In a little twitter discussion with the fine folks at RetroNouveau, an argument broke over whether it was an axe or a lever that was used to open the drawbridge at the end of the classic Super Mario Brothers levels.

Bruno Georget came up with shattering proof that it was an axe, while Dominic Bourret felt that an axe was an element that was ill-fitting in Mario's world.

I used my super-kung-fu-CSI-Photoshop mastery to enhance Bruno's proof and discover the real, actual, 100% not made-up proof.

(Click the picture on the right)

Last weekend, at the 5 th installment of the Roludothon - a quarterly social gaming event in Montreal, I've had a change of trying out Dread.

Dread is a very different breed of RPG than any I've ever encountered - its core mechanic revolves around Jenga.

D&D Birthday Party

DMed for a group of 12 year-olds this week-end.

I had already been DM for them 2 years ago and have been trying to schedule something with them ever since. This game was a birthday request from the birthday boy himself – a request I find myself very happy to oblige.

I decided to run a quick level 1 scenario from the Chaos Scar (you can find it Chaos Scar D&DI) a simple kill evil creatures scenario.

Before we start the game, birthday boy told me:

Eric, this time, I’ll try want to assert myself and take a more active role

Fine, I thought. This’ll be cool.

Learning to play Mouse Guard has me figuratively standing on my head, my feet helplessly flailing in the air in desperate attempts of achieving that sacrosanct performance level I always strive for.

Truth be told, from my understanding, Mouse Guard plays in the exact opposite way I have ever played RPGs.

MG is not exactly about you playing a character that reacts to its environment - its about you and your buddies working together to build a story.

This should - and could - be my holy grail for sharing narrative control.

But it seems that it also wants to be some sort of torture device aiming to make me feel inadequate at something I used to feel I was good at.

Kind of like high school.

I've been planning to come up with my own version of GameTable - now called OSU-gt - for a while.

I've actually ended up joining the dev team, but at this time, our objectives do not seem to be compatible. I planned an architectural redesign the whole thing - mainly to allow third party plugins, update to latest technology and potentially plug in a better graphics engine. They are working on stabilizing what they already have to push out a 2.0 version. They don't seem to have enough time on their hands to really look over what I plan to do.

I'm not "mr. Free Time" either, so I hate spending what time I had spare for this project on waiting to get my ideas approved... so I decided I'll branch my version out and see what happens. More details on my short-term objectives later on.

Right now, I need a name for the project.