New Year, New Game

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Scot Newbury

of Dice and DragonsCan I add new campaign to that?

The folks over at Gnome Stew have issued a challenge to gamers this year – run a new game. Most will take that challenge as a reason to go out and buy a new game system but in my case I’m using it as the catalyst to finally get off my rear and get a new campaign going (yeah, I know I’ve said that before).

I will admit there are a number of items that will make this both interesting and a challenge.

1. Moving to a sandbox style game

My group has been firmly grounded in the traditional plot style campaigns. The last major campaign I ran, Realms of Rylon, was of that type and centered around finding the lost pieces of a keystone. As I mentioned in my post-mortem, it was both a blessing and a curse as it locked in a lot of items but did give a chance for creativity.

With a sandbox game the players are more in control and need to commuicate what it is that they are interested in doing. From my side of the screen I better have a lot of material to pull from to make that happen (more on that in a minute).

2. Having a source of material for backstory

The campaign I’m working up will once again take place in the Realms of Rylon but during a period of time after when the last campaign would have ended (the last one died on the vine). So while a lot will be different I can use my existing notes and ideas from my last run to augment what I’m coming up with. It’ll also help lend a sense of history to the campaign, something that most of the players enjoy.

3. Lots of material to create

This is the big nut to crack – I need to get the whole campaign area up and running prior to the start of actual gaming. When you’re running a plot driven campaign you can leave a lot of the side details out, if it doesn’t directly realte to the main plot you can leave it off the table. This isn’t necessarily true with a sandbox – the more details and material you have at your disposal the shorter the downtime when the players decided the want to go “off map.”

4. Another shot at a long term campaign

It’s been years since my group has played in a long term campaign and while I can’t speak for others I do miss it. The development of characters, the reoccuring cast of non-player characters, the victories, the defeats, and of course the spoils are all elements I miss in the short runs we’ve done since Rylon was first run.

5. Running the game from the laptop

This one is a personal goal and an extension of everything else in my life. I’ve gone digitial with just about everything at this stage and I feel that I should be able to do the same with my gaming. This is also a tough nut to crack as once you commit to a tool you have to stick with it – or the tool has to provide an easy method of exporting your data into a form that you can take elsewhere.

So there it is, my thoughts and plan for getting back into the game.

Are you planning to run a new campaign or game this year? Why not share it in the comments below.

This post was written for the first annual New Year, New Game blog carnival hosted by Gnome Stew as part of the 2012 New Year, New Game challenge.

 
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Six years old today – State of the Blog

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Scot Newbury

Another year has passed and of Dice and Dragons has reached the age of six – Happy Birthday!

One of the nice things about birthdays is that they come every year and you can make them as special or as bland as you want. Over the last six years I’ve mentioned this milestone on occasion, usually with little fanfare and more often than not without the cake. So this year I’ve decided to make it into something of an important item and will now use the occasion for an annual State of the Blog post which will include not only blog related items but my own RPG goals as well.

Last year I mentioned some goals that I for set for myself to strive and I think it’s an appropriate time to take a look at how I did, share some of the traffic data I’ve collected over the last 12 months, and set some new goals.

Last year’s goals:

  1. Game more – I set a goal of having 12 sessions of gaming in 2011 as my group has been out of the RPG arena for a while and more into card and board games. Unfortuately I missed the mark on this one and there are a number of reasons for this but I think the single biggest is that no one really took the ownership of the GM chair. I was planning to sit in that chair again in 2011 but when it came time what I had planned didn’t really fit the wants and needs of the group so it fizzled after a mere three sessions. Of note is I did get a single session in with my kids this year to start their RPG education, I’ll count that as an unplanned high point. I’ll be adding this goal again in 2012.
  2. Post once a week – another miss. I’m not sure why but I have some ideas as to the cause of the famine of posts on this blog. I took a quick count and in total I posted just eight times (including this one) in the last year, not exactly a stellar performance. I could make any number of excuses but I won’t I’ll just say that only hitting 15% of the mark just won’t cut it.
  3. Publish an eBook – okay, that makes it a perfect game as I missed on this one as well. To be honest while I did toy with a few ideas I never really settled on any of them and didn’t put my backside in the chair to do it.

The statistics:

As a lot of other sites do I have Google Analytics running to track traffic statistics so I can not only see how I’m doing but also give me some insight into what folks are looking at, how long they’re on the site, and be able to do some comparisons over time. For those that have been around the site for a while know that the site has changed domain homes three times and with each change the data was cleared and reset so I’m only looking at data from roughly July 1, 2009 when I announced that the blog was still alive and for the purposes of this posting I’m only including data from the last 12 months.

Total visits: 7,289

In the grand scheme of things that not a lot but considering that the blog had very few posts and shifted locations roughly six months prior to the data we’re looking at I think it’s off to a good start.

Pageviews: 11,238 (1.54/visit)

Again, I know that this is a relatively small number and overall I’m happy with it given my comments above. The figure I would like to definitely see improved is the number of page views per visit – there’s a lot of material on the blog and it would appear I need to do a better job of making it accessible.

Top five posts of the last 12 months

The last item I want to include in my review are the top five posts of the past year as I think it’ll be interesting to see how this list changes from year to year (if it changes at all).

  1. Encounter Idea No. 2 – The Cat: This was the second posting I did in a series on encounters (sort of obvious from the title) and gathered 18% of the pageview traffic.
  2. A Fighter, a Wizard and a Bard walk into a bar . . .: This was a posting I did in response to my first, and so far only, gaming session with my kids and sheds a little light on the experience. This post gathered 8.5% of the pageview traffic.
  3. Encounter Idea No. 20 – The Undertaker: Another posting from the encounter series, this one pulled in 7.4% of the pageview traffic.
  4. Build your campaign world with your players: This posting introduced an interesting cooperative system for building campaign worlds with a history and managed 6.8% of the pageview traffic.
  5. Closing plot doors: Rounding out the top five is a short post that makes a simple suggestion of tracking things so you can close them. This short post pulled in a respectable 5% of the pageview traffic.

I will note two honorable mentions, the Encounter Ideas Page and the blog’s Home Page both managed enough traffic to be included in the top five but as I wanted it to be the top five posts they weren’t included in the above list.

So now that we’ve looked at how I did with last year’s goals and we’ve taken a snapshot of where the blog stands, it’s time to set some goals for the upcoming year.

Goals for 2012

  1. Post more frequently – Yes, I know this was a goal for last year and with only eight post in the last 12 months (including this one) I think it’s safe to say I need to put it in front of me again. This year I will once again set the bar at 52 posts (one a week on average).
  2. Game more frequently – Again a repeat goal but I think it’s important to put it up on the wall and this year do something about it. My group is interested in playing in more of a ‘sandbox’ style of campaign so that’s what I’m going to endevor to do – I just need to build it first. I’m going to again put this goal at 12 sessions.
  3. Increase blog traffic by 10% – Last year I didn’t set a traffic related goal as I was only six months into this domain and still working my way along getting all the kinks worked out. This year I’m going to build upon last year’s numbers and shoot to bring the visitor count up to about 8,000 for the year.
  4. Participate in a blog carnival – Every month the RPG community has a blog carnival where they pick a topic and everyone is invited to write up a posting on the topic. I have frequently looked at these topics and read some of the posts and feel that I should put a goal of participating in at least one this year.

Like last year I’m keeping the goal list small as life frequently gets in the way of what I’m trying to do and let’s face it, life is way more important than rolling some dice on the table (unless you get paid to do it).

Are you going (or have already set) goals for the upcoming year? Why not share a link or the goals themselves in the comments below.

May your dice roll well.

 
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A Fighter, A Wizard and a Bard walk into a bar . . . .

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Scot Newbury

No, there’s no punchline coming, and to be honest there wasn’t a bar but there was a fighter, wizard, and bard involved – played by my three children. That’s right the next generation of my clan has started their journey into role-playing games and it was both a high point and a low point so I thought I would share some of what I learned.

Remember your audience

A pair of ten year olds (yes I have twins) and a soon to be twelve year old, is not the same audience that most of us game with. It’s important that when you game with kids that you tone things done in some areas and pump it up in other areas. For my kids they really liked the dice rolling (big surprise) so I tried to give them lots of opportunities to roll. They also seem to understand the whole role-playing aspect which I hope continues as they’ll enjoy the game more (IMHO).

Divide and conquer

Note to self, never, never, never, have all three create their characters at the same time again. I wanted to have the kids create their characters, to give them a sense of ownership and to introduce them to some of the mechanics that would be used later in the game. Good idea on paper, bad execution wise. After rolling stats things bogged down and while we managed to cover the basics attention spans were tested. In the future I’ll plan on some time with each of them to build characters and to flesh the current ones out.

Water down the rules

After looking at some of the various options out there I decided that we would jump in at the deep end of the pool and go with Pathfinder, my group’s RPG of choice. What I didn’t do was go through all the skill decisions, feat selections, spell selections, you get the point. I would give the kids some options and they would choose from them or in some cases I selected an item for them and showed them where to place it on their sheet. The did all the number work, I just helped supply them in the right spots.

Timing is everything.

Or rather the amount of time is everything. The session, while short for an adult group was a bit on the long side for the kids. Our next session will be a little shorter and have a lot more for them to do – dice rolling in particular. The boys have asked about the game a lot over the years so I know there’s more sessions coming, so I plan to keep it to about an hour and keep the action flowing.

It will be interesting to see how things continue and if they stick with it, which I hope they do. Role-playing games are a good way of building problem solving, math, and reading skills as well as build imaginative thinking all good traits that will serve anyone as they grow older.

Besides, they might actually want to hang out with “the old man” as they get older as well.

May your dice roll well.

 
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Site work underway

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Scot Newbury

I mentioned on Google+ last night I’ve decided that the categories and post tags on this site needed an overhaul and I’ve already started that work and wanted to pass that information along.

Please bear with me while I work through this process. While there aren’t many posts to work with, roughly 260, it is still a time consuming process. I’m starting with eliminating those categories and tags that just don’t seem to make sense or have a relativly small number of posts. Following the weeding process I’m going to examine all the posts, starting at the begining, and determining if they are classified properly and if needed, post an update to them and/or expand on them. The say that hind-sight is 20/20 so, since I can make changes I will if I think it’ll make the post and blog better.

When this is all done my goal is to have each post have a single category and at least one tag to help further clarify what the subject is. This should make it easier for everyone to find things (including me) and keep me more on track as I add material.

Also during this time I’m going to be adding some needed items, like a policy’s page, tweak a few things that run in the background and do some general clean up.

While all of this is going on feel free to post any suggestions for the site and if you find something that doesn’t work or has gone missing please post about it below so I can either fix it or explain what’s going on – sometimes I forget that others are seeing the work being done.

May your dice roll well.

 
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Happy Birthday Gary Gygax

Posted on July 27, 2011 by Scot Newbury

For gamers around the world today is a special day as it celebrates the birth of Gary Gygax the man most consider the father of role-playing games and the original Dungeon Master.

When Gary was called from the gaming table in 2008 many of us mourned his passing but today should be a day of reflecting on all those things which we have been allowed to enjoy due to him – please take a minute to do so, and if you feel like sharing please do so in the comments below.

I would also like to pass along that there is monument in the works for Gary. The Gygax Memorial Fund is heading up that effort, visit their website, http://www.gygaxmemorialfund.com to learn more about this project and how you can help.

May your dice roll well.

 
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Build your campaign world with your players

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Scot Newbury

Gamemasters everywhere enjoy creating their campaign worlds from naming people and places to coming up with maps. It’s considered by some a badge of honor, a rite of passage – but why should the GM have all the fun?

What if there was a way to include your players when you sat down to build the world?

There is, it’s called Dawn of Worlds.

Dawn of Worlds is a cooperative system for building worlds where everyone gets to have a say in how the world comes into being and how it grows over time. In a nutshell, everyone that participates is considered a god taking part in the world’s creation which spans three ages. In the first age the geography is determined, in the second age, the races are developed and in the third age politics, war and learning move to the front thus give the world a history that everyone had a hand in.

Why would you, as a GM, want to use this system? Two words – player buy-in.

By taking the time to work through something like this the players truly become interested in the world. They understand why things are the way they are, and character backgrounds can be developed that will be consistent with the world they will be played in.

In short, it should make for a better gaming experience for all.

Have you used Dawn of Worlds or something similar with your group? If so, please share in the comments.

May your dice roll well.

 
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A Twitter stream for the Blog

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Scot Newbury

This past week I decided that I needed to break up my Twitter activity, not because I tweet a lot but because I felt that by separating certain things folks could follow the accounts they want to get the information they want.

Thus, I now have three Twitter accounts:

@scotnewbury – this is my main account, and the one most of you follow. If you’re okay getting tidbits about my life, what I’m up to, gaming items, or what I’m reading this is the account to follow. Please kept in mind that that this account is not centered around any given subject matter so you’ll never know what’s coming. You will hear about the posts on my blogs but it won’t necessarily be the moment they go live, so please keep that in mind.

@ofdicendragons – this account is for this blog. If you’d like to know when a new post goes up or when something specific happens regarding this blog – this is the account you want.

@newburyonline – this account is for my personal blog, Newbury Online. centered around role-playing games. If you want to keep up on what’s going on with that blog then this is the account for you.

I hope this makes life a little easier for everyone, now you can follow the Twitter feed that best suits you.

If you think I’m nuts to do this or if you think this is a great idea please sound off in the comments.

 
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Gnomes beat the Kobolds – enjoy the rewards!

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Scot Newbury

Those guys with the pointy red hats have won another victory, this time over the Kobolds of Kobold Quarterly and we get a chance to enjoy the spoils!

From now until February 9th, 2011, you can down load, for free, a past issue of Kobold Quarterly and enjoy all the goodness it contains from the likes of Mike Mearls, Robin Laws, Jason Buhlman, and others. This issue up for grabs includes an article on the ecology of the Vampire, Paragon Paths for some of the monster PC races, a Pathfinder Core class, the Spell-less Ranger, and Monte Cook’s Game Theories.

Don’t wait as this is a limited time offer – grab a copy and enjoy.

May your dice roll well.

 
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GameMastery Guide – First Impression

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Scot Newbury

“You only get one first impression.”

This week I finally broke down and picked up a copy of theGameMastery Guide for the Pathfinder system. I decided that it was about time as I am currently trying to get a Pathfinder game off the ground and thought this would be a good place to start. I haven’t had a lot of time to spend with the book so far but from what I’ve looked at I have to admit I like.

The contents are laid out well and I like the ‘toolbox’ approach that’s used frequently in the book. This is a book that speaks to a GM, both novice and veteran, and gives them tools and ideas to use in taking their game to the next level. The book spans players, characters (yes they are different), adventure construction, world building and a host of topics they list as advanced.

I’m looking forward to digging into the book over the next few weeks and using it in my sessions to come.

Do you own a copy of the GameMastery Guide? If so, share your thoughts in the comments below.

May your dice roll well.

 
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Five years old today!

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Scot Newbury

Today marks the 5th anniversary for of Dice and Dragons and it’s been an interesting five years to say the least. In my last post, which was my 250th, I touched on some of my favorite posts over the years, I won’t go back over that ground again but would encourage you to take a look at it if you haven’t already.

As we’re at the end of the year, it is also that time when everyone typically looks back over the year and then looks forward and sets goals for the upcoming year – it’s something I’ve done from time to tme but never really focused on it when it came to my RPG life but I was inspired by Johnn Four’s recent post at Campaign Mastery, John’s 2010 Year in Review, and thought I would take a stab at it.

So, here are my 2011 RPG Goals

  1. Game more
    I have a regular gaming group but over the last few years we’ve started playing more card and board games rather than RPG, that’s not a bad thing but I do miss the roll of the dice and the storytelling – we use to game 3-4 sessions a month now it’s more like once session every 3-4 months. I know goals are suppose to be measurable (that SMART goal system they beat into me over the years) so I tag this at 12 session this year.
  2. Post once a week
    Back in July I announced that the blog was still alive but then at the end of September I stopped posting again. I’m not really sure why that happened but rather than dwell on it I’m going to push forward and set a new goal, 52 posts (1 a week) in 2011.
  3. Publish an eBook
    For some that know me, they’ve heard that frequently said, “I should publish an eBook.” Time to start putting the money where my mouth is and put something out – now all I have to do is figure out the topic and all the logistics.

While I’m sure I could come up with more, I’m going to stop with those three. I’ve learned over the last few years that life has a funny way of injecting itself in odd ways to create “opportunities to excel” and as Murphy is my constant co-pilot I want to leave room to add, subtract or modify things a bit.

Those are my goals, what are your?

May your dice roll well.

 
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