Posting issues...

The astonishingly silent mouth breathers over at Blogger have broken something so badly that we have been trying for 18 hours or so to put up yesterday's post.

It seems they have created an intermittent problem that forces us to perform arcane rituals with our publishing settings to get anything posted correctly. I am able to post this announcement due to the combined intelligence of the people affected by this issue, who came up with a series of workarounds after it became apparent that the guys at Blogger couldn't find the handle on this thing. Some blogs have been experiencing these issues since 12/26. That's last year, folks.

Add one more thing to the New Year's resolution list: switch to Wordpress. I fully expect to hear "I told ya so!" from the rest of the roleplaying blogosphere now.

Thanks for staying tuned, we'll be back with you shortly.

Looking forward to 2009!

As we bound headlong into the new year, all of us over at Stupid Ranger Central met and came up with some resolutions for 2009.

Annoying things, begone!

Because of this fact, in the coming weeks you will see some changes over here at StupidRanger.com. We have been using Google AdSense to monetize our site, and two things happened: we've made effectively nothing from this effort and we often see annoying or irrelevant ads on our main page. So AdSense is gone for 2009!

This is not to say that advertising will never return, but it will be only to projects very close to our heart and will be entirely relevant to gaming.

In addition, we've decided to part ways with CafePress. We truly love many of our shirt designs, but we cannot price them competitively enough to make up the cost of maintaining the storefront. Vanir is going to make some of our more popular designs into desktop wallpaper which will be made freely available as he has time.

For the record, our good buddy Yax over at DungeonMastering.com now has a small collection of newly limited edition shirts! Thanks for the support, Yax!

Getting back to the fun of it!

StupidRanger, Vanir, and I have had a lot of fun with this site over the past year and a half. We're going to focus on providing the content that is important to us. Speaking purely for myself, I intend to continue to explore the ins and outs of being a better Game Master. That means one of my immediate resolutions is to get a gaming group together in our new locale. We know there is a small body of gamers right in our subdivision, and my coworkers have expressed some interest in getting back into D&D so this should be an easy win.

Both Vanir and Stupid Ranger have expressed a desire to stretch their creative writing muscles, so I suspect you will see more content from them on this front as 2009 progresses.

Relocating across country to a very demanding job has been taxing on SR and I, and Vanir's new wunderkind has drawn some of his recreational time lately so you can expect that our post frequency might not remain at the daily level that it was through much of 2008.

But that being said, understand this loud and clear: we are not going away. If you do get to feeling lonely and need some extra roleplaying content, you can always go drink from the industrial strength firehose that is RPGBloggers.com. Don't worry, we'll be there too with every roleplaying related post that we write!

I hope everyone gets their New Year off right, we're really looking forward to getting back to the fun stuff in 2009!

Behind the Screen: Old vs. New?

Stupid Ranger and I have recently made the long round-trip to Illinois to spend the holidays with our family, and this resulted in a fairly long hiatus from our standard RPG fare. Thankfully, our good buddy Vanir threw in some excellent roleplaying holiday specials for you all to enjoy!

Out with the old... or not?

On the 16 hour car ride from Illinois, Stupid Ranger and I mulled the start of our new D&D campaign, which will begin in coming weeks. I told her that I've got some exciting ideas percolating and we should get serious about pulling our group together, and then she asked a fairly innocuous question: "Are you going to run [D&D] 3.5 or 4.0?"

On one hand, we are both intimately familiar with D&D 3.5 and she knows the rules inside and out. When starting to play in a new environment with a new group of roleplaying friends, the familiarity is very attractive. One wants to bring his A-game to a new group, yes?

On the other hand, if I am never forced to fully acclimate to the new rule set I am unlikely to ever learn it. Our small group of players are returning to D&D after a long lapse, so they will be unfamiliar with either option which should allow some bandwidth for SR and I to learn along with them. Regardless of the final decision, I'm going to get out my D&D 4.0 books and really give them another read.

I will gladly welcome sage advice on this matter as I plunge headlong into campaign planning!

Thanks for putting up with the cold winter hiatus, we've got some exciting things in store for the new year that will be announced soon! Stay tuned!