The Pink Dice Chronicles

The first three are almost done.  Lots of other works-in-progress.

I am thinking about starting a Ponyfinder game very soon.  In preparation for this, I have been watching the cartoon  MLP: FiM.  So far, having watched the first two episodes, I am surprised, impressed, and slightly intimidated.  Unlike cartoons from my younger years, like Animaniacs, which had two sides to them, this cartoon has no "jokes for adults" written in.  It is pure, wholesome.  It is a level of cartoon purity I have not seen in years. And by pure wholesome, I mean no violence, not even a real enemy.  They defeated the foe using honesty, laughter, loyalty, kindness, generosity, and friendship.  Friendship, of course, generated magic, but the magic didn't kill the foe, it turned it into a friend. So, as an apprentice of Candlekeep, Baldur's Gate, and Neverwinter, and with the GM's heart of a dwarf, how am I supposed to GM a Ponyfinder game?  Will player's expect a wholesome "saving everyone" motif?  Is this the end of... dar...

So the party of 3 characters (Lillian, Morrigan, and Sagittarius) and an eidolon started exploring from the room where the 2 ogres had been previously killed.  The room had two apparent exits besides the door they came in.  To the south, there was a closed door.  A small tunnel, large enough to crawl through led to another small door.  The party checked out the door to the South, finding a room with 6 metallic urns circling about a well with a bucket.  There was hideous giggling in the room and the doors opened and closed by themselves, exposing a storage room to the south.  The auras of the room appeared to have an evil tint.  The party decided to explore the small tunnel rather than to deal with the "ghost" here. The party opened the door and sent a rat into the room beyond the door.  The rat was able to spy a bedroom with bags against the double entry doors, and a large ogre with a club.  Unfortunately, the rat was quickly squashed and t...

I follow Zak Smith who writes the Blog " Playing DnD with Porn Stars " (nsfw). It is interesting for those wanting to get a different perspective on a gaming group.  Zak seems to have gotten himself crossways with members of the community over his general attitude that discussions of feminism need to to be inclusive beyond the typical conservative elements that seem to drive feminism.  Zak has responded in his defense .  Still more interesting is an article from one of his players that puts their gaming group in perspective , as well as their reception by the gaming community.  I am the PinkDiceGM because I have an active interest in girls in gaming.  I have 4 daughters that I want to have good experiences in our hobby.  My conclusions thus far I think are rather interesting, though they don't really address the gaming community, especially with the strength that Zak has. The most important aspect of our community of gamers is that it needs to be ...

This week the party, missing only Bengrim from its active ranks, conitnued trying to find their way back.  When last we left our heroes they had just talked a beautiful glowing green apparition out of protecting its territory.   Unfortunately two small balls of electrical energy were still hostile and attacking poor Sora. Sora continued to be attacked by the two small floating balls until he lie dying on the floor.  Lillian, Vinde, Morrigan, and others headed past the dangerous creatures.  Sowden fired his crossbow at the creatures.  Tabbris attempted to use spells on the creatures.  The floating electrical balls floated over and started attacking Hecate. Vinde was able to make it to the chest on the side of the cavern.  She opened it without issue and found a large stash of all sorts of random magical and nonmagical items inside.  Unfortunately with the attacks still going on, she had to grab what she could and run.  Morrigan's eidolon, ...

Occasionally I find myself needing to GM online from my laptop rather than my desktop, most recently because of a sore back.  Unfortunately I recently found out that my laptop suffers from a Windows 7 bug that results in it randomly dropping teamspeak.  This week was one of those weeks, but I thought I had a solution using my cell phone to run teamspeak.  It turns out talking to one person is fine, but my cell freaked out when I connected up for the game. In a technological hail mary play I thought we'd give the audio a try on Roll20, but the group never entirely got it working.  It resulted in some unhappy players and a cancelled game, not to mention a frustrated gm. So, I got underway yesterday installing Windows 8 on my laptop.  Windows 8 installed nicely, though Microsoft locked out my license key on the license,  even though I never did get working on my old green monster desktop that died a horrible hardware failure death.  Grrr... that is $8...

It is an interesting tale that we weave when we play a character, a tale of our own life.  Ask a man to draw his fingers, and in the errors we add in the drawing, we reflect our own exaggerations of how we see our self -- a tall thin person will draw long, spindly fingers.  The person who sees themself as fat will often draw fatter, shorter fingers. But characters do not shine our flaws this way.  Look into the characters, and what we see are deeper reflections. Beginner players always start out the same.  They pick a character they already love and they try to copy them into the game.  For years I played in games with other characters named Ryu because of this.  Batman has popped up again and again in different forms.  And don't forget the always popular drow elf with two swords and a panther companion.  Their characters are always misplaced in the world, loners, unconnected, wronged, and for some reason, without parents. At some point player...