Category: Geek Interest

For those of you who are bothering to read blog posts on a Saturday, here’s Day 8 of #RPGaDay2015 – Favorite Appearance of RPGs In The Media.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to indulge in a bit of an old-man “back in MY DAY” moment. Y’see, the damn kids these days don’t know how good they have it. RPGs appear all over the place — featured in major network sitcoms (The Big Bang Theory, The IT Crowd, Community), major stars willing to come right out and say they are gamers (Vin Diesel, Stephen Colbert, the late Robin Williams) — hell, there’s even popular webseries which are entirely devoted to playing games, including RPGs. (Hello, Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana). Well, this was not always the case.

Back when I was a new gamer, gaming was something weird and suspect. This was the height of the “satanic panic”, remember. What little awareness there was of RPGs was religious-loonie-stoked hysteria. Hell, my own Dad — hardly a religious nut — called me from a business trip to ask if “I was OK”, after he’d watched the TV-movie “MAZES AND MONSTERS,” and became concerned that I was engaged in a hobby where I’d go crazy.

So, for me, my favorite appearance of an RPG in the media was this: A short sequence in the early moments of the 1982 Summer blockbuster, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, where the kids play something close to resembling D&D at the kitchen table:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH7pABfm1HQ

Nobody was in costume, nobody was believing that their character was really them, nobody was trying to summon Satan. Just a table full of kids, who looked like me and my friends, doing what we did on a weekly basis. Refreshingly NORMAL. A Spielberg family film, where I could point to that scene and say “that’s what we do. That’s all it is.”

It may not seem like much now, but at the time, it was very important.

So that’s mine. What’s yours?

Here’s Dave Chapman’s video entry for the day, where he discusses his fave:

Welcome to Day 7 of #RPGaDay2015! Today’s subject under discussion: Favorite Free RPG. There are a TON to choose from these days, ranging from System Resource Documents of Open systems (D&D Basic, Pathfinder, FATE, etc.) to DIY Indie projects, to less-than-official PDFs of long-out-of-print games from defunct companies, etc.

For my choice, I’m going to go with a commercial game that is now available for free in it’s complete form — so not a beta playtest version, or an SRD, but a game that used to be for sale, and is now available at no cost. It’s hard to find one out there that is better than the complete D6 System from West End Games. The game system that powered the phenomenal Star Wars Role-playing Game is freely available in it’s most recent form — the entire line! Three different core genre books: D6 Adventure, D6 Fantasy and D6 Space, as well as every supplemental release that West End did for it. All for free, at the link I just provided. Go grab it NOW. What’s even better — the entire system has been declared an Open system, which means that you can design and publish your own D6 products.

So that’s my choice. Let’s check in with Dave Chapman, and his special guest Anita Murray, for today’s video entry!

Here’s the question that I’ve been dreading. Day 6 of #RPGaDay2015: Most Recent RPG Played. Yeah… About that…

The sad truth of the matter is that I haven’t played an RPG, aside from work-related playtests of stuff I’m designing or that my students have developed in my game design studio at the Kansas City Art Institute, for literally years. I think the last time I was actually in a game was a 4th Edition D&D “Essentials” campaign that ran for a couple months back in 2010. Half a friggin’ decade ago. Yeesh.

There have been a few fits and starts since then — mostly character creation and single sessions which never panned out into recurring games, mostly due to scheduling difficulties and such. The One Ring, Marvel Heroes, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. The starter clicked, but the engine never turned over. Most of my friends are spread around the globe, and the ones that are local have all come down with severe cases of Life, making scheduling problematic.

It’s gotten bad enough that I’m seriously contemplating running an online game — something which I’ve never done before. Not sure if it would scratch the same itch, to be honest.

Well — THAT’S a depressing entry! Let’s check in on Dave for his video entry for the day… with special guest, the inimitable James Wallis!