There are two documentaries about this. The better of the two -- it's won a few awards, etc -- is called Rise of the eSports Hero, produced by Landrock Entertainment. Your son might be interested in checking out. landrockentertainment.com/rise-of-the-e ... ports-hero

Tuned in for a few minutes of watching the Australian Open.  And WOW, Serena Williams is on some MASSIVE STEROIDS.  She could wrestle Jose Canseco to the ground with one (heavily muscled, veiny, bulging) arm.  

Just sayin...

A wonderful piece from Jon.  To his work (to dig deep in search of the facts and truth), we continue to give thanks.

~throwi

sauromatian wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:Looking at the accumulating posts on Jon's blog, it seems more & more like there needs to be a new edition. I mean, the world has discovered an author whose contribution appears perhaps as fundamental to the game as Arneson's, yet we've only become aware of his existence IN THE LAST FEW DAYS?!!!!

Yeah, I get this a lot. Between this and the Mornard Fragments/Dalluhn alone you'd think there'd be a whole new story. Honestly, it is a constant source of relief to me that PatW is reasonably consistent with these discoveries, because it's pretty cautious about speculating beyond the documents I had on hand. So it's not like I feel there are glaring errors that need to be fixed, just more story to be told.

That much said, for various licensing reasons I will probably revise PatW in 2017. And given that opportunity, I would no doubt make some organizational changes and update it to reflect recent findings. You heard it here first.

increment wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:make some organizational changes

In many ways it seems like a series of books rather than a single text. The overall chronological narrative (the evolution of RPGs from wargames) is repeated several times, making it difficult to remember where any particular detail is located.

The section on the early development of wargames presents an editorial dilemma. If the introduction were brief, followed by a narrative in consistently chronological order, readers would skip forward to the parts about D&D, & thus would lose focus on the overall idea of the book (how various elements of wargames contributed to RPGs). So I can see why you chose to make the introductory section so substantial - it explains why the early-wargaming section is significant.

To some degree, for my own book I have to keep my own counsel about the required narrative and the relationship between the subordinate topics, but David is asking the right questions here. One could say without doing great violence to my intentions that the overall argument of PatW was that the line between wargames and role-playing games is extremely difficult to draw, and certainly the publication of D&D did not automatically generate any genuine line. All of the tedious (I gather) kriegsspiele and so on is essential to showing that certain elements we might consider native to role-playing games were 150 years old when D&D came out. Organizationally, I might relocate elements, but I wouldn't dispense with them.

sauromatian wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:It's not a matter of being tedious, it's a matter of marketing. The customer is likely buying the book for the D&D part. So dispense with, no, but it must explain to the reader why wargaming is relevant.

That bit about "the line between wargames and role-playing games is extremely difficult to draw" not only needs to be in bold, underlined but the point also probably needs to be made/reiterated that game players are free to add or drop paradigms as they wish, by agreement.
It's perfectly possible to play D&D as a "wargame" and the rules even encourage that by offering character improvement via XPs for killing things but not for "roleplaying" (whether that be "problem solving", "playing in the role of the character", etc.). Conversely, in "traditional wargames" individual leader characters clearly had individual characterisation (player characters with a larger number of mostly grouped/ungrouped NPCs at their command, in effect) from fleeting glimpses of related "roleplaying" paradigms long before D&D (1940s BMSSJs refs., for a start) and were not for casual sacrificing, the way that some campaigns were played. To say nothing of Leiber and Fischer, or Barker and co., of course.

</observation, aside>

Facebook buy/sell groups have become a Thing.

If you're not tracking that you're missing stuff.
Kudos to the Acaeum members who are all over it.

Congrats to Melnibonean for a wowie BIN grab yesterday.

F

webrik33 wrote in Random Thoughts or OT Chit-Chat Thread:do you have any names of said groups so I and others can join up?

Here we go:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/RPGAuctions/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/rolepla ... tradesell/

There's lots of RPG/D&D Facebook groups.  Here's another Facebook group for Gary Con.
https://www.facebook.com/GaryConLLC/