Introductions All Around

I'm Jamie, and I'll be your host here at The Revenge. I'm a longterm gamer, a theatre professional (currently in grad school), and I'm finding that the way I like to talk about things isn't supported, necessarily, by Facebook and other social networking.

This blog will consist of reviews of gaming products or hobby material, updates of material I'm working on, be it props, gaming info or miniatures, and my thoughts on the Nerd World as a whole. We've recently found out that wizards and video games are mainstream cool, and I think it's taking some time for us to adjust to that. With that in mind, let's kick this thing off!

Generation Gap: TMNT & Other Strangeness

The difficulty in generating characters if that for every Moronkainen, you can end up with a character that ends up being either unremarkable or perhaps terribly overpowered. Most game writers (particular among them the author of nearly all Palladium products, Kevin Simbieda) defend this as reflecting real life, and that any true gamer would be able to make any character effective. This is true, and I feel the dark and dangerous pull of this argument the longer I build characters for this project (to date, at least half a dozen, and some of them are not just games I would play, but characters I actually wouldn't mind having!).

One such character follows: Bertolli the Teenage Mutant Ninja... Cat

Generation Gap: Original Dungeons and Dragons

This series of articles will strive to catalog one of my love/hate relationship with a prime aspects of RPGs: random character generation. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that I get like a down-on-his-luck gambling addict in Atlantic City whenever there's a random chart I can roll on. I can't help but find out what would happen if I roll on it. Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!

To that end, the notes marked 'Generation Gap' will feature a different system, reviewed almost exclusively on their character generation. To help you understand this experiment, I accept the first roll, whenever possible. If I am allowed to make any of my own decisions, I make them from a purely mechanical perspective, and will explain each choice as we go. At the end, I will try to collect this information into one coherent character, if I can.

I owe it to black book D&D to start this nightmare, though I will admit that a different, more sinister game inspired this odyssey. We'll get to that.

Let's start: Generation Gap, Dungeons & Dragons