Friday Knight News – Gaming Light Edition: 16-NOV-2012

By Fitz, on November 16th, 2012

Greetings friends and welcome to another issue of the Friday Knight News! Hope all is well in your neck of the woods.

RPG Showdown – David Szilagyi

Not a whole lot to report on from my end of the universe… I’m prepping for a D&D 4e game to run the day before Thanksgiving and it’s been kind of fun. It’s been quite a while since I last ran a game and I’m more than a bit rusty, but there are all sorts of fun tools to use to help make the process simpler – everything from tools to create random names and roll dice to full-blown apps to help manage initiative order and monster stats. So I’m sure you’ll see an article or two on that topic before long.

Other than that we only had a few articles here this week:

Had a chance to chat with Marc Hutcheson from the InKarnate team a few weeks ago about their toolset. He was kind enough to answer a few questions afterwards.
In The Gassy Gnoll this week, I pondered a bit about why I write about games. Long story short, it’s a passion and has been for three decades.
And I reviewed 100% Crunch: Zombies by Julian Neale from Raging Swan Press. If you want to give your zombies a bit of zing, there are some great ideas in there!

Next week, because of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, I may only have a few articles as well. We’ll see how everything goes and if I get a chance to get some writing done with a bit of time off.

So let’s just dive into the links, shall we?

Note that this week I’m doing something a little different. Instead of commenting on each link, I’m just going to provide the naked links with attribution back to the original site. Please let me know if you prefer the simple lists to all the commentary. I’d really like to know! I’m playing with some ideas to continue to do the news round-ups but give myself more time to write reviews and other content. Each of the detailed 3,000+ word news round-ups I do on Fridays takes me anywhere from 3-5 hours to pull together and keeping it thinner has kept it to about half that.

That’s it for this week on the news front. If you want a bit more, check out:

Links for the Week @ Intwischa (and part 2 this week)
The Friday Five @ Ravenous Role Playing

There’s definitely plenty of news go go around!

I hope everybody has a great weekend!

As always, if you feel I missed something (and it would be impossible NOT to), drop me a quick note via the contact page or drop me an e-mail at news(at)gameknightreviews(dot)com and I’ll add it to the list for next week!

callin

November 16, 2012 at 1:28 pm · Reply

I prefer the descriptions. I found myself not following up links as would have in the past.
callin recently posted..5E Friday

Fitz

November 20, 2012 at 10:15 pm · Reply

Thanks Callin… Appreciate the feedback!

Mike Bourke

November 23, 2012 at 11:42 am · Reply

Unfortunately you didn’t ping any of this week’s articles at Campaign Mastery so I didn’t notice your question about approach until I came looking for anything I might have missed. That’s OK, you’re certainly entitled to choose what you link to; I wanted to talk about the question you’ve posed about format.

Firstly, from the point of view of the reader: Without the descriptions, the only thing the post has going for it to adequately describe the content and to entice a reader to follow is the title – but putting a whole swathe of titles in a block the way you have done in this test post makes it look like a block of text. The eye glazes over and instead of viewing one item at a time, all you see is a large lump of text. It makes it actual work to identify each article and whether or not you want to click on it.

Secondly, from the point of view of the blog author: I really treasure the feedback and comments that I get from this site and a few others that pingback. There are times when I discover that I’ve missed the point in my writing, or obscured it so badly that others can’t find it even with a metal detector. There are also times when I’ve discovered supplemental thinking with which to enhance my own notions on a subject by virtue of the cross-connections and associations with similar articles that the narrative reviews provide. Both of these make me a better writer, a better blogger, and a better GM.

So from both perspectives, I would prefer to retain the older format where you tell us what you think the value of each article is, and by extension, why we should read it.
Mike Bourke recently posted..The Color Of Pulp

Fitz

November 23, 2012 at 8:37 pm · Reply

@Mikke Bourke – Thanks for the comments. I do appreciate it and I’ve heard the same from a few other folks. I’m trying a slightly different tack tomorrow and we’ll see if that’s an improvement. And don’t worry, one of your posts is in the mix.

November 24, 2012 at 3:50 am · Reply

I wasn’t worried, Fitz – I’m always more grateful and appreciative of the votes of confidence review sites like yours provide. The way I look at it, I have to earn your pingback. I contribute when I have something to say because I know how much I appreciate it when someone posts a comment / contribution to one of my posts.
Mike Bourke recently posted..The Color Of Pulp

Game Preview: Kickstarter from the GameSmiths, LLC | Game Knight Reviews

November 27, 2012 at 7:01 am · Reply

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