10 reasons I'm thrilled my child is a role-playing game geek

The following was posted by a friend on facebook and reprinted here with her permission:

I love my 7-year old Dungeons & Dragons, World-of-Warcraft Geek boy!! Here are some of the reasons why role playing games (and [my son]) rock... 

1. Vocabulary Aquisition, using words like adjacent and dexterity if everyday conversations.

2. Leadership and Groupwork Skills, choosing abilities that will help the entire group succeed and choosing actions based on what will benefit the team.

3. Bad Ass Math Practice, subtracting hit points, understanding probability, and quickly tallying the most damage you can do with any combination of dice.

4. History Linkages, knowing way more than necessary about medieval weaponry and armor.

5. Quality Family Time, playing with mom, dad, [aunts and uncles]

6. Computer and Techonology Skills, helping brothers and friends create characters on dad's laptop, surfing the web for information and interesting youtube clips

7. Research, always looking things up in monster manuals and dungeon master's guides

8. Appreciating Mythology and Folklore, look out Homer!

9. Decision-making and good sportsmanship, let the dice fall how they may.

10. Passion, that gets him up at 6:00am on a Saturday so he can tell his mom all about the quest that they will begin that evening. Gotta love when sitting down and talking with mom ranks higher than playing the Wii.

Well said, thanks for letting me share this on my blog.

Follow Your Bliss,

JJ

What's in a Name?

I have recently finished the first two books of Tales of the Dying Earth - The Dying Earth andThe Eyes of the Overworld - and had started a post reviewing these books in light of their implications for D&D. As I went deeper into the subject I found there was too much information to cover in just one post. So this will be the first of a series of posts covering various topics in D&D that came to mind as I read through the Dying Earth series.

One of the first things that struck me about these stories were the names: Turjan, Pandelume,Phandaal, Laccodel, Kandive, T'sais and T'sain, just to name a few. These names are exotic and colorful and truly help to evoke the strangeness of the far future Earth; they help to set the tone.

This is very important when naming NPCs for a campaign. No plain Tom, Dick or Harry will do. Names of nobles should be noble sounding; those of commoners have an earthy ring to them. Sally the bar wench works, Sally the elven princess does not. Take the time to pick names that fit the character. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of name lists on the web. I just did a Google search of "name lists" pulled up 178,000,000 sites. One is bound to have something to spark your interest.

The previous paragraph applies just as much to PCs as it does to NPCs. It may be fun to play Bob the barbarian, but it does nothing to help set a serious tone for the character, but if the style of play you are going for is humorous, then it is a perfect fit.

In the Back to (D&D) Basics campaign I'm currently running, there are clear styles of names to help foster the sense of culture and depth of background. Based on recomendations from GAZ1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos gazetteer, the two main human populations of Karameikos have very different sounding names. Those of the native Traladaran descent have names inspired by central and eastern European countries, while those of the conquering Thyatians have Roman-like names.

Often times the names of characters mentioned in these stories belonged to great and powerful wizards of the day. Their names adorn the spells that they popularized. This brings to mind all the 'name' spells of AD&D1: Melf's Acid Arrow, Bigby's Crushing Fist, Nystul's Magic Aura, etc.Spells like these really tie the magic to the setting. Which would you rather cast - Acid Splash orMelf's Acid Arrow?

Not just the names of the characters but the names of locales were evocative of alien cultures in Tales of the Dying Earth. The lands to the far north: Grodz, Cil, Vull, and the Mountains ofMagnatz; to the south: Ascolais, the Land of the Falling Wall, Kaiin and Scaum Valley. Give just as much care to the lands in your world. Be sure to say them aloud. Some place names I've read in books and games look nice on the page, but I don't have the first clue as to how to pronounce them.

I really like the Karameikos gazetteer because it helps here as well in my current campaign. Many areas have two names: the name originally used by the native Traladaran's and the name used once they were conquered by the Empire of Thyatia. This layering of names helps build a richness of detail that brings the setting to life.

So next time you sit down to roll up a character or create a new locale for your players to explore, give some thought to the name and see what the reactions are.

Follow Your Bliss,

JJ

In The Beginning... (Part 1)

...Gygax & Arneson created Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). And all was right in the realm. Like many gamers of my generation, D&D is where it all started. Although I was not there at the groundbreaking I did arrive soon afterward.

D&D was well established as a cultural phenomenon by the late 1970's, which is when it first showed up on my radar. I have a clear memory of watching a local television program during the mid morning (probably during summer vactation). Featured on the program was a segment about a new game called Dungeons & Dragons. With a state-of-the-art flip-board drawing of a sample dungeon, the presenter discussed the basics of characters, monsters and dungeons.

Amazing, I thought, a game where the 'board' is different everytime you play! In fact, the board is only revealed as you play and each player has a unique character with which to explore this dungeon. Mind blowing. I had to have this game.

Even as a kid I loved games, all kinds of games. I loved games with lots of pieces, or as some have called them, fiddly-bits. The more fiddly-bits, the better the game. Games like Monopoly were ok, but I liked unusual games: Eacape from the Death Star, Happy Days, and the ever chic Welcome Back Kotter - Up Your Nose With A Rubber Hose game (if you don't believe me on the last two, check out the links to boardgamegeek.com and see for yourself). Only a couple of things stood between me and possessing this game: access to a hobby store and money.

As a pre-teen in the late 70's I had two ways of getting arround: my bicycle and the city buses. Growing up in Cleveland there were not many places to safely ride your bike outside of the Metroparks, which were nowhere near me. Not that that stopped me from riding unsafely (like on the I-90 freeway, for example - a story for another time). Though not as economical as my bike, the city buses were by far the safer and farther reaching option. That is, if you knew where you wanted to go.

This may be obvious to most, but there was no Google back then, let alone the Internet. You had to let your fingers do the walking if you were looking for a store you hadnever been to, and the Yellow Pages were not the most well-indexed tomes. That's really beside the point; had I truely wanted to find such a store I would have. The more problematic hurddle was money.

My father was a cobbler (the kind that worked with shoes, not desserts) and my mother a seamstress. They had worked out of a storefront a few miles from our home for a number of years before my father's health started failing. By this time, we were living on the disability checks, my dad's pension from Italy and whatever money my mom could make doing dress and clothing alterations from our home. We lived in a working class neighborhood and it is a testament to my mom's budgeting skills that we were as comforable as we were (somehow that budgeting gene missed me). Needless to say, I couldn't really afford such "frivaless things like games", as my mom would say (translated from Italian). Without money, what is a kid to do?

End Of Part 1

[Note: I will be typing a lot about my various experiences with all the editions of Dungeons & Dragons. To make thinks a little easier on my fingers and hopefully clarify which of the various editions I'm writing about, I plan to use the following abreviations within a post (for the Topic lables I'll replace the '&' with an 'n' since the ampersand won't work in a link):

• D&D - The Dungeons & Dragons RPG phenomenon as a whole
• D&DB - The Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules Set
• D&DX - The Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rules Set
• D&DC - The Dungeons & Dragons Companion Rules Set
• D&DM - The Dungeons & Dragons Master Rules Set
• D&DI - The Dungeons & Dragons Immortals Rules Set
• D&DRC - The Dungeons & Dragons Rules Compendium
• AD&D - The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line as a whole
• AD&D1 - The first edition of Advenced Dungeons & Dragons; subsequent editions will be labeled with the appropriate number; i.e., AD&D2 for second edition, AD&D3, etc.
• OD&D - The original Dungeons & Dragons game release and all of its supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, etc.)

I hope this will help clarify things without making the situation too overly complex. Feedback is always welcome.]

Follow Your Bliss,

JJ

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