Carlos and Ben welcome back special guest J.J. and new guest host Holly. Together they discuss recent movie news, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Path of Exiles, Fiasco the board game, Civilization the board game, and the Game of Thrones board game.
COTB 018 – A Geek Christmas
After a small break Carlos and B.J. return for a Christmas review of gift ideas for the geek in your family. Along the way they talk Justice League speculation, the new Superman and Star Trek trailers, and engage in various other geeky topics.
COTB 017 – The Halloween Special
Carlos and BJ try to do a Halloween themed podcast but get oddly sidetracked by the Lucas Films purchase by Disney and copyright laws as they try valiantly not to bore the audience to death.
Dear Audible: Your DRM sucks
I would love to have the opportunity to easily buy and listen to books in my car. We have a fairly long drive to and from work, and we occasionally take very long drives to visit our families. On the audiobook front, the most popular website appears to be Audible. I tried it once before on a trial basis, and disliked-it-with-prejudice for reasons that will become clear, because not a lot seems to have changed from my earlier experience.
COTB 016 – The all Guild Wars special
Carlos and Ben are joined by Scott and JJ to discuss all things Guild Wars. They cover the game lore, structured pvp, world vs. world, dungeon runs, and they finish with a small economics lesson from Scott on the supply and demand dynamics of the MMO markets.
COTB 015 – The Geeks make the world go around
Carlos and BJ wax philosophical about the weather and wedding anniversaries before diving into recent geek news. BJ pleads for some help with a new campaign idea and is upset with Carlos for not making him aware of a very special Kickstarter campaign.
The Midgard Campaign Setting
The Midgard Campaign Setting has recently been released by Kobold Press.
It’s awesome.
The Midgard Campaign Setting is based on the home campaign world of famed RPG designer Wolfgang Baur. The patronage project started almost two years ago, and much of that time was spent on the Kobold Quarterly forums, exploring, discussing, and creating the various parts of the world in the manner of Open Design. Other lead chapter designers include Jeff Grubb, Brandon Hodge, Christina Stiles, and Dan Voyce. A dozen other folk, including Ed Greenwood, also contribute to design. Among that dozen, I participated when I could (especially early on), and wrote some spells, deities, NPCs, and offered various suggestions in different places. And patrons gave suggestions, feedback, and ideas. So, given all that…
Some Musings on Kobold Press/Open Design
The Midgard Campaign Setting has been released. It’s brilliant. It’s amazing. It’s everything I hoped it would be. I’m proud to have been a part of it, and I have to thank Wolfgang Baur for letting us play with his home campaign setting. I have the PDF, and I’m waiting for the delivery of the hardbacks. I’ll put up a review after they arrive.
Way back in 2010, I mentioned I attended an event at a local gaming store (Dragon’s Lair). I woke up far too early on a Saturday morning so that I could attend the Monte Cook signing. I hadn’t realized it prior to arriving, but after the signing he was also going participate on a panel about game design. I left and got breakfast, fully intending to head home. But then I decided that the panel sounded too interesting to pass up, so returned to the store. Besides Monte Cook, I’d heard of Chris Pramas (founder of Green Ronin), but I wasn’t too familiar with the other folks. The people who had published the Shard RPG were there, as was the lead designer for the steampunk RPG, Tephra. There were also a couple of freelancers writing for Open Design and Paizo– Adam Daigle and Brandon Hodge.
I’ve always found the word “open” interesting. I’ve been a proponent of Open Source and Open Access for some time, and have followed the various open movements colloquially and in my professional and academic work. I found the Open Game License fascinating for a number of reasons I’ve discussed before. So what was Open Design? It seemed to be a way to do collaborative game creation. There was some payment required to get involved, but you received a product at the end, like a preorder, and you gained access to some normally behind-the-scenes aspects of game design. And you could potentially write and get credit for your contributions depending on how the community responded. So I signed up for a project that was using the Pathfinder system, to see what was going on. Although I had been an ardent 3E player, I hadn’t made the leap (well, hop) to Pathfinder.
COTB 014 – Geek news all the time
Carlos and B.J. take some time to catch up after taking another extended hiatus. All corners of the geek world are covered as the boys try desperately to discuss as much news as possible without being side tracked by rants and raves. Carlos succeeds in his normal graceful fashion while B.J. begs for a Mass Effect RPG, throws conspiracy theories out about the retiring of the Bioware founders, and gets a little creepy about Milla Jovovich.
Song of Fire and Ice Roleplaying Game
So, I took a look at Green Ronin’s Song of Fire and Ice Roleplaying Game. I’m actually pretty interested. It’s actually fairly unique (at least among the systems I know) in mechanics. It’s sort of like a lot of things, but doesn’t match any of them.
It’s mainly based on attributes, which is fairly true to the books. Â Your attributes define the number of dice you can roll – 2 is base, 7 is, I think, max. Â When you’re testing, you roll a number of d6 equal to your attribute, and sum them, to try to beat a target number. The interesting bit is the bonus dice piece – skills and training are represented by bonus dice (which can’t exceed your attribute dice). Â But bonus dice are extra – you roll more dice, but still only choose a number of dice equal to your attribute. Â So you get *better* results with bonus dice, but it’s never above what someone can achieve naturally with some luck.