ve used these things like crazy, and I haven’t played D&D in something like 20 months. Any time I get a chance to run a short fantasy-RPG campaign, though, (lately using systems like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition, or the SAGA System I loved, or a heavily retrofitted version of the Coda-System edition of Lord of the Rings, always with my own settings, ’cause I’m an egomaniac), I pull out a stack of these cards to use. Each one is pretty, thanks to Vincent Dutrait and the cunning art department at Paizo.

Besides being pretty, these allow for nice and easy MMO-style equipment-lugging mechanics and just enough “grind simulation” (uh, in the MMO sense) to make the acquisition of items feel like winning on a slot machine. (Every monster in WoW is a slot machine, don’t you know.) Not into that kind of tomfoolery? Me neither, sometimes. So, again, you can just fall back on the pretty.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Mission District stencil storytelling endeavor already. I hope so, as it’s a great little interactive-fiction object d’art. The short version: the stencil craze in San Francisco’s mission district is evolving, like so many other art forms, from fixed to sequential subject matter. That is, it’s evolving into a storytelling medium. As you, the reader, navigate around the Mission, you happen upon these story fragments stenciled onto the sidewalk. As you read them, one after another, a story unfolds. Depending on what order you read them, you end up with a somewhat different tale than that guy standing across from you, who got to this fragment from a different direction. Good stuff.

As you’re wrapping up your holiday weeks and slowly returning to work, I offer you a couple of related links to soak in and enjoy. First, read Russ Pitts’ great article on the subject, called “Night Bandits of Graffiti,” at its native home over at The Escapist magazine. Then, go and peruse fragments of the tale in this Flickr gallery.

“Weeks pass. Afternoon after afternoon, they stroll in the park, drinking in each other’s stories.”

Dreamblade’s online demo is much better than the live demo I played back at Gen Con SoCal (and wrote about here). It does a lot of things right, from letting the newbie player make a few mistakes without affecting the flow of the game to offering bits of advice. It does some things badly, too, like not explaining certain oddball exception rules very well.

But it also does something I didn’t expect, and that I don’t think is quite by design: It tells a little story.

// Keep reading

A screenshot of Weathertop in Lord of the Rings Online, taken from actual play.Out of curiosity, ever since the first day I played LOTRO, back in August, I’ve been informally polling players in the game with a few questions. I’ve asked on open channels, I’ve asked the members of kinships and Fellowships, I’ve asked strangers and in-game friends. Most of the questions I ask are about people’s history with paper RPGs, but the question that gets ignored the least: “Why are you here? Why did you choose LOTRO?”

A lot of the people I talked to had strong, positive opinions about their choice of MMORPG. I was expecting most answers to somehow involve the global MMORPG superpower, World of Warcraft. Some answers did. But three of the answers I got the most often surprised me.

// 3 Reasons People Play LOTRO

You’ve read the same kinds of opinions that I have regarding RPGs, especially D&D, versus MMORPGs. Specifically, I’m thinking about the opinions that say, “If all I wanted to do was walk a bunch of miniature figures through a dungeon, fighting and looting, I’d rather do it with a videogame and not worry about knowing all those rules. Let the computer do it.”

It’s a fair point, and you can imagine that I like it because it says people want to play paper RPGs because they get a degree of freedom out of them that CRPGs can’t match. (Yet.) That’s great. I want people to keep being attracted to RPGs, and the best way to do that is to attract attention to the thing do well and other games do not, as several commentators have said in the last couple of days.

But one of those things that RPGs should do well, they often don’t.

// Read more