Welcome to another Weekly Assembly! I think the timing of the Weekly Assembly may change in the coming weeks to sometime other than noonish on Mondays. We’re working on options now, and we’ll keep you informed. I also want to welcome Keith Davies to the MetaRoundup with his Links of the Week series. It’s well-curated and invariably interesting, so lend him your eyeballs for a bit. Now on with the links!

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

Only 11 Gaming Days Until PAX East! If you’ll be in Boston on Easter weekend April 6-8, you owe it to yourself to attend the best gaming con. Three-day passes have sold out, but you can still pick up day passes. We’ll be there running the “Fix Your RPG Problems with the RPG Doctor and Gamer Assembly” panel on Friday, April 6 at 7 pm in the Merman Theatre. Will we see you there?

The Call To Assembly, Volume 1, our collection of the first 2 months of Gamer Assembly posts is now available as a free PDF at RPG Now and as a not-free printed magazine at Lulu!

Some harmless joking on Twitter inspired T.W.Wombat to mine the chat room for ideas, culminating in a collection of Code Phrases for D&D Next, now including a code phrase randomizer at the top of the page.

Modern Assembly: Faceman Theme by Brian Liberge shows us the benefits of Charisma as your character’s prime attribute. I especially enjoy the Nothing To See Here utility power.

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

On Mission Statements by T.W.Wombat reflects on the past 1.5 years of RPG blogging and what it all means to focus the action going forward. Then again, the same technique works just as well with your campaign.

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

Wizards of the Coast went public with their announcement about the next edition of D&D on Monday 09 January 2012. We’re collecting D&D Next links in our wiki. If we’ve missed any good ones that you’ve read, feel free to let us know in the comments or join us in the chat.

The One Page Dungeon Contest is back for 2012. It’s a great competition in minimalist adventure design that offers great prizes.

On Successful Communication With the Other Side details an exchange of ideas and meeting of the minds between an Old School Renaissance enthusiast and a Story Game enthusiast. All communication of new ideas should be this civil and productive.

Thoughtcrime Games, a new venture from Ryven Cedrylle, Quinn Murphy, and David Welsh (@doubleplusfun on Twitter), provides an actual play description of how Marvel Heroic Roleplaying’s system handles social, mechanical, and combat situations with equal ease.

Todd VanDerWerff tries D&D for the first time after getting past his youthful belief that nerdy things are inherently bad in this article on A. V. Club, the first article in the Nerd Curious monthly series. It also includes some great history and unfortunate misconceptions about role playing games.

Precisely Subjective by Robin Laws shines a light onto the preconceptions built into the rules that may be excluding some of your players.

Meanwhile, over on The Forge Forums, Emily Care hopes to gather experiences from independent RPG publishers in her State of the Indie Publisher thread. If you’ve published an RPG, head on over and share your story.

Swords and Sorcery Heroic Roleplaying at Exploring Infinity shows us a few sample characters as a cool finale to a great series of articles on hacking Marvel Heroic Roleplaying to run a pulpy swords & sorcery game. Part 4 of 3 is rumored to be on the way, so stay tuned.

Thinking about starting a Science Fiction RPG? Stargazer’s World provides Some Thoughts on Roleplaying in the SF Genre, including deciding setting the dials for visualization and how hard you want your science.

If talking about the RPG business model interests you, take a look at this thread on the RPG Reddit. 91 comments later the opinions remain civil and thoughtworthy, except for the hipster/porn star/art stripper thread.

This Game Starts at Level Three at Tenkar’s Tavern talks about alternate ways to handle training new players other than setting aside the first two levels of play as training levels. I see some interesting ideas on both sides of the discussion in the comments.

Further musings on starting a game above first level can be found in Starting Above First Level at Untimately, including the insight that the deadliness of a setting is inversely proportional to how long it takes to create a character.

MetaRoundup

A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.

Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!

Game Knight Reviews comes out with Friday Knight News articles on Fridays. Check out this week’s news to see a list of differences between D&D and Savage Worlds, trying out Tabletop Forge for Google+ gaming, and 20 ways to add color to your darkness. Thanks for hanging out and mentioning the chat, Fitz!

Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s 500 New Fairy Tales Edition gives us ways to overcome story block, an Alpha Mutation draft in Gamma World, and pretending with Monte Cook.

Keith Davies maintains In My Campaign and he publishes a collection of Links of the Week including recommended Kickstarter projects and interesting YouTube videos. Take a look at this week’s collection which includes the excellent series of articles showing how to make a fantasy sandbox, the Birthday Shoggoth, and a video for World of Workcraft – Papers and Paychecks upgraded for the MMO crowd.