Category: Johnny’s Five
| June 15, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Ahhh convention season. It’s that glorious time of the year when I get to romp about at Conventions (the next one I’ll be at is Origins from June 22 to 25th), meet lots of new people (I’m friendly. If you see me, say Hi. Just look for the dorky guy in a kilt and flight jacket.), and run 4 hour games (chances are I’m running anything with the name Silvervine in it). Running games at conventions is always interesting because of the time limits. You’ve…
| March 25, 2011 | Posted by John Arcadian |
It’s safe to say that I’m a bit of an easy sell when it comes to miniatures. Every time I go into a game store, I buy dice or miniatures from their bargain bin. The fantasy games I generally play call for odd or unique minis, so your standard knight in armor rarely works, especially when I need minis to represent the vast array of unique enemy personalities. I also like to use big miniatures when there are big enemies, but those get real expensive.…
| November 2, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
Right before all of the Halloween craziness of this year occurred, my buddy decided to run a Halloween themed game instead of having the weekly Kilt and Beer night (yes, there is a weekly Kilt and Beer night). Not having been a player in a long time, I said sure why not. We only had a few hours, so knew it would be short and crammed with stuff, but it sounded like a hell of a fun idea. The game went great and I attribute…
| March 31, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
I just recently got back into a game of D&D 3.5, a short game run by a friend before we start a new campaign. My friend (fairly new to running a game) setup a fairly complex horror themed plot. There was some necessary railroading, which he mentioned beforehand and got our buy-in for, and it worked out fine. Due to circumstances beyond his control the game (which was intended for 2 sessions) became a one-shot with a short formed ending. It was a great story…
| March 8, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
While prepping for my regular Sunday game yesterday, I came across an incredible link on Boing Boing. This might already be floating around out there in the general gaming geekdom, but I hadn’t found it yet and felt it needed sharing! A gamer who seems to go by the online name of Burntwire took two years to build his gaming space into a great place to fit his massive collection, as well as provide some great immersion inducing atmosphere. The photo just above is just…
| February 24, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
I’ve been running my gaming group through a dungeon using Dungeonaday.com. In the last session the group came across a really well written puzzle and it got me thinking about the use of puzzles in games. Puzzles can be incredibly fun or incredibly frustrating. From the GM’s perspective, you don’t want to give the players something so easy it won’t feel like they have overcome anything, but from the player’s perspective you don’t want anything that is annoying and obscure in its solution. With this…
| February 3, 2010 | Posted by John Arcadian |
While I was watching old movies and cleaning out my basement a few weeks ago, I watched a movie that made me go “Wow! That was totally someone’s role-playing game!”. It wasn’t the first time that happened to me, and this isn’t the first time that the idea has been discussed here on the stew ( 1 | 2 ). There are a lot of movies and TV shows that have the feeling of a roleplaying game in one way or another. There are some…
