Dungeons & Dragons Archives

Geek Chic, maker of $30,000 gaming tables is out of business

Geek Chic, a company that custom built high-end tables for tabletop gaming has closed up shop.

I never understood to point of these fancy gaming tables. They seemed totally unnecessary to me. I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons back in the day without even using a table, let alone one hand carved by blind monks from a single piece of endangered hardwood.

When I was in the Air Force and stationed overseas, we would normally get together in someone’s dorm room on the weekend and we would sit on the floor and play. We didn’t need a fancy table or fancy chairs. We only needed dice, graph paper, pencils, sourcebooks, and our imaginations.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against playing tabletop games on a table. I just don’t see the need for a special table, especially when that special table costs so much. What’s wrong with a normal dining room table? They cost a lot less and they’re a lot more practical.

I have no idea why Geek Chic went out of business, but I’ve got to believe the marketplace only has so many customers willing to spend a fortune on a fancy gaming table, especially when a regular table works just fine for playing tabletop games. That’s kind of the whole point of the name, tabletop gaming. It’s not called expensive custom-built tabletop gaming.

I would think that once you build someone one of these tables, they will never need one again.

I blame Wil Wheaton

Professional pretend geek Wil Wheaton uses a Geek Chic table on his terrible Internet show Tabletop. That in itself probably lost Geek Chic a customer or two. At the very least it probably made people think twice before placing a down payment on one of these fancy tables. I know when I discovered Wil Wheaton owned the same Mitchell & Ness hockey jersey that I did, I couldn’t sell mine fast enough.

Geek Chic, maker of $30,000 gaming tables is out of business - Bent Corner — Professional pretend geek Wil Wheaton. He’s the one on the left.

Instead of getting an expensive fancy table for playing games, Wil Wheaton should have put the money into a new sofa. Tabletop is filmed at a porn studio. The sofa he and his guests sit on has appeared in porn movies. Who knows how many diseases and sexual pathogens are on that couch. I only hope he cleans the weapons-grade HIV off before his guests sit down to have a chat with him. I don’t care if Wil Wheaton sits in weapons-grade HIV. It’s the guests I worry about.

I simply choose not to play

I give up. I am done with the 2016 Presidental election. I have looked extensively at the two choices I have to vote for and I’ve found both candidates to be extremely lacking and wanting. No matter who wins this November, I firmly believe they will turn out to be the worst president in my lifetime.

There are issues in this election that are important to me. The problem is, for every one issue a candidate has that I agree with, there seem to be six others I do not agree with. This is the inherent problem with a two-party system of politics. This is why nearly every other democracy in the industrialized world does not have a two-party political system.

This is why most Americans do not vote.

Thanks, but no thanks. I refuse to continue to play this retarded game of electoral Sophie’s Choice. Let someone else choose the lesser of two evils. Choosing the lesser of two evils still requires a person to pick evil. If I never picked an evil player character in Dungeons & Dragons, why would I choose to do it in real life? If I was told by a dungeon master that I had to pick an evil character to play in his or her game, I would simply not play.

That is what I am doing now. I am choosing not to play.

Prepare thyself for more ‘premium’ Dungeons & Dragons releases

Wizards of the Coast will be releasing yet another premium version of a former Dungeons & Dragons product, a pricey version of the very first release of the game, Original Dungeons & Dragons RPG.

The original game often referred to as “the white box” was released back in 1974. It came in a very simple cardboard white box and included three pamphlets. It required ownership of the game Chainmail, a medieval miniatures wargame, co-created by Dungeons & Dragons creator, the late great Gary Gygax.

I never owned this version of D&D, but I remember it. The first time I saw it was in a toy store in Lancaster, California, called Jack’s Toys. It may have been called Uncle Jack’s Toys, but that seems too creepy to be real. Whatever the name, it had the game, and I remember looking at it.

This new version of the game will come in a fancy wooden box and instead of containing three pamphlets, it will come with four additional supplement pamphlets, seven in total. The covers of each pamphlet will feature new artwork, but the interiors will be as they were in the 70’s.

The set comes out November 19, 2013, and has an MSRP of $149.99.

I can’t imagine a lot of people buying this. It’s not only ridiculously expensive, it is almost nothing like the original product. What is with the fancy wooden box? I’m not sure how much nostalgia this version will bring. If they had only re-released the original white box with the three original pamphlets, all for a more realistic price, then I could see people picking this up.

Wizards of the Coast sues eight people over file sharing

Wizards of the Coast is trying to crack down on people that post Dungeons & Dragons products to the various file sharing networks. From ICv2:

Wizards of the Coast has filed three lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against eight defendants located in the United States, Poland and the Philippines alleging copyright infringement of its recently released Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook 2. The lawsuit contends that the defendants illegally distributed the Player’s Handbook 2 via free file-sharing Websites, and that these uploads resulted in a substantial number of lost sales and revenue for Wizards of the Coast.

Evidently Wizards of the Coast was selling PDF versions of there popular Dungeons & Dragons role playing system. That was until they realized that people could take these PDF files and share them on Bit Torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

Oops.

I realize that this is a civil lawsuit, but wouldn’t it be something to go to prison for something Dungeons & Dragons related?

I’m not sure they will have any luck suing somebody that resides in the Philippines for copyright infringement. The country has what you might describe as a very relaxed view on copyrights, or for that matter, crime in general.

I think by suing a few of their customers for file sharing, Wizards of the Coast may only be exacerbating the problem of unauthorized file sharing. By taking this action and then publicizing the fact, they are broadcasting to the world that their intellectual property is available for free at the various file sharing sites. The people they are suing are people that actually paid them for the PDF files.

Suing these people wont stop these specific PDF files from being shared in the future.