Category Archives: Tracer Rounds
Tracer Rounds: What Do You Buy, Read, or Play?
Rapid fire thoughts about your game acquisitions ~
Brant Guillory, 11 October 2017
Plenty of us have a stack of wargames that we haven’t played yet. And quite frankly, there’s a not-insignificant portion of that stack that is, in all honesty, unlikely to ever get played. Occasionally, we’re just holding onto something in unpunched condition (ie, “investing”). Sometimes we got it, read thru it a bit, and decided we weren’t going to play it after all. But how many of us bought something with the express purpose of studying the game more than playing it?
What do you buy? What do you read or study? And what do you actually play?
That brings up a very interesting three-part question: What do you buy? What do you read or study? And what do you actually play?
In my case, I buy a lot of games from designers and companies I like to support (that said, I’m a bad comparison for “what do you buy?” because as the editor at GrogHeads and a regular reviewer of games, I don’t spend nearly as much on games as it might appear). But the games that I study and the games that I play do tend to diverge quite a bit.
Tracer Rounds: The Nostalgia of Mystara
A photographic journey through an adventurous youth ~
Brant Guillory, 10 July 2017
Most images enlarge when you click them
This started as a set of pics for a personal inventory of the RPG collection. It turned into about half of the collection – this isn’t even all the TSR stuff! – but I wanted to at least get a some of the collection archived. Once I had the pics, though, I figured it was time to bring back at least one random episode of Tracer Rounds, and share some pics and commentary on the Mystara collection.
As an aside, for folks who are really interested in Mystara, you should check out the Bruce Heard episode of the GrogCast, wherein we ask about his background with Mystara, and get a few good inside stories from the glory days of TSR.
Mystara, for those that don’t know, was the expansion of the game world that was first introduced in the X1 module that accompanied the expert-level set of the original no-prefix D&D, starting around 1981. As the rules grew from basic to expert to companion and beyond, the rules series became known as the BECMI series.
How many of us started our adventures here?
Tracer Rounds: The Best Damn Songwriting You Never Appreciated
Can we finally give Guns ‘n Roses their due ~
Brant, 19 September 2016
Things have been a little too heavy lately, and we need to talk about something completely different… So can we just take a step back and spend a few minutes admiring what totally bad-ass, criminally-under-rated, and never-appreciated songwriters the guys from Guns’n Roses were? Sure, we all know the ‘hits’ – Welcome to the Jungle, November Rain, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, You Could Be Mine, and Sweet Child o’ Mine – and the ‘scandal’ songs like Used to Love Her, or It’s So Easy. But once you get beyond the radio tunes (or heck, even with the radio tunes) the quality of songwriting you get from the band so far exceeds their contemporaries that they’re not even in the same galaxy.
Back in the late-80s, the popular talk was comparing GnR to The Rolling Stones, under the premise that supposedly no other band had conquered the rock and roll world on their own terms to the degree that GnR did. That was typical rock journalist hyperbole, of course. But honestly, the depth of songwriting, quality of musicianship, and production was blowing most other acts at the time out of the water – even GnR’s supposed contemporaries. Motley Crue didn’t figure out how to write a song until their 4th album; Poison never quite did. Ratt’s riffs were impeccable, but aside from the one-off lyrical curiosity like Wanted Man, they didn’t keep up. Great White? Slaughter? Bulletboys? XYZ? Rough Cutt? Firehouse? Please. Don’t embarrass yourself suggesting them.
Tracer Rounds: When Positives Become Negatives
Possibly the most raw column I’ve ever written ~
Brant, 05 September 2016
Some of these columns are a lot easier to write than others. Some days I feel like I’m forcing it. Some days I honestly feel like I’m mailing it in (see the column about professional sports from last Spring). Some days the column just flows and before I know it, I’m at 2800 words and feel like there’s a lot left to say.
Some days, there’s a lot I want to say, and just not sure how. Many of those turn out to be kind of personal, like the column about the Imposter Syndrome. Today is one of those days, and it’s going to be hard for make this as coherent as it deserves to be, particular since I’m not quite ready to name names and potentially ruin lives. But I also said back when I first started this whole endeavor that I was going to do this without a net (i.e., no editor), so you’re getting an unfiltered look at the insanity that ping-pongs around my head as I write these things.
Tracer Rounds: The C2E2
Revisiting an older concept to reinvigorate the re-conversation ~
Brant, 29 August 2016
So, about 5-6 years ago, I started playing with an idea for a game/system. The idea was a basic unified set of rules for current events conflicts, with regularly-released updates that would provide unit information and updated map details for the current world situation. This would allow any player to just grab the current update, and “play forward” from there, to see how the various conflicts might shape up over the next few months or years. When the next update rolled around, the players would have the option to either reset to the current world situation, or adapt the update to their own ongoing conflicts and continue an “alternate future” using the update components.
It’s not like I was breaking any really new ground with the idea, but I had a pretty high-minded concept for how I wanted it to happen, but got quite bogged down in the actual execution of it all.
What I’d like to do here is reopen the discussion and attempt to reinvigorate the participation in the development of the rules and current updates, in the hopes that many minds are smarter than mine, and we can collaboratively move forward on an open-source set of rules and initial process for putting these kinds of tools in the hands of gamers with an interest in current events.
