Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming

People enjoy being impressed by multilingualism. “Wow, Mary speaks seven languages !” One hears this kind of thing. It sounds amazing. Speaking a lot of languages seems to mean you are especially intelligent. (As I will explain, this is not really so.) If you tested Mary and her seven languages, you would find she is not equally capable in all of them. She’ll have one, or maybe two, main languages of daily use with high fluency and a wide range of expressiveness, but varying and limited degrees of proficiency in the others. It’s cool to be able to order food at a restaurant and to ask for and receive directions in Italian, but that doesn’t mean you can have a profound conversation about your feelings or discuss the aesthetics of nineteenth-century paintings or explain physics in Italian. You know enough to get by in those other languages, and that’s all. It’s also a lot easier to learn to read a language with a dictionary than it is to attain spoken conversational fluency. Peop

 D&D and Indie RPG YouTubers! Yes, you. We know you read a lot of gamer blogs. You should be referring by name to the blogs from which you derive information and content, or even just inspiration. It's a simple courtesy to tip your hat toward the bloggers whose efforts are behind your own. It's not about views. It's about honesty, fairness, kindness, and good manners. It also contributes to a sense of community. Cite your sources and inspirations. It takes very little time.

Sometimes, GMs, you could trust the dice more to work for your game's fiction. Let me explain what I mean. Gamers like to come up with more and more rules to specify outcomes of complex fantasy situations that emerge as we narrate events in the game. It's been a basic impulse since D&D began to make house rules adding complexity to take account of the things players want to know. Where did your arrow hit the barbarian warrior? We want to know. Hit location rules and tables give some answers, but those are complex and can slow play. And then, once we know that the arrow hit the barbarian's leg, or arm, or chest, we want that to matter . More rules pile on to explain how it matters. Instead of making a new game rule or subsystem for each particular situation, or a new ruling, the dice as they are can decide the outcome with the parameters you already have . The parameters for "success" and "failure" with the dice are already fictional. You can just le