Penny Arcade
Yet another THURSDAY LINK DAY!!!
- More DMing advice from Penny Arcade
- The movie Gattaca is being made into a sci-fi, police procedural TV show. Sound pretty cool!
- How we’ll cope (or not) with the Dollhouse cancellation – the 5 Stages of Grief. But, maybe we’ll get more Buffy?
- Setting up your Mac to play PC games.
- Michael Chabon on breaking out of genre and the role of fan-fiction in popular culture.
- What Stormtroopers do on their day off.
- Some guy at the Guardian reads George R. R. Martin for the first time.
- Robin D. Laws does a great real world RPG inspiration. Maybe we should change the way we do ours?
- i09’s take on what SFF books you might like if you liked some recent movies. It’s a cool idea, done well and the recommend some great books!
- Finally, The Onion A.V. Club gives us more geek fun with their New Cult Canon write up on Army of Darkness, a movie I have never seen but now really want to!
Running your game outside of the session
Gabe from the webcomic Penny Arcade blogged the other day about how his D&D 4e game runs outside of the weekly gaming session. The basic idea is that they continue small situations outside of the game, including skill challenges through a custom online dice roller.
Here’s the example of their emails. It’s pretty GM led, but there’s no reason why it has to be, and seems like a good way to keep the interest in the game high.
I’ve tried to do a few things simialr to this in the past and it’s dependent on player engagement (and, to be fair, player spare time). In my experience there are players who rock at this and people who won’t even bother to respond. Gabe’s lucky he’s got a good group who want to keep going. And of course, the GM is hugely responsible for the level of engagement they players have with the game. But I think it’s a dream of every GM to get players who just want to keep the game going, even between sessions.
Also in comic form
As has been mentioned here before Bioware’s new fantasy RPG, Dragon Age is coming out on PC and Xbox 360 in November. Also with the help of Green Ronin it will be a table top RPG. And now, through Penny Arcade it’s an online comic!
Check out the first 4 pages here, and check back every Friday (North American time) for a new page. It’s pretty cool and looks to be doing a bit on the back story before the game starts.
The best a gamer can get
Really? A razor targeting gamers? I mean come on Gillette, that’s just a bit desperate isn’t it?
Penny Arcade have done a cool comic on this very thing (not surprisingly where I heard about it in the first place).
