Tabletop Game Quotes

In a tabletop game? Chance and probability. The higher your ability score, the better your chances. You roll a die to see if you succeed. For you, here and now?” She grinned. “Believe you can do it and try hard.

Dungeons & Dragons was like that. Forget that half the kids in school probably went around slaying dragons and stashing loot on their PlayStations or iPads. It's different when you actually have to roll the dice.

At that, Ascher stood up. “Hi,” she said, smiling brightly. “You don’t know me. I’m Hannah. Back off my partner before you get hurt.” “I know who you are, hot stuff,” I drawled, not standing. I set my staff down across the table. “And I already backed off your partner. You can tell from how there aren’t any splatter marks. Play nice, Ascher.” Her smile vanished at my response, and her dark eyes narrowed. She drummed her nails on the tabletop exactly once, slowly, as if contemplating a decision. A smirk touched her mouth. “So you’re the infamous Dresden.” Her eyes went past me, to Karrin. Ascher was a foot taller than she was. “And this is your bodyguard? Seriously? Aren’t they supposed to be a little bigger?” “She represents the Lollipop Guild,” I replied. “She’ll represent them right through the front and out the back of your skull if you don’t show a little respect.

Something had to be done, for if there was ever a man who deserved killing - this was he. Georgiana surveyed the room in the silence, finally deciding to take control, returning to the tabletop, taking her spot on the roulette field. "I shouldn't have to remind any of you that every one of you has a secret kept in our confidence." Temple understood immediately what she was saying, pulling himself back up to stand on a table. "If a breath of what happened here tonight--" Bourne rose, too. "Not that anything has happened here tonight--" "Nothing besides obvious self defense," Georgiana said. "And, of course, saving two perfectly innocent people from their own demise," Duncan pointed out, joining her. Cross spoke from his place on the floor. "But if something had happened, and information left this room, every one of your secrets--" "To a man," Georgiana said. Duncan climbed up beside her. "Will be printed in my papers." There was a beat as the words sank in around the room, silence fell as the membership of the Fallen Angel remembered why they came to this place, where their dues were paid in secrets. For the tables. The gaming began almost immediately.

Intelligence – An INT of 6 or less means a character is automatically illiterate and the player may not take notes at the tabletop to help him remember details

NCCIC delivers a full spectrum of cyber exercise planning workshops and seminars, and conducts tabletop, full-scale, and functional exercises, as well as the biennial National Cyber Exercise: Cyber Storm and the annual Cyber Guard Prelude exercise. These events are designed to assist organizations at all levels in the development and testing of cybersecurity prevention, protection, mitigation, and response capabilities.

Current data thus favor an ever-expanding universe shaped like the three-dimensional version of the infinite tabletop or of the finite video-game screen.

I thought to myself, “if tabletop RPGs were simpler, I might actually buy and play them.

Hamish busies himself with the milkshake, grinning like a trickster god. I don’t trust him not to get me into trouble with frost giants in an attempt to be my wingman.

I can practically feel my hit points plummeting. The one-heart-remaining video game alarm beeps in my mind. Seconds away from one final “Mamma mia” before Bowser burns the Mushroom Kingdom to the ground.

… I notice differences in how we all handle the mahjong tiles. Pat and Amy treat the tiles with something bordering on reverence. They silently select tiles for discard from their racks and place them gently on the tabletop, in a dainty almost whispering motion. Sue and I place our discard tiles down so they make that clicking sound I have always loved hearing. Betty flings her tiles onto the tabletop with a throw-away motion befitting the worthless items they are.

the LGTSA was playing various miniature battle games weekly, usually on Saturday mornings, and with growing attendance. In fact, the group had drummed up enough regional notoriety that it managed to get the attention of the U.S. government who sent a pair of undercover Army intelligence agents, posing as a man-and-wife team of wargamers, to monitor the activities of the fledgling group. Because so little was known about wargaming and miniature combat groups, and it being a time of great social unrest, there was concern among various government agencies that such tabletop combat simulation was meant to train and plan for real-life insurgency. Mary

Kestrel set her cup on its saucer. “I didn’t ask to see you,” she said. “Too bad.” Arin claimed the chair across from her table in the library in a manner unbearably familiar to her. It was as if the chair had always been his. He slouched in his seat, tipped his head back, and looked at her from beneath lowered lids. The morning light fired his profile. “Worried, Lady Kestrel?” He spoke in Valorian, his accent roughening his voice. He always pronounced his r’s too low in his throat, so that when he spoke in her tongue everything came across as a soft growl. “Dreading what I’ll say…or do?” He smiled a grim little smile. “No need. I’ll be the perfect gentleman.” He tugged at his cuffs. It was only then that Kestrel noticed that they came too short on his arms and showed his wrists. It pained her to see his self-consciousness, the way it had suddenly revealed itself. In this light, his gray eyes were too clear. His posture had been confident. His words had had an edge. But his eyes were uncertain. Arin fidgeted again with his cuffs as if there was something wrong with them--with him. No, she would have said. You’re perfect, she wanted to say. She imagined it: how she would reach out to touch Arin’s bare wrist. That could lead nowhere good. She was nervous, she was cold. Her stomach was a flurry of snow. She dropped her hands to her lap. “No one’s here anyway,” Arin said, “and the librarians are in the stacks. You’re safe enough.” It was too early for courtiers to be in the library. Kestrel had counted on this, and on the fact that if anyone did turn up and saw her with the Herrani minister of agriculture, such a meeting would excite little interest. One with Arin, however, was an entirely different story. It was frustrating: his uncanny ability to unsettle her plans--and her very sense of self. She said, “Pressing where you’re not invited seems to be a habit with you.” “And yours is to put people in their place. But people aren’t gaming pieces. You can’t arrange them to suit yourself.” A librarian coughed. “Lower your voice,” Kestrel hissed at Arin. “Stop being so--” “Inconvenient?” “Frankly, yes.” His smile came: quick, true, surprised by itself. Then changing, and slow. “I could be worse.” “I am sure.” “I could tell you how.” “Arin, how is it for you here, in the capital?” He held her gaze. “I would rather talk about what we were talking about.” “Arin, how is it for you here, in the capital?” He held her gaze. “I would rather talk about what we were talking about.” She arranged her fingers along the studs that pinned green leather to the tabletop. She felt each cool, small, hard nail. The silence inside her was like those nails. What it held down was something sheer: a feeling like fragile silk, billowing up at the sound of his voice. If she and Arin were to talk about what they had been talking about, that silk could tear free. It would float up. It would catch the light, and cast a colored shadow. What color would it be, Kestrel wondered, the silk of what she felt? What would it be like to let it go, let it canopy above her?

While I realize that there are a lot of different angles on this, I’m going to set all of these speculations aside for now and try focusing entirely on trends in fantasy from the perspective of tabletop gaming alone. The first thing you need to know is that the men who laid the groundwork for the role-playing hobby had an incredible appetite for books. You may have been in a comic book shop on a Wednesday when the new shipment came in and the most dedicated fans in your town are right there to get the latest installment of everything they’re into. Well, Gary Gygax and James M. Ward were like that with books: One fateful Tuesday, I was poring through the racks, picking up the newest Conan and Arthur C. Clarke novels. When I reached the end of the racks, I had seven books in my hand. There was a gentleman doing the very same thing beside me. When he got done, he and I had the exact same books in our hands. We laughed at the coincidence and he started talking about a game he had just invented where a person could play Conan fighting Set. I was instantly hooked on the idea. A few weeks later I was regularly going over to Gary Gygax’s house to learn the game of Dungeons & Dragons.1 Note that the main selling point of the game at its inception was that it was not merely an adaption of their favorite stories to game form. No, the “lightning in the bottle” that Gary Gygax had gotten hold of was, in fact, the apex of genre fiction.2 He was opening up an entirely new method for creating worlds and allowing people to enter them. We take it for granted today, but J. Eric Holmes was not exaggerating when he declared that it was a “truly unique invention, probably as remarkable as the die, or the deck of cards, or the chessboard.”3

The special thing about games, and tabletop games in particular, is the way they actively train you to think from within their rules. Other forms of art do this too, but in a more roundabout way that requires a certain sensitivity and willingness to taken in by the television show you're watching or the book you're reading. With games, it's a prerequisite. If you don't think the way the game wants you to think, at least a little bit, you're not really playing the game at all.

He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horseracing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. Once, he'd got involved in a tabletop war-games club, played by mail, with mutual defense pacts, munition sales, secret agents, and even assassinations, but the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry. Anything more complex than a normalized two-person zero-sum game was beyond them. Henry had invented for the a variation on Monopoly, using twelve, sixteen, or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players, which opened up the possibility of wars run by industrial giants with investments on several boards at once, the buying off of whole governments, the emergence of international communications and utilities barons, strikes and rebellions by the slumdwellers between "Go" and "Jail," revolutionary subversion and sabotage with sympathetic ties across the boards, the creation of international regulatory bodies by the established power cliques, and yet without losing any of the basic features of their own battle games, but it never caught on. He even introduced health, sex, religious, and character variables, but that made even less of a hit, though he did manage, before leaving the club, to get a couple pieces on his "Intermonop" game published in some of the club literature.

Things I can do to make my game better:

You don't need to sell a board game to be a game designer.