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 On 02/13/2015 at 01:44 AM by KnightDriver See More From This User » |
More riffing on Dragon Magazine #94, February, 1985. In this month and year Frank Herbert published his last Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune. I read the first trilogy of Dune books but I didn’t read all of the second. I lost steam after reading Children of Dune. Chapterhouse: Dune was the sixth book. There have been a lot of games of all types based on the Dune novels. The one I’ve been looking for is Dune: The Battle for Arrakis for the Genesis. It hasn’t been in any collections or been downloadable anywhere. You can only play it on the Genesis. Publisher Virgin Interactive is no more and developer Westwood Studios was bought by EA and then closed. So maybe EA has the rights to Dune: The Battle for Arrakis? Who knows.
Back to Dragon #94. David G. Weeks' article Divided rolls add variety and uncertainty is super interesting. So rolling just one die, let’s say a d20, gives you an equal chance of any number 1-20. Rolling 2d10 gives you a bell curve of results with a higher chance of an number in the middle and lower chance of either very low or very high scores. Rolling a divided die roll, d20/d4 (divide the result of d20 by the result of d4 and round up), makes the average number be lower and high number rolls happen less frequently. To reverse this so that high numbers happen more often, do the same divided dice roll and subtract the result from the highest possible roll. Doing these kinds of dice rolls gives you more control over the type of odds you want for lots of different events in a campaign. To me, it feels a bit like adjusting difficulty in a video game. Cool!
My eyes opened wide when I saw this ad above because one of The Compleat Strategist's stores is within my usual stomping grounds. They sell board games, D&D supplies, and host gaming sessions on the weekends. I figure, if I'm ever without a friend to play video games with, I’ll go there and play board games.
Wow! Tips, maps and a news letter for Wizardry and Ultima games. Is this the first instance of strategy guides?
Good algorithms to you all!
Chapterhouse Dune is the best one because his wife was dying then and you could tell one of the characters was based on her. There would have been more books after that too, unfortunately.
You should read the second trilogy. It's great. You know with my space opera, Dune is always like the benchmark I'm trying to beat as far as content and length.
I'd like to go back and read the whole hexology sometime. Herbert died almost exactly one year from the release of Chapterhouse Dune.
I'd be curious what was the first instance of strategy guides. That Wizardry book looks similar to the newsletters they called newspapers in the early colonial days.
The newsletter delivered via computer disc could also be the first instance of a kind of gaming web site, without the web.
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