The Humble Indie Bundle

Soooo… six months later.  I guess this sort of fell by the wayside.  And I make my return with a brief post.  Ah, well, so it goes.

I just wanted to direct any gamers out there who haven’t already heard of it to wolfire.com’s Humble Indie Bundle.  This is a “pay whatever you want” sale of a bundle of five indie games to benefit Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The games in question are World of Goo, Gish, Aquarius, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture.  They work on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and there’s no DRM.  No catches.  Just a chance to get a couple of great indie games while also supporting some deserving charities.  Which reminds me, there’s no “overhead” on the donations (aside from credit card charges), and you can choose how much of your money goes where, if you’d like.

As I write this, there’s about 4 days 15 hours left in the drive, and they’ve collected just over $430,000.  Check them out.

Of Possible Interest… (PDFs)

…EN World is offering a whole bunch of assorted PDFs for $1 each.  The sale runs until Gencon.  I know, I’m a little late with this one, but it slipped my mind.  My free time has mostly been occupied with writing a piece for Nevermet Press.  They’re a bunch of cool fellows.  Have you checked them out yet?  No?  Click the link, then.  Click it!  I’m watching you!

…Ahem.  Anyway.  You’ll see that piece toward the end of August, if all goes well.  More about that later, though.

The sale’s on 3.5e-era stuff, so it’s likely primarily useful to those who are sticking with that edition or Pathfinder.  A quick look shows at least a couple of options that would have utility in almost any game, though.  Need some inspiration for a thieves’ guild or two?  A city council to drop into your new city?  Ideas for some tournament or festival games?  Want to add some steampunk flavor to your game?

Maybe even try a new game?

There’s a lot of material on offer.  It’s worth a look through.

If I were still playing 3.5, I’d go for Everyone Else: A Book of Innkeepers, Farmers & More.  Almost 70 pages of ready-made statblocks for villagers, mooks, and other random NPCs in case that tavern brawl breaks out?  I’d buy that for $1 and save myself a whole chunk of work.

What are the Best 4e Ability Score Arrays?

I’ve been following an interesting thread about 4e ability score arrays at ENWorld.  Poster 77IM calculated all of the possible arrays on a 22-point buy, and posted the list.  Turns out there are 121 unique arrays, in case you were wondering.

Then the analysis began.

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“No, Wait…”

Order of the Stick #1, by Rich Burlew. Upgraded to 3.5e!

There’s an interesting thread at the Giant in the Playground forums that deals, in part, with retracting an in-character action.  (As a side note, if you’re not reading the Order of the Stick comic at GitP, you really should.  There’s a lot of terrific gaming humor there.)

Among the questions the original post poses is the following:

- Do you allow your players to revise an action, if, a second or so later, they remember themselves why they shouldn’t do that?

There is, naturally, quite an array of views on the matter.  Some espouse the “you said it, it’s done” school of thought.  Others allow retractions with few restrictions.  There’s a lot of ground in between.  General opinion seems to fall toward “it depends,” which I realize isn’t terribly dramatic.  But the question of what, exactly, it depends on remains intriguing.

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Humor and Gaming Blog Carnival Roundup

The carnival has moved on to Roleplaying Pro, where this month’s topic is “The Future of Roleplaying.”  April’s carnival on Humor and Gaming produced quite a few posts, though, so let’s get to them:

Here at A Butterfly Dreaming, I presented the pun-laden Grape Jelly monster, and also discussed how such humorous stuff might be used in an actual game.

An Undisciplined Oaf Quartet discusses useful shortcuts for comedic roleplaying:  powered by tropes.

Viriatha of Bard of Valiant offers some easy notebook projects… with a bit of bite.  Don’t ask to borrow a pen.

Having the right quip at the right time is pretty important for comedy, and Campaign Mastery talks about how different forms of comedy can be used in a game, and how to do so effectively.

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