Month: August 2021

Although I’ve never worked as a MMORPG or other games developer, I have some personal experience of creating pen and paper D&D modules. This has only been for self-publishing on the DMs Guild, with me doing the majority of the work (writing, editing, layout and organising testing) as a hobby activity. So far, the only external deadlines I have had to work to came from community events like the RPG Writer Workshop, so they are as elastic as they need to be based on the free time I have to plug into the project.

As previously noted, I feel I did pretty well on the writing front, 5500 is a good amount to get through. Sadly, as is the norm for me, I prioritised writing over communicating – I barely touched the RPG Writer discord channel this time. In the last two weeks I had a sudden non-creative priority to…

If you look anywhere over on social media, there’s always a big debate going on about how gamers play their games, and if the way they play their games makes them real gamers or not. One of my biggest pet peeves in an argument is about assists being available in games that are meant to be hard.  

The whole debate started one day when gamers had gotten annoyed about cheats, assists, and anything else being available to help you beat a game, as if it meant all of their hard work being said game was for nothing. Here they were playing a game as intended, or how they thought it was intended, and then someone else could come along, play the game in half the time, and no one would be the wiser. This irked many gamers as it meant there was no way to tell who beat the game and how. Which begs the question, do you…

In Dungeons & Dragons culture, Dungeon Masters have a lot of ideas, which often turn to arguments, about what is the *right* way to run the game.

I believe that many of these arguments, whether it’s about fudging dice rolls, having restrictions on who can roll what when, or even the style of adventure in the campaign, all comes down to where you fit on what I’m calling the “Somebody/Anybody Spectrum.” The core of this spectrum, is what you prioritize in your game.

At the end of the day, the biggest priority should be fun, and if you are all having fun, then you’re playing the right way.

It is worth mentioning that some games (games that aren’t D&D which you should explore), are built around one of these ideas, and if you find that you are strongly on one side of the spectrum, you could look into playing those…

Be honest with yourself: are you or have you ever been addicted to video games?

Now, I don’t mean that you like to play games a lot, that you have 1000+ hours on Fortnite, or that your gamerscore is above 100,000. What I’m asking is have you ever had an overwhelming need to play video games to the point where you cannot function without them, and that you’ll put off important tasks just to get your digital fix?

Recently, the Chinese state media declared that video games were a form of “spiritual opium,” using the comparison to the harmful narcotic to argue the reasoning behind their strict regulations on the industry within the country. After the report, shares for the Chinese gaming companies Tencent and NetEase plunged by nearly 10% on the global market.

This isn’t the first accusation that video games can have an addictive quality to…

There used to be many reasons to pre-order a game you wanted before it’s release date. Many reasons that aren’t really around in today’s gaming market. Although it’s 99% unnecessary these days to pre-order upcoming games, I still do it sometimes. It’s still fun to expect something. It’s the same as ordering products online and later checking the shipping updates and getting excited. It’s like a mini-birthday gift for yourself.

Let’s go over some of the reasons why we used to pre-order games:

Guaranteed Copy

This one is very rare, but it did happen a couple of times to me.

There were times when I was younger that I didn’t pre-order a popular game that I wanted and when I arrived at Best Buy, Game Stop or EB Games they were sold out. Yes, this was a rare thing and probably would be an incredibly rare occurrence today, but it…