The time that is given

OK, for those of you who have played a role playing game where there’s an incremental or numerical value representing intelligence you’ll follow this short discourse quite easily. For those who haven’t, well go out and pick up a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

How many times have you ever come up with this great idea or retort or question and then paused as you glanced at your character sheet…”Oh whoa…my intelligence score is pretty damned low. I wouldn’t think of that.” and begrudgingly dropped the idea?  I certainly know that I have. Which brings into question the idea of a numerical score for intelligence. Continue Reading »

I had an interesting thought this morning while I was reading a blog from a fellow grognard… What if you absolutely knew what happened after death? I mean not “believed” you knew… but actually knew. How would you live your life? Would you do things differently? Why?

I suppose I ask because death has been a frequent visitor lately. My father’s not doing well and I’m not sure that he’s long for this mortal coil. It makes you stop and think, and take stock of things.

Is death like stepping through a door? I’m not sure that’s a good analogy but if you think about it, it’s pretty apropos.  You know where you “are” right before you step through that door. You “think” you’re pretty sure where you’re going to be after you step through the door, but you’re not certain. Does it matter though? You’re going to step through that door and whatever happens, happens. Should “knowing” change how you’re living today? Do we ever really know what’s going to happen? No. It’s the human condition. We can NOT see into the future.

So I guess that the old addage, live for today, holds some water.

In my last post I spoke a bit about the structure of a game that I would like to run. For simplicity’s sake I’m going to call this Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s quite likely that I’m going to be using the Castles and Crusades rule set from Troll Lord Games. (Link) Why? Well, in a nutshell, it’s a set of rules that encompasses a lot of things that I like about “new school” (additive AC for instance) with the open ended feeling of the old school genre. Continue Reading »