Out of Order Telling Our Story

We’re starting to discuss what our next RPG will be–no hurry, we probably have a month or more of our current one, and then a short interlude of playtesting Four Colors al Fresco. 

In discussing what people wanted, I mentioned that one of the things I’ve always wanted to do was play a game out of order. That is, where a given scenario might take place before, rather than after, the previous one. Like the stories of Sherlock Holmes or some of the old pulp-era serials, where the chronology of individual stories could be just about anything. So then I started looking at my game collection to see what sort of support we have for that. It looks like I may have to write my own.

How Not to Take Over the World

The Evil Mastermind has at his disposal:
1: A guy who can generate winds sufficiently powerful to smash his way into Tony Stark’s Vault of Dangerous Top Secret Things™.
2: A radiation source capable of melting a battleship in a matter of seconds, through a mile or so of water.
3: A cosmic space dragon.
4: A super-genius, who in turn controls:
5: “Titanium Man”, an unstoppable force of destruction.

So, what’s his clever plan to Conquer the World, BWAHAHAHAH!!! ?

What’s a “Cleric”?

I haven’t been following the discussion of “D&D Next” particularly closely, but I’ve liked much–but not all–of what I’ve seen. I finally read Mike Mearls’ discussion of their founding principles for the cleric class , and I think my response to it sums up my feelings, pro and con, towards the whole endeavor.

In general, it looks like the next edition of D&D is making much better choices than D&D4E–or D&D3E–did, at least for my tastes. Specifically, capitalizing on what people like D&D for while fixing problems, rather than making significant changes to the core of it or trying to make it into a different sort of game. Of course, reasonable people can disagree on which parts are the “core” of D&D, so I don’t claim this is a universal answer. After all, while D&D3E failed to fix many of the problems I had with AD&D1&2, and introduced some new ones, it was obviously wildly popular. But I think I have some idea what I’m talking about, given that those who eventually were turned off by D&D3E seem to have been because of exactly the problems I had with it, and D&D4E was, in part, an overreaction to those same problems.

Replace Corporations with Cooperatives

Brandon Blackmoor drew my attention to Matt Bai’s editorial about the impact of the Citizens United ruling.

In a comment, he suggested that we should just abolish corporations, but downplayed his suggestion as “crackpot.” Well, maybe I’m a crackpot, too, but I would love to see their end (or rather death, since they’re apparently people). However, I wanted to make a slightly longer response: