Ostensible Cat

Today has been an incredibly lovely day. I decided to try something a bit different and do some gaming outside. Bear has been bugging me to get a game started. Unfortunately, he is only reading in Italian at this point and the academic advisor recommended that we hold off teaching him to read English until he has a better grasp of reading in Italian so as to not confuse him. So, I decided to come up with a very basic on the fly RPG system using percentile dice as the resolution mechanic and my D&D minis to create a 3d "dungeon". It actually turned out to be quite fun. The key here was to be free form enough so as to keep Bear's interest while having something of a structure. I created a four class system so Bear, my daughter Rosa, and their "cousin" Marco had a field of characters to choose from. I had a hobbit, wizard, warrior, and amazon princess. Each character had hit points, a percentage chance to hit in melee, a percentage chance to block an a

What can I say but my son Bear is an incredibly imaginitive little guy who always amazes me with the things he comes up with. Halloween is a particular favorite as it gives Daisey a chance to show off her crazy costume skills and Bear to show off his imagination. The October after we arrived in Germany, we took a trip to Bavaria and visited the town of Oberammergau . From there we visited King Ludwig II's Linderhof Palace as well as Hoenschwangau and Neuschwanstein . It was an enchanting trip to be sure and one that struck a particular chord with my then 3 1/2 year old son Bear. Bear was particularly taken with the story of the swan knights that were said to have built a castle in the area in the 12th century. Lohengrin, the Swan Knight became a particular favorite of Bear. I played some of Wagner's Operas for him and he loved them. So enchanted was he with Lohengrin, the very next Halloween, he asked his incredibly skilled mother to make him a Swan Knight costume for

Yesterday I posted about changing the rules to suit my game needs, which got me to thinking about how we played the game when I was a kid. As I mentioned, AD&D was our game of choice but we actually played it more like B/X D&D with the expanded classes of 1e. We tended to ignore rules that slowed things down for us like weapon vs. armor, etc. However, on an interesting note, while we did ignore rules, it was almost taboo (to our 11 and 12 year old brains) to actually CREATE new rules. I know that is part and parcel to what Old School gaming is about, and I’m not saying that we didn’t do it at all, but it was much more akin to amending the Constitution of the United States to create a new rule than to simply ignore a standing one. Even for very cosmetic things like spell names, we considered changes very gravely before we instituted them. For instance, we would never have thought about renaming Tenser’s Floating Disk, but we didn’t think anything about ignoring the materia

It is thrilling for me to see the development of my son's creative abilities. He reminds me of lot of myself when I was younger. I wish I could match his prolific output these days but what can you do? I definitely want to do some collaborative work with him. Here's a sampling of some of his latest works.