Keep on the Shadowfell: A Good Read

Keep on the Shadowfell has performed its intended purpose: I'm excited about 4e again.

The adventure looks pretty good, but I'm no particular judge of that. It does have a couple of neat miniature (read: whatever weird junk happens to be within reach) placement tricks, which I should have been using already, but at least it didn't take me any longer to find out about them. Just stuff like not putting all the miniatures down at the same time, if a couple members of the group are hiding, or putting the battle map out and letting the PCs move around a bit before starting things up.

If 4e ends up becoming my game of choice (Not that I have one now; I've played more 3.5 than anything, but when I run games, I always have to figure out whether I want to use Iron Heroes or d20 Modern or GURPS or whatever else.) I'll probably get a fair amount of use out of it, because it's got everything I need to start up a game with new players at short notice. I've done that kind of thing before, but this looks like it'll make it a lot easier.

Oh, and there's a gnome in it. Page 31. I guess Mearls and Cordell wanted to let it be known that they haven't forgotten about them. I'll be surprised if there isn't a full gnome write up in the PHB II.

There's not a whole lot more than I can say about the adventure, and the game it represents, without playing it. I'm running a campaign this summer using 4e, and I'll probably use Keep to kick it off, so there'll probably be lots of commentary on it and the system in the coming weeks.

Keep on the Shadowfell and Edition Angst

I did it: I broke down and bought Keep on the Shadowfell.

Even though the rules will be out in a week. Even after hearing about possible printing problems. Even though my group might not even want to play it; the previous plan was to do a bit of Feng Shui, and there's one guy who really wants to do that because he played a bit of KotS and didn't like it.

Partially, it's because I feel kind of bad about getting my core books off of Amazon. This way, I got something at the FLGS. It's not much, maybe, but it's not like I haven't bought things there before.

Partially, it's because I've never run a published module. I tried, with The Heart of Nightfang Spire, but I don't know what was up with that thing; there's a trap at the beginning that I just couldn't figure out, and the whole mood was off, anyway. So I figure, even if we don't end up using it before the rules come out, I can use it to kick off the campaign, take a bit of the design load off while I'm learning the rules.

And (not incidentally) find out just what an adventure is supposed to look like, anyway. I've never had a real good grasp on that. My campaigns always start off with an actual adventure, but it usually trails off into a mess of plot threads and intrigue. If I''m going to do WoAdWriMo, I want to get some idea of what I'm up against.

Mostly, though . . . I want to get some idea, personally, of what the edition actually feels like. I don't have torrent software, no need for it, and at any rate I much prefer to read books for the first time in actual copy. That's important to me, for whatever reason.

But there's an uneasy feeling I have. I hear about 4e a lot, I read about it a lot, I think about it a lot, and all in hearsay and abstract terms. I'd like to get a stronger handle on it, and something I can distract myself with until the edition comes out properly.

Wherein I Discuss Puzzles

Trollsmyth has some cool ideas about applications for the timed dungeon doors thing. This is one of the things I love about blogging. Bouncing ideas off of people, and ending up with things that are even crazier than what I come up with. And, of course, it gives me a good clue to what ideas are actually interesting.

The whole thing got me thinking about puzzles. The calendar/timed doors make pretty good RPG puzzles, as long as the GM is willing to keep track of them, and they don't end up making bottlenecks in the dungeon and stopping the session while one person solves them.

If I worked up a labelling system, and turn them into a cipher-type puzzle that gets easier to solve the more doors they solve, the puzzle people would be really happy. But I've also got a player who just likes to take notes, and keep track of things; even after the puzzle had been solved, she'd still get a kick out of being able to tell the rest of the group which door to go back to.

The best part about these sorts of puzzles is that they're fairly well integrated into the game part of the activity. A puzzle based off of the calendar the DM uses, that you can only solve by exploring the dungeon, and rewards you with even more dungeon, isn't the kind of thing you can pick up in a drug store. And of course, building a bit of world info into a puzzle, a challenge the players can solve, gives them a reason to actually pay attention to the background for once.

Even better, though, are puzzles that I think of as "environment puzzles." I give the players some not-immediately-obvious situation, say, some bit of treasure on a pillar in the middle of an underwater lake. I give them a sketch description of the area, maybe make some modifications if they ask a question that suggests a particularly interesting possibility, and they figure out some way to get to the treasure. The fun part, of course, comes with rolling the dice, because then their plans never go quite the way they want.

I figure most people are already doing this. I got a lot of it, originally, from Roleplaying Tips #5: How to Turn Brain Teasers Into Amazing Roleplaying Opportunities. But this is the kind of thing I didn't know, when I first started out, and I'm still trying to work out, after having been at it for a bit: how to play to the medium's strengths.

Wherein I Discuss Time, and Also Doors

One interesting thing that could be in a dungeon would be doors that open only at certain phases of the moon. This would work best with large dungeons, or if you otherwise had a reason to return to it over time. Then the dungeon would cycle through different areas being open; the players might even need to complete some task or puzzle in one area to get further into another.

Some doors might be open for relatively long periods in the moon's cycle, others for only a single day. And if there was more than one moon, a door might open at certain specific combinations of phases. There'd probably have to be some kind of notation system, a code for the PCs to figure out, that indicated when these doors would be open, so the players wouldn't have to go through and check every door every time they entered the dungeon.

Other time-based doors are fairly simple to imagine. Doors based on time of day, days of the week, months, seasons, and specific times of the year would all be fairly straightforward, though, again, it's a good place for a puzzle, especially if the time when it opens is fairly specific, or a long way away. It wouldn't necessarily have to be code-based (my group likes codes); the information they need might be written down somewhere, or known by other inhabitants of the dungeon.

More exotic time-based requirements are possible. Eberron's planar conjunctions would make an interesting criteria; any fantastical, regularly occurring even would work well, especially if it was somehow important to whoever built the dungeon. (If it was built by mortal hands, that is.) Doors like these would also make a good place to use fantastic calendars. Using the contemporary calendar of the world would encourage the players to actually pay attention to it, while a calendar constructed specifically for the lost civilization responsible for the dungeon could help illuminate its culture and strangeness.

Character Death and a Good Campaign

I've been reading Jeff Rients' tales of PCs past and their rousing adventures, and something odd occurred to me: I've never had a character die. (Properly, in influencable circumstances, I mean. I've been victim of "rocks fall, everyone dies," but I don't know that quite counts.)

And I've had precious few character deaths on the other side of the screen. Three characters died in the "Desert Campaign," the most combat heavy game I ever ran, and the only one that had anything approaching a dungeon crawl. A couple died in the Gnome Town game I ran, but that was exclusively PC-on-PC violence.

In other campaigns, I had the occasional close call, but I always fudged it. Once I got a guy ressurected by the main villain of the piece (long story, it almost made sense at the time) and once I took the more convential route of "misremembering" how the dice came out.

Part of me feels bad about those incidents--lack of character, or something. Part of me thinks it worked for the campaigns. The way I tend to run games, I get very interested in the characters, and what they're going to do, and the history they're building for themselves. When I'm in the moment, running those kinds of games, even if I've said to myself beforehand that I'm going to let the dice fall where they may, killing them just seems like a waste of time.

On the other hand, fudging at the last minute probably isn't the best solution. But it always worked out alright. Those campaigns went fairly well, everyone mostly ended up having fun.

But the "Desert Campaign" was pretty fun, too. When people weren't arguing with me, or complaining that I wouldn't let them play a half-illithid whatever, anyway. But it had a different sort of style to it. We played at lunch, and it was mostly guys who liked building characters, killing things, and taking their stuff, in roughly that order. I flailed around a bit at the beginning, but once I figured out that what they reall wanted was to kick in the door and have a fight every day, things started to go pretty smoothly.

I was a lot less focused on story -- that is, what had happened before in the campaign, and what was going on outside the characters, and what might happen next if they didn't get involved -- and a lot more focused on what was going on in the fight of the day, and prepping the dungeon so I'd be ready for the next day.

Because I didn't particularly care about what the characters had done, or were going to do--they were interesting enough, on an individual level, but the the guy the player came up with next would be, too--I was a lot more comfortable really dropping the hammer on them. I even used a death ray on one of them.

It was fun. The players liked the fights, and the occasionally liked rolling up new characters, and not taking things too seriously. I had one guy who liked arguing, another who liked making just-barely-almost-broken characters, and another who liked playing the weirdest things he could find, but I handled it.

I liked the change of pace from my usual games, and actually getting to use the random monster and treasure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide, for once. And I liked building the dungeon. The dungeon--which was, in the game, a tower, but in practice it was a dungeon--wasn't particularly good. It wasn't much more than a bunch of rooms filled with monsters and treasure. Very little in the way of traps, description, puzzles, or interaction amongst its inhabitants.

It did have a couple of virtues. It was extremely non-linear. Any place you could get to, you could get to in a couple of different ways. Which was good, because the players could still get to the stairs after they decided that the black dragon, and later the basilisk, just weren't worth messing with.

I think, if I'd continued to run that dungeon, or something like it, that I might have eventually worked out the finer points of dungeon design. But they finished it, killed the sorcerer at the top of the tower, and a short time later the campaign went on permanent hiatus, in favor of a campaign by the guy who liked to argue that ended pretty quickly, too.

It was fun while it lasted. I some important things from that game, even if, at the time, it was a source of serious frustration for me, and it didn't end quite how I would have liked.

I'm thinking about running my summer campaign along similar lines. Improve my dungeon design, because I know a lot more theory than I did then, that I'd like to put into practice. And maybe get more comfortable with PC death, so I don't back down from it as much even in games where specific characters are more important to the players, and to me. I'll have a good mix of players for that style, and it'd be good to test how well 4e can handle it.

4e D&D on the Amazon Best Seller List

The Dungeons and Dragons Core Rulebook Gift Set, 4th Edition, is the 7th item on Amazon's bestselling books list. And its even higher up the hot new releases list.

This gets me to wondering about just how big the release is going to be. Sure, it's huge in the gaming community, but although I occasionally see articles about comics in the paper (the Captain America fiasco, for starters) I've never seen one about tabletop games. I don't expect to see anything about 4th Edition in the papers, but I didn't expect it to get so high up on Amazon, either.

And why is it the Gift Set, rather than the Player's Handbook, that gets that high? I didn't even see the PHB on the list, though it's certainly possible that I simply missed it. But if that's not the case, well, in my group there are more people getting the PHB than the full set, but apparently that's not how it is everywhere. Maybe players are less interested in pre-ordering, or are more likely to do it through their FLGS.

WoAdWriMo: A Declaration

I'm going to do Worldwide Adventure Writing Month this July.

I really, really want to say I'm going to be to busy. I want to hedge, say I'm not ready to commit, I want to wait to see how things are going to turn out. I'll be running a campaign then. I'll be busy. I don't want to completely commit to it, in public, until I'm sure that I can do it.

But that's what I did last year, and I never got around to it. I was never sure.

So screw "sure." I'm going to do it. Even if what I turn in ends up being mostly notes from my campaign, even if it ends up being ridiculous, even if it ends up driving me crazy, I'm still going to turn something in. This is a solemn, public vow, and I am going to hate myself for it come mid-July.

But what the heck. I did NaNoWriMo, right? How bad can it be?

Return of System Obsession

So, I guess the list 'o systems now looks something more like this:

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons
Feng Shui
"OD&D"
Star Wars Saga Edition
Iron Heroes
Castles & Crusades
Mutants & Masterminds
Truth and Justice
Encounter Critical
Savage Worlds
d6 Space
Stargate: SG-1 Roleplaying Game
Ars Magica
Forward . . . to Adventure!

Feng Shui is present on the list, and has taken the second spot, because I now have ownership of the book.

OD&D has scooted up because I've been further enlightened as to its awesome, thanks mostly to Sham's Grog 'n Blog and Square Mans. (Which you should reload a couple of times until you get a glimpse of the wicked cool Dune board game. I need to get my hands on a set.) I'm considering using it to run my college game next year. I fear its power may be necessary to combat the Exalted zombies who have taken over the local scene.

(Nothing against Exalted; the main reason it doesn't make the list is that I'd never go out and buy the rulebooks to start my own game, I'd rather get in on someone else's. It's these specific people, and their attitude, that riles me. Telling me that "D&D isn't fun" is not the way to get on my good side.)

I realized an interest in Savage Worlds, d6 Space, and Ars Magica when I was thinking about what I wanted to get from the Compleat Strategist. d6 Space is the variety I've heard the most about, but I'm also intrigued by Adventure, because I suspect it's something I could run mad scientist nazi smackdowns with.

Oh, and Stargate moved up a bit because I got closer to being willing to spend the money. Still don't have that many people to play it with, though, and enough other things that it's cozy on the backburner.

The Compleat Strategist, and Awesome Therein

I just went to the New York location of The Compleat Strategist.

It is awesome.

My local store is pretty good, but it mostly sticks to d20, White Wolf, and GURPS. It might have a smattering of other systems, but I haven't check in a while.

The Compleat Strategist, on the other hand . . .

Wow.

Shelves full of d20 books I'd never heard of, systems I'd only read about only, and others I'd never even fathomed. Most of it I probably could have gotten online, but I can't browse online. I'm not surrounded by books, can't pick them up and flip through them, can't walk out with a book I only heard about today.

They even had a copy of the Stargate SG-1 book--the one that's out of print, because Sony revoked the license. I very, very badly wanted to get it, but a $50 price tag and a drought of acquaintances who both like gaming and would care that they were playing Stargate stayed my hand.

Instead, I'm now the proud owner of Feng Shui.

A tough choice, between that and d6 Space, (or perhaps Adventure, haven't heard as much about it but it looked cool) and I would have considered Savage Worlds if they'd had it. Something about it being out of print. I dunno.

(Amusingly, none of these were on the list of systems I want. Ah, well.)

So far, I'm happy with Feng Shui. Prep on both sides of the screen is fast a simple, since it encourages everyone to lean on action movie cliches, so it may fill that "one-shot system" hole I've had in my game line-up for a while. I need to get a chance to run it (I've got at least one weekend free before 4e hits . . .) but it looks like it fits my natural style pretty well. Fast, loose, a fair amount of action, but not nothing but fights, and encouraging cool ideas from the players.

We'll see how it goes.

Love Through Action

There's a cool new blog out there, Love Through Action, and it's worth checking out. Please excuse a bit of deviation from my normal topics, I just thought this would be worth letting people know about. It's about a kid with cancer and doing good deeds and--well, the blog explains better than I would.

Thanks to Qwerty for the link.

Quotes VI

"I'm starting to envisage a massive egg-thief campaign here, progressing from birds of prey, to griffins and hypogriffs, to dragons, but don't think I'd ever be able to justify it." noisms

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." Major Mike Shearer, UK military spokesman

"We're not shooting for authenticity here, but awesome-osity." Jeff Rients

"Being the biggest name in fantasy gaming since 1974, D&D has always attracted more than its share of players who didn't really like it in the first place and wanted to 'fix' it in ways that shredded its very soul." James Maliszewski

"I don't eat. I don't need to eat. When I do eat, I eat rocket fuel." "Bill"

"I eat rope. By the transitive property I could eat a guy named Rope." Mike Gravel

"Whoa, hold on! Are you saying that, should Obama be elected, all the white people won't be put on ships and deported to Africa?" Michael Clear

"Eating snakes is just as bad as being gay." Artemis

"Beowulf makes so much more sense in a tree." Amanda

"He kept throwing up. Until I killed him." Qwerty

"Develop AI, Orbital Mind Control, Google Football League, Buy New Zealand, Build Singularity, Crop Circles, Elimination of Evil." Google's Corporate Goals

"Note that this method works in any game that is awesome." Jeff Rients

"Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery." William Shakespeare

"Facing the terrible trio is like some bizarre surrealist dream, where you're in battle against a law firm composed entirely of Egyptian gods and former high school mascots." Scipio

"Bah! Three little boys can't defeat the President! Riding a robot spider!" Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Not releasing Thundarr on DVD is an ongoing crime against awesome." Jeff Rients

"If religion is the opiate of the people, is UU the methadone of the people?" BlackBoc

"If they did three or four more National Treasure movies, getting more and more ridiculous, and then had a movie where Nicolas Cage was running around swearing that the Egyptian Pyramids were put up by Abraham Lincoln as a clue to where Mark Twain hid Franklin Pierce's fabulous treasures, and everyone in the movie called him crazy, and then he was wrong? That would be amazing." Montykins

"....right or wrong? I so want to see that movie now.

Just to see the pyramids start rotating when they push the right sequence of stones just after the put the giant counterweight on the Sphinx to make up for the missing nose that opens the Masonic cache that leads down into the Nile Chamber where the ancient dumbwaiter lowers them into Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad to Riches." Eric Burns

Players: Inspiration, Aid to Laziness

As much as I like being a game master and a novelist (sorta) it does get to be annoying sometimes. Because right now, when I'm gearing up for a game, and should be focusing my creative energies on that, I suddenly realize that the short story I was working on is not nearly as interesting as what's going on in the background, because there lie the seeds of an epic tale.

This is not the first time this has happened.

But for the most part, it's a good thing. The writing reminds me just how much less work gaming is, when I have the players there to protagonize for me. Though I know I must have done it when I was first starting out, I can't imagine railroading my players past "hey, here's where the game starts, think up some reason to get yourself involved," because then I'd be stuck making all the decisions, and who wants that kind of responsibilty?

Well, novelist-me, I guess.

Gnome Rodeo: Why It's Awesome

Gnome Stew has a new feature that I hope very much becomes a regular one (and that does look like the plan): Gnome Rodeo.

It's a big ol' list of links, mostly about GMing but with a few contests for flavor. Having a large, (and I think Gnome Stew aims to become a mighty force in the GMing blog-o-sphere) active, and consistently useful blog doing this is excellent.

If writing something clever about GMing will get you linked by Gnome Stew, that'll encourage people to write clever things about GMing. And everyone who reads Gnome Stew gets easier access to all those clever things people are writing about GMing, because Gnome Stew (and its readers) are out there, searching the web.

And Gnome Stew's multi-author, comment-encouraging, community driven set up makes it pretty close to the best possible forum for this endeavor.

I haven't gotten a chance yet (limited computer access, it's been a busy weekend) but as soon as I do I need to go through my own list of GMing resources. Can't be extolling the virtues of the program if I'm not going to contribute.

Adjustments to the Look

I'm continuing to make changes to the layout. Added a few blogs to the blogroll, and fiddled with its settings. I may make some more changes to it, and move some more things around. Mostly, I just like tinkering with it.

And while I needed an "about me" type of section, what's there right now might be too much. I'm going for short, entertaining, and relevant, but getting there may take some time.

Gnome Stew

Gnome Stew is up and running!

I don't read as many GMing help-sites as I used to, but Treasure Tables was one of my favorites back in the day, and if Gnome Stew ends up half as good (and so far, it does look very good) it's worth checking out.

I'm not a huge fan of the layout right now, with all the text way over to the left--looks fine above the fold, but once I scroll down it gets a little disorienting. But that's a massively minor nitpick.

The community features intrigue me. If they end up getting used, it could end up as a pretty powerful game blog hub. I'm not aware that we really have one right now. There are some sort of hub-esque things, blogs big enough that most people know about them, but nothing like When Fangirls Attack that keeps everyone talking to each other.

The take home message: Gnome Stew. It's cool. Go there! Do it now!

Why I Keep Geeking Out About A Villain's Life

Man, I already thought A Villain's Life was cool, and sort of sweet, but now I care. Doctor Cataclysm, please be okay!

Yeah, I'm still geeking out about it. It'll pass. In the mean time, a small insight:

Most media has a fairly clear division between real/non-real. Movies have a screen, books have their pages. Even if there's a framing device, in most cases it's still pretty easy to tell, just from the format, that it's fiction. Yes, that book may claim to be a journal, but its still professionally printed with the publishers name in the front.

This kind of fiction, this fictional blogging, has a little less of that. It's still obviously fictional--there are no superheroes, no superpowers, no weather machines. But that's only discernable from the content.

In form, this is just another blog. It's framing device is built into the media itself. I tend to dislike frames in books, just because they're not. You can tell, very easily, that the frame is also false, so it tends to interfere with my suspension of disbelief. Your mileage may vary.

But this is cool. I get information about Doctor Cataclysm in exactly the way I would if he was real. 'tis a trick, rather like a well done game story, that allows for stronger audience/character attachement.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

4th Edition Excerpts: Giants and Epic Destinies

Who and a what huh? Hill giants are just like stone giants? When did that happen? Why was I not informed?

Okay, maybe they play similarly in combat. I wouldn't know, having never had a party of the right level to express my thwarted interest in giants. But how does that translate to "too similar?" They may have the same intelligence, but they don't act the same. Maybe they could use a little mechanical differentiation, as the kids say these days, but I can tell 'em apart.

And I'm all for limited campaigns, and the presented material does look kinda cool, but I'm not so sure I want my game system structuring my campaigns for me. On the other hand, giving characters a concrete way to provide feedback to the DM sounds kind of nifty. "Ah, Dave has taken 'destroyer of zwirfs' as his epic destiny. He must want to fight zwirfs." On yet another hand, shouldn't the DM be able to figure that kind of thing out?

I'm still looking forward to 4e. I've liked all the preview material so far. (Except for the sword wing. No hints of history, and it does nothing horrible to the PCs, fulfilling neither of my main monster criteria.) And, if it plays fun, fast, and with less work, that'll be worth any weirdness in the setting fluff. And any weirdness generally.

But those bits of it strike me as just a little bit off.

Literary Pretensions: Iron Man

Iron Man is about technology. In the movie, he's also very specifically about the corporatization of technology, and the responsibility creators have over their creations. But he also represents a general conversation about the role and effects of technology.

In Iron Man, technology has a dark side. In the movie, Tony Stark creates the suit, but he also creates the villains he uses it to battle. And in the comics, Iron Man's suit has, on occasion, become a villain in its own right.

But Iron Man is a superhero. He's technology personified, and, for the most part, he's a force for good. The wrongs he has done, even inadvertently, he works to right. Technology is a powerful tool in that fight, and he has a unique control over it.

Which is at the heart of the Iron Man concept. How do we control technology? In what ways does it affect us? Tony Stark has a remarkable talent, but he simultaneously depends on technology to survive. His injury was inflicted by a man-made weapon, but another device keeps it from killing him. He uses technology to do good, but the evil he fights is often similarly empowered.

And, of course, it's not just shrapnel in his leg or his liver or something. It's his heart that has shrapnel and a magnet in it, magnifying its importance in both physical and metaphorical terms.

"Technology" isn't the only thing that Iron Man is about. And being "about" things isn't the most important thing about Iron Man--the most important thing is smashing bad guys with fancy gadgets.

But what he's about is important. Superheroes, and other culturally important stories, give us a window into our culture's collective unconscious.

Technology is very much on our minds.

Random Thoughts on Iron Man

I loved Iron Man. Awesome movie. Shame I didn't get a chance to write about it until now, but thems the breaks.

I wasn't expecting it to be so funny. It works. It would have been interesting if they'd put one of those testing videos Tony Stark took on YouTube, but it obviously wasn't necessary.

I love tech-y, shiny, robot type stuff. I knew the movie had the suit in it, but then it turns out to have even more robot awesome, and I am officially happy.

I was impressed by the psychology of the movie. I think this movie has the most coherent explanation for why its superhero became what he is, out of all of them that have come out so far.

And his relationship with Pepper Pots seemed more human than the sort of "no, I can't love you, it's too dangerous" business most superheroes satsify themselves with. I mean, it had that, but it had a lot more than that--we work together and depend on each other but I'm desperately afraid of commitment, etc. Standard pieces for relationship movies, but stretching the superhero box a bit.

And--this is a personal thing, not analysis--I liked Tony Stark. A lot more than I like, say, Peter Parker, or Bruce Wayne. I sympathize with Peter, and Spiderman, and I accept Bruce Wayne as necessary. But I don't even particularly like Batman, as a person, I just think he's cool.

I hadn't realized that, until I saw Iron Man. It made him a likable guy. A messed up guy, but in an understandable way. And, in the end, a mostly decent guy.

Homework for Fun

Every so often I'll be carrying my roleplaying books around with me in public, either as reading material or because I'm working on an adventure or something. And, every so often, someone will ask me, "Are you doing homework?"

Which is, I suppose, understandable. I'm carrying around what a couple of textbooks. They're textbooks about dragons, but they're still textbooks. I'm reading charts, and taking notes, and doing calculations. I look like I'm doing homework.

But I tell them, "No, no, this is fun. This is Dungeons & Dragons."

Which isn't entirely true. It is homework. It's self-imposed homework, it's fun homework, but it's still homework.

It's a weird hobby.

WoAdWriMo: Ideas

Yes, it's that time again: WoAdWriMo is nearly upon us. Word is, it is in dire need of hosting. Unfortunately, the best I can do is pass the request along.

I'd really like to participate this year; didn't last time, mostly out of fear of failure. This time, it's a mix of that (there's always some of that) and time issues. It comes right as I'll be frantically learning the 4e rules and trying to run a campaign, but I could get that to work in my favor, if I just write the adventure using material for the campaign. That way it even gets a tiny bit of playtesting.

I've even got some ideas. Possibilities include:

• the idiocy I've produced so far for ChattyDM's contest
• my old, weird idea about verbifying Keep on the Borderlands
• the same idea relating to Keep on the Shadowfell
• along similar lines: Fall Off the Shadow Keep (stolen)
• pilfer something from a (new, improved, more sensical) version of my Very First Campaign
• pilfer something from my most recent campaign
• use something I came up with thinking about last years WoAdWriMo (most of the good ones are in the contest entry)
• fix up some of the material from an Iron Heroes one-shot I never ran
• fix up some material from the one-shot I ran instead

There are probably some more rattling around in my head somewhere.

Look! More Internets!

Wizards of the Coast plans to bring back old settings. Never played any, always been fascinated.

Plausible Deniability possesses, among other things, an article on Geek Social Fallacies. I've suffered a sort of reverse #4, "no mixing of groups because this one is magic!" I got over it.

Qwertyuiopasd is posting again. About Batman villains. I approve.

Everyone Rides Dinosaurs

Or rather, everyone cool rides dinosaurs. This was one of the best things about Eberron, the dinosaur riding, but they did not, in my opinion, take it far enough.

No. In my setting, the halflings aren't the only ones with access to the dinosaur awesome. Everyone cool rides dinosaurs. The players ride dinosaurs, important NPCs like kings and bartenders ride dinosaurs, major villains in spiky black armor ride dinosaurs. Even plenty of people who are not cool ride dinosaurs. Like bards.

No one rides horses. (Even bards.) They might ride things that are significantly stupider than dinosaurs, but they don't ride horses.

A lot of the different knightly orders have running arguments about which dinosaurs are best. This has evolved into bi-yearly contests in the civilized realms, jousting and that sort of thing, where you're on teams depending on what sort of dinosaur you ride. When two riders of different sorts of dinosaurs meet, they have a tendency to engage in an impromptu dinosaur-measuring contest.

Non-dinosaur riders tend to think this is sort of stupid, but they tend to think that everything relating to dinosaurs is sort of stupid. That's the problem with dinosaurs: they're sort of stupid. You can train them, and some of them are less stupid than others, but there are some definite limits to their intellectual capacity.

Doctor Cataclysm

I mentioned Doctor Cataclysm, and his blog A Villain's Life, in sort of an offhand way, but it really deserves a full, proper post. If you haven't read it, go read it now, so far it's very short. (I further recommend that you add it to your feed, and if you don't have a feed, to get one, but now we're shading into irrelevancy.)

I'm really quite taken with it. I have a mild obsession with non-standard storytelling, and I've been interested in the idea of fictional blogging for a while. And, of course, superheroes are cool. Supervillains even more so--especially mad scientists.

That's all certainly part of it. But Doctor Cataclysm himself is really quite charming. He's a super villain, but he's not psychotic. When he's not engaging in (excellent) supervillainy, he occasionally stops muggers, and worries about being "too much of a moocher." The villainy is entertaining, but it seems like a cross between a job and a hobby, (love your work, I guess) and less like destroy-the-world craziness.

Which is good. It's relatable. And, at times, very sweet. (Though I recommend running through the previous posts before hitting that last.)

My favorite thing about this is that it's not fiction in blog form. It is, in fact, a fictional blog. In addition to recounting his villainy, he blogs about movies, politics, and YouTube videos. The politics and the videos are fictional, which is probably necessary, (though the videos might make an interesting project) but the movies are real, which is excellent.

The only trouble is that there's not very much of it, yet. Which is great for me, and you, and everyone getting into it right now, because there's not much to get into before we're up to speed. But I sure hope it keeps up, at the same level of quality, because it sure is a lot of fun.

(I can think of one other nitpick--the most generic of the generic blog templates. But in some ways, that adds to its charm, and I can't fault a brand new blog for not having figured out it's look yet. I still haven't really figured out mine.)

Oh, and a thank you to Neitherworld Stories, for linking to A Villain's Life in the first place. From there I have also learned of Velvet Marauder, but haven't yet had quite the chunk of time I'd like to get through it.

Questions Relating to Web-based Serial Fiction

Why is it web-comics rather than web-fiction?

Is that what fanfiction is? The text-only equivalent of webcomics?

People like funny stuff. Is funny easier to do with a visual medium?

People like pretty things. But one of the most popular webcomics out there is xkcd, and Penny Arcade was popular even before it looked awesome. (Of course, back then, Penny Arcade had a lot less competition.)

Is pure text fiction significantly harder to serialize than a comic strip? The only serialized fiction I know of is Othar Tryggvassen's Twitter. (By which I am fascinated, as previously discussed.) There has to be something else like that out there.

Does anyone blog fiction? There's Banter Latte and Short Little Stories, (both, oddly, by comics bloggers, at Websnark and Damn Good Comics, respectively) but that's not quite what I mean.

Webcomics, at least the serious/story variety, tell a continuing story over a series of installments. Does anyone use blogs to do a similar thing?

Does anyone read them?

(I would mention Doctor Cataclysm, but that's clearly not fiction.)

Japan Travel Blog

If you've an interest in Japan, take a look at I (topic marker) something (destination). My friend Karen is spending the summer there, and she's blogging about it.

Metal Steampunk Vikings

Yes. This is what my next campaign needs to be. Metal. Steampunk. Vikings.

Loud, horned hat dudes wandering around in a Conan-esque Lost World, fighting robots and finding rayguns.

Weird, clanking, brass and springs constructs rampaging around in the wilderness. Mysterious machines from dimensions beyond time. Mad scientists demanding tribute along with the necromancers and dragons and mad god-kings.

Dinosaurs.

Cool Happenings: Duranmas Duranmas, Contests, and Crosslinking

As a purveyor of fake modern awesome holidays myself, I heartily approve of Duranmas Duranmas. You should approve it too!

ChattyDM has an adventure concept contest. The catch: 10 words.

I finally figured out what Trollsmyth is trying to do. It says right up at the top, "I’ll also link up with as much good stuff as possible for your websurfing convenience," and even expanded on the idea further. But it didn't really click until he linked to a comment about plot and story in a Grognardia post. Then I realized: he wants the game blog-o-sphere cross-linked.

This is an excellent idea. Something I should do more, too.

Wizards Are Weird

Wizards are very odd kleptomaniacs. Even if this is 4e, and 4e wizards don't need material components to cast spells (off the top of my head, I don't know) they'll still have the ability to produce any number of odd, valueless, seemingly useless objects at the drop of a pointy hat.

Warlocks can't do this. Sorcerers might be able to. Mostly, though, it's something wizards do, because they're weird.

They're not born with power. They want it, but they don't have the sense to do the easy thing and cut a deal with some extradimensional being. (Clerics, I'm looking at you, too.) Whether from principles, morals, or fear, they work for their power.

But then, they're not usual in that, either. They're not like fighters, or rogues; not practice and discipline and skill. They spend all their time reading books. And thinking. And tinkering with the fundamentals of the universe.

All without wearing pants.

Armor and Other D&D-isms

So Charles Ffoulkes is responsible for the weirdness that is D&D armor. I knew it was screwy already, having a friend who does Real True Historical Re-enactment, but I'm both glad to see that there's an explanation for it beyond, "eh, some daft thing that Gary put in there because he thought it looked cool."

Not that that would have been bad, necessarily. I know some people who are deeply disturbed by the idea that not everything in D&D is 100% historically accurate. The most annoying guy I ever gamed with would go on, at length, about how studded leather armor doesn't make sense, like the mere fact that he knew it wasn't real true medieval armor made him really, really cool.

I've never gotten so worked up about it. I like that D&D is filled with D&D-isms, bizarre little easter eggs that only make sense in the history and context of the game. I like that it has monsters inspired by plastic toys, and spells named after characters that people actually played.

I like that D&D doesn't always make sense.

Eladrin Are Ruled by Undead

Mostly by not-entirely-evil lich/mummies of their ancient kings. They still have living kings, but they tend to be not quite as important as the dead ones, because after a king dies he sticks around as an undead, and keeps all his followers and wealth. So mostly the living king gets used as a pawn by the more powerful houses of the dead.

Elves tend to have slightly more normal ruling systems, (often little or none at all) but there are also an unusual number of elven vampires and death knights running around, enslaving elves and mortals and building little fiefdoms. Elves also have an unfortunate tendency to come back as ghosts. It's just something that they do.

I'm not as completely sure about the elves as I am about the other races so far, but some one's ruled by undead. And since I don't know what else I might do with elves, it might as well be them.

This also sort of assumes 4e, but if I might end up using this for a setting that doesn't have eladrin. If so, I'll just stick it all together and say some elves are ruled by undead kings, and some are ruled by vampires.

As a further note, this is not entirely stolen from Eberron. Some of it is also stolen from the Incan empire, who mummified their kings and kept them around as rulers of political parties. Part of the reason they lost their war against the Spanish was they were already in the middle of a civil war between two mummies. (Not kidding, read 1491.)

Dinosaurs Make Everything Better

The PCs are all dinosaurs. You run around avoiding meteors and stomping things.

This could be played totally straight where the players are all dinosaurs doing dinosaur things. I spent a lot of time pretending I was a dinosaur as a kid, so there's got to be some fun there.

Or it could be more of a reverse Turok kind of deal, and the dinosaur-PCs eat Marines or Lost World explorers or scientists or whoever it would be entertaining for dinosaurs to eat.

Maybe Dinosaur Escape: Washington, D.C.

Halflings Are Cannibals

Not all halflings, of course. Some of them cremate their dead. And their have been rare instances of halfling burial, generally under unusual supernatural circumstances. But most halflings, in most cases, eat their dead.

They're a nomadic people, and thus they feel that it's better to carry their lost loved ones with them then to stick them in the ground in a place to which they may never return. They also believe that, by eating a person, they can absorb that person's strength and wisdom, and carry on their works. There are also some practical considerations; though not all halflings inhabit swamps and waterways, many do, and it's difficult to properly bury someone in that sort of terrain.

It's very unusual for halflings to eat non-halflings, or even members of their race that they don't have a strong personal connection to. It does happen occasionally, most often when the odd, marginalized sect comes up with the idea of eating their enemies. It's even more unusual for a non-halfling to partake of a halfling funeral ritual, but that, too, is not completely unknown.

Halflings don't usually bring it up when they live around other races. They think everyone else's practices are a little unnatural, but they're aware that a lot of other people find theirs downright repulsive, so they don't push the issue. A halfling adventurer might ask it of their comrades, in the event of their permanent death, but only with people they'd known deeply for years.

(Yes, I sort of stole this from Dark Sun. Dark Sun is cool.)

Dwarves Are Crazy

Dwarves get psychotic when they see the sky. They have some weird dwarven word for "sky madness," that they call it, because I haven't decided whether I'm going to go for "old and germanic" for dwarven, or "lots of 'kh' and 'g' and 'd' and little triangle things over the vowels." Everyone else mostly just assumes that dwarves are all nuts, especially in the Southern Lands, where it's more common.

It's really the night sky that's a problem, the stars or the planets or the moons. And for most dwarves, it's not really a huge problem. In ages past, a dwarven sorcerer-king learned to craft a sort of charm that mostly protects against the curse, or whatever it is, and with these forged the first above-ground dwarven empire. Nowadays, like most of dwarven government, they're largely religious in character, and the priesthood controls their manufacture.

It still comes up often enough that that's what a lot of people think of when they think of dwarves: weird, psychotic, atheistic serial-killers. Usually it happens to dwarves who have been exiled, but every so often, for whatever reason, the charms don't quite work.

And that's why dwarves are crazy.

Truth in Advertising

Livejournal's "sponsored links," that it displays on the link-out to this blog, are as follows:

Sandbox
Fast Cars
Lasers
Elder Scrolls
Solar System
Dinosaurs

(You can see for yourself on my friend Maggie's LJ.)

I am amused.

Also, this blog would be better if it fit that topic list more closely.

The Implications of Paragon Paths

Boy, does Wizards want you to buy the splatbooks.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm still looking forward to 4e, and I was probably going to buy a lot of those books anyway. Really, most of the people who care probably would have bought them anyway.

But technically, in 3.x, prestige classes were an alternate rule. You didn't have to use them, and DMs who didn't want to deal with them had rules text to back up that call. But in 4e, these paragon paths (which I do think are cool) are required.

And, according to that preview, there's only one for each class in the Player's Handbook.

Maybe there are more in the DMG. I kind of doubt it; now that they're required, it doesn't make much sense for a player build tool to be in the DM-only book. If you want more, you're going to have to buy more books, or a subscripition to D&D Insider.

The way these are pitched, they're integral to your character build and, particularly, concept. So if you want your cleric to be anything other than a "warpriest" -- say, a pacifist, or an oracle -- and to be mechanically differentiated by that role, you'll need more books.

Which, honestly, was sort of required by 3.x, too. If you want your character to be really unique, mechanically, the options in the core books probably wouldn't cut it. If you'd already played a standard cleric and wanted to do something a little different with your build, you'd need to buy more books. The people who care about that were probably going to buy those options books anyway.

But it's interesting that they're making it this explicit. Especially with all the talk on the interwebs about 4e just being a money grab.

New Look

It had been overdue for a while; I think the last time I changed it was over a year ago. And I don't really wear all black anymore, so my blog doesn't need to, either.

I might, eventually, return to some variation on that, because black background white text does look pretty spiffy. But for now, this is good.

I'm still not totally solid with the way the sidebar looks, though. Wondering whether I should rearrange my gadget scheme, or add some more. Particularly, I think I may break up the blogroll by topic.

And I am, at the moment, really not happy with the label system I'm using. Not sure whether I should actually go back and do the work to redo it, or just start using a new one and leave the old one as an artifact of earlier times.

Multi-DM Persistent World Campaign

Crazy idea: a sandbox game with no regular group, in the style of the West Marches but with the setting that powers it shared between multiple DMs.

This could just be on the design end: you have multiple people collaborating on a setting that one of them then uses to run a game. Co-operative worldbuiling. Or you could get fancier, and have each participating DM run their own player pool through the game.

Which could, in turn, run a couple of ways. You could have multiple independent games, seperated geographically or by convention, or you could have multiple DMs supporting the same player pool, with players switching back and forth between games. My personal situation better supports the former option, since I don't know many other DMs locally. But the second option could be interesting.

There big issues I've identified so far are time-keeping, DMing style, and griefing.

That last is also the least important; though I assume there's some potential for one DM to put way to powerful monsters in places they're not supposed to be, without warning for the players or the other DMs, a little thought put into who you invite into the project ought to keep the chance to a minimum. A bigger problem would be people doing that kind of thing accidentally, but that would happen even in a single-DM game.

Slightly bigger issue is time-keeping; if you put everyone on personal time, affected solely by in-game activities, as I tend to do in my normal games, then you could potentially end up with some groups way behind others, depending on how active the different DMs are. Then you get weirdness like dungeons that haven't been cleared out yet, but will be, so you can't go there because of what will happen, but hasn't. My solution would be to put everyone on universal time, perhaps locked to real-world time, and your character hangs around in taverns until you take them out on another adventure. (Which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a character to do.)

Finally, DM style. Part of the idea behind the set-up would be to produce an environment with greater depth and variety than one DM can provide, but this could go too far. And everyone involved would have to use a similar format in their world notes, and a similar level of rigor in applying those notes.

This could work, and it might be fun. It's not something that's likely to happen; I'm probably too distractible to pull something like that off. The vision I have in my head is of a game that keeps going for years, with different players and different DMs, but one persistent world. But at least in my case, it's more likely to stay just as an idea.

EDIT: Reposted because I just realized I misspelled the title. Why do I keep doing that?

What I Might Actually Run

I still haven't gotten a handle on what I'm going to run this summer. I was going to do a sequel to last year's game, but that fell through when it turned out one of the main players wouldn't be able to make it for most of it. I could still run it, but I'd rather do something new, and go back to it later when I've got another game between the old game and the new one.

A significant part of me very, very much would like to run 4e. Not unreservedly, but enough that it's probably what I'll end up doing.

My original plan was to run the preview module, Keep on the Shadowfell, and spin off from there. Maybe even go on to Thunderspire Labyrinth, if Shadowfell is any good. I've never actually run a published module before, and I've got an idea that I might learn something from it.

Of course, I'm also thinking about running a palette-swap on the system, fiddling with the flavor to make it more steampunk. A couple of my players have indicated an interest in the genre, and I'd have a fair few crazy ideas to mine for a setting.

My other major ideas for 4e are to go with (a heavily hacked version of) the new default settting, or make it metal. These ideas are not incompatible, nor are they in oppostion to the idea of starting off with a published module. Even the steampunk idea could be made to work with that; I'd just have to file the serial numbers off the adventure, too.

And then there's the non-4e ideas. I've still never run Eberron, despite it being on my list since it came out, but the two players who have the book are the two who aren't available this summer. I've had Iron Heroes for ages, but I'm more likely to loot it for parts for a 4e game, since if I'm going to run a relatively combat heavy game I'd rather try out the monster/encounter set-up the new edition promises. Encounter Critical is an option; though a few people have expressed desire for a "serious" game, it might work as a pre-4e mini-campaign if I decide not to start the game with the module.

The final factor is the sandbox/megadungeon/hexcrawl game I want to run in the somewhat near future. That's not likely to happen this summer, partially due to player interest, partially due to work requirements. More likely, I'll run something else over the summer and start working on the sandbox thing either during that or right after it ends.

Rabbit Attack Day, 2008

In honor of our Most Beloved Holiday, I give you: a giant rabbit attack.



Which I believe is from the movie "Night of the Lepus," a movie that I have not yet had the pleasure of viewing.

Fun Fact: The original Rabbit Attack Day entry is the most popular single post on the blog.

What I Want to Play, In No Particular Order

• Eberron
• human dragonmarked artificer of House d'Cannith
• elven wizard from Aerenal
• a megadungeon
• fast cars and the idiots who drive them
• pirates!
• interplanetary sailing ships with that baroque/victorian feel, "aether" and the spinning models of the solar system and everything
• perhaps a captain of a ship like that
• or an aether surfer, something like Ray Tracer
  
• Tamriel (Elder Scrolls Setting)
• ancient desert ruins
• Promethean: The Created (though I'm a bit off White Wolf, at the moment, for non-game related reasons)
  
• Exalted (same caveat as above)
  
• dawn caste/other fight-y solar using those artifact throwing ring thingies
• freedom fighter against the corrupt dragon-whatever government
  
• maybe another solar type, or another exalt entirely, since I don't know much about the world
• Vampire (again, same caveat)
• Malkavian!
• or one of those annoyingly pretentious artist types
• Werewolf (yet again, same caveat) (also, assuming it's possible to play this as something other than "science is evil" eco-terrorists)
  
• Girl Genius
• kitchen sink post-apocalyptic: "wizards, dinosaurs, mutants & lasers"
• something like the setting of Jak 2, and the parts of 3 that weren't stupid
  
• something sandbox-y
• a halfling wizard, specializing in rays
  

I Stab Things With Magic!

Your Score: Spellsword
51% Combativeness
16% Sneakiness
88% Intellect
33% Spirituality

Aggressive, but with the brains to back it up: You are a Spellsword!
Score! You have a prestige class. A prestige class can only be taken after you've fulfilled certain requirements. This may mean that you're an exceptionally talented person, but it probably doesn't.
Spellswords combine arcane might with combat know-how. They're much tougher than mages, like to wear armor, and can cast spells through their weapons. They're very, very, good at doing lots of damage to a single target very quickly, and while not quite as tough as most fighters, are still pretty hard to kill.
You're both smart and aggressive, which means that you're probably pretty dangerous when pissed off. You also tend to be somewhat straightforward, which is nice, and don't have much use for spirituality or mysticism.

Link: The RPG Class Test written by MFlowers on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(MFlowers)

From: Retro-Roleplaying: The Blog

I Read Too Much Science Fiction, And It Shows

How well would it work to have the PCs all play individuals who were part of a greater "over-person?" This is basically a trans/post-humanist concept, worlds where the basic unit of society isn't individual humans, but groups connected chemically or psychically or what-have-you. It works pretty well in fiction, and I think it's a cool idea just on a pure conceptual level, but I wonder how it would work in a game setting?

Partially, it would just allow the game world to really process what happens at a table naturally. Characters can have close to perfect information about what their fellow party members are up to, even in the heat of battle, when when separated by time and space.

But the concept would logically demand less character conflict than most of the games I've seen actually end up with, and are fun with. If the characters are all basically the same person, why would they have different, sometimes conflicting goals? There's probably a way to build an architecture that supports some of that, and still makes sense, but it would probably require some thought to get the reasonable/playable balance right.

Would this be worth it? Or would it be just an intellectual exercise? Seems like something that might make a good hook for a one-shot.

What I Want to Run, In No Particular Order

• something sandbox-y
• a published module
• a megadungeon
• the party is a group of young, bored, reckless nobles who occupy themselves by causing trouble for their elders and their rivals
• kitchen sink post-apocalyptic: "wizards, dinosaurs, mutants & lasers"
• the new 4e default world
• Eberron
• something really dark ages
• fantasy Europe -- "Europa" or something of that nature
• pirates!
• old west
• ancient desert ruins
• steampunk
• interplanetary sailing ships with that baroque/victorian feel, "aether" and the spinning models of the solar system and everything
• everyone rides dinosaurs
• something like the setting in Jak 2, and the parts of 3 that weren't stupid
• Tamriel (Elder Scrolls setting)
• dragonriders for the Queen, who lives in an airship
• Expedition to the Moon!
• fast cars and the idiots who drive them
• magic fast cars and the idiots who drive them
• noble families based on hereditary wizardry
• 1st-20/30th: the players ascend to godhood and found an empire in the process
• that same world, 1000 years hence

Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!

I just discovered something interesting. "Talk Like a Pirate Day" is, apparently, frightening to some people. Not that I've ever met anyone frightened by it, but I have, nevertheless, been informed that this is the case. Any event that involves it will, I have been told, necessarily be badly attended, on account of this phenomena.

This explains a lot about me. I have misinterpreted the normal fear response that the average human experiences when exposed to pirates as awesomeness. As a result, I've been scaring people off by my displaying the symbols and mannerisms of this most frightening of creatures. It will take years of counseling to retrain my shattered psyche, so that I can finally interact with people who are properly afeared of pirates.

Or, I suppose, I could revel in the SHEER TERROR I can invoke through the use of a simple pirate hat, which I, due to my unusual mental constitution, can tolerate.

System Obsession

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons
Star Wars Saga Edition
Mutants & Masterminds
Truth and Justice
Castles & Crusades
"OD&D"
Encounter Critical
Forward . . . to Adventure!
Stargate: SG-1 Roleplaying Game
EDIT: Iron Heroes

The games that I currently want to play; this leaves out d20 Modern, 3.X Edition D&D, GURPS 4th Edition, and Risus, because I've already played them, and I'm currently in a new system mood.

There are probably a few more I've forgotten. These are in the order of "estimated likelyhood to play," based on ease of access to materials and interests of potential players. 4th Edition is at the top because I'm absolutely getting the books, and barring natural disaster or mutiny I'm going to be playing at least a couple of sessions of it.

Stargate is at the bottom because it's out of print, and the books on Ebay cost over $60. Otherwise, it would be very close to the top. Curse you, Sony!

Everything else ought to be fairly obvious . . . I know more people who are into Star Wars than superheroes, it's easier to get people to play d20 than weird, newfangled systems, and I don't know many people who share my mostly unrealized fascination with old school gaming.

Accoutrements

I want a DM cape.

This Is Why I Can Never Just Sit Down And Pick Something

So now, in addition to some kind of "living dungeon/sandbox" D&D 4e game, I also want to run a wing-it based GURPS 4e game. Because I like winging it, and if I actually put together a decent setting, I think I could get it to work, with GURPS.

But my books are falling apart. They're 1st printing with the really terrible binding and I haven't gotten around to getting them replaced yet.

By next month, I will have discovered yet another shiny thing to obsess over.

Books Are Our Friends, Not Food

Heard about White Wolf's new promotion? You tear out the pages of your D&D 3.5 Player's Handbook, and they give you a copy of Exalted, for free, and a diploma that says you've graduated from the world of "standard fantasy" and "10' by 10' rooms."

This, not surprisingly, has pissed some people off. There's talk on the boards of elitism and failure and what have you. Pisses me off, too, but not because I'm insulted by White Wolf implying that Exalted is "better" than D&D. (Maybe it is. I don't care.)

It pisses me off because they're encouraging people to destroy books. Books! I have a hard time writing in books. And they're trying to get people to tear the pages out? Blasphemy!

I don't play Exalted because the two people who have tried to get me to play it were irritating. I want to hear what's fun about the game, not how much what I'm playing sucks. But honestly, that's neither here nor there. Exalted does look somewhat intriguing, and I'm sure that with the right group, I could have had fun playing it.

But support a company that encourages the destruction of fine printed hardbacks? No way.

E. Gary Gygax

I've been trying to think of something to say. Not just any old thing, something good.

All I can think of is "thanks."

"You All Meet . . . at a Funeral"

I'm planning to start out my next D&D game with a funeral. Sketch out an NPC dead guy, and have everyone make characters with some kind of connection to said dead guy. Then, at the funeral, they discover something untoward about the circumstances of his death, or something odd he was up to before it. Being PCs, they investigate, and it's off to adventure.

I Am Not Dumb and I Must Scream

I am not stupid.

My mother is not stupid. My grandmothers, my aunts, my cousins are not stupid. I have no stupid friends. (Even the guys.)

Women are not stupid.

I watch General Hospital. I play The Sims. I've fainted. I bake. I feel emotions other than rage and triumph.

I'm still not stupid.

Maybe I am a mutant. Maybe the fact that I play Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, (it has math!) Oblivion, and Civilization, that I don't read romance novels, watch Grey's Anatomy, or talk about Botox, that I have aced every standardized test I have ever taken, can do Calculus, and help my boyfriend with his math homework means that I am part of that cadre of "brilliant outliers."

Maybe.

Or maybe, just maybe, gender is a little more complicated that brain scans and IQ tests. Maybe there are more kinds of intelligence than abstract logic and suppressing your emotions. Maybe there are a lot of women who are good at "male" things--and a lot of men who are good at "female" things.

Maybe gender and intelligence are both way too messy and complicated to declare that "women are dumb" with a handful of studies and some circumstantial evidence.

I am not "dim." Not deep down, not even a little bit, not even secretly.

I live in a society that undervalues what women are good at, and then tells them to go take care of "men and children and the weak" because they obviously aren't useful for anything else. I live in a society that is obsessed with measuring and testing and putting people into categories so it can confirm what it already knows about race and gender and class.

But I'm not stupid.

And Charlotte Allen isn't, either.

A Big Crazy Campaign

I'm sick of running short campaigns.

I want to run a campaign that lasts longer than six months. I want to run a campaign that goes from 1st level to 20th level. I want to run a campaign with more than one big villain, more than one big story, a campaign where the characters go from dirt-hugging nobodies to gods.

I'm not sure I'm going to have the chance to make that happen. I'm distractable; part of the reason I run short campaigns is that I like short campaigns, I like campaigns that can end when I get tired with them, let me start something new. I don't have a stable group, I'm not likely to get one, and even if I do there will be unavoidable breaks where we can't play.

I know it's possible to have a campaign pause and then pick up a couple months later, but am I going to want to do that? Or am I going to get some crazy new idea in the interim, and then get frustrated when I pick the old campaign back up, rather than being able to start on the new one?

Top Ten Campaigns

Going through my old notes got me into sort of a nostalgic mood, so I sat down and re-ranked my top ten campaigns. I've done it before, but I've played in a couple more games since then, and I had a sneaking suspicion a few things might have gotten moved around. Plus, I'm starting a new campaign through, and thought it'd be a good exercise, to re-evaluate my past gaming adventures.

Oh, and since I now have notes from all those old campaigns, I can now pin down with exactitude dates that were previously rough estimates.

The list, in its current form, stands as follows:

1. Is This Fair? Is It? Arcana Evolved (me) 2007
2. Space Tree GURPS 4th (quantumelfmage) 2007
3. Outlaws d20 Modern (me) 2003-2004
4. Star Wars Star Wars d20 (Artemis) 2005-2006
5. Desert Campaign D&D 3.5 (me) 2006
6. Drow/Evil Campaign D&D 3.5 (Karen) 2004
7. Evil God Dimension D&D 3.5 (quantumelfmage) 2004
8. Greek City States D&D 3.5 (saganatsu) 2007
9. Outlaws: Reloaded GURPS 3rd Revised (me) 2004
10. “UCF” Forum-brewed D&D 3.5 ("that guy") 2006

Two main things to keep in mind. One, this is not just my top ten campaigns, it's my complete gaming history. So the "UCF" is, without question, the worst game I've ever played in. Two, every other campaign on this list was, at some point, fun. The ones down at the bottom may have had fairly high pain/fun ratios, but they all had fairly high absolute levels of fun.

Organizing the campaigns like this gave rise to a couple of thoughts.

These were all really short. The longest, Outlaws and Is This Fair? were each about six months. Star Wars, Desert Campaign, Drow/Evil, Evil God Dimension, and Outlaws: Reloaded were each a couple of months. The others lasted four sessions or less. Is This Fair was planned as a six month campaign from the outset, one of the most successful technical aspects of that campaign was the neat execution of that timeframe. Drow/Evil and Outlaws also both had formal endings, but neither had the timing specifically planned ahead. The others just fell apart, mostly due to lack of player interest and/or GM frustration.

The other major factor was that, for the first part of my gaming career, my group had five members and four GMs. One guy tried it, but didn't like it; the rest of us all had games we wanted to run, so there was a lot of competition for game time. The reason Outlaws ended when it did was that Karen was ready to run her Underdark-based game with evil characters.

The top four campaigns are the ones that I consider really good. 5, 6, and even 7 were fun; after that the frustration index starts to really climb. But the top four were good. What's funny about that is that, at the time, Space Tree and Star Wars were sources of profound frustration.

Outlaws and Is This Fair too--both of them started to drift, in the third quarter; both of them were cut short to some degree to get into the end-game--but I was DMing. I knew exactly what and where the problems were, and it was in large part (though not, of course, entirely) within my power to correct them. Space Tree took ages to get going, character creation took weeks, and that, combined with the limited amount of time we had to play the game in, got me to thinking, "if I was running this game, we'd be playing right now." Whether that was actually true is immaterial; once we actually got the game going, I had a lot of fun.

Star Wars had a similar, though rather stupider, problem. It had been a while since I'd GMed, and I was starting to get tired of playing. So I was weird and distracted and generally a worse player than usual. Cleared up once I started running the Desert Campaign, for a different group, but I should have just gotten over it, because I had a lot of fun in the campaign once I started playing my character mostly sane.

Those games all had another major thing in common: crazy hi-jinks. I was happiest as a player when I was coming up with ridiculous lies, ramming judges at high speeds, and stealing carpet. I was happiest as a GM when the players were coming up with ridiculous lies, crashing weddings, and invading cities. The absolute best scenes, in all those campaigns, used the system to mediate some bizarre scheme that the players had come up with; the pure roleplaying encounters tended to run out of steam, the pure combats tended to be uninteresting, and the game was always more interesting when I was reacting to the players, rather than the other way around.

Finding old notes is Awesome

I just discovered that I have this huge mess o' roleplaying stuff on my hard drive. I went through a period where I thought I had to do massive write ups for campaigns, so I have all these (unfinished) documents detailing various aspects of campaigns that I never actually ran. And I still have all the material I prepared digitally, for the campaigns that I did actually end up running. So there's a rather larger number of documents in my "Old Roleplaying" folder than I expected to find when I opened it.

Some of it is pretentious and lame. Like how I went through a period--that only lasted for one campaign, thankfully--where I decided that the thing to do about the races was to give them all different names. Elves become akkan and so on. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea.

Some of it is . . . interesting. I'd forgotten that I'd once had the idea of running a campaign that revolved around empires run by characters with bloodlines. I got about halfway through the list, detailing the kinds of empires each had, or the role they played in other empires. I'm actually sort of intrigued by it, so much so that I might finish the rest of the entries, and touch up what's already there. I'll never get to run the campaign, but I find that campaign design can be a past time of its own.

Mostly it's just gotten me kind of nostalgic. I've got the notes for the first adventure I ever ran. The only one I ever made a flow chart for. It's 7 pages of notes, filled with science nonsense, acronyms I don't understand, and detailed encounter descriptions that, if memory serves, I completely ignored.

Back in the Gaming Groove

I've got a game again. Last Friday, I ran a short combat with three brand new (or close to it) gamers, to give them an idea of how Dungeons and Dragons works. Later this afternoon, we'll be doing character/party building, with hopefully a bit of scene setting to get everyone together.

This makes me happy.

And I was surprised just how much fun the extremely basic campaign I ran was. Two factors involved: I had new, easily excitable players, and I turned up the difficulty level. Instead of putting three first level PCs up against, say, two orcs, I threw a Worg at them. That turned out to be a little bit too tough, but this Worg happened to be a little on the low side of the hit point scale, so we got actual danger without total carnage.

Quotes V

"In the real world, superhero registration would be at least mandatory. However, let's be completely honest--not even the Ultimate universe goes far enough with how superheroes would be treated. These people would be dehumanized and used as weapons, period." Eric Teall

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Richard Feynman

"Orc is a recessive gene." Bamdy

"That means you're qualified to reach inside men's pants." Bamdy

"I'm illegitimate -- uh, illiterate." Tim

"Do they make saddles for cows?" Quantumelfmage

"I think we're just big dumb crazy squirrels that like to collect stuff." Paul Saffo

"Libertarianism is anarchy for rich people." Pete Sears

"A good story is like a garden carried in the pocket." African proverb

"Oh Martin, why'd you have to go and explode?" Artemis

"Next time a dorky guy hits on you at the bars, just look him over cursorily and say, "My analysis indicates that you are Genetotype 27R, Subset 79W, which unfortunately falls well outside my acceptable parameters." Not only does this let him down firmly but gently, it makes him feel better because he realizes you're much dorkier than he is." Scipio

"How many other people do you know who have a dollar bill signed by Dweezil Zappa?" Will Thornton

"Reminds me of an argument I got into with a pro-forced pregnancy dude who went on about the unique genetic identity of an embryo, and how that unique combination will never occur again and blah blah blah fetus magic." Vanessa

"I don't want to be dead. I want to be alive. Or a cowboy." Caboose

"Back off, man. I'm a scientist." Dr. Peter Venkman.

"You can lay back and enjoy the wall." Dustin

"It is okay to want to touch it, Superman. That is the natural response to a hat so sexy." Batman

"Ha, loser. A true tactician doesn't know WHAT the hell he's doing until he's halfway done with it." - Quint

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad-hoc plot device" - David Langford

"No movie shall triumph over Snakes on a Plane. Unless I happen to feel like making a movie called More Motherfucking Snakes on More Motherfucking Planes." Samuel L. Jackson

"You can't be both pro-life and anti-zombie." anonymous?

"The Fire King was intensely loyal to his friends. Growing up as basically an outcast wherever he went, he was not about to throw away friendships over something as minor as world domination." Rich Burlew

"Wild animals don't wear pants." David Landy

"You don't have relationships. I have relationships. You have 'hide in your room and swear at people.'" Qwerty

"Do you know how many times Elvis has come back from the dead? More than three, okay?" quantumelfmage

"To me, D&D is not about trying to recreate 12th century England. It's Conan meets Aragorn and Boba Fett to go kick Kulan Gath's boney behind." Hussar on EN World

"Maybe 'hooten blag' was just his accent." Oddysey

Adventures in Gnome Town

I hit a new GMing milestone the other day. It's not on the actual list, but I'd put it there if I was making one, because it's something that in six-plus years of game mastering I'd never actually managed: I ran a complete, one-session adventure, with a mostly satisfying conclusion. I've run single session deals before, but they all were either irredeemably stupid or ended when people had to go home, rather than having an actual conclusion.

It was a bit humorous, revolving around the rescue of the son of the Mayor of Gnome Town (who was definitely a gnome) but we managed to avoid sending it completely off the rails.

Other items of note: It was almost completely improvised, and everything that wasn't improvised on the spot was less than two hours old. It was one player's first ever game, and although he spent the beginning of it slightly confused, by the conclusion he'd gotten the hang of it and happily wreaking havoc after the Mayor of Gnome Town let slip that the only way to become mayor was to defeat him in single combat.

I had fun. As far as I can tell, the players did, too, and I hope I'm not wrong in that impression. Now I know that with a little enthusiasm and an hour of prep-time I can turn five otherwise normal hours into some quick, dirty, and fun D&D. And that's not a bad thing to be able to do.

Stunt-tastic!

Funny. I've been looking through Iron Heroes again, in anticipation of running an actual one session scenario using it, and I've been rediscovering the best part of the book. I can't believe that I'd forgotten about stunts.

I guess I was just too busy being blown away by tokens, and having interesting choices in combat just on the PC level. Now you tell me this game has a stunt system, too? And not just any stunt system--a stunt system with some real tactical decision making, so I've got some rails. I've got some guidelines for what's too over the top, and angles for story/wacky antics players and more combat/math focused players to engage with it.

This is how my group plays. "Can I swing off the chandelier?" is a pretty standard question for the GM to hear. I've asked similar myself, when I'm on that side of the screen.

Now I know this isn't news. The stunt system, and the closely related challenge system, was kind of the point of the book. (Or a big part of it.) But somehow, I missed it.

Almost makes me want to

"Bog Standard" D&D

Can I run a campaign with the races more or less as they are described in the Player's Handbook?

By which I mean two things. "Is it possible for me?" but also "Is it a good idea?"

Because I have never done this. Even when I was running the (at least initially) core only, fight the crazy wizard in his tower, desert-y campaign, I fiddled with the races. I fiddled with a lot of stuff: it was in the desert, rather than the woodsily pastoral pseudo-European setting that the game kind of expects as default. But the races, I didn't mess with mechanically, but I did make a number of adjustments or total rewrites to the flavor that was in the book.

Honestly, it was kind of confusing. And not entirely necessary.

In a broader sense, I'm wondering if it's possible for me to run a campaign that more or less makes use of the core setting, as presented implicitly in the core rule books. Greyhawk, I guess.

I might, I think, replace the gods with a traditional mythological pantheon (Norse or Greek, most likely) on account of it being more immediately evocative. And maybe even pull some of the cultural trimmings from that mythology.

Leaving that possibility aside, though, I'm thinking, why not try to actually use what's in the book? Run a semi-standard, pseudo-European, elves like trees and dwarves like rocks basic D&D fantasy campaign. Rather than whatever strangitude I normally gravitate towards.

Because this will be for all, or mostly all, new players. And I'm not sure that saying, hey, the book says all this, but ignore it, because that's not how I'm doing it, is exactly the greatest way to get started. Could be confusing.

And what's in the book, it's got to be there for a reason, right? It can't be half bad. There's the sheer novelty of it. Less useless work for me to get stuck with. And it's really not that huge of a restriction to be under, because the information is, after all, awfully skeletal.

Sort of Kind of Mostly Back

Novel's done. Finished. First draft, anyway.

Currently the big project is getting a group together for January. Still don't know how I'm going to go about teaching four new people to play D&D. Don't know how well that's going to work out, what the best way to do it is, any of it.

Currently I'm thinking, run a quick one or two session deal, pre-made adventure, something along the lines of The Burning Plague. Or write something like that, but I'm leaning towards just going with that, because that's the first adventure I ever played. Besides the rescuing unicorns from goblins junk, but that was just a two hour thing and really doesn't count. So there's sentimental value in that adventure, and of course that needs to be passed on, no matter how ridiculous it happens to be, what with it's plot that the players can't have.

And then after that, run an actual campaign, with new characters. Probably in the initial intro adventure, hand out pre-made characters, because it's a lot easier to teach the game than it is to teach character creation. (In my experience.) Then have people make characters, once they've got some idea of the mechanics of the game.

Writers Strike Video

Noticed that the Daily Show is in reruns? Wondering why the writers are striking? In a nutshell:

Who Does She Think She Is?

I think some of the Hillary-hatred arises simply because she's a woman -- and because that vulgar word, the one that rhymes with rich, is always available to describe a woman who gets a little too powerful, or acts like too much of a smarty-pants, or exudes a bit too much authority. That word isn't just a put-down, it's also a pointed question: Just who the hell does she think she is?

Goal For Running Combat

Based on comments on my last post on sequels, I've added another goal to my next campaign.

If it's heavy on the story side, tie the violence into the story. And even if it's not heavy on the story side--if it's more in the vein of those exploration campaigns I've been considering--tie the violence into that.

Not just in the "you must win to advance" sense. Have something story-related, or exploration related, happening during the fight. People switching sides, learning new and exciting things about antagonists, the characters are trying to execute some plan they've made. So there's a tactical level and a roleplaying, what would my character do level going on at the same time.

For exploration campaigns--I've never run anything like this, so my examples can't be pulled from my experience, as those are above. But the things you fight, and where you fight them, would reveal things about the location--you run into an owlbear, and that means there are owlbears in the area. Or you run into an owlbear, and you've never run into an owlbear in the area before, and you have fairly good reason to think that there are no owlbears in the area, that tells you something strange is going on.

More Thoughts on a Sequel

Make it epic. I've never done epic. Post-twenty, or close to it. That's where my thinking is right now. I may change my mind (and probably will) but it would definitely be different. I have never done epic before, or anything remotely close to it. Highest level I have ever run for is 10.

Though there are reasons why I have never run epic, and why it still might be a bad idea. Epic is hard; there's more to keep track of, more powers to take into account, more stats to keep track of. Combats last longer, and are more complicated.

Of course, I don't plan, at this point, to be running a combat heavy game. There will be some combat--this is Dungeons and Dragons we're talking about, but like the first one, I expect that a great deal of what the players accomplish in this campaign will be accomplished without much combat.

Sequel!

I'm thinking about running a sequel campaign. A couple of the players from the Is This Fair? . . . thing . . . want me to, and I think it could be kind of interesting. So I'm currently trying to figure out how to do that, in between the Massive Amounts of Stuff! that I have to do.

I ran another sequel campaign, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And it was bad. Incredibly, indescribably, horrifyingly bad. But probably for reasons unrelated to its sequel-ness. I hope.

Mostly it was just kind of incoherent. I did a lot of prep for it, but didn't end up actually using any of it in the game. And there were incomprehensible scavenger hunts, revolving around ducks. Bad, bad, bad.

But this sequel, while I'm wary of muddling up the general awesomeness that was the original campaign, I think could work. Maybe, possibly. Currently pondering ways to increase the chances of that happening. The big one so far? Make it distinct. Set it years later, make significant changes to the characters (but keep as many of those old characters as possible) and make the action center on something very different from the original one.

Also: come up with a better name for the dang thing.

Lessons From The Internet

I'd rather be attacked competently than defended badly. There's nothing more painful than someone who agrees with you, but has no idea what they're talking about.

No, not even that.

Probably Not Too Hard

But still awesome.

Not In My Pie

Very little blogging of late. Been busy. NaNoWrimo, etc.

In other news: Some random dead guy just took over my novel.

Huh.