Now It's Time to Think About Something Else

According to the blog, my period of mild excitement about 4e D&D ended up lasting, at most, 13 months. From the first "hey, this is cool," post to . . .

Right now. Yeah. I am over 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

The period of active, this is the coolest game ever excitement was even shorter. Hard dates puts it between the awesome, tactical craziness of my first session and the realization that all the tension in combat is artificial. Comes to about sixty days. At least it lasted longer than Feng Shui.

It's not like I won't go back to it. Right now I'm seriously thinking about going back to 3rd, after being off of it for most of that 13 month period. Or d20 Modern, which I've been falling back in love with. (First game on the other side of the screen. I'll never get completely over it.) So I will probably play 4th edition again.

But not now. Not while I feel like, to get the most out of it, to get the complete experience, I'd have to buy a bunch of books that I'm just not interested in buying. Not while I'm thinking about just how much I've got invested in 3rd and 3.5 and d20 Modern -- in memory, money and knowledge -- and how much gaming I have left to do with them. And not while I still have a lot to learn from the older editions of the game -- not to mention all the stuff that's not D&D.

It's Not All About "Unified Mechanics"

I'm not interested enough in it to actually register and post, but there's an amusing discussion going on at RPG.net. Apparently, some contend that the only reason people play older editions of D&D is the nostalgia factor. If it's what you played in your childhood, that makes up for the obvious inferiority of a system without unified resolution mechanics. Or whatever.

Which puzzles me, because I started gaming as a kid with 3rd edition, but nowadays I play 2nd edition AD&D. I won't go as far as to call myself "old school," but there are a lot of things I like about the playstyle, and the older editions in general. I also know two guys my age who play 2nd exclusively, despite starting with 3rd, and will take any opportunity to declare 2nd's superiority. 

It's possible that us whippersnappers are just absorbing older gamer's nostalgia; I'm interested in playing older games mostly because of what I've read in the old school blog-o-sphere, and one of the other guys I know started playing 2nd edition when his neighbor gave him four or five boxes of books and miniatures and stuff. But I really do think that they're different games, different enough to be worth investigating.

I used to tease that guy about playing such an obsolete game. I assumed that the differences between 2nd and 3rd, and between 2nd and 1st, and between 1st and OD&D, were mostly a matter of fixing things that were "broken," and making the game more intuitive. That was the intent behind most of the changes, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff that got left behind along the way -- the troupe style of play, campaign-centered (as opposed to character-centered) play, irregular parties, and genre bending, just to name a few ideas that have changed the way I think about D&D, and gaming generally.

(Completely unrelated side note: I think "whippersnapper" is a pretty good term for those young, hip gamers who are getting into the old school scene. But that's just because it would give me an excuse to say "whippersnapper" a lot.)

The Battlestar Game: Getting to Know a New Group

That Battlestar Galactica game I'm in is going pretty well. We just had the second session last night. They've both been short, off-the-cuff affairs--the DM has walks downstairs and says, "Hey, you guys want to game tonight?" It's kind of refreshing, used as I am to long, rigourously scheduled weekly games.

The system itself is sort of weird, and I don't yet have a real good handle on the odds involved, but I don't think we're using it as written anyway. I've never played with this GM before, or with two of the other three players, and it's the first time I've ever joined a new group as a player since I first started gaming. I'm used to responding to new player styles as a GM, but adjusting to them as a fellow player, while trying to get the hang of a another GM's style, is not something I'm used to.

This GM's style is very different from mine. We're all Viper pilots on an old Battlestar, with the campaign starting just before the Cylon attack the on colonies. That just happened last night, but most of the game up until that has revolved around the specific, minute-to-minute activities of our characters on the ship. Trying to get enough sleep, hanging around in bars, going to the gym, interacting with NPCs, getting into fights. The first session largely revolved around one character trying to get revenge on an NPC (who outranked him) for vomiting on his dress uniform. There's also a lot of "party splitting," and one-on-one interaction; when we get off duty, one guy might go to the officer's rec, another to the gym, and another to shower and bunk, and the GM goes around and resolves each scene in its turn.

I tend to skip over this kind of thing, unless the player's specifically initiate it. I'm usually busy trying to get back to "the action." But well handled, it's really quite engaging. I do worry, based on a couple of comments the GM has made about how he has the campaign "written up," that the game will end up being scripted events with these kind of character interludes in between, but that'll be a problem only when it starts getting boring. Right now, I'm having fun getting a look outside my usual gaming scene.

And -- I'd planned to write this post about how I'm the only woman in the group, which is a new and exciting experience for me, but I'll leave that until next time.

Games Up the Wazoo

The mysterious explosion of gaming has spread. Last night, a couple people I know wandered into the campus coffee shop with Burning Wheel, and next thing I know I'm agreeing to a weekly fantasy game. Add this to Yesteryear, and the irregular Battlestar Galactica game I was also more or less randomly recruited into, and I've got a lot of gaming going on.

Unfortunately, this means I'm thinking about putting my own Traveller game on hold. I'm still having fun working on it, and I'll continue doing that, but I've got enough going on besides gaming that I'm not sure I can justify setting aside two weekend nights for it. A weeknight game might work out a little better, but that's more likely to run into other people's schedules.

On the other hand, if I can figure out a way to tap into the rest of the college gaming scene, I might be able to put together a large group, ad hoc schedule, West Marches kind of game. There's talk of a gaming club, and while I'm generally dubious about the value of such an organization, it would be handy for this kind of project. 

I might use Traveller for that game, if I can figure out a way to reconcile the "return to home base at the end of the session" requirement with the whole spaceship thing. It might also be a good excuse to finally download OD&D and take a look at getting that together. Or go back to 3rd, and really make it my own.

I know this must make me sound incredibly flaky, hopping from one idea to another and never getting anything done, and I am. I'm still negotiating this strange new idea that my entire social life doesn't need to revolve around roleplaying, I'm enjoying getting to be a player for once, and I don't feel like doing the work to run a game right now. I'll get back to it, but I figure it's better to back off a little and take a look at how other people run their games, rather than drive myself crazy about not running the game that I should be running.

Notes & Nostalgia

I ran my first campaign almost entirely off of handwritten notes on graph paper. I carried them around in a couple of folders, and worked on them during classes. I occasionally e-mailed things to my players, and kept a few long term notes on my computer, but I printed out almost everything important I wrote on the computer and stuffed it into the folder.

I didn't write up as many notes for the next couple of campaigns after that (I'd started doing work in my classes) but they were still mostly handwritten. Even if I wrote them on the computer, I kept all my need-to-play session notes in folders and binders and notebooks. One somewhat less successful campaign even revolved around a box of 3x5 cards.

Then I got a laptop. The one real campaign I've run since then was almost entirely based on computer notes; basically just the maps, and a couple of player generated notes in a binder. Which was great, especially for in-game notetaking. (And, most especially, handling initiative. "Sort alphabetical" was my best friend in the whole world.) I could have gotten more use out of it if I'd organized my notes a little better, or kept them in a format I could search through better, but my notes have always been a mess, no matter what their format.

I love the convenience of keeping track of my campaigns on the computer. I like being able to take advantage of my typing speed, and I'd like to try using a wiki, or some other fancy new Web 2.0 organizational scheme.

But I miss scrawling out NPC organization charts, monsters, the random ideas I have for next session. I miss sitting down with paper, pencil, and a couple of books. I like having a big stack of paper, or a binder to flip through. And I especially like being able to work without any of the distractions that come along with the computer.

I do wonder, though, if that feeling is mostly nostalgia. There are a lot of technical advatages to working partly or entirely on the computer, but it's not how I did my notes when I was 14, and caught up in my love for this crazy new game that I had discovered. Before I knew what I was doing. Before I worried how to do my notes.

Edited 9/22/08, for the grammar.

A Problem of Lists

The Traveller game hasn't started yet, but it's coming along. I'm most of the way through my starting sub-sector, and I've started sketching out the larger political situation. Nothing detailed, mind you. I just needed to know who was running all those spaceports, if there's no Third Imperium in my Traveller universe.

The answer is: another sort of space empire. So far mostly cribbed from Dune, but I'll add in other bits as I go along. Combined with at least some of the Class A and B starports being alien relics, run by robots, this satisfies what need I have for the setting to make sense. I'll make up for it with the planets -- I still need to figure out a place to put the Red-Eyed Cat-Apes.

I am, though, struggling with how much detail to put into that upper-level political situation. I'd like to keep it as loosely defined as possible, partly for philosophical reasons, and partly to avoid doing work. I do plan on making up a minor noble from a minor house (noble houses being the main thing I'm stealing from Dune) to be governor of the sub-sector, and eventually I'll work out a few rivals and allies, to aid in the generation of schemes and plots. But there's no need for a big list of all the houses and nobles and all of that.

Except that I had this idea, that if each of the houses has its own army and so on, then some of the characters might have pre-existing allegiances to them, or old grudges or something. Which would, then, necessitate some manner of list. Unless the players could manage to make something up on their own, if the idea interests them, but I've had mixed success with those sorts of schemes.

Quotes VII

"So the end of all life on the planet, and indeed the planet itself, could still happen anytime between now and next Tuesday." RPGpundit

"He's not ugly. I just hate his face." Emily

"I used to kill Hitler, then go back and stop myself. That was a pretty neat couple of Saturday nights." Deep Time . . . agent . . . guy (Does Starslip Crisis not have a character bible? Or did I just miss it?)

"At the top of the United States today sits a meritocracy, an elite who believe that their intellectual achievement earned them their high status. Meritocrats think of themselves as progressive and antiracist, but they are certified into the elite by the SAT, an IQ-like test on which whites and Asians consistently outscore blacks and Hispanics." Caleb Crain

"It's like, do they not have butter in space?" Gabe

"Mad with power. Post later." Dr. Cataclysm

"Smugglers aren't real. They're just manifestations of my fear of the sea. Combined with my fear of theft, secret caves, men with scars, and rum." http://www.scarygoround.com/?date=20080723

"You can trust me. I'm an English major." Oddysey

"Look, I'm not suggesting by any means that my readers should go kill George Lucas. And certainly not by using the swift, undetectable poison known as curare!" John Seavey

"Shush. There's nothing overcomplicated about Linux at all." Qem

"I can accept shallowness in my news media, but not in my comic books." Scipio

"What kinda gonzo-fantasy universe are you livin' in? In mine, a cut that lays your chainmail open and draws a line of gushing crimson across your chest is just an excuse to tear your shirt off." TonyLB

“Our party and our country are better off because of her, and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Barack Obama

"It is the opinion of myself and this website that the person responsible for this effect should go to jail, or gaol, or whatever the British call the place where you store your evil men." Tycho Brahe

"It's rare that you're simply presented with a knob whose only two positions are "Make History" and "Flee Your Glorious Destiny." Tycho Brahe

"Pirates: Is there anything they can't teach us?" Freakonomics

Spore!

I'd almost convinced myself not to get the game -- better things to do with my time, mostly -- but then the boy got it and I have near-constant access to his computer, so I've logged a couple hours today, and over the next couple of weeks I'll probably be playing it more than is healthy.

The interface is a little clunky, but that's partially because I'm not used to it, and I've only gotten about halfway through the creature level. Though most of the advertising focused on that stage, I have a suspicion that most of the action happens at the civilization stage and beyond, so I'll reverse judgment until I've seen how that plays. I am, however, very impressed with the game manual -- it's the best I've seen in a while, a major plus for a game as varied and complicated as Spore purports to be.

If anyone reading this happens to pick up the game -- the account I'm sharing now is "medievalguy88," if you want to drop me a note in-game.

A Low Level Game?

I'm thinking low-level is the way to go with the Traveller game. Not so much in power level -- I don't plan on messing with character creation, at least on the first outing -- but in money, equipment, and variety of adventure.

Partially this is because I've been spending a lot of time looking at the trade tables. I expect they won't get quite as much attention once we start playing -- we'll too busy with the adventures, see -- but they still look like an interesting way to generate some on-the-fly excitement, and a quick way to decide where to go next. As long as they need cash, there's always something to do. Traveller has some handy mechanisms for keeping that need active -- mortgages and so on -- so this shouldn't be too hard.

Mostly, though, I want the PCs to have a sense of a larger universe. This goal may change once I get into the game and start seeing what clicks with my player group. But at least going into it, I want there to be a sense that there are things going on -- interstellar politics, trade deals, matters of empire -- that are just way out of their league. Not particularly important things, in the backwoods part of space they'll be in, more faraway, might matter if they cared things, but things nonetheless.

Random World Generation Official Verdict: Awesome

Planets I have made so far:

• D79A65-7 S NI Wa. Gola Tau. Run by the engineers who keep the environment bubbles working. They will challenge you to duels!
• C683589-8 A NI. Degenerate agrarian communists. Currently being pestered by one of their neighbors (to be decided, as I fill in the sector) who keeps trying to set up a puppet government to take them over.
• C7838AF-4 S P Ri Lt Amber. Deutsches Reich. They got hold of some old Nazi propaganda tapes, liked what they saw, and now they have tourists swarming all over what the travel agency calls "Hitler World."
• E2108CE-4 P Lt Na. Holo. Religious nuts trying to keep their atmosphere generators together with duct tape.
• C555300-6 Ga Lo NI. Sukka. A bunch of Heinlein-ian farmers, mostly notable for the guy calling himself "the King of Cold" who keeps bothering space travelers and trying to set up his own little kingdom.
  
• B000A53-14 N T I As Hi Ht In Na Va Red. Hox Anoth. Alien space arcology that the Imperium (or whatever) desperately does not want to antagonize.

So yeah, I'd say I'm having fun. No group together to play it yet, but I'm working on it. It may take me a week or two to get the sector sketched out anyway.

On Being A Player -- and a Bit About 2nd Edition

Being a player again is pretty spiffy. I've done a few one shots or short campaigns, here and there, but I ran my last few major campaigns. But now I'm playing Zavijah, a lawful neutral human cleric, in Yesteryear, a PBB 2nd Edition Planescape game, and it looks to be rockin'.

Especially because I'm not running it -- noisms is -- so I have someone to pester with pesky questions. I have schemes to unravel, things to explore, and NPCs to bother. It's a refreshing way to play the game, especially with the triple new of internet play, Planescape, and 2nd Edition.

All three of which I quite like. Planescape, of course, is awesome, and it's nice to be able to sit down and compose one's actions, rather than being driven by violent competition with the rest of the table. And I'm enjoying 2nd Edition more than I'd expected to; I doubt I'll ever run it, but character creation was surprisingly enjoyable, freed from the mechanical considerations of feat choice and skill point optimization.

I'm sure there are mechanical optimizations in 2nd edition, but I don't know what they are, and I have no intention to find out. At any rate, having no idea what the usual items for the system or the campaign would be, picking proficiencies and equipment was a lot more about what my character would actually know, and less about the optimal character grind I tend to slip into with 3rd, and 4th is actively built around. I can see why people still play the edition, and I'm glad to have joined them.

I Got Traveller Today

Mongoose edition, but hey. I've had it for five hourse, and it's almost made up for the rest of the day.
I mean, I knew what I was getting. I've heard people drop Universal World Profiles. I knew about death during character generation (Not required, but present. It's called "Iron Man" character generation -- the default on a failed survival roll is Horrible Manglement, because peg legs are fun.) I was aware, in a general way, of the charts.

But sitting here, book open to page 160, checking two charts to figure out how many passengers want to go from the space rock you're on to the space rock you want to go? Flipping through the book and finding a table, completely unrelated to the entry on the alien race it's below, about what a character's enemy is up to on the planet they just showed up on? Discovering charts for generating random animals to harrass the part with?

Crazy awesome doesn't even cover it.

Now I just need to figure out what to run with it. The crazy part of me says "Stargate SG-1 meets Star Trek (TOS) by way of Foundation, with a little Star Wars on the side and as much Dune as I can cram into it and still keep the laser battles." The campaign would bear the moniker "Star Truck," and an early session would center around a mysterious spinning cube, encountered in the mysterious reaches of space. Oh, and space marines.

The more serious part of me . . . well, basically agrees. I'd explain it in a way that doesn't hinge on pop culture references, but that's the space fiction I like. Basically, I'm thinking:

• The whole "ancient earth cultures scattered by a mysterious race" theme
• Pulp craziness, the kind that straddles the line between "making a point about human nature" and "laser dinosaurs!"
  
• One or more Imperial whatsits (that a lot of human worlds sit outside of) based on trade in exotic items, transhuman conspiracies, and dukes of planets (also: space princesses)
  
• Lunatic investment schemes by the PCs and/or their employers
• Space battles with ridiculous weaponry, up to and including colored lasers beams that cause computer banks to explode
• Space Marines. With powered armour. And laser swords.
  

I'm both under the impression that this is not too far of from the Third Imperium and not sure exactly how Traveller would handle it, not having read the full book. Even if I modify the mess of ideas I've already got into something a little more system friendly, I do plan on building my own setting, more or less from scratch. Nothing against the Third Imperium, I just feel the need. I know this space stuff pretty well, a lot better than I'll ever know fantasy, and it's been a while since I put together a really crazy new setting.

That, and it's Traveller. If I get stuck, I'll just roll some dice and work out something interesting.

The Healing Surge Trampoline

My 4th edition summer game, the "get the band back together" game, is now officially over. I had a lot of fun running it, and the usual levels of hair-pulling frustration, and I think my players had a good time, too. In the end, a good game.

We even managed to give it a decent finale. It was clear, and had been for a while, that there was no way we would actually finish the module, if we played through it as written. I'd decided already that there was also no possibility of ever picking it up again to finish it, at least with this group, but I was reluctant to leave yet another adventure permanently unfinished, with no sense of closure. So I boosted them to 3rd level and cut out most of the second level of the dungeon, bringing them straight to the final two fights.

Not a method I'd recommend in most circumstances, but this time, it worked out okay. Mostly because it turns out that (a) the stunt rules are easy to handle and (b) the wight raining crackling purple death upon them was standing right next to a pit. Cue the Wilhelm scream, splashing, and helpful wight sound effects provided by Alefist. (Reeeeee!) After the battle, they amused themselves by dropping various objects on the very wet, very angry, and very trapped wight.

Other than that, the fight was pretty standard. They all ganged up on Kalarel at the end, neatly demonstrating that the primary purpose of having all those monsters is to distribute fire; five levels above them, he lasted about two rounds.

It had the usual near-death moments, which I'm beginning to think are an artifact of the way healing works rather than a sign of actual peril. The damage/healing system, to put it most simply, is subject to negative feedback. There are, of course, monsters that are more dangerous against bloodied foes. But those effects are dwarfed by the basic dynamic of the PCs healing abilities: the more wounded they are, the easier they are to heal.

Mostly it comes down to the death and dying rules. There are a couple of powers I know of that exacerbate the effect, but they're not what drives it. Sooner or later, the death and dying rules kick in whenever a PC takes damage. And they don't just make it impossible to die within less than 3 rounds after hitting zero, giving their friends plenty of time to get them back on their feet with a simple skill check. They also guarantee that when the character does get back into the fight, they do so with a quarter of their starting hit points -- any healing on a dying character resets them to zero before hit points get added, and that basic heal check option gives them a free use of a healing surge.

Having those back up systems in place means the monsters can have a lot of hit points, and do a comparable amount of damage to the PCs, and the only effect will be 3 rounds of "peril" before the character gets back up and pummels the monster, who does not have the healing surge trampoline. Which isn't a bad thing, exactly, but I do wonder what would happen if the player's figured it out. Is there an intermediate setting in a 4e fight, between "artificial danger" and "certain doom?"

The Little Details

This Sunday and last I ran sessions of the 4e game, which I haven't posted about mainly because there wasn't much to say about either of them. The first was fairly good, the second was distinctly lackluster. Maggie has, in usual excellent fashion, recapped the August 3rd session but likely won't have the next one up for at least a week; I'll link to it when she does.

The only thing I can really add is that naming the goblins was a surprisingly good idea. It's the first time I've done anything like that, and was shortly followed with the first time I've ever had a player feel bad about something horrible that he did to an NPC. Usually I'm happy to have people rampage around, breaking stuff and having fun, but it was sort of neat to have that happen for once.

Oh, and last Sunday we came up with the best sentence ever: "He was engulfed in sartorial flames."

Otherwise, though, I've been starting to think about wrapping this game up and starting my next one in a month or so. It was clear we were not going to come close to finishing the module in the time left before returning to school, so I bumped them up to 3rd level and skipped the entire second level of the dungeon, moving immediately to the last three fights. It's working out okay so far, and I think it'll work out better than just leaving (yet another) module hanging that we know we will never go back to.

Failure!

So it turns out that "what's the worst that can happen?" is probably a bad question to ask. It was mostly due to procrastination and lack of planning, but in any event -- the adventure didn't get finished.

I will finish it as I get the time and the will, and happily, this practice is 100% officially approved.

In more encouraging news, my friend Maggie is now officially a DM. With all the joy, wonder, and soul-crushing frustration that blessed activity entails.

Another Day, Another Game

We had another session of the 4e game Sunday. I just haven't reported it yet, because my wrists have been wonky lately, so I've been trying to stay off the computer. With less success than I'd like.

Not a particularly exciting session, truth be told. Only three people showed up (though a fourth did arrive about an hour before the official end, after we'd decided to break for the night) so everyone was running more than one character, but they did alright.

Maggie has, again, provide a full recap. And even better -- pictures of the table, and of Sara and Doug, the guard drakes they took from the shady looking gnome. At some point, I'll write about how I'm handling that -- 4e has no official rules for henchmen or pets, so I'm winging it.

Keeping an Eye on the Battlefield: 4e and Healing

I've noticed, running 4e, that PC hit point totals don't really matter. On a round by round basis, yeah -- if they're bloodied, or if they're low enough that a monster can take them down in one hit, that matters. But just paying attention to their hit point totals doesn't let me know how they're doing, what the pace of the fight is, or how close they are to defeat.

Because hit point levels go up and down a lot. Even at 1st level, they have a lot of healing. Whether they've used their second wind matters, how many players have used theirs matters, how much major healing the cleric has left matters. I'm used to keeping rough track of hit point totals, and the enemy hit point totals, to tell where the battle is headed, but running KotS I've had to adjust that strategy.

What I should do is make up a little battle tracker, where I can mark how many healing surges everyone has used throughout the day, who's used their healing surges, and what healing the cleric and the paladin (or the warlord, if they team had one) have used. Probably track dailies, too, because they're as important as surges in determining when the PCs should rest, and at least at this level they're a measure of the PCs abilities to get themselves out of trouble if things really go south.

Skill Challenges and a Sudden Interest in History

Had another session of my 4e game last night. Things are starting to come together. Still some arguments, but everyone is at least trying to move things forward. Maggie's done me the favor of compiling a recap, complete with quotes, if you're into that sort of thing.

The best part of the session was testing the skill challenge system, interrogating a shady gnome archaeologist to find out what had happened to their mentor. As written, it's basically just another fight, but I had some information I wanted to get to the players, (mostly pre-hooks, for if they finish this adventure before summer ends) and I wanted to see how the skill challenge system actually worked. I can easily see how it would apply to traps and exploring and such, but as to social encounters, I was a bit skeptical.

For us, it's great. It's not that much different from what we normally do, except there's an initiative order, so people aren't shouting each other down) and everyone has to participate, even the quiet players and the ones who don't normally dig social encounters. A lot of my players are good at and enjoy social encounters, but I have one guy whose comfort zone runs more towards stats and tactics, and he seemed to enjoy himself alright during the challenge. The system provides a safety net -- just do what your character's good at -- if you can't think of what to do, and me and the other players gave him some help figuring out exactly what that meant in game terms.

The ones who were more comfortable with it had no problem with it, and pretty soon people were rolling shaking the gnome down and figuring out why he was here and what the mirror he had was. If they gave me more detail about what they were doing, in game, I'd respond with more detail, or an extra benefit within the challenge.

I had players asking me questions about history. This, I don't think, is entirely on account of the skill challenge format. Having a shiny poster map with little bits of detail to latch had something to do with it, and reminded me to use visual aids more often. But the skill challenge gave them permission and time to ask questions, by explicitly giving the spotlight to each player in turn. And it made it easy for me to give them little rewards for doing so, and to turn the information from "boring DM lecture" to "something I found out by asking the right questions and getting lucky."

Oh, and most of the answers I made up on the spot, which was fun. It was based on some ideas I'd been thinking about for what they might do next, if they get that far, but now I have some specific detail for further adventures -- a dragon named Malebraxis, whose now young adult children have infested the mountains to the north.

I'll be doing this again. Even if it turns into a special event thing rather than my usual way to handle such encounters, it makes a good change of pace, and it's nice to have the structure there to fall back on.

The No Fun Game

Why do some people try to get others to play their game by explaining why the game they're already playing "isn't fun?" That's been the Wizards of the Coast marketing tactic for 4e, towards older editions, and the main effect I've noticed has been a perfectly justifiable increase in grouchiness amongst the people who play all those editions.

WotC (and their overenthusiastic minions) aren't the only ones who do this, though. It seems to be a foundation of the more annoying forms of Forge theory, that D&D isn't fun and all the people who think it is are delusional. And I've had several people try to get me to play Exalted using this strategy.

I don't get it. If those older editions weren't fun, how'd the hobby get started in the first place? (I'm using "fun" broadly here -- maybe better to say "worth playing.") In WotCs case, I think their target audience is people without the history to know any better, just trying to create comparison, but still. Clumsy.

And even leaving aside the stupid insult angle, telling me why my game is bad doesn't give me any reason to play yours. It's sort of understandable that Wizards sees the world as "our new D&D vs. your old D&D," but it always puzzled me that the Exalted players thought that if I wasn't playing D&D, I'd automatically move to their game, like there weren't a hundred other systems out there that I could play.

A Game of One's Own

I'm starting to think about homebrewing my own system. Mostly, I blame Trollsmyth's Moldvay/Basic hack, and Amagi Games. 4e coming out had something to do with it, giving me two related but different games to analyze.

And then there's my own sense that, someday, this is something that I'm going to have to do. Like running OD&D, or owning a sword. (And learning to use it, of course, but I've already started that; I have good luck with friends.) Someday I will write a terrible RPG and inflict it upon my friends. This is a law of my universe.

But lately it's moved off the back burners, and started taking up a bit more mental time. Especially since all this talk of cyberpunk started. If I were to start a serious project, now, it would be cyberpunk -- or rather, a fully cyberpunk-embracing version of that specific setting that was my first campaign. It's been on my mind lately, and while there were serious problems with that game I think there's a pretty decent setting there, cleaned up by my semi-adult self.

What's more likely to happen is that I'll use that setting for this year's NaNoWriMo novel (again) and run some D&D instead. Might be better to do another novel with it anyway, to get the setting into some kind of coherent form. (Not like it needs another incarnation -- this is one of my few really deep obsessions, along with D&D and Batman.) I may write up some notes as the mood strikes, but my school could really use some more D&D.

What I really want to know is, why does this have to hit during WoAdWriMo?

Not Post-Apocalyptic, It Was Actually Cyberpunk

Huh. So, I always thought of my first campaign as post-apocalyptic, in genre. Then noisms comes along with a new and exciting definition --

But cyberpunk was always about more than that, at root - its heart has always been in what Bruce Sterling called "the victims of the New"; the people who the Brave New World of the Future has left confused, damaged and trodden underfoot. From our perspective in the new millenium, what are the kind of things that will make people into outsiders, rebels, dropouts and scumbags, and what will those people - the ones with the pizazz to do anything, that is - be directing their rage against?

-- and I realize, no, it was cyberpunk.

Post-apocalypse never really worked, anyway. It had some elements of that, but it also had this whole techno-city-biz thing going on next to that, and the point was the conflict between the post-apocalyptic part and the shiny happy capitalism part. Cyberpunk.

Armed with this knowledge, I might go back and run another cyberpunk game some day. Using a setting built off of what I used for that original campaign, but making significantly more sense now that I have a better idea of what it's about. (That'll help with the novels I keep trying to write about it, too. A lot.)

One thing I know I'd change would be to add a lot more genetech to it. Gene manipulation, out of control retro-viruses, some kind of GM ecological disaster. In the real world, as a general rule, I think GM crops and gene therapy and so on are a good thing. But I like the themes their mis-use suggests, especially for a game. Lets me give people mutant powers and fun things like that. Out of control technology, generally, is something I'd like to play with; robots run amok and people buying military hardware off the street.

Unfortunately, I've got a lot of other games I'd like to run, so this may sit on the back-burner for a while. And I don't know what system I'd use -- I love d20 Modern, and I have both it and Future, but the equipment lists aren't that great, and I don't know that it handles genetech abilities that well. GURPS would be better in both those areas, but I'd actually have to send in my core books to get replaced (bad first 4th edition printing) and I'd want to get a couple other books. And while I like GURPS, I've never had that much success actually playing it.

Powerless 4e

The other day, szilard (of Neitherworld Stories) noted that there are lots of character features that aren't powers in 4e. Which got me thinking: is there a game there?

Take out powers and you'd probably have to redesign classes, to give them a tad more distinction, and I'd want to check to see how many to-hit bonuses attack powers have, to make sure the math still works out right.

But with a few adjustments, it'd work. Combat would have to revolve around stunts, but most martial power effects could be reasonably simulated. Magic might be trickier, but I'd probably use this to run something science-fiction-y anyway.

I don't know that there'd be any point, but it's probably possible. It'd definitely depend a lot more on having the right group than straight 4e.

Challenge: Media Influences

I'm a little late to the party, but here's the deal: James Edward, from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, has challenged the members of the role-playing blogosphere to list at least five media influences on their campaigns, and explain them. Check the links back to the challenge itself to see the power and majesty of the thing. Mine include:

Dune
Not the first book I fell in love with, but one of the earliest, and the deepest. It was one of the first science fiction books I read after discovering the genre through a book report on Asimov and--wow. It's the book I re-read every couple of years, often during NaNoWriMo. It's probably responsible for the amount and intricacy of the politics that tends to work its way into my campaigns, as have its particular vision of transhumanism (both the Bene Gesserit and Tleilaxu varieties) and image of an unconquerable wasteland.

A Wizard of Earthsea
One of the few fantasy novels I've read; my tastes and habits have always run towards the science side of speculative fiction, though that's beginning to change. It's got a cultural depth that I've never quite been able to imitate, beyond working some non-medieval details into my worlds. It's also probably the reason that every time I really think about how magic works in my world, it ends up related to words in some way, though for me it's usually writing rather than speech.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
Flawed heroes! Magic rings! Epic quests! The other fantasy novels I've read, besides Earthsea and Lord of the Rings. Magic tied to the land, wise and seafaring giants, the whole "white gold wielder" thing, prophecy--these things speak to me.

Animorphs
The whole teenagers with superpowers thing was a big deal to me, at the time, and probably still is. Especially teenagers whole honestly like having their superpowers; the Animorphs never complained about having their powers, they complained that they had to deal with evil aliens, and couldn't get any help because they might be anywhere. Being a long-running, ensemble based series, it's a good model for team dynamics, the right mix of tension and co-operation, and how to give each character the right amount of spotlight time. It's also very talky, which is more noticeable in my writing than my DMing, but my ideal games do have a fair bit of chatter, both between PCs and with NPCs.

The Elder Scrolls
By which I mean Morrowind and Oblivion, not having played any of the earlier games. Morrowind, particularly, defines my ideal fantasy tone, a blend of mostly normal medieval/roman and bizarre bug creatures wandering around in the desert. I've tried, with varying degrees of success, to create fantastic ecologies for me games, and especially to use weird domesticated beasts, mostly because there aren't any normal animals in Morrowind, and how cool this is in the game.

Oblivion's influence is the most obvious of any of the items on this list, because I lifted the core of the plot to provide a backbone for the Is This Fair campaign. It worked out very differently, and I had changed enough things originally to make it distinct from the video game, but having a guideline was handy. I did, unfortunately, end up having the plot revolve around an NPC -- which is how it works in the game, but I should have known better. Especially since thinking about Oblivion and its major NPCs helped me work out some basic principles on how to make them important without upstaging the players.

On a less embarrassing note, it's also had an influence on the kinds of game I want to run. A great deal of my interest in sandboxes, with ancient ruins and collectible locations, is due to enjoying exploring Cyrodiil. And I'd like to use a something similar to the Imperial Cult in a future setting.

The Lord of the Rings
Well, duh, right? For the most part, though, I'm not into any specific setting details -- none of the non-human races are crazy enough for my tastes -- except maybe the long-lived line of kings descended from ancient glory days bit. I like the setting in the book, but I don't have a whole lot of interest in emulating it in my games. What I do like is the comradery and courage of the fellowship and the people around them. It doesn't work in every game I run, but I like to encourage it, when appropriate.

Special Bonus Non-Influence: Anime
There's nothing particularly wrong with it, and I've probably incorporated a specific idea from a specific show I've seen a couple episodes of here and there. But a lot of my friends are really into it -- which is why I've seen most of what I've seen -- and I've just never particularly cared. Except for when I was seriously into DragonballZ, but I claim extenuating circumstances.

There are probably some other influences and non-influences I missed, but that's a pretty decent list of the things I'm aware of. Except for "history," I guess, which seemed a little vague to give it's own spot, but I really do love settings and stories based on ancient culture and myth.

Jar Jar, You're A Genius

Do you read Darths & Droids? Imagine DM of the Rings, Star Wars style, except that the game master in question isn't nearly as much of a jerk.

It's also responsible for the phrase, "Jar Jar, you're a genius," existing on the internet. It's hit #40 on Google trends on its own, through the efforts of spam bots, but --

I think we owe it to the world to sustain and propagate this insanity. So if you haven't done it yet, go to Google and search for "Jar Jar, you're a genius" (with the quotes). Mention the phenomenon in your blog and encourage other people to Google for the term. Make posters proclaiming Jar Jar's genius and stick them up all over town. (If anyone actually does this, send us photos and we'll show them off!)

Having a love of Star Wars, webcomics, this comic in particular, internet shenanigans, and hijinks in general, I agree.

(Internet shenanigans brought to you by Qwerty.)

EDIT: If you're here for the first time, welcome. Though it's not quite as crazy as the game in Darths & Droids, you might be interested in the space adventure game I'm currently running. I've also got a quick and dirty guide on how to start roleplaying, a few notes on putting together a megadungeon, something like a review of Fight On! and a few crazy ideas for Vampire chronicles. And I encourage you to check out the links on my sidebar: there's a whole lot of gaming goodness in the blogs mentioned under "More Words to Read."

OzCthulu

Noisms, of Monsters and Manuals, is writing an Australian/Cthulu mythos Labyrinth Lord supplement. And:

Even better than that, if we're talking pipe-dreams, I'd love to have some budding artists, layout people and computer-nerds to give the thing the veneer of professionalism, and turn it into something that people are really going to want to read and play. In other words: collaborators. What do you say, talented people of the role playing blogosphere?

So go check it out.

In less exciting news, my laptop's graphics card just fried for the fourth time in three months. This is both inconvenient and extremely frustrating. If I'm a little flakier than usual for the next couple weeks, it might be that I couldn't borrow someone else's computer. It's more likely, though, that I've just gotten sick of the blasted things, and am working on my megadungeon, safely removed from the digital world.

The Ashen Rift

An idea has come to me, for a WoAdWriMo adventure: a rift in the earth, surrounded by ashen wasteland. Within it thrive all manner of strange beasts and factions, and at its heart lies a malevolent, fiery presence.

I'll probably refine the concept a bit as I work on it, but I'm going to keep the canyon part and probably the wasteland part. I like deserts, as fantastical locations, mostly because I read Dune at a young age, and I've never really done as much with them as I'd like.

Ideally, this'd be the kind of thing that could be dropped into a campaign on short notice. I'll try to put together some suggestions on having it as a longstanding feature of an area the players are just now exploring, and some on having it open up in a place they think they know pretty well.

There Will Be Dragons

I haven't run that many dragons in my DMing career. One or two, here or there, usually as NPCs, not actually intended for fighting. Which is no way to run dragons. The occasional wise sage/enemy to be bargained with is fun, for a change of pace, but dragons are for slaying. That's actually one of the few things that bugs me about Eberron, that the "great dirty lizard on a pile of gold" trope isn't really workable.

Part of it is that I really haven't run that much D&D. I've run plenty of d20, but my two long-running games used d20 Modern (which I want to get back to, someday) and Arcana Evolved. I've only ever ran one even mildly successful 3rd Edition D&D game.

But still, no excuse. So this current game I'm running, once they finish up Keep on the Shadowfell (or if they decide it's not worth their time; it would still be interesting if the cult succeeded at what they're trying to do) there will be dragons. Possibly several dragons.

Great horrible dragons, sleeping on piles of gold.

WoAdWriMo Rising

It's rare that you're simply presented with a knob whose only two positions are "Make History" and "Flee Your Glorious Destiny."

Rare, yes, but it happens: WoAdWriMo is nearly upon us. The blog's even back up.

I'm currently in major freak-out mode because I haven't started yet. Not even planning. I've been focused on other things, and I'd almost forgotten about it.

I'll probably go with the hex crawl idea, or something very close to that, just because it's fairly simple and easy to get started with. It might turn into something a little more complicated, but it's a decent start.

Minotaurs and Other Creatures

A thread on theRPGsite a while back got me thinking about minotaurs. I noticed on my first read through of the 4e Monster Manual that they had a lot more depth than I'd been expecting, what with a new and improved civilized version. But then my thought was that this gave me the old savage brutal minotaurs with a bonus set of demon cultists.

The mention of non-evil minotaur societies just registered as an interesting dungeon side trek, along the lines of Myconids or Desmodu. But now, after remembering that they (or a retouched version of them) are a major race in World of Warcraft, and that there's some minotaur city thing going on in Thunderspire Labyrinth, I wouldn't be surprised to see a full race write up for them in the second or third Player's Handbook.

I wouldn't be surprised, actually, if most of the races in the back of the Monster Manual got full write ups in future Player's Handbooks, or in campaign books. The Eberron sorginal ones are guaranteed, but goblins and orcs are also important in that setting so I could see something there. Githyanki and Githzerai will show up with psionics, and I'd bet Shadar-kai will get full write-ups when the shadow power source gets more detailed.

Why Is Irontooth So Deadly?

The crazy-hard deadliness of the Irontooth enouncter has to be intentional. It's 1evel 6, for a group of 1evel 1 PCs, which by the book is just on the edge of survivability, if they spend all their dailies and action points. And one of the monsters is a level 3 elite, which, again, pushes him into the edge of survivability range.

And it's an encounter that the adventure kind of funnels the group into: It's the only way for the players to figure out that there are bad cult happenings at the Keep unless they have the "heroes on a quest" kind of hook. Presumably, if they're heroic types, they'll be willing to make a quick (and paid) detour to help the good citizens of Winterhaven out. And even if they're not initially interested in the kobolds, the kobolds attack them, repeatedly, and are incredibly annoying. My group decided to wipe them out on principal.

My theory on this is that it's the same reason there's a dragon, a solo monster several levels above the party, at the end of Kobold Hall, particularly the demo version. The word on the street (by which I mean the internet) was that it's impossible to kill low level characters in 4e. By putting a very hard encounter at a key point in the flagship adventure, that everyone who's interested in 4e will hear about if not play, the designers send a very clear signal that this is not true.

Additional 4e Game Notes

Maggie and Qwerty, playing Thyme and Scourge respectively, have both written their own recaps of last night's game. Maggie has been writing regularly about the game, if you're interested in more detailed recaps and quotes.

Which I appreciate, a lot, because while I like having a general record of what happened in the game I wrote ridiculously detailed accounts of the game myself for the last campaign I ran, and I'm just not interested in doing it right now. They're more interesting when players do them, anyway. And it gives me a very good idea of what my players actually think is interesting.

I also neglected to mention that, on Sunday, I had everyone tell me where their character was from, originally, before they got to Fallcrest, where their mentor is from and where they met up before heading to Winterhaven. A good way to get people into the game, and I'll probably make it a habit. I'd sent out an e-mail with the question ahead of time, so the people inclined to give that sort of thing thought could take their time. The most table time it took was spent on looking at the campaign map and figuring out where "the nearest mountains are" and things like that.

I'm using the basic campaign map that comes in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide. I'm really quite enamored of it, and it's been very eye-opening. I always had an idea, in theory, of how to make a region map, but . . . examples, man. This is a pretty decent example. It says to me "draw some terrain on a map, and give it a name. Then draw some dots on the map, and give them names." Simple, easy, I should have thought of it before but much clearer now that I have it front of me.

The Fall of Irontooth

Tonight was a good night. The party finished the fight with Irontooth. They won by a hair--Scourge, the warlock, gambled his last action point on an extra attack rather than getting the heck away, and eldritch blasted the goblin down to exactly 0 hit points before the four unconscious members of the party started failing their third death saves.

And then the whole party cheered.

First time that's ever happened in a game I ran. But their lives were on the line, in a way that isn't usual in my games. They were smart--they have the tank wall plus snipers strategy pretty much down now, are learning their powers and how to use them to help each other, and and made some really rather inspired use of readied and delayed actions. And they were lucky--Stonefist, the dwarven fighter, rolled three 20s on his death saves, allowing him to keep Irontooth at bay just long enough to deal sufficient damage.

"We should have all encounters be like that," his player said.

Their one casualty was Liam, the elven ranger, who has now been replaced with a doppelganger wizard who has convinced the party that he actually is Liam, that he was only pretending to be dead. And a ranger. I have to wonder just how intentional that was; Liam died because he charged Irontooth, without backup, and was a striker, and the player had a back-up character on hand and ready to go.

It's actually good, because now that player has a weirdness schtick that doesn't annoy the rest of the party like going off into the woods and shooting at things did. And the party is now at the platonic six-person configuration of one of each role, plus an extra defender and an extra striker.

The best part of it all is: no fudging. I was tempted. Oh, how I was tempted. Not to fudge the rolls, because I'm doing them in the open, partially to remove that option. (I have been known to misinterpret the dice, taking advantage of player inattention, but not this game.) But I seriously considered knocking a few hitpoints off the dragonshields, or to "forget" Irontooth's regeneration.

But I didn't. No fudging. They could have run, but they decided they could take it, or were willing to risk it. All on their own terms.

The defeated Irontooth. And they earned it.

Teamwork and Storming

Another Sunday means another session of the 4e game. (Which needs a name; I had planned to name it after their adventuring guild name, but the players have not provided. Alternate plans are being explored.) This time, they almost managed to get through two encounters -- outside and inside the kobold lair. (The second being the infamous Irontooth encounter.)

They are also starting to learn 4e teamwork. After rushing into the first combat (Liam started shooting at things) they took their time, scouted the cave, and devised a cunning plan. They still might all die, because the encounter is just as tough as I've heard, but they've brought down all but the two dragonshields and Irontooth, and they're still in pretty good shape. They're through a lot of their healing, but not all of it, and most of them still have dailies.

Most encouraging is that Thyme, the least tactical of the bunch, is starting to get a handle on the system. She's making pretty good use of her powers, and while I think we've been misinterpreting certain rogue powers as ranged and she'd be more effective in melee, the learning curve is not as frustrating as I'd feared. She's also switched her half-elf encounter power from eyebite to scorching burst, which has been fun and useful, giving the team a little battlefield control they were missing after the wizard died.

It's also got me thinking that the wizard may now actually be the least complicated class to run. Everyone has the same power scheme, and if the wizard has a good team backing her up she has a lot less to juggle than the rest of the group. Which is weird, historically, but I may start recommending that the new players play wizards and ask the veterans to play defenders. Crazy edition.

It wasn't all dice and dragons, though. We seem to have hit the "storming" stage, and it's a little worse than I'm used to. They got into a huge, almost-shouting argument over whether to go to the dragon graveyard or the kobold lair first, and later into another about which entrance to use to attack the lair. Probably the worst argument I've ever witnessed at a table, but it's a new group, so things should settle down. Next time, I'll do a secret ballot, use a little of my DM power for good before things get too contentious. And maybe talk to a couple of people outside of the game; I'm still hopeful the group can resolve itself, with a little helpful guidance, but I've done that kind of thing before, and sometimes it's necessary.

What Will I Write for WoAdWriMo?

I'm kind of committed, but I'm still not sure exactly what I want to do. I'll figure it out, likely at the last minute, but right now, not sure.

I'll probably use 4e D&D. I'm not completely, absolutely positive about that -- it's not like 4e isn't going to get plenty of support besides me -- but it would be the most efficient use of my mental energy. I'm running a 4e game, and I'm sort of obsessed with it, and there are a lot of things in it I want to play with.

Actual subject matter is a lot more nebulous. I might do something like Asteroid 1618, or an encounter-filled hex map. Interesting places to explore, rather than a sequence of events, and trust the DM and the players to make some fun of their own. It'd be a lot easier than trying to plan out any kind of plot, without players to provide all that agency stuff for me.

I've changed my mind about topics a lot already, though, so I don't know how long this will hold. I might just end up doing Fall Off the Shadowkeep, or some kind of fantasy survival horror scenario.

D&D Fight Club!

I got a sort of strange idea today, while I was out walking the dog. What if I used a combat oriented RPG (4e is what I would use, but that's just because it's my current obsession) to run a player vs. player combat league?

I'd probably set this up with multiple players on one team. I could see having each team be run by one player, operating several characters, but at least with 4e I could see that getting unweildy at higher levels. Making it one-player-per-team would also increase the "build the statistically perfect fighting machine" aspect of it, the kind of thing that dominates competetive play of games like Magic. Which is fine, but I like the idea of having a teamwork element to it.

Because that's really the whole point. The concept, in my mind, is "like sports, but with D&D," which strikes me as stupid but quite funny. I could never make this a regular game, but as a way to kill a couple of hours a week, supplemental to a regular game, it could be fun. Especially if I could get enough people together to have a bunch of teams, with rankings and feuds and maybe even playoffs.

I'd have to figure out a way to do leveling. The standard D&D "winning makes you more powerful" deal would require me to work up a system that kept one team from totally dominating everyone just by dint of superior level. Probably what I'd do would be to just have everyone level every week or so, and set up a 20 or 30 week "season," after which the whole thing would start over with new characters, and maybe some changes to player lineups, if desired.

The other logistical issue that occurs to me right now (there will be more, if I actually try to get this thing going) would be refereeing. We'd need some way to adjudicate and interpret rules, to fix issues on the fly and keep little disagreements from derailing the whole thing. But without monsters to run, I could see that job being crazy boring; I can't see anyone wanting to do just that, all the time. I certainly wouldn't.

The easiest thing would be to rotate the job through players who's teams aren't in the current match up, but that still has a certain element of conflict of interest involved. Probably not a big deal, as long as things stay casual. And the job could be made more interesting by giving that person the job of designing a map and tactical features. It might even work to throw in traps, or even a few monsters, as an additional hazard.

I could actually see doing something like this next year. I've got some people talking to me about putting together a roleplaying club, which, if we could get it going, would make it a lot easier to get enough people to put this together. And having a light but roleplaying related activity like this would give people a reason to actually show up to the meetings.

Sunshine and Mongol

So I've been watching some movies lately, in between being massively busy and accompanying mental exhaustion. Sunshine and Mongol.

Sunshine was awesome, but frustrating. It could have been one of the best science fiction movies of the decade, maybe ever, except that this ranting over-make-upped Batman villain kept popping up, teleporting around, and strangling people who had just stabbed him. Great. On the bright side, I think a lot of it would have been fixed if they'd just cut out his lines; the movie does use the extra tension well, and without lines he fits in pretty well as just another menace of the sun.

Mongol was neat, and was worth seeing (haven't seen the new Hulk movie yet, but I loved the first one so I'm not to sure about the new, improved, more fight scenes less staring at flowers Hulk) but not so engaging that I didn't spend most of the moving trying to figure out how to make it an RPG setting. A bunch of tribes, all mobile but with home bases, PCs adventuring in part to gain warriors and power, (maybe rivals, maybe siblings or all supporters of one of their number) a mysterious mountain shrine where the gods live -- I need to fiddle with it, but it could work.

4e GSL and Related Speculations

You've probably already heard by now, but the 4e GSL and accompanying SRD is now out. You've probably already heard because Trollsmyth, the Chatty DM, and James Maliszewski are already discussing it. I mention it for completeness, and because it's worth checking each of those sites for their own take.

None of the reactions are good. You can't reproduce Monster Manual stat blocks in adventures, there's some dodginess about web support, if you Wizards publishes something similar to what you're already doing you have to cease-and-desist immediately, no questions asked.

A lot of it sounds like they're trying to avoid competition with their D&DI, which kind of worries me because at this point I have no confidence that the thing will actually be usable. I hope it will be, but if it ends up disappearing I'd like to be able to access fan-created resources that do similar things.

What I don't really get is why they appear to be so worried about people taking their system and doing other things with it, stuff like Iron Heroes and Mutants & Masterminds and so on. I could be misinterpreting it, but it looks pretty much impossible to do that with the new license.

That isn't going to keep people from jumping ship to other systems, it just means that 3.5/d20, rather than the new edition, is going to be the keystone system that people learn because they want to be able to play a bunch of games with one set of rules. And people who care about that kind of thing may well be inclined to pick up Pathfinder as their fantasy RPG of choice.

But I'm not much for prediction or for business, so there's a good chance I'm completely wrong. I'm just disappointed that it looks like there won't be nearly as many supplements for my game, especially the crazier ones. I wasn't planning on dropping 3.5 completely anyway, so this is just one more reason. And I am starting to worry a bit about the fan site policy, but that's a wait-and-see situation, too.

Low Level Monster Drought

There aren't that many low level monsters in the 4e Monster Manual. Sort of noticed it glancing through the book, really noticed it, in the way of a problem, when rolling up monsters randomly. I kept getting the same results. Not absolutely all the time, but enough that I noticed.

Is this necessarily a bad thing, though? I could kind of see where it would be intentional, because there's some value to things being simple and regular and unified at low levels. Low levels is where absolute beginners start, and keeping the options light makes it easier on the DM and on the players -- it's easier to work out effective strategies if the monster side of the equation stays relatively static.

Then, the monster selection expands as they gain levels and proficiency. This causes problems for people who already know what they're doing, but even then, giving the early levels a unified feel, revolving around various kinds of goblins and kobolds and critters, might not be a bad thing. If the lack of selection is really a problem, there's always the allegedly dirt simple de-leveling method, though even full monster creation doesn't look that hard. (Another thing on my to-do list: make some monsters. Preferably weird, crazy ones.)

And, of course, there's always the endless stream of Monster Manuals promised by Wizards, which should solve the problem rather handily. Albeit with more money, but if I'm still playing then I'm likely to get the new and shiny anyway.

Random Dungeon Generation

I've been working on a random dungeon, mostly for my own amusement but also with an eye towards using it when my group finishes Keep on the Shadowfell. This campaign ends when summer ends and everyone goes back to school, so I don't want to get to in depth and do my usual plot-arc wrangle, but we're going to need something to do after they finish the module. If the dungeon turns out interesting enough, and I don't think of anything better, I'll use it.

It's the first time I've generated a fully random dungeon. I started out with 3rd edition, which has charts for randomly stocking dungeons with critters and features, but no map tables. I got the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide partially because of the random dungeon charts in the back, but was pleasantly surprised to find that the 4e DMG also has a nice set of charts.

I've been using those, because they generate the assumed size of rooms, but will probably refer to the AD&D charts for at least a couple of levels, as a change of pace. And I'm going to use the AD&D charts for weird noises and laboratories and so on; the 4e charts are even worse than the 3.5 charts in that area.

It's fun. Even without occasional re-rolling ridiculous or uninteresting results, there's enough decision-making that it's as interesting, if not more so, as a dungeon I'd hand make, and figuring out explanations for weird combinations is fun. It's also very relaxing; just the right mix of input and output to make me totally lose track of time.

MMO Terminology in D&D

4e class roles system has, for our group, been a very good thing. It's similar, in its broad strokes, to the way MMO's organize their classes. They map almost exactly to the archetype set-up of City of Heroes, my MMO of choice; the execution of each role is quite different, and CoH breaks strikers down into melee and ranged, but the basic structure of tank, damage dealer, buffer, and debuffer is the same in both games. I'm told that World of Warcraft has a similar system, though I don't have any direct experience with it.

The advantage for us is that half the group has played various MMOs, and the other half is familiar with the basic principles and with similar ideas in other video games. It was very easy for the players to understand the basic sorts of things that each class could do, how they should be played, and how they interact with each other. We're learning the finer details in play, but the basic structures are familiar.

This'll be a bigger deal with new players. Not all the people I've taught to play D&D have been video gamers first, but a lot of them have been; the interest areas do overlap. And these days, if a video gamer doesn't play an MMO, chances are good that they know someone who does, or have played a game that borrows some of that class architecture. That D&D now uses some of this common language may make it more familiar to these people, its outlines easier to understand, and provide some common reference points to aid in my explanations of the system.

The 4e Teamwork Angle

As I was mulling over yesterday's game, another issue popped up: action points. None of them have used any action points yet, and if they'd thought to do so Takom might not have gone down, and the fight would have been over a lot quicker. I don't think they all understand what action points are, because they're very different from the mechanics of the same name that we used in 3rd. I'll go over them next week, before the game, and see if they do any better.

But there's still a significant teamwork angle to the game, and though my experience with it is limited, my sense is that this is a good thing -- at least, compared to 3rd, the only edition of D&D I have any extensive play experience with. The tactical thinking/communication load on players is greater, and this may be an issue for casual players, but it also looks like the work involved in other parts of the system has been reduced.

Thyme's player, one of the least system-wonky person at the table, has mentioned that the system seems a lot easier to handle than 3rd. Part of it is probably presentation, but the system does seem a lot cleaner and clearer in a lot of places, and your character's abilities are more clearly explained and organized.

Thinking about it, the less system oriented players have had an easier time of it than the crunchy ones. Takom, after all, was run by the most system oriented guy at the table, the one who ran a cerebremancer because neither a wizard nor a psion gave him enough options. The ones with less interest in or experience with the system talk to the other players more about what to do, which slows the game down a bit, but also keeps them from barreling into situations where they end up on their own.

And, in my experience, casual players had a bigger problem in 3rd edition: they'd get overshadowed by the gearheads. This never caused massive friction in any of my game, but I could see where it could have been a problem had the situation been slightly different. I've run several campaigns where one or more players were much better at building characters, or more interested in building characters for statistical effectiveness than roleplaying reasons, than the others. These characters had the effect of shutting down combat before anyone else could participate, or dominating it to the point where no one else's contributions were meaningful.

Now, at least, the system players need everyone else to succeed. This could cause its own set of problems, if they decide to start telling everyone else what to do and how to run their characters. But at least it opens the possibility for those kinds of people to get satisfaction out of the game without shutting everyone else out.

It's another reason why I want to run 4e a lot, hopefully with a couple of different groups. It's new and shiny and most importantly it's fun, and that's enough to keep playing it. But I'm still trying to figure out how the game and the table interact; what's supposed to happen, what actually happens, and why.

Kobold Fury

We had some more 4th edition excitement tonight. Unfortunately, we only got through one more encounter, the second kobold fight on Kings Road. I was a little late, we had dinner right in the middle of it, people kept getting up to do stuff on their turn, people kept taking ages to decide what to do -- it happens. Most of the delays were decision and/or rules lookup based, so I have confidence that the situation will improve as we get more comfortable with the system.

That one encounter was pretty thrilling, though. Four of the five characters present (Brandis's player was not in attendance) were bloodied, and the fifth, Scourge, was an infernal pact warlock whose temporary hitpoint-related powers we misinterpreted. Thyme got knocked unconscious twice. And Takom, uh . . .

Turns out that, in fine D&D tradition, the getting surrounded by kobolds is pretty bad news for the wizard. The two crits didn't help much, either, but that main of it was just the familiar equation of three dragonshields vs. one 1st-level wizard. After a short period of mourning for the fallen (and a bit of gloating by the DM, because I actually managed not to wuss out and have the kobolds attack a different, better defended character) Takom's player has replaced him with Ubuntu, the tiefling paladin, which ought to be entertaining.

The most interesting thing about the affair is that while the kobolds were the proximate cause of his demise, the incident was really due to poor communication by the players. If Stonefist had realized what he was trying to do earlier, he would have been able to use his daily exploit, covering strike and move him out of range of the otherwise extremely difficult to get away from kobolds.

It'll be interesting to see if the players can learn to better co-ordinate their tactics. It occurs to me that it could just be that the system is too complicated, and requires the players to keep track of too many things -- their allies capabilities in addition to their own -- but right now I think it's an area where they could significantly improve if they just talked to each other more.

Of course, some of this is probably my fault. My 3rd edition fights tended to be way too easy -- and around here, I'm the DM who actually cares about combat -- so they're just executing the "charge in and start hitting things" routine that has always brought them success in the past. I may encourage them to go hit up the dragon graveyard before they invade the kobold lair (though as the module expects, they are now very enthusiastic about wiping out those damn shifty kobolds; so far they've been just exactly the right mix of vexing and smashable) so they can get some more practice with the edition's assumptions before taking on the allegedly killer Irontooth encounter.

Warforged and the Default Setting

My favorite race that I never got to play is now 4th edition ready, allowing me to achieve new and exciting heights of non-play. Swank.

They also come with a place in the history of the new default setting, and a few more details about that setting -- specifically, how the empire of Nerath fell, and a couple of things that were going on in the decades before that. They even drop a note to explain the economics behind the warforged: Nobles could get out of required military service by paying for their production.

I kind of suspect that the setting will get a lot more defined as supplements come out and things have to be fitted into it in interesting ways. The core books play pretty fast and loose with that implied setting; it's there, but there's a lot that's clearly marked "do your own thing." I wonder how long that will last.

Waranger!

There are two new (to core) classes in the 4e Player's Handbook, the warlock and the warlord. They both have "war" in their names, and this, of course, is an excellent thing.

But it is my considered opinion that they did not go far enough. Every class should have "war" in its name.

For some, this is fairly simple. The fighter becomes "warrior," the cleric "war-priest," the wizard "war-mage." The ranger, similarly, is easily converted to "waranger." The rogue might sensibly be referred to as either a "war-thief" or "war-lurk," though these lack a certain iconic elegance.

The paladin vexes me.

Dungeons and Dragons and . . . Gladiators

With 4e, my long simmering idea to run a gladiator campaign has re-emerged. Not in anything approaching full force, mind you; the tropes of classic heroic adventure and sandbox-y wilderness exploration sing their own siren songs.

But ever since I read Dragon #303 (the only issue of Dragon I have ever owned, though now I'm not sure now where it is) I've thought that having an entire campaign revolve around the gladiatorial arena was a pretty neat idea. I put it aside in favor of other things, but what's got me thinking about it again is that I think 4e would be a much better fit for it than 3e.

Having just one fight per day wouldn't massively skew the power curve or the XP system; I'd just have to take into account that the players would pretty much be able to use all their dailies, if they wanted to, and make the fights a little tougher than usual. And the game seems geared towards big, set-piece battles, so I can use lots of monsters and throw in lots of gimmicks and I'd have a lot of support from the books on how to do that. It's also an excuse to use mechanically interesting but plainly bizarre monster combinations.

If I was going to do this, I'd make the party a team of gladiators, and the setting would revolve around them and other teams fighting monsters and occasionally each other. Put together a tournament system, some kind of rankings they could work up in, and probably use an actual, numerical system so the players have something to keep track of. Then add in enough behind the scene schemes within their stable and between stables to keep things interesting outside the fights, and to make ways to make the fights meaningful. Rivalries, bets and so on; maybe the start out in some small town, outskirts ring and have to work their way up to the big leagues, maybe there's an emperor who they can impress by pulling stunts and doing daring deeds in the ring, or particular kinds of daring deeds.

I'm still considering whether they'd be slaves or whether gladiatoring (gladiateering?) is legitimate employment. To a certain degree it depends on the death rate, and how final death is. I'm kind of leaning towards the former, based on its potential to generate subplots, but figuring out why they're crazy enough to want to be doing this could be interesting in itself. The free-agent model would also work better with mixing the idea with some urban adventuring/mystery solving.

There's a lot more I could do with this, but right now I haven't figured out where it ranks in the ever-shifting pantheon of games I want to run. I really badly want to do a straight up, 1st-30th sword&sorcery-ish exploration game, but I doubt that's particularly realistic. I'm also not sure which one I'd get more players for, as I don't yet have a solid college group, and might need to do some recruiting.

4e Burnout Already? Kinda, Sorta

I'm sort of sick of talking about 4e. Seems like that's all anyone's interested in right now, on the internet and in my home group. What's good, what's bad, how it fits together, how it's different from the other editions, and on and on and on. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, reading the books and thinking about things to do with it, changes to make, campaigns to run. I need to find something else to think about, because I don't, at the moment, feel any great need to discuss them.

I just want to play the dang thing. Worry about whether it's good or not later.

Damn Shifty Kobolds

Played me some 4th Edition D&D last night. We basically just ran through the first encounter in Keep on the Shadowfell, and then the PCs tooled around Winterhaven long enough to figure out where to go next. Character creation took over three hours, next time we'll get through a lot more game.

It was fun. The encounter was pretty well designed (and I've picked up a few tricks in that area from the module) and we were able to keep rule look ups relatively fast and infrequent. I described the scene a little better than usual, and everyone had fun moving their minis (lego, for the PCs, and paper on pennies for the kobolds) around the mat and laying the smackdown.

Kobolds are a lot of fun. One of the players had heard rumors of their vile shiftiness, and those rumors turned out to be all too true. The dragonshields were the most irritating -- the fighter had a hard time getting close enough to them to hit. ("They'll shift! They'll shift! Box them in!") I should have reminded them to use action points; that would have been a good use for them, and made things a bit easier.

The party currently consists of Liam Nate Boniface Andrews, an Eladrin ranger, Stonefist Aleboot, dwarven fighter, Takom, human wizard, Scourge, half-elf warlock, Brandis, human cleric, and Thyme Flyse, half-elf rogue. (Whose player has posted her own session recap.)

The characters are still pretty sketchy, this being the first session, and a short one at that. Highlights include: Stonefist's name is on account of being descended from two destroyed clans; he took both to honor their memories. Thyme Flyse has hers because her parents have "a bad sense of humor." Scourge distinguised himself by asking around for the exact population of Winterhaven, because he "wanted to have options. Lots of options."

4th Edition and the God Format

Got the 4e books. I've got a session going tomorrow (er . . . later today) but I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to say about it beyond "it is/is not fun." I'm still in the "ooh, shiny new book" phase.

I do like the format it uses for the gods, though. Name/alignment/domain and worshipers blurb/commandments. Especially for new role players, and with limited space, the commandments are a good way to get across how you should act if you worship a particular god. It helps that most of them include at least one that lets you know who you should beat up.

Character vs. Setting

As I was writing about the assumption of a long term campaign in 1st edition, it occurred to me (at least partly) why that is. The game is about the world, not the characters. That's why Gygax keeps going on about "the milieu," that's why the game is supposed to last as long as possible. Because the point is the world that everyone is building.

This is a huge contrast from the sort of game that I usually run, and learned how to run from the 3rd Edition DMG and places like Gnome Stew. The game is about the characters; when they end, when they die or their adventures come to a satisfactory conclusion, the game ends, and you start a new one.

And on a slight tangent, to me, character death makes a lot more sense in a game of the prior variety than the latter. If the point of the game is the world, then one character dying just means it's the end of his particular story, and the chance to add another dimension to the setting. In a game that's about the continuing adventures of one specific group of people, there are probably other ways for them to fail, without having to deal with a character-sized hole in the campaign. Which can work, and be interesting, depending on how the characters are related and what they're doing, but it's a lot more disruptive.

An Endless Campaign

The thing that really jumps out at me, as I read through the 1st Edition DMG, is the focus on long term play. 3rd Edition, the only one I've played so far, assumes the game tops out at about two years of solid play. I don't think the books explicitly discuss it, but that's the advancement rate built into the XP tables. Sure, you can go into epic, but then the game gets really dang weird, and you need another book.

4e goes even further. You can not play your character past 30th level, because at 30th level you get the power of "You die, but it's awesome." Which is perfectly good if you have one group of players and their awesome adventures, with plot arcs and so on. Eventually, you'll need to have a satisfying conclusion.

1st edition is different. Right off the bat, Gygax tells us that "Limitations, checks, balances, and all the rest are placed into the system in order to assure that what is based thereon will be a superior campaign, a campaign which offers the most interesting play possibilities to the greatest number of participants for the longest period of time possible." How well the system, the maths and so on, supports this, I can't say, not having played it, but that's at least what it's designer assumes you'll want to do with it.

The other main section that got me thinking along these lines was "Territory Development by Player Characters." You don't play your characters to the maximum level (or the maximum interesting level) and then start a new campaign; eventually, your characters should settle down, clear some land, and maybe continue adventuring but also start dealing with managing a stronghold and political maneuvering and so on. Then, even if that player leaves the game, the DM still has their character and their stronghold and their contributions made to the world, and can continue to use them as background for future adventures.

None of this is particularly new--I wouldn't necessarily have noticed it if I hadn't already read about the sandbox-y, multi-character nature of those early games, and their assumed end game. But it does seem to stand out.

Guess What Came in the Mail Today?

Yep. I've (finally) answered Dr. Rotwang's challenge and acquired an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide of my very own.

The new(er) cover isn't quite as cool as the original efreet-fighting one, but it's not bad. Overall, I quite like the "book" part of the book. It's got a nice weight to it, and that wonderful old paper smell.

And, of course, it's got charts. I haven't had a chance to really study it yet, but what I've flipped through so far looks good. "Unexplained Sounds and Weird Noises," suggestions for tricks a dungeon might play on adventurers, a whole set of tables for generating random NPC personalities (including sanity!) -- all kinds of crazy goodness.

Spore, Evolution, and Intelligent Design

I'm kind of worried about Spore.

There's the standard "it won't live up to the hype" complaint, but few games do, and even if it doesn't it'll probably be pretty awesome. I've enjoyed every other Will Wright/Maxis game I've ever played, so I'm not worried about it not being fun.

What bugs me is -- IGN describes it as an "evolution game." It's not. If anything, it's an intelligent design game. Which doesn't bother me, intrinsically, because it makes a much better, or at least more approachable, foundation for a game.

But I do worry that describing it as an "evolution game" will get people mixed up, or that it's a sign that they're already mixed up. A minor worry, but something I think about.

Dreams of Continuity

I always get kind of jealous when I hear about people who have been running different campaigns using the same setting, often for decades. I've never had any kind of serious, long term continuity in my games. The longest campaign I've ever run lasted about six months, maybe a little longer. And each of them has had, at least in theory, a completely distinct setting.

Which has had its advantages. I've been able to play with a lot of different kinds of things, and I like that. But I've never had a setting that I worked on for a long period of time, that grew from something basic and straightforward to something complex and multi-faceted. I like the idea of having a project like that.

What I always get stuck on is in building a cosmology that can acommodate "anything." Some kind of mult-world thing. That's always where I get stuck on setting design, when I do get stuck; I get the idea into my head that I have to have some grand framework supporting the whole thing, and I can never get that finished. And making it "multi-world" from the beginning always ends up seeming ridiculous and forced and opening up all kinds of weird problems that I don't want to deal with.

So I'm going to stop doing that.

The campaign I'm going to run this summer will end when the summer ends. And setting isn't going to be its main focus; I'm starting it off with Keep on the Shadowfell, may consider moving on to Thunderspire Labyrinth if that goes well and doesn't bore me out of my mind. (Though I'm going to need something to write for WoAdWriMo, and using an adventure written for the campaign seems like the obvious thing to do.)

If I end up needing setting material, I'm going to start with the 4e default setting and work my way out from there, see how well that goes. I've had some success with taking existing settings and tweaking them to my needs, and I want to see what I can do with the new setting. In general, though, I plan to focus more on developing my description and encounter-level skills than my world-building and scheme-planning skills.

But I'm going to have another campaign to run in the fall, and if I like 4e, and I like whatever setting evolves out of the summer campaign . . .

Well, we'll see.

Alignment and Deities and Other Cosmological Nonsense

Unless there's significant rules cruft that makes it unfeasible, I'm might just house rule the 4e alignment system into something that's a little more recognizable to me. I might ressurect the 9-point system, but at the moment I'm leaning towards replacing "good" with "chaotic good," "evil," with "lawful evil," and leaving it at that.

I could leave in plain "good" and "evil," but the shades of distinction aren't absolutely necessary, and if I leave them out I can maintain the law/chaos axis as the one that's actually important, something I've wanted to implement for a while.

Cosmologically, that is. In such a system, mortals -- meaning the PCs -- think of evil/good as the important axis, and think lawful good and chaotic good have more in common with each other than lawful good and evil. But the gods might think differently, seeing themselves and the devils on one side of a great struggle with elementals and demons.

Such a set up would run the risk of putting too much setting emphasis on things the PCs aren't involved in and don't care about. On the other hand, it would let me have religious wars between two good churches. (Chaotic good gods are renegades from the standard divine set up? Or chaotic good mortals worship something else entirely?) Not sure whether that would be a good thing, but it could be interesting.

Something to play with. I need to see the 4e deity set up, and decide whether I want to use it, to really be sure what I'm going to do. I might not even use gods at all.

To the President Cave!

Last night, at my kitchen table, Tommy Ocean ("Description: George Clooney), Mikaela "Mikie" Daniels (waitress and Buffy fan), Abraham Lincoln (a supernatural creature who takes the form of our sixteenth president because "Abraham Lincoln frees slaves!"),Kazak (an abomination from 2071), and Don Filks Ruth (an assassin from 1865) saved President (Harrison) Ford from Nazi ninjas, but were unable to stop the rest of the Nazis from stealing the Washington Monument and blasting off in it. ("They must be headed for the secret presidential moonbase!")

Yeah, I ran some Feng Shui yesterday. Highlights included a fight in the President cave (like the Batcave, but the bar is better), Mikie stabbing Hans, the main ninja/Nazi, with a flaming American flag ("American flags -- my only weakness!") and a decapitated wooden ninja statue signed by Harrison Ford.

It was pretty fun. It would have run a lot faster if I'd prepped better, but I might not have been able to muster the same level of bizarre-itude if I'd planned things out ahead of time. The players took to the game with enthusiasm, and made up for a lot of my waffling. They did a good job with stunts; thinking up good ones gave them something to do while they waited for their turn, and they figured out pretty quickly that they could invent appropriate items of scenery.

I'd planned for this to be a one-shot, and had been planning to use a series of Feng Shui one-shots in the event of player absence from my upcoming 4e campaign, but the characters came out so well I might just run this as a back-up game instead. The guy who's most likely to go missing wasn't there last night, but if necessary we can have him make a character, too. It doesn't take long. I might, someday, run a full Feng Shui campaign, but for no I'm pretty happy having it as my game-for-when-I-don't-have-a-game.