Man, I haven’t done these in a long time. I wonder if I can even remember how to do one anymore.

Oh, right, right. Wait one moment. There we go.

Intro: Wyatt, in my book? Get out.

The Open Game Table Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs has a fucking long title, but you can kill two words of that by contracting the RPG. Yeah, I know I’m a genius. Yale’s missing out.

More importantly, it is a collection of “the best RPG blog posts of the year” which is in quotes because of the subjectivity involved in choosing the best absolutely anything. One reason I know the best ones aren’t there is because I’m featured in this book once and those pages could have gone to somebody else.

In fact this just baffles me. Let’s do those calculations for a moment and see how it figures out.

Book – Wyatt = Collection of the best RPG blog posts of the year.

I could see that one happening.

Now,

Book + Wyatt = Collection of the best RPG blog posts of the year?

Yo no comprendo, amigos. What is this foreign notion assaulting my brain? People consider me to produce content of…quality? These alien emotions that are overcoming me…are they pride? Satisfaction?

My friends, I fear apocalypse must be nigh. I must secure a case of Jaggermeister because for once I feel I have accomplished something. And I cannot feel happy, or the world will be destroyed. God told me this in a dream, before apologizing for the three dogs, six fish, the two nice SUVs and for that one time where a child was ran over while I watching the traffic.

He did not apologize for my Economics or Architecture classes, saying those were necessary.

The above paragraphs were necessary and because godliness is next to godliness, I will not apologize for them.

Sign My Grievances

Now, two things. I got this book for free, so necht. (That’s a disapproving sound, kinda like a nyeh.) Secondly, this book was put together entirely of volunteer work, the most admirable of which I believe to be the efforts of Jonathan himself in coming up with the idea and pushing so hard to get it done. I greatly thank all the people involved in the book and don’t want to diminish their hard work in any way.

So as a disclaimer, I like the book. I don’t think it is possible for me NOT to like it. Go out and buy six, including one to go back home to everyday, one to make love to, one whorish one you go out with behind the other’s backs, one to hide in a secret treasure chest, one to send to a starving child in Africa, and one to read.

But I’ve always said that I don’t like the kind of short pat-in-the-back reviews that get thrown around the internet, so I’m going to dig my claws in it. You can leave now if you don’t want to see blood spurt around. Because that’s the name of the game.

To begin, the cover of the book is astoundingly nice. Beyond that we get a foreword by Wolfgang Baur. Wolfgang Baur is the author of a bunch of stuff I haven’t read. This happens a lot to me lately. I tried to read the foreword, but I could tell what it would say from the first sentence. There are a select few special forewords that actually make you want to read the book or tell you something insightful. Then there are forewords that pat everybody in the back, make football team secret handshakes and tell the players to go get those sons of bitches and win the trophy. Aside from learning that AOL sucked, which I could not have guessed from their quality services for the past 3 million years, this was a football foreword.

In fact, the last part of the foreword should’ve been the entire thing. It would have been fucking awesome that way. You see this massive page completely empty save for the words “Damn, we are smart, fun, sexy and darn good-looking.”

Now that’s a foreword I can get behind. Fucking salute, Mr. Baur. You are as wise as you are succinct.

The book has 10 sections. The first chapter is on play style. One thing I noticed in some of the posts is that a level of jargontastic acronyms were left behind and untreated. For example, I know what the fuck OF&F is (…wait, I don’t) but somebody picking this up who might not be as internet savvy as us (which is one of the points of the book, to bridge the gap) may not know what it is and be instantly confused. This was in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first post of the first chapter of the book. I’m not sure, but I think it sets the wrong tone to start with a possible WTF moment.

Yes, the OF&F thing doesn’t feature prominently in the reading, but it’s a road bump that didn’t have to be. Further down, we have things like OD&D (easy), M&M (wat) and this is, again, the first entry in the book!

A couple of bloggisms were left in the text which, while preserving the authenticity of the work as blog posts, seem like a bit, I don’t know, silly? I use the word silly to describe many things, so let’s go with silly. Things referring to comments, for example. I’m sorry Ben, my man, but I can’t leave a link in your comments, bro. I have yet to master the psyschic techniques necessary to do that through a book. Now, in the interest of fairness, perhaps we’re looking for readers to go online and fullfill these requests for comments at the original post. Still, it seems pretty odd.

The second chapter is game play. I’m the kind of guy who would’ve just rolled that into play style and called the entire thing Game Play, but sure, let’s roll with it. Then later we have players and characters…okay, so the last two were about DMing, perhaps it’d have been better to label it that way?

These sections have some great information if you’re willing to sit down and read it, but I can’t give a lot of feedback on that because, I read the before. For me, this book is something I pick up every once in a while for specific things, not something I read cover to cover. I think perhaps catering to people looking for those “specific things” via use of clearer labeling of sections could have been worthwhile.

The artwork varies. I don’t even want to say what I really think about some of it, but there are some legitimately fuck-awesome pieces in there. Then there’s…yeah. Let’s just keep quiet. (Art is one of those things I don’t like talking about much, especially volunteered artwork. I’ll take what I can get – except from White Wolf. To them, I show no mercy.)

4e Ate My Neighbors

Skipping ahead, the Classes, Action and Equipment section might as well have been called the D&D 4th Edition section. I have nothing to complain about, because I don’t care about the other D&Ds one bit, but for those that do, this section was pretty grossly mislabeled. People looking for some old school D&D variants (I know there are least a dozen different thiefs out there), or for 3.5 prestige classes or something (for whatever bloody lunatic reason you’d want MORE of those) would have thrown the book against the wall.

The book lied to these people. Maybe folks for the older editions don’t get at brewing new classes and equipment very often (or at least they don’t post it), but in the future, maybe there should be a bit more effort into including things for D&D editions other than 4e. Even if I think they could all sink in a pit of sludge. Though I’m thinking the old-school guys would probably rather submit their stuff to all the fanzines they have right now, rather than posting them on their blogs to perhaps represent their community in a blog anthology. So the problem will probably persist.

Another thing was that the monk class was really damn long, I kept wondering when it was going to end, it seemed excessive. I think in the future, it might be prudent to have some guidelines on this kind of thing. Have, say, one build per class (two powers per level) and two paragon paths and a few feats in there, and tell people that there’s more at the blog. In my case, there wasn’t more, but for the Monk, I think it could have benefited from being an abridged work rather than the full monty.

The older set, however, received their spotlight in the RPG History area, which had all the makings of “Grognards, sign here” except for like, one inclusion way at the back.

In fact, I think I’m kinda ready to name my new and improved indexing scheme. Broad sections with the article titles beneath:

Chapter 1: DMing RPGs

Chapter 2: Players And Characters In RPGs

Chapter 3: D&D 4e, Take It Like A Fucking Man Or Leave

Chapter 4: Get Off My Lawn Or I’m Calling The Police You Fucking Good-For-Nothings You Have No Respect*snip*

Chapter 5: Tutorials

Finally we get to the end of the book, which has a big list of all the RPG Blogs on the network at the time of publication.

Hey, mine’s in there.

The Sprits Of Eden

>Sprits

>SPRITS

At a price of 20 bucks, the book is very reasonable for the content it includes, including a full D&D 4e class, a full build for an existing class, loads and loads and loads and metric fucktons of WORDSWORDSWORDS about DMing and playing RPGs, and even a few lectures about the inadequecy of your age.

Until next time, I’m Wyatt Salazar, and I think I can die happy now.

…

No, I’d probably still be miserable.