Articles tagged with D&D

A Slime Draws Near. Command?

posted by perich on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 7:07am

When we talk about video game RPGs—as opposed to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, or roleplaying performance like acting or improv theater—we’re talking about a set of games with recognizable characteristics. They may be lines of monochrome text, like the original Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork. They might be dungeon crawls with sizable parties, like the Might & Magic series or Dragon Quest. They might be the world-spanning epics we’ve come to associate with Japan, like the Final Fantasy saga. These games cover a disparate range of play styles, play experiences and settings, yet everyone calls them RPGs.

Why?

For one thing, the original console RPGs – Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and the like – were all intended to emulate other things that we called RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons. So calling them the same thing made sense: this is just like the RPG you play with your friends, only you’re playing it on a Nintendo. Even if later games like the Final Fantasy series weren’t meant to emulate the D&D experience, they had evolved from games that had. So we can trace every console RPG through a chain of descendants back to the original tabletop RPGs that inspired them.

And yet.

Overthinking Lost: Episodes 3.9-3.16

posted by mlawski on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 6:31am

NikkiPauloEverybody told me that season three of Lost was kinda sucky.  It got better eventually, they said, but the beginning was just not as good.  Only after episode 14 did things get back on track.

So I watched episode 14: “Exposé.”  It was a weird episode.  It almost seemed experimental.  It left a bad taste in my mouth.  When I looked it up on Wikipedia, the section labeled “Reception” said the fans and critics didn’t much care for it, either.

So of course I said, “I’m going to write a blog post about ‘Exposé!’”  The first question is, “Why don’t I like it?”  The second question is, “What does it say about Lost?”

But, first, the summaries of the episodes I watched last week, to refresh your memories…

Dungeons & Democrats

posted by lee on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 7:34am

Robert Mugabe may be a Fighter, but is Barack Obama a 6525th level cleric?  Because that’s apparently what it would take to cast a “World Racial Healing Spell.”  That’s right, the worlds of politics and Dungeons and Dragons have collided on the campaign trail.

Robert Mugabe Officially A Fighter

posted by fenzel on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 6:55am
Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe has been finally and officially stripped of his knighthood by staggeringly lenient Dungeon Master Queen Elizabeth II.

This image is aligned lawful evil. Also center.

This makes Mugabe officially a fighter, which is probably the class he should have been all along.

But before we look forward at the next few years of borderline-genocidal min-maxing that Mugabe will bring to his beleaguered nation once he is declared the winner of last week’s joke election (as of this writing, the votes hadn’t been counted, but, oops, SPOILER ALERT!), let’s take a look at what Mugabe loses along with his Paladin class, and what he did to let it slip away –