In space, no one can hear you sperg.

We played Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator this weekend and had an amazing time. So it's a not a tabletop game, but it falls square within the realm of Nerdery. Basically, you network together computers and each one fills a role on a starship bridge. It's heavily Star Trek influenced, obviously, and I can't believe no one has thought of it before. We only had the demo, but we recorded our rather disastrous session and will hopefully have it on youtube soon. Watching things like helm accidentally activate warp in the middle of a firefight, engineering misreporting shield strength and our poor, energy depleted ship limping toward a space station as it's assaulted on all sides by bogeys was tremendously entertaining.

Given that it was our first time with the game, it was basically chaos, but it was much fun nonetheless. We hooked the main screen laptop up to the living room TV and I nearly had a geekgasm as it lit up with a view of the starship. The full version is 60 bucks, but you can play 6 people on the thing.You can get the demo that just has helm and weapons to try it out, I highly recommend it.

Old school? You don't even know old school.

And neither do I, really. Even though I cut my teeth on AD&D 2e, there are guys out there that make me feel like a babyfaced nooblet because I never played OD&D and haven't ran roughshod through any number of Gygax-penned modules. I'm in a weird place, because when 3e released 10 years ago (!) my insular little gaming group refused to move to the new system. In retrospect, that was probably a good decision, as unrevised 3e has a myriad of problems I didn't ever have to deal with.

After years of playing Kenzer and Company's fantastic HackMaster game, we've started a Pathfinder campaign. I had minimal contact with 3e and none at all with 3.5, so I'm coming at Pathfinder from a very different angle than most. I guess I'm not Pathfinder's target audience of people who were so involved in 3.5 that they don't want to move on to the rather alien 4th edition, but Pathfinder suits my needs as a continuation of "Gary's game." I like Paizo's attitude of breathing new life into old tropes instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and converting to something MMO-player friendly with it's silly anthropomorphic character races (I'm looking at you, dragonborn) and character powers. It's also easier to fit the stacks of old modules and resource books from the 30+ years of D&D history into the campaign.

So I'm looking for the old school experience with a brand new system that's based on a system that is now "outdated" but is new to me and my regular group. Sometimes I think I'm just trying to make life hard on myself.

You're standing in a dungeon...

Hello all, they call me The D. I'm here to talk about hardcore Nerdery. Nerdery spans a lot of things, but I'll mostly be shooting off about RPGs and all the novels, games, conventions and whatnot that tie into them.

What qualifies me to do that, you ask? Absolutely nothing. I'm a web developer in the great southern American wasteland and don't have much to do to keep myself entertained besides play games of various sorts. Video games don't need any help, so I'm here to talk about gaming and fantasy the way they were meant to be.

So that's my obligatory introductory crap, now we can get on to things that may actually be interesting.