cellio | Entries tagged with dnd

Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a site for writers, gamers, and others who build settings and have questions about getting the details right. Questions cover a wide variety of topics -- astronomy, biology, chemistry, sociology, urban planning, creature design, magic, and more. Last month we launched a blog for the kinds of posts that don't really fit the Q&A format so well.

One of the requests from the community was posts about how, as a writer or GM, to effectively reveal the interesting details of your world, so you're not just presenting big blobs of exposition or confusing the heck out of people. Some years ago I played in a D&D game that did this really well (run by

ralphmelton), so I've started a series of posts about what I learned from that.

Here are the first two: Revelation for RPGs 1: Setting the Stage and Revelation for RPGs 2: The Written Word. Future articles will cover NPCs (there are lots of people in the world who aren't your players' characters; use them well), player meta-game contributions (in this case an in-character journal), prophecy & visions, and geography, at least.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and say you want a set, and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

alaricmacconnal gave me: Pittsburgh, writing, your favorite song, chicken, D&D, knowledge, and al-Andaluz.

( Read more... )

This parlor game comes via

talvinamarich:

Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

He gave me: Lisp, On the Mark, Accessibility, Books, Role-Playing Games, Filk, Faroe Islands (one of these things is not like the others).

( Read more... )

Elsewhere, in a locked entry, a game designer asked what game designers ought to be doing to market role-playing games to women. (Women gamers are definitely a minority.) I wanted to record my (slightly-edited) reply to him. (If this post generates discussion, I'll probably point the original poster at it. This post is public.)

What got me into RPGs, in high school, was that it was a natural outgrowth of the books I was reading. SF&F nerd ostracized by the "cool" kids was the right basis, as it turned out. I, not the guys around me, was the instigator.

Once I got to college I found games to play in, all run by men, and I played rather than running for many years. (As a self-taught GM I was pretty terrible at it.) I was often the only woman in the group despite trying to draw female friends in. I didn't try to analyze it much then; I chalked it up to geek/non-geek rather than male/female. (I didn't know too many female geeks.) There wasn't much "R" in the RPGs I was playing at the time, by the way. More about that later.

More recently, I've seen the "associate" effect [that somebody else wrote about] dominate -- a woman who plays in the game because her husband does, etc. I don't think it's a new trend; I think it's just that I'm now in a position to run into it more. The most recent campaign I played in started with three women (among seven players): one was a not-very-interested wife of a gamer and both of them drifted away after one session; one was the wife of the GM and she was very interested but had a low threshold for rules-geeking; and I was the third. The two women who stuck around both engaged most with (1) storytelling and (2) interesting magic (not just direct-damage spells, though we used those too). I should note that I personally detest games like "Once Upon a Time", but I love the cooperative storytelling of a campaign with a plot and an arc through it. (What's the difference? Maybe the pace? Dunno.) I liked pure-hack-and-slash games when I was in college, but now they don't draw me. I want to craft a three-dimensional character who shares an interesting world with other non-cardboard characters.

To market to women like the two of us, then, emphasize the power of the system to tell interesting stories, to allow character development that isn't pure-optimization stat-wrangling, and throw in some interesting magic. Oh, and don't make the rules so complicated that they get in the way of the story; D&D 3.0/3.5 had its flaws but combat was smooth and spell effects were easy to calculate, and that's huge. I walked out of the only game of Traveller I ever played an hour into character creation because the whole thing was just too complicated. (Bookkeeping is fine -- RuneQuest! was one of my favorite RPGs, back in the day -- but it has to stay in the background.)

So that's one woman's view, for what that's worth.

I commend this response to a discussion about optimizing RPG characters, by

akitrom, to my role-playing-gamer friends. This captures a big part of what made

ralph_dnd such a fun campaign: it's primarily about the character development, not the power development.

When I want to play an optimization game, I'll go for one of the German-style games of that sort, like El Grande or Merchants of Amsterdam or Hermagore. Optimization games can be fun for several hours. But when I play D&D (or similar games), that's not the kind of game I'm looking for.

Ralph's game ended several years ago, and I still enjoy remembering and telling stories from it. I've played in, and enjoyed at the time, RPGs that were less about character and more about optimizing power; I don't even remember the names of most of the characters I played in those games. I enjoyed it then, but it didn't stick and it's not very interesting to me now. What attracts me now is the role part of "role-playing game".

Which is kind of funny because I'm a pretty inhibited player, and not very good at role-playing, until I've been with a group and a set of characters for a while. My character in Ralph's game was pretty under-developed for the first several months, while some others sprung to life in the first session or two. Keeping the game journal actually helped a lot.

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Today I played in a test run of D&D fourth edition. None of us (except maybe the GM) had read all the rules in advance, though all but one of us had played extensively under the third-edition rules (3.0 and 3.5). And the GM had a module with pre-fab characters and quick-start rules, which is what we played.

It's different from third edition. Better? Worse? Don't know yet -- just different, with some interesting twists. We'll need to play more before I can make that judgement.

They have made first-level characters much more effective than in previous editions. That's a win in my opinion; it used to be that first-level characters were both fragile and lightly-powered, so you'd start an adventure, have one fight, hole up somewhere to lick your wounds, try again the next day, and so on. One bad role could send a healthy character into near-death (or actual death, if the party couldn't act immediately to intervene). Heroics were pretty much impossible.

Contrast this with the following sequence involving my first-level dwarf fighter under the new rules. The enemies were a priest with half a dozen underlings. They ambushed us and the priest opened by attacking my character with a spell. (And the underlings threw spears and stuff.) This knocked me down almost to half my strength (which is to say, down to 16 of 31 hit points). Our cleric gave me a quick burst of healing and I charged the priest, hitting him but not hard enough to kill him (no surprise there). In the next round the following happened, in order: the priest and about four underlings attacked me, knocking me into negative hit points (and to the ground); another party member attacked the priest from the other side and pushed him into my spot on the board (so he was standing over me); another party member gave me some (ranged?) healing that brought me back to consciousness; I, from the ground, made a big power attack (this character's once-per-day special attack), killing the priest and sending him flying; I stood up, looked at the line of underlings, and said "who's next?". It was fun. :-) And it was fun that I don't think would have been possible under previous editions.

(Now, mind, D&D is as unrealistic as it ever was: I asked if I could make that attack, the GM (and other players) concurred that it was legal, and I said "let me be clear: my dwarf is going to make a big power attack from the ground... with his two-handed maul?". You've got to be willing to suspend some disbelief to play this game, but if you are, it can be fun.)

( more rules and analysis )

( SCA, D&D, Pikestaff, Pennsic house, sandwiches )

Yesterday we played the penultimate game of our D&D campaign, and it was wonderful. I've never before played in a long-term campaign that had an overall story from beginning to end; we didn't know it had a single story at the beginning, but looking back on it it's obvious that Ralph had planted clues in the very first session. This was very neat. I guess it's sort of like writing a series of books or scripts that span years, with the additional complication that you have players who may take your plot and turn it sideways. I don't know if I'd be able to do that.

( plot stuff )

I don't know how soon I'll be able to bring my character's in-character journal up to date, but I didn't want to let this game pass without comment.

I'm a little sad now that this game is ending, but on the other hand, it would be a much weaker story if it didn't have an end. Maybe every now and then we can do some one-shot reunion adventures or something.

Welcome to LJ,

osewalrus (aka

hfeld_blog).

Last night's D&D game was fun (though long). The campaign will be ending soon, and that makes me sad even though it's necessary. Ralph set out, four years ago, to play out a particular story arc, and we're almost done. We've had some great moments, and we have some good story yet to come. I wonder what we'll do when it's all over.

We're nearly done watching Wonderfalls, a half-season TV show we borrowed on DVD. The first half-dozen episodes were wacky and quirky in a fun way, and on that basis we bought a copy for a friend as a gift. The last few episodes have been growing more dark and weird. While I know that the decision to kill it was made by episode #4 (that's all that aired), I'm not sure the outcome would have differed if the entire run had been allowed to air. But then, maybe something's coming in the last episode to tie it all up; we'll see.

From the "just shoot me now" department: We got a glimpse of the new time-tracking system we'll have to use at work starting in a couple weeks. The first sign that this would not meet our usual high standards for user interfaces came in the text shown in the desktop icon: "3270". Yup -- text-based COBOL system, no shortcuts, no UI brains. Whee.

One WallMart now requires employees to commit to work any shift, 24x7, or be fired (link from revlaniep). Got kids with specific day-care hours? Have a problem working on the sabbath? Tough noogies. I found this quote from the article ironic: "The officials who did know were attending a conference on diversity and could not be reached, he said." Diversity, huh?

Shabbat was also the last day of Pesach (a holiday), so our informal minyan didn't meet in favor of a holiday service at the later time. After the service another regular pointed out to me that while all our other services have gradually changed over the last few years to include more Hebrew, less repetition (in English), and more-accessible music, our holiday service has stayed pretty much the same all along. She's right, but for something that only happens a few times a year I'm not sure how much I want to worry about it. Because this service has Yizkor (memorial prayers), this service particularly attracts a demographic that doesn't show up often otherwise. They're older and more inclined toward "classical reform"; for a few days a year I can just wait for this portion of the congregation to gradually fade away.

There are special torah readings for the holidays (that is, we break the weekly cycle). The last day of Pesach gets the end of the exodus story, with the scene at the sea of reeds. It struck me during the reading that this passage is a pretty good argument for human authorship of the torah. Think about it: God persuades Paro to pursue, interferes with their ability to do so, performs a miracle, and when the Egyptians try to give up and flee, recognizing God's obvious superior might, God picks them up and flings them into the sea, wiping out every last one of them. That sounds pretty vengeful (contrary to the famous midrash about God reprimanding the angels for rejoicing), and it sounds like just the sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy an underdog would write. Mind, I am not actually making this argument (I have different non-orthodox beliefs about that), but it struck me pretty hard during the reading. How odd -- it's not like I haven't heard/read this passage many times before.

Saturday afternoon/evening we had an exciting D&D game. There's some stuff in the game journal about it. I'm way behind on my own entries there; must catch up soon. What made the game especially fun was the good role-playing and scene-painting from everyone there. It's neat when things click.

I don't keep extra days of holidays so Pesach ended for me last night. This morning I had french toast. Mmm. :-) (Random food aside: does brisket, already cooked and in sauce, freeze well?)

This afternoon we visited with my parents. For our anniversary they bought us a Pomerantz Wine Pro cork remover that is a joy to behold (and to use). They found a nice bottle of kosher wine to go with it too; I didn't know that stores in their area carried anything but Manischevitz. I test-drove it tonight with a bottle of Lindeman's (lambic ale, capped and corked and a real struggle for me in the past), and the cork came right out with no effort on my part. Woot! (I did have to use a cutting board to raise the short lambic bottle to a suitable height, but that's fine.)

Last night's episode of 24 really triggered the "if I were the evil overlord and my enemy had delivered himself into my hands I'd just shoot him" reflex. I'm just saying.

Last night's D&D game marked the temporary end of a major arc. We succeeded in killing the evil vampires, but the big nasty one did not in fact crumble to dust when exposed to sunlight, or running water, or both, and a stake through the heart seems distressingly temporary. Whee. So we still have to worry about him. The fight was exciting and we managed to get out alive (though injured in not-entirely-recoverable ways). I expect some good character journal entries from the last several game sessions; I hope to get them written soon.

Thursday night Dani and I head to Silver Spring where we will, with several friends, celebrate a victory over a different evil overlord by consuming vast quantities of food and drink. Someone once said that most Jewish holidays can be reduced to "they tried to kill us; we won; let's eat", and with Purim that's really true. :-)

HP sent me a rebate check for $50. The problem is that they owed me a rebate check for $150 according to CompUSA, and CompUSA itself still owes me $100. The CompUSA folks aren't overlords, but they might well be evil. Time will tell.

Fun game tonight. As much as, last session, my character couldn't seem to do anything right, tonight I was on. Ok, I hit a low of 7 hit points (from 88), but it still felt like everything was clicking.

We're in the middle of a big adventure that will be about half an hour of game time but several weeks of real time, so it'll be a while before any of this shows up in my character's journal. But I want to write about some of it now, so here we go.

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The weather has been strange lately. Aside from a couple of very minor glitches, the temperature began rising Monday morning and continued doing so for 48 hours. Nights were warmer than the previous days, twice. The temperature then dropped all day today (and is still doing so). Weird!

We played D&D last night. Third edition is inconsistent in one way -- usually high die rolls are good, except when determining whether something goes wrong during teleports. Those were my only high rolls of the night. Bugger. Well, that's what healing spells are for and third time's a charm, I guess. (I have an in-character explanation for why this happened at this particular time, but the out-of-character explanation is "Monica's dice lice were in open revolt".)

I talked with our associate rabbi this morning. Our senior rabbi, who leads the informal Shabbat morning service, isn't going to be there this week or next, so I had to find out if the associate rabbi is planning to take over or if we're supposed to take care of it on our own. It turns out that he would be delighted to just be a congregant and have us lead things (he's not a regular so he doesn't know the routine very well). He views it as a good learning opportunity for some of the folks in the group. Ok, now I don't need to find a way to make that suggestion. :-) This will probably strike some people as weird ("wait, there's a rabbi here but he's not in charge?!"), but that's actually perfectly normal in Judaism. Any competent adult can lead. So we'll do that for a couple weeks and see what happens. (Fortunately, I have two people I can tap for torah reading on short notice.)

( Judaism, travel, D&D, life changes, cooking )

The D&D game I play in has a definite story, and while the GM has sometimes been frustrated by unpredictable players not going in the directions he envisioned, it's a very cooperative game. We all want to tell a good story. Recently, we had every expectation of reaching a local climax with lots of drama and exposition -- and then the dice interfered.

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Tonight's D&D game (fun game, but more about that later) involved a big fight (a duel of sorts), which we'd been able to plan for in advance. The result of this has been a lot of email over the last week or so, which has been interesting. And because some of us are geeks, part of that volume of email has been dedicated to a discussion of probability theory.

The opponents had proposed entering the arena with no preparatory spells cast and then rolling dice each round to see when to start the attack. (Until then we'd be able to take defensive measures.) This led to a discussion of how many rounds of prep to expect for any given die-rolling proposal. (That's "expect" as in "expected value", not "expect" as in "really think this will happen every time", of course.)

This is a simple probability problem, if you're up on your probability theory. The three people who explicitly tried to answer the question used three different approaches.

I, being rather distant in time from formal math of any sort, took the intuitive approach: for N equally-probable outcomes, the expected value is N/2. (I'll justify this error in comments if asked. There was actual reasoning behind it, not just a guess.) Ralph wrote a perl script to run simulations, and came up with the same results as Kevin, who applied formal theory. Sure, it's obvious that the answer is log(0.5)/log(1-1/N), right? Um, yeah. Sure. Whatever you say. If he didn't have the perl script backing him up, I'd be more argumentative.

I think this is an illustration of why formal math and I do not get along. I started college life as a math major, but it didn't stick. I'm just fine if I can relate a theory to actual facts I can really observe and understand, but if it's all "sure, whatever you say" to me, then I have trouble conjuring up the correct invocations from memory on demand, and that's what the exams were all about. In a real-world context I do not yet understand why the probability of a 1-in-10 event is 6.6 rather than 5.5. [Edited to add: Sloppy writing -- I meant the expected number of trials before a 1-in-10 event occurs, not the probability.] And if I can't understand it, there's no reasoning involved -- just number-crunching.

This is kind of bizarre when you think about some of the theoretical contexts I'm perfectly comfortable working in. But there you have it: why advanced calculus and everything that followed seemed completely foreign to me.

Oh, as for what actually happened? We wanted to get about 10-11 rounds of prep, so we opted for a match on 2 d20s. The expected value from that would have been 12-13 rounds, which was good enough. It actually went 48. So much for theory. :-)

Saturday was the wedding of two friends, Krista and Ben. The short ceremony was nicely done; I hadn't realized that the groom is a preacher's kid until I saw that his father was conducting the service. Krista got a laugh by looking around the room with a glare when they got to the "if anyone has any objections..." part.

The reception had a higher ratio of SCA people to relatives than I expected. Boy, is it weird seeing SCA people in formal (non-SCA) dress. There was also the challenge of remembering people's real-world names in conversation. :-)

Just in case we didn't get enough food at the reception, there was a post-revel for some of the guests. This group seemed to include the SCA crowd and assorted friends of the bride's family who hadn't all been at the reception. (This party was hosted by the bride's mother.)

Over the weekend Dani's computer died. It had been sending up warning flares for a while, so this was not a complete surprise. So Sunday and Monday he went shopping, and to my surprise actually came home with a machine. Usually we have to special-order computers. (He had started by browsing Dell's site, but they wouldn't even ship until this coming Friday, so he decided to shop locally.) Amidst all this we learned that a party we'd been invited to on Monday, that had then been cancelled, was un-cancelled, but we found out too late to do anything about it. Oh well -- some other time.

Sunday afternoon I got a call from someone at VW who, after confirming that I've bought a car this year, asked if she could pay me $15 to take a customer survey about my experiencies. I told her I'd be delighted to do so. :-) Alas, the survey was more concerned about features than service, but that's ok too.

I began to catch up on the D&D log. (Ralph, I hope to have something posted in the next several days. Sorry for the delay.) I've commented before about how I enjoy the shared-world-fiction aspect of this.

I also pulled together some notes for tomorrow night's Worship meeting, where I'm going to give a summary of this summer's Sh'liach K'hilah program. Half the members of the committee have asked me about this individually, so I don't think people will mind spending meeting time on it. :-) Meanwhile, I've learned that the winter weekend session will be in LA and that it appears it won't actually cost an arm and a leg to get there.

We've been watching DVDs of Babylon 5 and West Wing alternately. We're nearing the ends of seasons 4 and 3 respectively. We have the first season of 24 to watch yet, and season 4 of West Wing ships at the end of the month. At the rate we watch TV, this'll hold us for a while.

Apropos of nothing... this essay by

dglenn on no longer being special in the modern era resonated with me.

Tonight's D&D game was a lot of fun. The party is slogging through some difficult terrain, and the visual imagery has been effective for me (both terrain and monsters). This is going to be a several-days trek that will wear the group down over time, but I think that's the right thing from a story perspective. Sure, if Frodo and Sam had had the ability to teleport straight to the heart of Mordor they would have, but had they done so Lord of the Rings would not be the classic it is. I play these games for story and character, and for me the story demands the trek.

Ever since we moved to our current house I've been building my sukkah using 2x2s, rope, and existing structures (a fence and a trellis). That's nice in a lot of ways, but it's a bit of a challenge to set up alone, and some of my infrastructure is hard to use. Meanwhile, a couple years ago our Pennsic group got a new shower frame made out of no-tools-required pipes that just slot together, and I think that's pretty spiffy. So today I ordered a tubular sukkah -- passing on their walls, as I've prefer the lattice I've been using for that. This gives me a free-standing sukkah that should go together very easily. Woo hoo. Who wants to come for dinner during the festival?

It was nice to get back to Sunday dinner after missing a few due to Pennsic. We began to see distant flashes of lightning not long after we finished eating; then we started to see really impressive lightning bolts with lots of forking that just lit up the sky. It was a very pretty storm (I wish I'd had my camera with me), and the liquid component was short-lived. It did a decent job on the humidity and didn't knock out our power. What more can you ask of a storm?

I moderate a mailing list that's a filter on an unmoderated SCA list. I reject messages that (1) clearly should have been sent privately, (2) are off-topic, (3) are flame-filled, or (4) duplicate other messages (the 17-replies-to-a-FAQ problem). Most of the time, I approve pretty much everything that comes in. But since Pennsic there have been a lot of rejections, first because of an accusation someone made that got a lot of people riled up, but then because of an inane thread on laundry. Yes, laundry. Not just things like how to clean tent canvas, which I believe to be on-topic for an SCA list, but discussion of dividing chores, whether it's ok for men to do laundry (!), horror stories involving bleach, and stuff like that. Sheesh. I hope that ends soon.

The "decompression" from HUC continues, but hasn't spawned more entries yet. There's more stuff in the pipeline, eventually. I met with my rabbi Monday morning and we took a very haphazard tour through the curriculum. He'd read my journal entries, but just sitting down and talking about it was helpful, particularly in thinking about how some of these ideas apply to our own congregation. We talked in vague terms this time; I'll be more organized next time.

Tonight I met with the pianist at our synagogue to go over music for next Friday's service. We had already talked about which pieces, but we hadn't worked out keys. Unfortunately, he's having to transpose for almost everything; fortunately, he's very good at that, and is able to spend a little time polishing. As I predicted, on average I'm comfortable about a fourth below our cantorial soloist. If it were just a step or two I'd fake it. Paul (the pianist) was really nice about it, though.

Tonight I made whitefish (it was sole this time) poached in beer, a trusty favorite. Note to future self: stout doesn't work as well as ale, but is passable. (You want a beer with some umpf for this; pilsners et al need not apply. That's ok; they're good to drink instead.)

Last night's D&D game went well, though I attribute everyone's survival to GM benevolence. We had some fun role-playing that I suspect the GM was forced to wing, and he did a good job with it. Many members of our group believe that taverns are inherently dangerous places to go, but we visited one anyway because, in character, we'd been wandering around in the wilderness for a while, there were dangerous things out there, and Turok was out of beer. :-) This gave opportunities for some very funny role-playing. (While Larissa was trying to be innocuous, Turok was fire-breathing to light his drinks before consuming them. Stuff like that.)

This week's D&D game was nifty. The last several sessions have had some very nice scenery and world-building, thanks to

ralphmelton. The land in which the characters live bears, shall we say, tight relationship to a certain dragon; we've recently been exploring in "Laryn" (tied to sound) and "Optalis" (left as an exercise). Each area has had thematic magics and thematic inhabitants. Next we are heading to the gorge of fire. :-)

I've also been enjoying the character-level developments. I find particularly striking the divergence between two characters. Liandra (lorimelton's character) has a clear place in the world (that's been known all along) and a place to settle down when "all this is over". Larissa (my character) doesn't; it's pretty much established that she can't go home again, but she also has nowhere to go to -- except that there's been a surprise development (surprise to both the character and the player) that could play out interestingly. I've been trying to play Larissa as being a little sad about the future but trying to ignore it because she doesn't want to be jealous of her friend Liandra; I don't know how successful I've been.

The world in which we're playing is rich, and even if that story line doesn't play out, I can think of oodles of things to keep my character busy for her post-campaign life, and even when the game is over I may try to write some of that. (I've been writing some of her story during the campaign, so this would be a continuation.) I've been having a lot of fun with the creative aspects of this that go beyond game sessions.

1. What do you like best about the city where you live now? What do you like least? ( Read more... )

2. What is your impression of Orthodox Judaism "from the outside", as it were? ( Read more... )

3. How did you choose the synagogue you go to?( Read more... )

4. How did you get into RPG and what's your favorite game? ( Read more... )

5. If you could have any job in the world, what would it be? ( Read more... )

1. One of your major "gripes" about your fellow Jews in the Reform movement is that how unsupportive (and at times hostile) they are of those within the movement who choose to be more religiously observant. Why do you think that is? ( Read more... )

2. Both the reform and the reconstructionist movements hold that religious observance of halacha is nonbinding and voluntary -- what I find troubling is that lay reform and reconstructionist Jews often don't have enough of background to make meaningful choices. Do you see this as a problem? ( Read more... )

3. How did you get involved in gaming? What do you enjoy most about it? (I've tried, Lord knows, I've tried and my character is currently riding around in someone's sack.) ( Read more... )

4. Describe your favorite childhood comfort food. ( Read more... )

5. If you were given a year long all expense scholarship for Jewish study, where would you go? ( Read more... )

This came as a complete surprise to me, but my sister would like to attend a Star Trek convention with at least one of her teenage kids. (None of them have ever been to any con.) If anyone has suggestions for ones not too far from Pittsburgh that might appeal to newcomers and not be too expensive, I'll pass the suggestions along. Shore Leave in Baltimore could work, except if I recall correctly the hotel is something well over $100/night, which might be a problem.

It seems a little, I don't know, unnerving that the "eye for an eye" part of the Torah (in Mishpatim) rolls trippingly off the tongue, both musically and textually. It's so smooth and graceful... but hey, at least it's easy to learn. :-)

They gave me an aliya this morning at services. Before reciting the blessings, it is customary for a man to touch the Torah scroll with a corner of his tallit. For a woman, they have you use the sash that's used to tie the scroll shut. But this morning they had temporarily lost track of that sash when it was my turn, and while they were looking for it one of the guys told me to "just wear a tallit already, ok?". This is the first evidence I've seen in ~5 years of going there that it would be considered socially acceptable in that congregation for a woman to wear a tallit. Heh -- learn something new every day.

Tonight's D&D game was fun. We had several combats in rapid succession, and we know there will be more before the characters have time to rest, which lends excitement to the game in excess of the sum of the excitement levels of the individual fights. And we did some fun things in the fights; I was particularly happy when something (probably called a cloaker or the like) enveloped someone and my sorceror -- polymorphed as a troll and flying -- attempted to out-grapple it and pull it off. This rightly failed, as my character is not a warrior, but it was entirely appropriate for her to try. (Similarly, it was entirely appropriate for her to charge into combat with the undead whatever-they-weres and smack them with her undead-hating sword.) I like the fact that the level of paladin gives me flexibility in interesting ways without in any way competing with the party's half-dragon fighter.

1. Why did you pick the hammer dulcimer? ( Read more... )

2. What foods, if any, do you particularly miss from your pre-kosher days? ( Read more... )

3. What's the scariest experience you're willing to talk about in this forum? ( Read more... )

4. What technological advance do you most look forward to in the next ten to twenty years? ( Read more... )

5. I'll return the question, but more broadly: what would you like to get in your next RPG experience? This might include whether you'd be a player or GM, ruleset, genre, tone, character type, whatever. ( Read more... )

Monica

worldbuilding blog: RPG posts

"7 things" #3

parlor game: let's talk about...

women and role-playing games

D&D: character optimization

random bits

D&D fourth edition

interviewed by mikekn

yesterday's D&D game

short takes

weekend

evil overlords (short takes)

D&D tonight

short takes

interviewed by mrpeck

D&D November 20 and 23 (and a fit of future musing)

D&D and probability

weekend bits

last few days

last few days

D&D campaign

interviewed by ichur72

interviewed by cecerose

semi-short takes

interviewed by ralphmelton

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