Recent Posts
Critical Hits
Return To Blog Listing
Critical Hits is a place to discuss games, movies, comics, music, and news.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'editorial'
Why You Shouldn’t Watch Firefly
Many, if not most of you, have already viewed Joss Whedon’s Firefly series and the follow-up film, Serenity. This article is not intended for you; however, let me say that I’m sorry. I n...
Some Pleasant Overlap
I’ve noticed lately that there seem to be two groups of people who really enjoy 4e, and who are coming back to it after years of not playing D&D: WoW Players Eurogamers Now, I think I̵...
A Corpse, a Belltower, and Yog-Sothoth: Favorite RPG Moments
Bartoneus and joshx0rfz have started talking about some of their favorite RPG moments, and I was asked to share mine. I tend to GM much more than play, so mine are more about what my players have done...
Stop Having Fun: My Game is Better than your Game
Spinning out of Chatty’s discussion on the “Tyranny of Fun“, we see that what a lot of the argument boils down to is that people have different playstyles and tastes, and different g...
The Perfect DM
According to players, the Perfect DM should be able to… Create an evocative world with every tiny detail thought out for whatever the players decide to investigate or whichever NPC they decide ...
Gaming Now on the iPhone
It’s a good thing I was randomly floating around a few sites on the internet today, otherwise I might have easily missed the launch of Apple’s oh so appropriately named (haha!) App Store f...
Let’s Talk About Fluff
I was reading through a discussion on Paizo’s message boards that grew out of a post linking to our coverage of the panel with Mike Mearls at Origins, and one discussion in particular caught my ...
Origins Wrap-up and Swag Report
Well, another Origins has come and gone. As with the past two years, I focused on press coverage and hanging out with friends moreso than playing games. However, I did still manage to hit the big game...
4th Edition: Class Acts
In the convoluted web of intrigue that blogs create, Phil (the Chatty DM) led me to a link via a guest post at Geek’s Dream Girl, to a very cool fan-created Bard class for 4th Edition. Unlike ...
WTF is up with D&D Insider
I consider this a public service, since there’s tons of confusion about the issue (and for that I can place the blame solely on Wizards of the Coast.) With the advertisement in the back of every...
Pain of Campaigning V: Suitable Villains
So, let’s see, you have pre-planned your campaign, started it out with a bang, managed to balance a bunch of squabbling players interests in the game and even dared to put politics into it. Sounds ...
Venture Brothers: Watch It
I’m very happy to say that the third season of the cartoon the Venture Brothers started three weeks ago on Cartoon Network. You don’t know what Venture Brothers is, you say? Well that...
How to Compare Birds to Fish
A common topic has come up several times throughout various discussions that has been wracking my brain lately. The discussions it has been most prevalent in are ones that pertain to game design, and ...
4th Edition Round Table: Classes and Other Topics
Just as with the core races, we also talked about the Classes in the new 4E PHB. Of course, we ended up going on a few tangents about the system in general. The panel this time consisted of myself (T...
4th Edition Round Table: Races
undefined...
Campaign Wrap-Up: Recaps, Obsidian Portal Wikis, and General Thoughts
Last Sunday, I finished the D&D 3.5 campaign that I had been running since last August. The game ran on roughly an every other week schedule. I started with 6 players, added one more player for a ...
Out with a Bang: D&D Finale Checklist
Back from Balticon, full of caffeine, and ready to work on the finale for my campaign! I’ve actually managed to keep my prepwork pretty light for this campaign. I knew between full time job, ful...
So what IS D&D anyway?
An interesting meme has seemed to pop up among those who dislike where D&D 4e headed. It’s one simple declaration: This is not D&D. I’ve touched on this idea before: in many people...
A Game of Epic Numbers
There’s a lot of buzz going around about the soon-to-be-released 4th Edition D&D Adventure Keep on the Shadowfell, some people even did a ridiculously thorough read through of it, though Phi...
The Pain of Campaigning IV: Put a Little Politics in it
One of the hallmarks of my DMing style is the political element. My games tend to focus on character development and overarching story, with combats serving to accentuate those aspects. One of the k...
D&D 4e: A Whole New World
Within the core books for the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a base world is being set up which is intended to give new players and especially new Dungeon Masters a much easier time getting in...
Behind the Wave
I received quite a shock last night when I opened an e-mail newsletter that I somehow started getting from EB Games. You see, I haven’t been up to date with current gaming since the Gamecube wa...
The Castration of the LAN
Two weeks ago a bunch of us gathered to share in some X-Box LAN goodness, we managed to get about 12-14 people together with 3 tv’s, 4 x-box 360’s, one sweet-ass projector with sound syste...
Paizo’s 3.75
Paizo announced yesterday that they will be sticking with their own re-branded version of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 for their popular (and well made) Pathfinder series. The Pathfinder RPG will serve ...
FL1: Panhandle of the Lost
DM: Alright, so tonight’s module is a solo thing, but you’ll meet up with other characters later. What are you playing? Player: I’ve got this Grad Student/Game Designer. Oh, and he j...
X Marks the Spot
My wife and I went out to a bar in downtown Baltimore on Saturday night, with all of the typical inner city driving escapades that we love so much. What we didn’t expect, however, was what hap...
First (Level) Impressions: D&D 4e
With four games under my belt, along with talking to some of the designers and developers at length, I’m ready to give you my Critical opinion of D&D fourth edition! Of course, this was only...
Of Martians and JJ Abrams
One day, a week or two ago, I came across this story about images sent back from the Mars Spirit Rover. What you see to the right is a small version of a panorama taken at a crater on Mars from this...
The World is Full of Dungeons
We’ve recently been having some long discussions that essentially started as, “OMG Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed. is just WoW!!!11!” I was very surprised when I was reading the 4th Ed...
Guitar Hero for Reals?
My wife was kind enough to show me this article about Guitar Rising at Gizmodo, which looks like a great attempt at creating essentially a game based on guitar hero that can actually teach you to play...
