Who's trying to keep the rights - Nintendo or Silicon Knights? Because SK had an obviously-doomed Kickstarter a little while back that looked like an Eternal Darkness remake.

I think the saying is "New things I hate are gimmicks, new things I like are innovations."

See, I look at the lockpick versus tactical nuke as exactly the sort of situation that benefits from that style of approach.

A lot of the big co-ops are doable as single-player games, since ultimately everyone is supposed to be working together. Forbidden Desert (or its predecessor, Forbidden Island) is probably a good starting point. I've managed to convince my Mrs. to try it out on occasion as well, and she's very much not a board gamer,…

Yuck. A few of us came down with mild colds we dubbed The Crud, but I can't imagine trying to trudge through the hall with bronchitis. Sorry to hear that. (But great job getting this coverage despite the illness!)

I'd actually be kind of curious to see how the various crowds break down, though heck if I know how you'd go about doing it.

Re: Headspace There are problems with the game in its current form, though… there are no difficulty settings for rolls. Hacking mom’s computer to learn her library-card number and wiping out the power grid of an entire city is the exact same roll for the Tech.

Yeah, quarterbacking is a huge problem. Even if you're trying to be polite to each other, ultimately good teamwork means working as a single unit, which boils down to pretty much the same thing.

Today I learned: Tasha and Samantha have wildly different boardgaming interests from me. The only ones of those I even heard of while I was at the con were Abyss and Pandemic: Contagion. Both of which I glanced at enough to determine that they look fine but aren't really my cup of tea.

Quick heads up - the email link in the article is all kinds of screwy. It's showing up as "mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:mailto:avcqa@theonio…"

Agreed, but Bethesda's decision (or just mistake?) to regress society for Fallout 3 probably contributed as well. I played FO3 before 1 or 2, so I wasn't aware at the time, but it can be fairly striking in retrospect.

Rivet City was my favorite because it was the most Bethesda of all the communities. Specifically, there were a bunch of NPCs clearly lying down taking naps that you could talk to. Doing so would cause them to stand up completely straight, look you dead in the eye, and flatly declare "I'm trying to sleep, leave me…

Yeah, but I'm only passingly familiar with Fate, so can you clarify something? I was under the impression that in order to spend Fate points, you still had to invoke a relevant Aspect belonging to you, your target, the environment etc. The idea being that this approximates a character arc of your traits causing…

Sort of.

5E is probably your best bet. It resembles 3E pretty closely, but generally involves a whole lot less fiddling - I consider it a pretty strict upgrade. The only benefit of tracking down 3E books would be the full breadth of expansions, but frankly that's mostly going to be overwhelming if you've been out of the game…

The good news is that the Random Harlot table is 100% backwards compatible. And 100% forward compatible. Basically, it's open for anything if you've got the time and energy.

Enter nature's beauty pageant, hope to get 2nd place.

To be fair, a few of the prompts do sound a lot more dire than they probably need to be. "You must pay nature's price" makes nature sound like a huge asshole. You almost need to squint to realize that maybe nature just wants you to pick up your litter or help prevent forest fires.

Ah, there's the rub. I can't imagine playing D&D without using maps to represent dungeon passages and rooms, even if said maps are hastily sketched on graph paper, with various chits and coins as markers.

We're still very much learning DW, but the "anything can happen" factor is heavily tempered by the fact that you do have a DM there making judgment calls. You're not rolling a d100 on the Random Harlot table to see what pops out — you're reading the situation and choosing a sensible outcome. If anything, that's made…