Continue reading »]]> I’ve been meaning to write this and just hadn’t gotten around to it.  I want to offer up some observations, all personal and from 30+ years as player and gamemaster for Pen and Paper RPG’s.  (Who uses pens anyway?  I guess pen is just easier to say than pencil)

It’s about engaging the players and keeping them interested and focused on what’s going on at the table.  First let me state you’re not going to get every player every session every round.   It’s just not going to happen, maybe they’re tired from a long day at work, or having issues at work,  or they’ve had a fight with their significant other, or their car needs costly repairs, or whatever.  Real life intrudes no matter how much we might want to get a few hours to escape it.  Expect it and work around as best you can.

Your goal as a game master is to engage most of the players at the table most of the time during most of your sessions.

To help with this, here are some things that I’ve come up with after thinking and experiencing modern life -

Downtime -

This is a big one to me personally.

You have to reduce the downtime between each player’s turn so they’re not sitting on their thumbs for long stretches of game time.  If the player only gets to actively participate in what’s going on, once every half hour then you’re going to have a serious problem. Even if it’s once every 20 minutes you’re going to have a problem.  IMO you should be shooting for sub 15 minute’s between a given player’s turns and sub 10 is better.

Do whatever it takes to get that time down.  If it means moving out of your game system of choice comfort zone then do it.  Nothing in my opinion will make a player wander off mentally and physically more than having to wait too long between their turns.   There are tons of lighter game systems out there that can reduce the time for a players turn from minutes to a minute or less.  Don’t use a heavy system UNLESS your players are seriously interested in the system directly and the system itself will keep them engaged.

There is a huge list of factors that contribute to this.  The system you’re using, it could be inherently slow due to the number of options each player has to choose from when its their turn.  It could have complicated combat mechanics that require a lot of repeated math and comparisons.  The system may be structured such that it simply takes a lot of time to wear down a the bad guys, aka The Grind.

The players, they could be disengaged when it’s not their turn taking additional time each time it is their turn to get up to speed on what’s going on.

The gamemaster could have so many bad guys and so much data to keep track of for each one that his/her turn takes unduly long.

Something as subtle and simple as the number of dice rolls involved for each participant in the situation, if there are several involved then each one adds up.

The Setting –

If the setting isn’t grabbing the majority of your players then you’re going to get disengagement and honestly if you’re not running or playing in something you’re looking forward to each week then consider coming up with something else.

Game settings and storylines are very strongly influenced, even dictated, by the gamemaster.  In my experience most GM’s have a story they’re wanting to tell and that story unfortunately may not be one that their players are interested in at either the macro or micro levels.  I don’t exempt myself from this issue by the way.  But your idea of a great story may not be interesting to your players or interesting enough to engage them.

Maybe the player doesn’t like the excessive roleplay segments but the world setting is interesting.  Maybe they don’t like the excessive combat segments because they’re not playing a combat oriented character.   Maybe they want to be killing zombies instead of dragons or the other way around.

But if you’re not engaging your players with the setting then you have to engage them with something else.  And vice versa again.

The System –

Not everyone enjoys the same mechanics in a system.  Many people for instance find the Fudge system too simple.  Others find GURPS too complicated.  Some people enjoy the Aspects of the Fate system while to others they’re just a “Uh what now? How does a parking lot have aspects?”

I don’t personally believe that a system will make or break a campaign as long as the gamemaster is familiar with it enough so that it doesn’t get in the way of the story.  But if every 5 minutes you’re having to look up rules because you’re not sure exactly what happens when you grapple someone or how damage is computed or what determines success on a skill check etc.   Then odds are you’re in for trouble in terms of keeping your players interested in what’s going on.

Modern Day Reality –

Let’s face it, the players are not the same players the were 20-30 years ago.  We’ve played MMOG’s, CRPG’s, we’ve got RPG’s on our phones for goodness sake.   We’re used to, spoiled by and expecting swift game play, infrequently missing, and lots of POW! and Kablam!  We simply aren’t the same as we were back then.   We don’t have the time to invest in gaming.

And I don’t know about your players but my experience hasn’t been great in getting old players to learn new tricks.  Or even show a minimal amount of interest in new tricks at times.

So What Can You Do?

That’s probably what you’re asking yourself and struggling with if you’ve come across this article and it hit home enough to get you this far.

On some levels I wish I could tell you something other than find try again or find players who slot better with what you’re trying to do.

But that’s rarely an option for most locations at least in finding physical bodies to sit in chairs, virtual gaming is a horse of another color and not germane to this post and comes with it’s own host of issues.

So I’ll offer this little nugget of wisdom which I’m sure you’ve never heard before, “Know your players.  Know what drives them to show up.”

And “If your desires and the players desires don’t mesh, don’t try to force it.  You’re doomed to failure.”

Design your story around those drives and desires.  If it’s hack and slash group, then throw dungeon crawls at them with vast amounts of loot and monsters to take it away from.

Say yes to your players. I repeat, say yes to your players.  Don’t come up with ways to screw them.  If a system is inherently screwing the PC’s then fix it, do away with the mechanic or get a new system.  I have one golden rule in designing my own game system, if a mechanic sucks then it’s coming out.  There’s a difference between a mechanic that adds difficulty/tension and one that sucks.  Spell memorization sucks.  Making death saves when you’re dying adds tension.

Learn you’re system or know your system.  Yes you might end up having to shoehorn a size 9 hiking boot onto a size 3 ballerina’s foot to make a system work for something it wasn’t intended to do but at least you won’t waste time looking up rules.  And hopefully you’ll be able to keep the game moving quickly enough to keep most of the players entertained at a given time.

And a key rule, if you’re not having fun as a GM then again don’t bother.  If you’re not having fun there’s just little to no chance you’re going to be able to make it fun for your players.

Don’t railroad your story.  The story that you think is just oh so damn cool, the players may end up with a been there, done that or I’d rather be buying rope.  So be flexible and learn to read your players.  If they’re browsing ESPN on their laptops while you’re trying to play a game then odds are you’re story is of little interest to them.   In a side note, if they’re wandering away when it’s not their turn, odds are you’re system of choice is taking too long to play out and they’re simply getting bored waiting.

Boring, don’t bore your players.  Don’t have scenes where most of the players didn’t need to be there but were forced to.   If you do have to focus on a single player for undue amounts of time make sure that the other players have at least the appearance of having something to do during the encounter even if you’re just pretending and nothing they do will have any impact.   And make sure they don’t know that.

And finally don’t force it.  I used to have a saying, primarily right after Ultima Online came out, if it was pretty obvious that the majority weren’t paying attention I’d close my notes and say “Okay disinterest has reared it’s head, we’ll try again next week.” and we’d spend the rest of the evening talking about something else.   Just because you’re pumped and ready to go doesn’t mean you’re players are and you have to learn to recognize that and work around it.

I hope something here helps you get a more engaged players and more engaging materials to present to them.  Because nothing kills your own enjoyment of this particular hobby than presenting it to players who aren’t interested.

Continue reading »]]> A butt load of little changes over the last few days, too many to remember really.  Added a group roll mechanic, primarily to Stealth but the mechanic would work for everyone.  It’s roughly the same group mechanic I came up with for 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.  To sum up, the law of averages makes it impossible for a group of players to sneak anywhere, someone is either ALWAYS going to fail their stealth roll or make their Perception roll.  This removes any chance for the group to work as a team and sneak into something.  Granted it might be ‘realistic’ but it doesn’t fit the cinematic game system I’m going for, where yes Virginia sometimes the hero can manage to sneak a group of women and children out of the bad guys warehouse without getting spotted even though none of them are particularily stealthy.

Basically it’s just a bunch of synergy rolls, one person makes the actual skill roll and everyone else involved simply adds or subtracts to that roll.   So it’s not possible for one person to blow it for everyone and it’s possible for the group as a whole to help or hinder the leader’s roll.

Extended the Extended Skill challenge system to allow for conditions where two or more groups are trying to achieve a goal against each other.  It now works much better for chase scenes or for any extended challenge with actively opposing forces.   And extended challenges can have their own unique stunt tables that the participants can purchase to achieve successes or bonuses or assign penalties to their opponents.  Should work out fairly well I think.

Came up with the basics on how to make the system work with just d6′s as an option for those that want it.  Requires a handful of value changes and it impacts the math more than I like but it can be done for those who don’t want to try and get a set of d8′s for everyone which typically aren’t sold separately in sets at least in many places unlike d6′s and d10′s.  D10′s aren’t a great option as it waters down the stunt and explosion factor which are a strong component for adding cinematic feel to the system.

Due to a math issue the standard TN is being shifted to 15 from 13.  When I was computing average rolls I’d changed the code to only allow one dice to explode on the skill rolls and only allow it to explode once and forgot to change it back.  As a result this impacted the average roll for 3d8E down a bit.   And 15 works better since I’m using multiples of 5′s.  Even the warriors can usually add and subtract by 5′s.

There’s also a bit more love for battlefield control for melee types either the DPS or Tanks, their Taunts and Intimidate ploys can now shift their targets around on the battlefield and by buying the appropriate knack they can turn them into an AOE.

Skills –

Taunt (Intellect) - You can taunt someone within a number of squares equal to your skill as a standard action.  Make a Taunt skill roll opposed by Resolve.  With one degree of success the target suffers a -2 to attack anyone but you on their next turn.  With multiple degrees of success the penalty increases to -4 and the target is immediately pulled one square toward you if they can.

Intimidate (Resolve) – You can intimidate someone within a number of squares equal to your skill as a standard action.  Make an Intimidate skill roll opposed by Resolve.  With one degree of success the target suffers a -2 to attack you on their next turn.  With multiple degrees of success the penalty increases to -4 and the target is immediately pushed one square away from you if possible.

Tier 2 Knacks -

Taunting Call – Requires Taunt 3+. As a normal Taunt but you can affect targets in a burst 1.

Intimidating Roar – Requires Intimidate 3+. As a normal Intimidation but you can affect targets in a burst 1.

In other news I’m listening to a podcast of guys playing DnD, Pathfinder version I believe and once again I’m struck by how much playing a wizard sucked under those vancian magic systems.  To paraphrase the conversation…

Dude 1 - “How many magic missiles did you memorize dude? That’s like the third [bleeping] one!?”
Wizard Guy - “What do you mean, I can’t cast it over and over?”
Dude 1 -“*laughter* No you [bleeping] idiot,  just the once for each time you memorize it.  You get them back once a day.”
Wizard Guy - “Ohhh… *pause*  That [bleeping] sucks.  Okay I’m done, that’s it, I got nothing for the  rest of the [bleep] day then.”
Dude 1 -“Use your staff and hit something with it.”
Wizard Guy – “I’ve got 4 [bleeping] hit points!”
Dude 1 -“Welcome to playing a D&D wizard.  Enjoy.”
Wizard Guy - “This sucks, go ahead and kill me, I’m going to play a ranger.”

Continue reading »]]> Not much to report lately but I’ll offer what I’ve got.  Work has been kicking my ass along with doing things around the house that I just haven’t had the time to do much.

But with that said, I’m going to be adding in a Dodgy Bastard Knack that can be bought by a character.   My thought is to allow them to take a hit on their next turn to increase their Evasion score this turn.  It’ll go something like this for play testing -

Dodgy Bastard – Before an attack is made against you, you may choose to dodge out of the way and gain a +2 Evasion against this one attack and are Off Balance until the start of your next turn. (Off Balance is a standard -2 Evasion penalty)

I’ve cleaned up my States section and currently employ Dazed, Off Balance, Slowed and Immobilized.  Dazed = no actions, Off Balance is the -2 Evasion penalty, Slowed reduces your speed to 2 and Immobilized means you cannot take any actions that require rolls based on Brawn or Grace.   I want to strike a balance between no states and Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition’s ginormous amount of states which while they add verisimilitude are incredibly unwieldy in game play at times.

I also really don’t want any lingering states that have to be kept track of if I can help it.  The most you can be dazed for instance is one turn and that’s if you fail your undazing check.  So fail = lose one turn, succeed = suffer a penalty on this turn, suceed well and get your full turn.   No getting stuck losing actions turn after turn because you rolled crappy and not getting to play.   It’s awesome when a party of players stun locks a boss (or is it? Really?) and they put a beat down on it and it never gets to do anything.  It’s not so awesome when it happens to a player.   And I’m going to fall down on removing not so awesome issues where I can.

The exception is Immobilized from the Crowd Control power which does linger as long as you don’t break free and the power user keeps the power going on you.

In addition to hammering that stuff out I wrote the Animate Object spell which will be used for everything from summoning skeletons to making tables walk to dancing swords.   To counter the potential power of such a thing I think I’ve got it limited in such a fashion that it’s useful but not overshadowing.  Time will tell.

And I’ve created a first draft of a character sheet, I don’t have it with me or I’d post it, it’s blah like all my character sheets are, I design for usability not graphic splendor.  I have trouble reading character sheets filled with backgrounds, stains, rips textured boxes, white text in black boxes, with tiny fonts.   Ergo I don’t do that.

Continue reading »]]> Work has continued on my game math and things are still looking ‘okay’ for the most part.  I just realized on the drive to work this morning though that I don’t have any mechanism to reward good strength stats in melee.  With fixed damages for the sake of the math and balance, it’s going to be a bit tricky perhaps.

Typically games that reward strength in melee do so by granting a bonus to the damage.  Savage Worlds lets you use your str die as one half of your damage roll, Dungeons and Dragons, Gamma World 4E, various D20 systems give you a flat bonus to your damage, Hero systems gives you additional dice of damage.

A problem is though that at this level of granularity flat bonuses stack up very quickly. This has the subtle effect of making your ability to hit more important than your damage output when you do hit.  As well as making any hit damaging.  It’s a lot like older editions of Dungeons and Dragons where after awhile the damage range on your weapon became less important than all the bonuses you got from magical properties, strength, feat, and assorted other bonuses.

I need to run the numbers and see just how deadly fights become with my current mechanics when adding in flat damage bonuses based on dice pools.  My thought was to add a +1 for each die of strength in the strength pool.  But that means a warrior with a 5 dice strength is going to deal on average 13 damage on a regular hit with a 2 handed weapon (2d8).  That’s going to hurt someone with each hit.  Granted that’s the worst case scenario.  I could though adjust for that by nudging protections up slightly but that will have a cross effect against ranged weapons.

But on second thought that helps to balance ranged weapons versus melee weapons as the ranged weapons have a universal DC to hit a target while the melee weapons have a variable DC based on the targets melee skill.

With game design the more features you add the more a single change can have a big waterfall effect that you’re not expecting, especially if you’re not using formulas or my favorite, simulating it with a million virtual warriors locked in eternal combat, to verify the math.    I think the lack of simulation or advanced math testing that there are powers in the 4E power collections that simply do not work based on the math.  That some powers are just such weak sauce that they’re only taken by accident or because they sound cool.  Cool goes a long way but a player shouldn’t, in my opinion, be able to gimp his character by going on cool.

But then I could be wrong.

Continue reading »]]> The search for a game math mechanic that I’m happier with continues.  Unfortunately the single die roll which determines attack and damage doesn’t work well for me.  The math extremes are between the top and bottom are just too extreme.  It’s a lot like the issues with the One Role Engine and it’s derivitives, there’s just too much disparity.

I’m still working on the dice pool versus the flat percentage probability of the D20 and WFRP versus the stepped dice of Savage Worlds.    The flat percentage while I think it works well for DnD leaves little area for… excitement?  You know 1 in 20 times you’re going to do maximum damage. If you’re an avenger or twin weapon ranger you know one in 10 rounds you’ll get a critical hit.  That kind of thing.  Other systems you don’t even get that, you simply hit or miss.

Granted the use of the damage dice are a secondary implement in how to determine how well you did.  But I think for most people there’s a subtle or not so subtle expectation that if you roll 12 higher than you needed to hit that you should somehow hit ‘better’ or ‘harder’ or whatever.  But if you need a 7 or better to hit (or 30% or higher) to hit then it doesn’t matter if you roll a 7 or a 19 you have the same range of results.

With the single roll out of the question I broke combat down into the ubiquitous attack and damage rolls again.  This oddly enough broadened the math between the least and maximum dice pools.

Like apparently many people I enjoy the thought that the better your attack roll the better your result should be, rather than a binary or trinary result which is pretty much all the other systems I’m familiar with.

I’ve run a few bazillion simulations and balance is getting closer and is within reasonable parameters right now.  Some of the current highlights -

A character’s ability is determined by their dice pool.  Someone untrained in a skill has a pool of 1d10 and is subject to a -5 penalty.  Someone with some training or ability gets a 1d10, a master of something gets up to 5d10 in their pool.

Success at something is determined by beating a equaling or beating a 5.

Your level of success is determined by how many multiples of 5 you roll over the necessary number. This is very Savage Worlds but I found that type of mechanic workable for what I wanted and thus using it.

In combat a character has two defenses.  Their Damage Avoidance or DAv and their Damage Absorption or DAb.   DAv determines if you get hit at all.  DAb determines how badly you got hurt by the attack.  Again this is like Savage Worlds Parry and Toughness.  I’m not 100% in like with it but tracking Hit Points is slow and annoying regardless of the mechanic and I found the Wound levels of Savage Worlds another thing worth stealing from them.

A round of combat consists of a character rolling his attack dice pool and determining the highest number rolled.  This is then compared to the target’s DAv.  For each multiple of 5 that the attacker rolls over the DAv they roll their damage.  Damage is determined very simply, weapons that are wielded in one hand deal 2d6+xd6 damage and weapons that require two hands deal 2d8+xd8 damage.  The xd6 and xd8 are variable depending on how well the attacker rolls.

While it sounds odd that two attacks at 2d6 somehow equal one attack at 2d8, oddly enough that’s how the math works out with the range of damage avoidance and absorbtion numbers I’m using.  I was a little surprised myself.  But using the same damage for each major group of weapons provides for ease of play and opens up a lot of roleplay opportunities without having to worry about the nuts and bolts.  Granted for some groups that’s simply not going to work, they want the 12 pages of weapon stats, but that’s not the group I’m designing this for.

Example:  Attacker rolls his dice pool of 3d10 using a pistol, a one handed weapon.  His highest die is a 9.  This is then compared to the DAv of the target.  If this was a 5 then the attacker hit with +4 over so he deals the base 2d6 damage (one handed damage).  Let’s say he shoots another person the next round who’s DAv is 4 and gets another 9.  9-4 is 5.  This means on the second shot he does the base 2d6 but because he got 5 over the necessary value he gets to add another 1d6 for 3d6 damage.   This varies from the Savage Worlds in that it’s open ended.

Another reason I’m using Dice Pools is that I want to include a Stunting mechanism.  I’m doing this through the use of doubles.  To determine how many stunt points you have you simply add your matching dice up and take the one’s digit.  Example:  You rolled 2 6′s in your pool.  6+6 is 12 so you get 2 stunt points.  Roll 2 9′s?  18 or 8 stunt points.  Two 10′s?  20 and 0 stunt points but then rolling two 10′s is reward in and of itself.

As a character’s skill increases, their dice pool increases.  This causes a corresponding chance for doubles and thus stunt points.  Someone without any training or little training with a 1d10 pool, never gets to stunt.  With 2d10 they stunt but rarely.  With 5d10 they’ll stunt roughly 25% of the time.

Stunt points will be used add special effects to an attack.  The list is nebulous at this time but I foresee things like for X points you get to add another dice of damage, or push the target  X spaces or knock the target prone or immobilize the target by pinning it to an object or smashing a knee cap etc.

These points will allow players (and the GM) to essentially build a power on the fly as they need to and the better skill a character has the more stunts they’ll be able to pull off.

Right now I’ve got the numbers pretty balanced again, between 1H+Shield, 2H and Dual Wielding warriors.  How it’s working out is that dual wielding works better against lightly armored targets and 2 handed weapons work better against heavily armoured targets.

Dual Wielders have a bit of a penalty in that they never achieve the win percentages that the other two types of fighters do but they have an advantage that’s not apparent from the combat sim in that they get two rolls per round and thus two chances to get stunt points.   So the dual wielders will in general be the flashier fighters while the other two will be more steadfast and stable fighters.

This works out pretty well to my thinking.

Some things that came out of this is that in Savage Worlds a dual weapon fighter HAS to have ambidexterity to be as effective as the other types of warriors. As a result I’m simply not going to be sticking an off hand penalty into the system.  Anything that’s mandatory to be equitable should be a given.

Another thing that came up is that if you assume a multiple action penalty of -2 like Savage Worlds then for the math to add up you can only allow this to be reduced to -1.  If you allow something like Two Fisted to reduce that 0 then the dual weapon fighter becomes drastically better than someone who doesn’t wield two weapons.

By removing the off hand penalty completely and then limited MAP removal to -1 and subsequently offering an equivilent advantage to 2 handed fighters to gain +1 attack bonus and shield fighters to gain +1 bonus defense when using shields you continue to keep the math balanced.   If you don’t test all three types of fighters against each other then you always run the risk of breaking the math of any system.

Right now the numbers are looking good at this particular juncture, A vs B vs C are within reasonable balance and have a bit of Apples to Oranges feel with them with each type of fighter having a bit of a niche to fill.

There’s always though the ‘feel’ of the system.  I really want to replicate the ease of Savage Worlds system, just with a little different feel and the inclusion of some other mechanics and get the math more in line with what I need to be happy with it.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been noodling the math some more.  I’d come up with a scaling damage system that seems workable but I’ve hit a bit of a snag.

To sum up the system, your level of ability at something is set by a dice pool.  The more dice you have in the pool the better you are of course.  Each time you need to do something roll the appropraite number of dice and take the highest one.  The dice can ace or explode such that if you roll the highest possible value you get to keep that then roll it again.  This repeats until you don’t roll the highest value for that die.

The value you roll is compared against the defense of a target which is a flat number right now, how it’s determined is still to be determined but likely it would be a factor of skill and physical defenses.

For every X you roll over the defense of the target, currently for every 4 or 5 units is the number I’m using using d10′s for the dice pool, you inflict a damage condition.  This starts at Dazed, then 1 Wound, 2 Wounds, 3 Wounds, 4 Wounds.   Once you get to the 6th condition, 5 wounds, you’re dead.  The number of wounds you suffer inflict attack roll penalties.  Unfortuantely this is resulting in a definite death spiral that’s hard to get out of.  That’s one issue.

The other issue is more subtle.  As your dice pool for your attacking dice goes up, your average value goes up as well which also makes your average damage go up in direct correlation.

The systems I’ve got my eye on right now for inspiration I’m realizing have flat damage.  It really doesn’t matter how good you are with a sword in Savage Worlds or Dungeons and Dragons, you’re going to inflict the same base damage pool for the majority of your attacks.

It’s realistic of course that someone skilled can inflict more damage than someone unskilled, I don’t really have a problem with that.  It’s the granularity of it that’s the biggest issue.

Someone with a dice pool of 1 die has a  3% chance to defeat someone with 5 dice in their pool and this doesn’t even start to bring in the Stunting system which is currently set up with doubles rolled during your dice pool.  i.e. the more dice the higher the chance for doubles the more stunts you can pull off.  2 dice versus 5 dice is 13% chance to win, 3 dice vs 5 dice is 27% chance to win, 4 dice vs 5 dice is a 40% chance.   The percentages change too drastically for me to think this is a workable solution in its current state.

Assuming I remove the ability to increase damage with the use of stunt points this still leaves a limited level of granularity.    Now I do know that the Level +/- x range limitations exist pretty heavily in many games, it’s just a fact of life.  But I want content to be more widely useful than say Dungeons and Dragons or Gamma World or Mutants and Masterminds etc.

Perhaps I might have to go back to the drawing board and work with a system of a smaller or larger pools (hates handfuls of dice) and flat bonuses to represent skill levels.

Continue reading »]]> As I mentioned awhile back I’ve been tossing around a dice mechanic for a game system.  There’s a rather extensive set of design goals I’ve got floating around in the back of my head.  Here’s some random thoughts on existing mechanics that keep them floating.

Disclaimer: I like my systems to be mathematically balanced.  Some people don’t, I’m not them.   I don’t like systems where combinations of race/class/powers/builds are just world crushingly more powerful.  Whether by accident or player design characters that end up with those combinations make the game less fun.  When one player constantly upstages everyone else during play, you’re going to find few enjoy playing.   So balanced math is near the top of the list for design goals.

Let’s look at an obvious mechanic in almost every game, weapon damage. Weapons have different damage… for lack of a better word let’s use range. Let’s take a familiar system to many, Dungeons and Dragons.   A longsword is a d8, a greatsword is 2d6.  One averages 4 points of damage, the other 7.  But it gets tricky, a long sword has +3 to hit while the greatsword is only a +2.  That nudges the longswords damage over time upwards because it hits more often.   A long sword also allows you to use a shield which decreases the damage you take over time because you’re harder to damage.

Are they balanced?  Unlikely.  With a limited set of ranges caused by a fixed set of dice (d4,d6,d8,d10,d12) it’s not possible to balance them.  You can get them close but there’s always going to be a particular weapon that’s simply… better to use.

Gamma World Fourth Edition bypasses this by throwing out the whole individualized weapon stats, a move I really applaud.  It’s a paradigm shift for this particular style of mechanics.    There is no one best Light 1-Handed Melee weapon in that system.   This is an awesome step forward for roleplay and characterization and a giant step backwards for mechanical diversity.   But the step forward is what I personally care about.

So one of the design goals is that weapons are Gamma World 4E in flavor.  A few broad categories or rather combinations of categories, Light/Heavy, One Handed/Two Handed, Ranged/Melee, define each weapon.  Light weapons favor faster fighters, heavy weapons favor stronger fighters etc.   Light weapons hit more often but do less damage, heavy weapons hit less often but do more damage.

But mathematically is there any real difference?  If something hits more often but less damage and less often for more damage, isn’t that simply the same thing by the numbers and all its really doing is giving the illusion of a difference?  Something to think about certainly.

The damage ranges conflict with another design goal, a better roll on your attack increases your damage output.   Dungeons and Dragons allows for this in a binary way, you hit and deal your normal random range of damage or 5% of the time, on a natural 20, you deal maximum damage.    But if you need say a 5 to hit that means that it doesn’t matter what you roll really.  You either need any one of 14 numbers, makes no difference which one or that 20.  5-19 always results in the same damage.

It works but I’m thinking, what if your damage scaled in a more granular fashion?  So that a 19 is better than a 15 is better than a 10 is better than a 8 is better than a 5?  That would be pretty cool now wouldn’t it?  Of course if we were playing with a computer we could easily do that.  Computers have no trouble computing what 57% of 1d8+4 is.   People, generally not so much, ignoring any Rainmen in the group of course.

On a side note, one of the House Rules I used for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is I averaged damage across the board.   1d8+4 meant you dealt 8 damage.  It worked really well for speeding up the game and no one found it detracted from it.  So it was a win/win in our group.   Other’s who’ve tried it report a similar overall

After running millions of simulations and computing percentages and spreads and the like my current design (after shelving several) is to use dice pools for your attempt roll.  The ‘better’ you are at something the more dice you get to rol but you still only use ONE of them.  The pool currently ranges from 1 to 5 with non-skilled getting 1 die with some penalties and legendary world shaking heroes getting 5 dice with bonuses.

To this basic premise I add the ability to fine tune percentages by adding flat bonuses, a flat bonus nudges the percentages up by (1/dice size)*100) percent.

A hero with a some training in Heavy Melee skill might have a 2d8+4 which averages out to roughly a 10, while a 5d8+4 averages 1 better with an 11.

Whaaaa? you might be saying, increasing the dice pool from 2 to 5 increases my average roll by only 1 point (technically it’s 1.4 give or take).  That’s crazy, why spend character points to get bigger pools?

Well there’s a fix I have in mind for that which is simply adding in the exploding or acing dice mechanic from Savage worlds.   Which simply means that if you roll the maximum on a dice you get to roll it again and add them together.   With explosions turned on let’s run those numbers again.    2d8+4 exploding now averages 11 per roll.  5d8+4 exploding is 13.6 so we’ve gained a 2.5 higher roll.   That’s a more reasonable gain.

Exploding dice also have a very critical (to me anyway) benefit of allowing anyone to successfully attack anyone. Granted it might be a ‘ slim chance’ but there’s none of that “Oh they’re level 2′s and I’m a level 12?  Pfffft, I just walk through them, they don’t have much chance to hit me and if they do it’ll take a week to burn through my hit points.  Meanwhile every time I swing three die.”  This is important to me because it keeps all content relevant.  There are no creatures that get ‘out leveled’.   That’s one thing I dislike about Dungeons and Dragons in all Editions but especially 4E.  Any creature four levels higher or four levels lower than the players is difficult to impossible to use.   They’re either impossible to hit or impossible to miss or vice versa depending on your viewpoint.

One of the other design goals was the use of ‘stunting’ dice mechanic that Dragon Age Origins RPG brought to the table.  With that system you roll 3d6 but one’s an off color.  That die is your stunt die and the value shown gives you that many stunt points you can use to give your attack a bit of ‘oomph’ by letting you knock someone down or daze them or move after the attack etc.  In other words you’re encouraged to do cool shit on your turn which is never a bad thing.

Now we could go with an odd color in a dice pool and that would work certainly.  But what if instead we say that if you roll doubles of a number you get that many stunt points…  That gives a player a bigger incentive to up their dice pools than purely more chances to succeed.

Your chance of getting doubles with 2d8 is only 12.5%,  with 5d8 though you’re going to end up with doubles 83% of the time.  Which kind of makes sense, a barely trained fighter is going to be lucky to hit you with a sword much less do a double flip over the bar, bounce off the mirror after cracking the bartender on the skull and then swing out to catch the chandelier to swing over to the door.  But a legendary warrior with a 83% chance of getting some stunt points should be able to do something that awesome a majority of the time.

Another design goal the use of a bell curve where extreme swings in value are infrequent is in one of those shelved systems but I had to drop it as I like the idea of dice pools.  It might be possible to ‘do the math’ and come up with a way to drag it back in but for now it’s on a back burner.

By the way, the d8 I refer to is simply a placeholder.  I’ve yet to determine which die size offers the best results for the damage design goal.

So right now my current mechanic, using a dice pool for attacks of exploding dice along with a way to allow for stunting handles several of my large view goals.

The trick is of course going through the nuts and bolts of the minutiae.   How to handle specialized training? What about weapon quality?  What are the typical min/max ranges of bonus possibilities and penalties.  What about the range of target numbers you’re trying to succeed at, whether it’s whacking someone with a sword or picking a lock or convincing a tavern wench to meet you after closing?

Let’s not forget about weapon classifications, how do we truly differentiate those?   What about damage mitigation?  How many hits, hit points, damage ratings does it take to go from healthy to dead?  How many attacks does that take on average?  Is it too slow to be fun aka the high level solo boss slog in 4E or too flast like the one hit kill possibility in Savage Worlds?

Game mechanic design isn’t something you can just jot off on a piece of paper.  You can have what appears to be an awesomely workable system but then once you start coming up with all the nuts and bolts it just falls apart.

But running through it is certainly mentally stimulating.

Continue reading »]]> Played a solo game of Castle Ravenloft yesterday, first time playing and was immediately struck by expandable by the consumer the game would be.

Sure enough a quick search this morning and there’s a bunch of new adventures, heroes, magic items and the like available.

You can get started over on this thread on Board Game Geek and start picking up all kinds of nifty things for the game.

The game is very simple to pick up, assuming you’ve played 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons or at least have some faimiliarty with it.

The solo Adventure 1 turned out to be a cake walk for me as the Dragonborne Warrior as one of the first itmes I looted was a Teleport Scroll.  I just kept exploring edges, killing monsters till Strahd woke up and came after me.  Once he entered my tile, I burned the teleport scroll and put myself on the far side of the dungeon and kept digging through the tiles while he came after me again but I found the Secret Staircase before he got anywhere near me.

Without the teleport scroll I’d of probably been dead, the Staircase tile was 4 tiles deep and I was out of Healing Surge tokens with a skeleton, a ghoul and a gargoyle and of course Strahd.  The teleport to get out of jail free card was pretty much that, an I Win button.

Short review – Good quality materials, game is reasonably fun, playable solo and provides a bit of a 4E hit when you don’t have any other options.  It’s a basic dungeon crawl, you navigate a randomly generated tile based map finding and killing monsters, collecting treasure and trying to achieve the Victory Conditions of the specific adventure you’re play.  There’s quite a bit of luck to the game, weighted to that end in fact given monsters, loot, attack rolls, tile selection are all randomly generated.  Your only real tactics are in picking and choosing when to burn one use powers and items.  But with additional characters in play this can be mediated to some extent.

If you’re a DM who wants to play 4E this is one way to do it.  If your’e a group of people and just want a beer and pretzels session of 4th Edition without having to deal with character generation and running a ‘full’ session this certainly fills that need.

Overall I’ll give it a 4 out of 5.

Continue reading »]]> I’m working with Savage Worlds and now that I”m wanting to delve into Fantasy I’m finding another system I need to try and get around the Casters Get Dicked syndrome with this one.  It seems in many systems the philosphy seems to be that Magic is some dark and dreadful thing that only masochists need apply to.

Warning: Some people are going to find this sacrilege and even possibly offensive depending on how much they cleave to this idea of magic and their personal sensitivity to something they believe being questioned.   You’ve been warned.

Remember the first time you played DnD and wanted to make a cool wizard?  And then got told he averaged 2 hit points when the least weapon averaged 2 points of damage? For the math impaired that meant a single successful hit on average would remove the character from play and leave the player to sit there with nothing to do.

And that they got maybe 2-3 spells they could use. For the ENTIRE day?And had to play the Fortuneteller game and try and decide which 2 or 3 of their several spells they should get memorized.  And then the caster gets to toss his one or two Magic Missiles and then guess what he pulls out some weapon he has little hope of hitting with and does little damage with.  A well chewed and almost tasteless bone to throw to the poor player so they can keep participating in the game.

Toss in that whole Materials component book keeping and it’s a wonder anyone bothered to be bothered with it.  And frankly in my experience a wizard was far from the class of choice for most of the players I had under me over the last 20 years.

I’m running into the same issue I’ve had with DnD (barring 4th edition) since day one and various other systems since up to and including Savage Worlds.   To wit, the caster gets a limited use of his characters bedrock, underlying most basic abilities, the ability to cast spells.

Meanwhile the Rogue simply doesn’t run out of backstabs.  The ranger can fire his bow all day long.  The fighter can swing an axe until the cows come home.

But the gods help the player who wants to be a caster.  He has to continually try and guess how many fights there are going to be before the next rest period so he can husband his powers and not be stuck throwing rocks after the first fight.   Yay, how heroic!

On top of that with Savage Worlds, every time, every SINGLE time the caster tries to use any of the abilities that define his character he’s subjected to a chance to knock himself out and if he’s stupid enough to keep using them when he’s wounded he can actually kill himself by casting the simplest spells.  Yes I’m not making that up.

After hearing that a couple of the Savage World’s settings books, to wit Solomon Kane and Hellfrost have non-resource management mini-games for their world settings.  And after reading them yes they both do away with the resource management.  But they delve into a Let’s Dick The Caster Even Worse area.  In both of these systems one in 36 times that the caster screws up their use of their basic powers their ability to use their powers decreases.  Permanently.  That’s right even the best wizard on the planet will eventually fail often enough that they’ll end up without any magic ability at all.

In addition their system, called Backlash tables, penalize the caster with being knocked loopy to taking damage and typically losing the ability to use their powers for anywhere from several rounds to several days.

Yes, just by using the powers that make them what they are, that are their reason for existence they can and are penalized to the extent that their character is permanently screwed over and fairly often they’re forced to come up with some other way to play. Not an option to play differently, forced to.

Meanwhile the rogue is still having a great time stabbing people in the back and never once will he ever kill himself doing it, nor knock himself out, nor ever have even the most minute chance of losing his ability to stab people.

The ranger is still shooting people and having a hell of a time, picking them off from afar and up close.  Let the gray geese fly he cries with gleeful abandon and no worries an arrow is going to loop around and hit him in the eye.

The warrior can leap into the middle of any fray, day or night, without a care that he can swing maybe 3 or 4 times and then he’s down to name calling because he ran out of energy.  Never is he going to manage to lop off his own hands and remove his ability to swing an axe.

I have to applaud 4th Edition for seeing that this is a problem and for deciding to do something about it. That this particular vision of magic as laid down by the great Gygax and company doesn’t have to be carried forth as a sacred cow on a platter.

And if they’d of gone the other way with it and made a resource management game for every single other playing option, i.e. warriors only get X swings per day, rangers only get X shots per day etc. while I’d of seriously questioned their sanity at least it would have been fair and equitable across the board.

Of course your opinion on any of this can differ, you may enjoy the strategic points of playing a caster and trying to figure out when you should just sit back and do nothing and when you should toss out a spell or two.  But I think, and this is just my opinion, I think that the majority of people simply want to be able to be a wizard and throw magic missles around all day long just like the ranger does and not have to count beans and sit out of combats because it hasn’t been eight hours of game time yet so they can rest and get their three spells back again.

Anyway, I thought I would just go off on a bit of a mild rant or perhaps express my thoughts on how I felt on this subject.

In an aside this is an issue I have primarily because I don’t see it as being very fair, indeed it’s very unfair in my eyes the differences in classes in a fantasy setting.  I do NOT have this same objection to say a super heroic setting where EVERYONE has the same resource management issues.  Where everyone has X amount of power to do the the things their character is built to do.  That I have no problem with at all.

Happy gaming!

Continue reading »]]> This is our Finale session for the summer, during the hiatus we’ll be delving into the Savage Worlds system.

Everyone is present and accounted for in this session, Biminey, Stak, T’Balktu, Torel, Visra.  Our heroes have reached level 10 in the quest to end the dangers to their little corner of the world.

We join them in Aricee’s lair where the dragon, shifted into human female form, instructs them in their tasks, how they must defeat the Guardian of the Lance of Unmaking, recover the Lance and then go to Darkmith to destroy the Chaosborn.

T’Balktu and Aricee spend a few hours alone while the rest work on their gear and Biminey crafts magical items.  Aricee gifts T’Balktu for his performance with a matching set of axes, the greataxe known as Ghost Slayer and the throwing axe known as Splintertree.  He is pleased as was she.  And it’s not everyone who gets to lay with a dragon.  Which I’m sure will have no dire consequences…

They proceed toward the Guardian’s lair after Aricee assures them that she will help them return after they find out it’s a chute down into a room.  Biminey uses his Ladder ritual to make it easy to descend into the depths.

There they find a floorless room with flipping platforms on gears and pistons to stand on.  As the fourth one comes down the platform flips and almost tosses Biminey [I think] into the bottomless darkness but a quick grab by one of the other’s saves him from certain death. [Yes this was a return to the Save or Die of the old days but it is the season finale and the dangers are ramped up accordingly.]

They spread out and defeat the constructs that are attacking them for serious damage, inadvertently spreading out and reducing the risk of any particular platform flipping over. [A platform flipped on a roll of 15 or high, +2 for each person on the platform over 1.  By splitting up they made it a lot less likely that a platform would flip.  Purely unintentional on their part.]

They moved around the room, jumping from platform to platform with Biminey working his way closer to the central brain to shut it down but the amount of damage the party can pump out swiftly overwhelmed the mobile portions of the construct.  There was another bit of a hair raiser as T’Balktu jumped on the platform that Biminey was on and caused it to flip over sending T’Balktu plunging to his death only to be snagged at the last second by Bimney’s Acrobatics roll (which he has no skill in) saving T’Balktu’s player from having two deaths in the campaign.

Under the platforms they uncovered the Lance and retrieved with T’Balktu nimbly climbing the pistols and gears to get to it.  There was no sign of Aricee so they left the room of the guardian by T’Balktu using the lance to open a passage through the shielding magic.

Aricee was waiting at the top and she had a bit of an interlude with T’Balktu in a frozen moment of time where she gave him her True Name so he could destroy the crystal binding her to her service as the tunnel’s guardian.   When he destroyed the crystal embedded into her chest a two headed dragon shadow was cast from the explosion of light.  T’Balktu kept this bit of information to himself.

They talked with Aricee about what they were supposed to do, “Kill the chaosborn” and she was going to get them to their destination and bring their airship to them and support them in their battle.

[In an aside, with herself free from her captivity she didn't give a rat's ass about the chaosborn, a minor annoyance only to her and simply wanted the party out of her hair figuratively speaking.  When she didn't show up to help, when they had to walk back because there was no airship, and later on as Biminey figures out the whole 'explode the airship' was bullshit the light began to dawn on the group.  "Never trust a dragon." isn't a phrase that came about by whim and whimsy.]

The group found themselves in Darkmith where a war was going on.  They spotted the central power area and headed that way, failing their attempts to sneak through town and were surrounded by undead, summoned by Phy’el Fleshwalker for the battle.  They defeated a huge swarm of undead only to seem hundreds more running after them.  When the undead all stopped and Phy’el himself appeared.  “If you win, remember I did you no harm when I could have.” he says and all the undead drop motionless to the ground as the cut the strings binding them to him.  Phy’el has long held a grudge against Liloth and her King and like all good evil people is more than happy to screw them over for slights they have done him.  And he’s also hedging his bets, he senses the magic artifact the group possesses, trying to curry a little future favor perhaps.

They push on and reach the ziggurat of power where the Chaosborn is being reborn.  Liloth his lover is climbing the tower toward him.

T’Balktu kicks on his Ghost Slayer ability and charges the Creature, slaying it, at least it’s human form, releasing the chaosbeast within.  He continues to use the Lance of Unmaking against the creature, finally destroying it and the group turns its attention to Liloth who’s a little upset at the events.  But the group has grown too strong for this little regional hazard and mops up the floor with Liloth and the pet shadows.

They recover a Shadowblade, a dreadful greatsword from the shadowfey that was the Chaosborn’s weapon and very gingerly maneuver it into a bag of holding without touching it.

They help mop up the city, joining in with the hobgoblin tribes battling the minor darkness’s still released in the city alongside the strange eyeless, mouthless priests of the white king.

Leaving the city, on foot, they trudge through the swamps surrounding the city and stop off to spend a couple of days with the Soul Eaters in their home range, the tattoo’s on their arms are extended by the tattoo artists of the tribe, depicting their battles against the darkness in stylized abstracts.

They continue back to Larkson where they find Teagon working a power play to take over the city and remove the Council.  He’s hired more mercenaries from Anvil and after all the fighting his forces outnumber the Watch.    With the group informing him that the deed is done and the city is safe he bargains with them to join in.

The group does and become partners with Teagon.  They arrange for Garon and the just appointed Merchant faction Councilor Neev to be moved out of power gently as possible.  They work a deal to keep the Watch alive and in their control and direct all martial activities in the city, although everyone understands that with Teagon holding the purse strings that feeds the mercenairies that that control could be tenuous.  But Teagon is smart and wise and understands the power that the group presents so the deal is made and at this time both sides appear to be genuinely interested in keeping it.  The group will receive a 1000 golds a month each for their portion of the bargain, a fortune really for this town although Biminey is going to donate his income to the Watch to help train, equip and restore them.  The Watch lost most of their men, dead or injured beyond fighting ability, and what’s left are the lucky, green and inept without only a small cadre of veterans.

They bring the airship into town and then fly out to the slaver stronghold searching for the two ships full of the town’s women and children, finding only a work crew lead by a slaver working on rebuilding the islands buildings.  They capture them all, interrogate them and then destroy the newly constructed works and building materials and fly back to their city.

Sushanna tells Biminey that one of the until now dead lights on the ship’s consoles lit green for a few hours one day while they were gone (during their walk back to Larkson).

When they get back to the city, there is talk of a flying creature spotted in the skies out to sea, seen more by it’s blocking out the stars than any direct visual.  It was assumed to be the group’s airship but when word got around that it wasn’t then other people stepped forth saying it was a vast flying creature, a dragon certainly.

What it was, what the green light means, where the slavers took the slaves, where did Phy’el wander off to, where the slavers main bases are and what they’re doing, the rebuilding of the city of Larkson and the outcome of the battle of Darkmith, these questions and more will have to wait till we pick up this campaign and enter the Tier of the Paragon’s…

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> We start our little soiree with everyone present, Biminey, Stak, T’balktu and Visra.  The group meets with the Council and founds out all the bad news, the town was attacked shortly after the group left by portals pouring through undead inside as funnel clouds descended and ripped up the protective stonework even as an army of undead swarmed over the outside walls.

The priests of the temple of Eris were able to eventually sever the controlling strings of the undead and they all dropped to the ground motionless and the citizen rose up in arms to destroy those wandering the city streets.

As the group arrived back they found Captain Werrick missing one of his legs from the knee down and discovered that he led a force against three figures that seemed to be commanding the forces as well as breaching the walls, a female in white, a mostly nude man who’s flesh morphed and wavered and a dark shadow figure.

They also learned that ‘merchant ships from the south’ had arrived and were taking on women and children to sail them to safety.  Two of the three ships had already left filled to the brim with children and women and the third was still loading.

The group jumped to the conclusion that the ships were slavers picking up an easy profit and headed to the harbor.

They ran into a group of sailors and approached them.  A noble looking individual confirmed that what the group suspected and delivered an ultimatum, the group delivers the airship to the island and they give the women and children back.  If they don’t deliver the airship then they’re going to infect all the captives with the parasites and give them back.

The discussion rapidly went downhill.  The noble turned out to be a fake, while the real noble, a fire mage of some power was dressed as a sailor.  The sailors were quickly put down leaving the fire mage and the slaver lashmaster.  As things took a turn for the worse for the slavers the firemage made his escape using a contingency teleport ring to teleport back to the ship leaving the lashmaster who surrendered to the group.  As he made his getaway he told the group that they’d just doomed one ship full of children and if they wanted the others returned then bring the airship to him.

The gruop took a few minutes to recover, loot and discuss the thing and smoke started rising from the harbor.  They rushed to the harbor and found several of the small fishing ships on fire as well as the docks and warehouse. People  rushed in to quench the flames.  Once it was clear the flames were under control  the group got out their longboat and sailed out to the airship and set off after the fleeing slaver ship.

after an attempt to set the ship’s sails on fire failed, the firemage simply doused the flames, Stak shot a note down to the ship demanding the slavers debark in the ships boats and leave the captives onboard.   The slavers failed to listen so the group started riddleing it with ballista bolts.  The slavers quickly retaliated by lashing their captives to the sides of the ship.  This failed to deter the group and they continued to try and sink the ship.  And yes their ballista bolts hit more than one captive.

On board the ship the firemage weighed his options and found them wanting and performed a ritual that exploded the entire ship, killing everyone on board rather than see group rescue a single one.

The group turned the air ship around and headed back to its usual place with a rather somber atmosphere.   They re-entered the city.  Torel’s new found ability to see the lines of power protecting the city while holding the battle standard lead them to an old reading room now in use by the high priest as a bedroom as he didn’t feel comfortable taking the last high priest’s bedroom.

They found a mosaic in the floor and using the key they’ve been carrying for so long they triggered a lift, the entire floor of the room that dropped them down deep into the earth into a chamber.

There they were accosted by constructs demanding a pass phrase, when it wasn’t forthcoming they fought the constructs.  Torel in his infinite avenger wisdom opened a door and added in another set of constructs.   But with clever use of the Deamon Heart amulet and a failed reaction roll the new buzz saw construct fought with one of the other’s and the two ended up dealing something like 150+ points of damage to each other which was probably one of the few things that could have saved the group.   In total the encounter ended up a level 15 against a level 9 party which would typically result in someone or all someone’s dying.  But by setting two of them on each other they removed roughly 300 damage the group would have had to absorb and added 300 damage to the group’s output.   Call it luck if you will but it saved them.

Inside the second chamber they found the Book of All Things and Biminey was able to recover an ass load of residium from the cylidners powering the protections on the room as well as enough parts to make a new construct, a mobile buzzsaw that he can deploy in combat.

As they left the temple they were met by Aricee, a strange being in the form of a plain looking woman but with the eyes of a dragon.  She opened a portal leading them into her lair where they waded through piles of gold and jewels to a side chamber where they were fed a great meal.

Aricee told them that their best chance in the upcoming battle was to recover the Lance of Unmaking which is located deep in her lair guarded by a creature.  She tells them she guards the lair, the guardian guards the lance and she has a device embedded in her chest that protects the lance from her.

The group is located in an instant between the past and future and will have several days grace before the time in the world ticks over and the chaosborn is freed.   This gives them time to prepare, recover the lance and save the world.

She also tells them that the lance and the banner may not be enough and that it is possible to destroy the airship in a single cataclysmic event that will unmake everything in the blast radius.

We leave our group there as they prepare to descend into the tunnels after the Lance of Unmaking for their final climatic battle against the chaosborn and go down in a ball of flame or emerge victorious.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> I thought some people might find this interesting.  To me what makes a good session great or a bad session better is the amount of time the DM puts into thinking about what’s come before and what comes afterward.  It’s only with thought that things tie together.  You might get a happy synchronicity on occasion but these, at least for me tend to be accidents and can’t be relied upon.

So with that said, the party was  going to need to seek out the hobgoblins in the region last week, who have banded together.  On the way there I’d come up with a minor POI or Point of Interest that could be engaged or bypassed as the party wished.  These always start out as ‘filler’ material to lend verisimilitude to the world that things happen in spite of the players, not because of them.

There have been several such incidents during this campaign.  What might appear to be a minor encounter just for an encounter’s sake branches the world as the player’s react to it.  The rescue of the people kidnapped when the airship touched down in Darkmith, the rescue of the slaves from hobgoblins, the encounter with the Hill Giant (Rest in peace big fella you had so much ahead of you), the bandit encounter, the woman and child who entered the town bleeding to name a few off the top of my head.  These were all Important Moments In Time and helped determine future events.

This most recent PoI was of a similar nature.  This little encounter started out in my planning as a small little tactical combat opportunity as they searched around the countryside looking for a tribe of hobs to parlay with.  Nothing special, the kind of thing that every DM pencils into his flow chart to make sure he has enough ‘stuff’ on hand to fill the session.

But over the course of the week this little minor side point grew and evolved and here is how it happened.

As the week went by the generic “Necromonger” as it was, your basic necromancer encounter, a creature shunned from town for his stereotypical fetish for the dead.  My initial envisioning was of a necromancer taking advantage of the bodies of a hobogoblin intra warfare site.   The initial single encounter broadened into two encounters and the scenery was filled in.   The generic aka without much interest antagonist turned into the Steppes Hag as I found time to consider the upcoming weeks events.   I envisioned this creature as a minor legend in the area, one that fed on the dead and made them serve her and the encounter grew into three ‘minicounters’.  A kind of minor delve.

Then as I was working on my Rogue’s Gallery of villains on the opposing forces a little note I’d penciled many weeks ago about one of the creatures working for the BBEG back in the day, Utha Plaguebringer now escaped from her prison like so many others of the dark days, caught my eye and the Steppes Hag became Utha and a new plot branching was brought into being.

I’d already set the stage for Utha to make an appearance, her pet, a kind of liche like dragon creature had already been spotted searching the countryside (looking for bodies for his mistress truth be known now after the fact as a kind of foreshadowing but it also had the side benefit of increasing the paranoia of the players).

As I dressed up the encounter a bit more I realized that Utha wasn’t doing her job very well.  So the encounter grew more legs and stretched out.  Instead of just sending out Bonegnasher to spot battle sites, she set up a ritual, a powerful summoning magic that subtly leads people toward her lair and drives them to their natural tendencies to fight.  It was aimed primarily at hobgoblins who enjoy fighting other tribes.  This way she doesn’t have to go looking for bodies, they come to her.  Naturally though as the players traversed the countryside they would be caught in this ritual.  Although they discovered it before walking into the trap as heroes tend to do.  But what makes a hero is what he does with such knowledge.

In addition she’s still bitter about her sister, Liloth gaining the favor of the Dark One and is always scheming ways to curry favor and throw down her bitch of a sister as she sees her.  So she’s concocted a plan to infect the corpses with plague and give them back the semblance of healthy flesh.  These hobgoblins she’ll send back into the tribes where they’ll pass on the infections.

The underlying reason for her actions are many as I inked her into being.  She along with all the others of the Darkmith bunch hate the hobgoblins as they were part of the forces that locked them away and to date still guard against any creature that escapes the wardings of the ancient prisons.  By decimating the tribes she hopes to win the ‘love’ of the Dark One.  In addition committing genocide by disease is just a joy of hers anyway.  She’s not a very nice creature.

In the end the encounter grew from a simple time filler into what I think was a fairly interesting encounter (even if there was no loot ) and the players’ actions or inactions yet again have a direct and major impact on the world.  If they’d not followed up on the encounter, if they’d of not killed her or if they’d of taken too long to kill her she would have escaped and continued on with her plans and the players would have had to deal with the consequences of the hobgoblin tribes, a major if unknown factor in the fight against Darkmith sickening and dying.

As it was they performed a service for all hobgoblin kind, the same hobgoblins by the way who have ransacked and destroyed several farming villages of Larkson and taken the people they didn’t kill into slavery.  Just because hobgoblins have a common enemy with the group, doesn’t make them nice people either.  Not everything is black and white, in fact few things are.

So there you have it, the evolution of an encounter from a generic combat fight into something with interest and ties to the world and the story line and it was simply by spending a little time each day thinking about the planned encounters and past encounters and the forces at work in the world.

Hopefully this will inspire you to turn that next random wandering encounter into something with deeper roots than as a portable bag of experience and gold for your players.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> Thought this was interesting and decided to share.  I made this with the idea to see how big a module would be when charted out in Masterplan.  Pretty big actually and this doesn’t have a lot of the minor pieces in it as I was creating it off the top of my head and the campaign goes back a few months now.  Hell Biminey could still read at the start of this campaign.

This takes the campaign from the opening capture at the spring festival to the current heading out to play with the Souleaters.

It’s interesting to see how much of a campaign is shaped by player choices.  This is actual play flowcharting and it has only passing similarities to my original campaign outline and episode events. Oh the broad story arcs are still there, the capture by the slavers, the visits to Darkmith, the airship, the the activities of hobgoblins and the creatures of darkness, the Council’s activities, those of Shuk and the thieves guild, the bandits outside of town.   But over the course of the last 14 sessions the details have certainly altered to react with the players.  The order of events has changed and the players’ characters have had a dramatic impact on the town and its future.

Some things they’re aware of as having gone on, some things they aren’t.  Some minor things turned into major things and major events turned into minor ones.

As a discrete example, Noribar and Meri’s absconding with the guild’s treasury had little impact on the group with the way the campaign has evolved.  If Dra’kin had still been alive then it’s a given that Shuk would have asked for the players help with the thieves.  But as that character died, that link to the guild was broken and now it’s a mere periphery event.

How exactly did the characters impact the course of history in this world? The players choosing to rescue people or not changed many things about this chart.  Their choice to try and heal Torn and Soozin, again alter the flow.  How they dealt with Krag and the murders in the city.  How they reacted to Phy’el’s first sally to get them out of the town.   Their decision to not go with the slaver envoy as they watched the airship get towed out to sea.  Their relationships with the Council, the Watch and the Temple all generated alternate time lines of events.

And in looking at this flow chart and trying to figure out how to package it up for others to use, I realized would make it a railroad and a half. It would be forcing other groups to follow in the footsteps of this group.  Because the players choices for their characters caused some events to come into being and others to die stillborn, how exactly would you write that up to give to others?  How could you?

Which is why I’m coming to the conclusion that packaged campaigns, full length ones commonly are left to discrete dungeon crawls.  Which many bemoan.  I read all the time, “This module has no roleplay in it.”  Now in looking at mine, perhaps there’s a reason for that.  Any roleplay embedded into a module isn’t roleplay.  It’s force feeding a script on the players and GM.

Where a module, whether it’s a 3 encounter delve or a 4 session story arc or a full blown campaign shouldn’t fail though is providing the DM with something to hang his RP hooks on.  If there are no descriptions of the town, none of the people in it etc, if the product is simply “Room 1: 3xOrc Headbangers  Terrain Features of X/Y/Z, Dimly Lit.  Phat Lewt includes:  X/Y/Z” then it’s failed a bit, more than a bit perhaps unless it is nothing more than a Delve.  But even delves should have something to build on.

Player – NPC interactions are something best not put on paper I think now but the building blocks certainly need to be.  If I were to package my current campaign up, it would simply be something like pearls on a string.  Each pearl would offer a shiny distraction to the players and dm, if you go here, you’ll be able to interact with this.   How you interact with it would be your responsibility.

For instance I would offer up something like the below and I wouldn’t offer the information until the players and DM needed it -

Arrival In Larkson -

A partially walled city it’s open to the sea.  Most of the inhabitants work in the fishing fleets, support the fishing fleets or provide services for those that do.
Powers in the town include:

• The Council, a trio that rules the mercantile, political and legal side of the city.  Teagon runs the shipping and handling.  Aloof and cold.   Garon runs the fleets and docks.  Friendly but sad as he recently lost his children to slavers.  Larik, hostile and bitter, a humanist runs the merchant guilds.
• The Watch, overseen by a conservative captain who controls the martial side of the city.  The watch is tasked with keeping the city safe from inside and out. He takes that duty seriously and won’t put the city at risk for nothing.
• Thieves Guild, small by most standards with a lovely half orc who assumes everyone assumes that she’s an idiot when in fact she’s quite brilliant.  She’s involved with one member of the party as appropriate who doesn’t know of her position.

The council will want to talk to the party when they arrive assuming that news of their escape is known.  This could from any other slaves they’ve rescued along the way.   Garon will be eager to hear tales of their captivity, news of his family and etc.  If tales of their derring deeds filter through the town the Captain will be impressed by them at least a little.   Garon will endeavor to task them with investigating the bandits on the river.   Lerik will sneer at them with disdain, at least the non-humans, and try to splinter the party by inviting the humans to a feast or celebration in an effort to get them to join his hate. Teagon will attempt to dissuade the party from going after the bandits using whatever innocuous means seems appropriate but won’t push the issue.

The average man on the street ranges like most do from outgoing to gruff.  Most of the citizens are commoners, fisherfolk and craftsmen or their kin.   As word spreads the party will be approached by others that have lost people to the slavers looking for news or just hope.

That should be enough for most DM’s to roleplay out.   Anything more than that and a) it’s unlikely your players are gong to respond in the same way to any canned dialogue and b) it’s forcing your players to fit the role that the writer wanted.

So as you’re ‘building your sandwich’ [Podcast listeners will get it.] remember to allow for the players to change the world, the city, the dungeon.  You can certainly have a direction for them to follow but also give them the latitude to change to a different lane and swing by some of the scenic points and hell, make some of the scenic points.

Continue reading »]]> We join our heroes in mid conversation at the Temple of Eris, it’s the same day they were dropped off in from the airship and left to hike into town, the crew not wishing the airship to be known yet.  Biminey, Dash and assorted persons, primarily Visra’s old retinue, now Biminey’s crew are sailing above the clouds eating dates and figs and the like.

Elisssa has decided to retire for awhile from the adventuring life [Laura wanted to try something else]. The reason that I made up for this was a fairly obvious one, the group (characters) keeps getting on Elisssa’s case about killing the hill giant, not being able to pitch a tent or sail a boat.  For a dragonborn such insults and snide comments are hard to take.  Them not letting her kill the captured slavers was the final straw and furious with the group she stalks off to see her friends and family as soon as they enter Larkson.  She takes with her a couple thousand in gold and Krag’s Axe and Bracers and some assorted trinkets and souvenirs.

Later discourse over the course of the session might reveal that Elisssa may come back as the floating crew of available NPC’s for use by players (Torn, Dash, Sushanna, Kane)

The action starts immediately with the first of three encounters for the night.  Screams are heard echoing through the temple and grabbing their arms the group rushes to see what’s going on.  T’Balktu, Torel, Visra and Stak are joined along the way by a visiting Cleric of Kord from Anvil here to do research at the temple by the name of Spar.  [Played by Biminey's owner Temple]

THe five of them find the room that contains the temple’s main ritual circle filled with a vortex of energies.  People located in the room are being sucked into the vortex and being… reformed as something else.  As the energies die away the group catches a glimpse of Liloth and Phy’el Fleshwalker through a rent in space causing the effects.

An abomination of flesh, humanoid, composed of merged persons in the room roars out a challenge.  It’s back bursts and hunks of flesh drop free to create little humanoid creatures dripping flaming slime. The monkeys immediately start flinging their slime around the room and where the gobs hit, invisible before now runes flare and burn out, a few seconds later the bricks blow outwards in blasts of energies and shrapnel.

The group attacks of course, taking down the big creature and then mopping up the smaller ones but not before they cut a wide swatch through the walls, floor and celing of the room destroying  large sections of the bricks and subsequently the wardings inlaid upon them.

As they stop and catch their breath they hear more screams, deducing (correctly) that this was a diversion while another attack was going on.  They rush through the temple to find the forbidden archives under attack by rats.  A section of the floor has fallen away down into the sewers that run under the town and rats are streaming in, each grabbing a scroll or parchement or tome to flee down the hole with it.

They follow, smashing rats as they go.  In the dank large sewers they run into Krag’s animus which has formed a temporary body out of rats along with other rat swarms.  Due to their positioning Krag has to reveal early on that he can absorb the rat swarms to recover his mass (i.e. recover health) and the group destroys the swarms before working on Krag.  (this made the encounter easier on the group by a considerable amount thanks to their smart thinking).

As the mass of rats that is Krag collapses to stream away a red mist shoots off down the sewers. (Krag’s animus).

They follow the animus (and trail of parchment fragments) to Krag’s lair where he’s been feeding the blood of those he’s slain through one of Liloth’s warps.  A large chamber has been damned up at the doorway forming a pool of blood like liquid several inches deep.   The room is filled with rats each holding a parchment.  Right now the rats are being lifted through the portal bearing the parchments. They turn on the group as Torel and Spar both try to bless the portal to destroy it.  (A whole hella lot of very low rolls).

Eventually the group gets the warp closed and triggers a trap laid into the room turning the blood into a blood elemental.  It’s not designed to be able to stand up against a full group but is aimed to destroy single intruders and the group makes short work of it.

Spar had the idea during the fight to break the dam holding in the blood and if they’d of done that before the fight they could have destroyed the warp and prevented the elemental from spawning but hind sight and all that.

They recovered a bracer and axe that Krag’s been slowly enchanting to replace his lost axe and bracer.  He’s a very good enchanter, at odds with his brutal nature but has a knack for things that deal with blood.  It’s just hard to enchant things when you’re a ghost.   The bracers are similar to Iron Armbands of Power but require a healing surge to activate, after activated they boost edged weapons damage by 2 for the rest of the encounter.   The axe gives its wielder a Immediate Reaction ability that grants them a basic melee attack with the axe when an adjacent target is bloodied for the first time and it deals an extra +2 damage when the wielder is bloodied.

The group retreats from the chamber and heads back to the temple.  They rest and recover and then work on plans.  They talk to the captain of the watch and Garon of the council.  Garon is floundering.  He’s out of his league with the things that are going on and doesn’t know which way to stumble much less lead.  People have been leaving the city out of fear, this is obviously a bad thing for the city’s protection and the party points it out and want him to lock the city down.  He’s reluctant to do that, he doesn’t want to be the ‘bad guy’ or institute the martial law that this requires.  Larkson has always been a free city and preventing the poeple from leaving strikes him too much like slavery, an act that really runs against his core values especially after having lost his children to slavers.  He’s also loath to go against the agreement with the Watch in terms of disbursement of the mercenaries.

He asks Torel and Stak to hire on advisors, a task they reluctantly agree to consider.   The group considers their actions and decide to send a fetch out to Biminey asking him to meet them early.

They purchase a longboat and row out to sea, successfully navigating to their general meeting area.  They discuss things with Biminey and the others.

Biminey asks them to ask Sushanna to come visit him for multiple reasons, the primary one he wants to teach her the ways of the artificer so that she can at times take control of the airship allowing him freedom to leave the ship.

After discussion they’re going to try and lead a band of mercenaries out of the town to gather information on the hobgoblins who are taking small villages and farmsteads captive as a threat for the town to give them some book, a book they believe holds power over the creatures loosed from Darkmith.

We end our session there.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> To steal Icosahedraphilia’s DM’s phrase, Prop Shop, I just had to share these.  [FYI:  Decent podcast and very 'clean' so you can actually listen to it with children in the room much unlike a lot (most?) of the rest.] Tangible potion props for inventory.  I won’t tell you what they cost but let’s say sellers on Amazon should be taken out and shot for what they’re charging for these kinds of bottles.  No I didn’t buy mine on Amazon, I’d shoot myself for paying that much for something like this.

Anyway, now I can hand out actual potions when the players pick up or make potions. And if the slaver they’ve got on the airship ends up joining the party then they might have access to quite a few potions as he’s a master alchemist.  Of course you have to get over the idea that he’s a slaver of course. Or ex-slaver.

They’re filled with nothing more than a little food coloring in some water.  In retrospect the first ones I filled have too much coloring.  The blue and the green are pretty hard to tell apart at a distance.  I briefly considered using some kind of silicone or epoxy to fill them since they are made of glass and could conceivably break if they hit the floor just right but they’re fairly thick and small enough and light enough that I think you’d practically have to fling them at the floor at top speed to get them to break on the average floor.

I think I’ll pick up some more and get some of that ‘swirly’ shampoo.  WIth a little food coloring that make a pretty cool visual inside one of these. 

Continue reading »]]> Thanks to the gods of whimsy the groups warlock, a ‘conlock’ by the name of Dra’kin died last session.  Unfortunately there just wasn’t much that could be done although much like the death of Aoefel it might have been preventable.  But we’ll never know.

At any rate the net result is T’Balktu has joined the group.  He’s a younger goliath barbarian.  Think of the goliath in my world more as a Hill People than some half elemental race.  Lots of muscles, outdoor types with a hunger for living as large as their view of the world from atop their mountain fortresses.

He was made in a hurry Saturday and I’ve since cleaned it up a little, swapping a couple of things out that didn’t work for a 2handed great axe wielder.

The end result is a veritable damage machine.  If he crits his Ragestrike power he’ll be doing 60 damage.  Not half bad at all.  And with multiple ways to get temporary hit points he should make up a little for his lower defenses.   With low reflex and willpower he’s going to get whacked a lot by critters that attack those defenses.  And unfortunately as I happen to know, more than one of the bosses of this campaign have powers against those.

Against masses of mobs his total damage output should go through the roof and he should be a minion killer from hell.  An at-will that has a blast 3 component if he hits with it?  I’ll have to seriously ramp up the minion count just to break even.

I’ve started him out with Bleeder, his father’s greataxe, that spurs him onward to greater displays of glory as well as an Ironskin belt made by his grandfather out of materials no one in the family likes to talk about.  And I think he may be a good candidate for the Cape of the Red Path they recently found as mobility for him would be a good thing so he can get to the best position on the field to unleash his burst/blast attacks against swarms of bad guys.

Too bad though about Dra’kin.  But failing 3 out of 4 death saves and the healer failing 2 out of 2 stabilization checks?  His death was meant to be.

But T’Balktu should be able to pick up the slack and then some.  And as a front line striker it should help keep the others alive and in better shape a little more.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> I’m going to be trying some different processing techniques on the current podcast in production.  For one thing I’ve tried to remove silence gaps that are longer than a 5′ish seconds.  This cuts down on the time you have to listen to ‘nothing’ and file size etc.  Although I don’t have any bandwidth restrictions on my hosting I do have a finite amount of drive space. Â  At some point I’ll probably have to whack older podcasts but that shouldn’t be for awhile.

I’ve also run volume equalization on the sound files such that everyone should be the same volume regardless of where they are in relation to the mic.  This may have a detrimental effect of enhancing background chatter in some locations but we’ll see how it goes.

The podcast files are ready, I just need to schedule some time with my announcer to do the recap and lead in for me and then put some public domain back beat under her.

My molding efforts are steadily showing fruition.  I’ve run easily 20-30 moldings, with Laura’s help, of the ones I own and the bags of pieces are growing at a steady rate.  Since I really want all the pieces to be color matching I’m not going to even consider painting until I have way more than I need for what I want to do with them.

I may start considering my basing options though in the near future.  I am going to be going with low walls for viewing purposes which will also help with the obvious (to me) seaming issues with the fieldstone.  I may try to come up with a technique to help minimize that as well using some kind of filler materials here and there to break up the horizontal seams.  I’m also going with a more modular approach than the one posted on Hirst’s web site for flexibility’s sake at the cost of set up time.

In regards to the painting, I’ve been perusing various other people’s efforts in painting and IMO too many of them are following Hirst’s color schemes to the letter and as a result they all look identical.  And, again my opinion only, those colors are hard to get realistic especially if they’re the only coloring you apply.  The color values are too separated and garish and too bright.  Part of the problem is I believe that the molds overly emphasize the texture. I do though realize that roughness to scale would be invisible at standard viewing ranges much like it is now if you stand and look at a brick wall from 100 feet away but I think a more subtle color scheme would work better and then use washes to highlight the texture could look better.

I aspire to this kind of coloring/shading (images pulled from this thread where you should go look if you have any artistic appreciation.  Absolutely gorgeous game board in the making for HeroQuest):

Not this (Image from Hirst Arts) :

In other news I see I’ve surpassed a quarter million unique visitors since this site initially went live with this inaugural post on April 21st, 2007.

Continue reading »]]> Well I borrowed mold #85, an accessories mold from a co-worker and tried my hand at adding it to my molding rotation.  I’ve found that 2 cups (58 grams of water + 186 grams of plaster x 2) of material will just fill 3 deeper molds and one floor tile mold with very little waste and I was able to salvage most of the small waste material and fill in three or four holes in a fifth mold.

Mold 85 has some hard pieces to get to come out correctly. Â  A lot of very narrow parts, especially the small bucket is giving me problems in getting the mold filled and a couple of other pieces are also inconsistent in their turn out. Â  But it gives them character and helps reduce the ‘clone’ effect.  I guess.

Mold 71 has a couple of problem pieces, some fiddly curved bits that are for window moldings I think that if I’m not extremely careful unmolding snap in half.  I could wait longer I suppose for the plaster to harden more but I’ll just have to be more careful I think.  I’ve probably only gotten 4 or 5 of these pieces intact out of last nights work and should have 10 at this point.

Molds 70, 75 and 201 don’t give me any problems, easy to fill, scrape and demold.

My piles of pieces are building slowly but surely.  I’ve run about 10 moldings of 3 to 4 molds at a time and the bits and pieces are starting to pile up.  There’s going to be an ass load of excess pieces though that I probably will never use. Â  The tiny triangles and such on the floor mold springs to mind as well as some of the more esoteric curvy bits.

Image Copyright Hirst Arts

Continue reading »]]> [D'oh.  There is a similar kind of thing that you can find here by GreyScott.  Different from mine but the spirit is the same.  I like mine better but then I like my kids a lot more than other people's kids so that's not unexpected.]

Barring dungeon crawls I don’t really do trivial encounters, that long progression of ‘gimmie’ fights that a DM puts a party through to do a slow drain on their resources to soften them up for the BBEG encounter at the end of the work day.  I certainly run multiple fights in one work day but typically they’re not quantified as ‘trivial’.  Each one has a chance to result in death for someone other than the NPC’s.

Let’s face it, the vast majority of us have limited play time and expending that playtime in fights that are ‘gimmies’ seems wasteful.  Many of these single type encounters can be done using Narrative rather than combat.  But there are times that you do need to show the wear and tear on the group as they go through a long series of encounters but breaking out the mini’s for each one just eats horribly into the time you have to play.

Lately I’ve been using skill challenges to drain surges from the group to simulate small but pointless fights as they flee pursuit through the swamps or try to hide from the hobgoblin tribes while making their way home. Â  But those seem rather flat.

So I’m considering something more combat encounter based and let the party use their combat values against some defensive value, kind of an abstract combat.

The key question is how, I like the 3 rounds and you’re out system I use for skill challenges (duh or I wouldn’t use it right?) rather than the three strikes and you’re out that is the official system. And right now three rounds of combat are close to typical for the group at the level it’s at and seems like a good place to start.

So primarily how to abstract something as tactical as 4th Edition combat is the big question.  I need to work in a way for the players to gain some benefit from the various level of powers, at-wills, encounters and dailies with the understanding that a daily used during an abstract combat encounter is a daily they will not have during that work day.  And we need a simplistic way to simulate buffage.

So my thinking is on any of the three rounds the players can elect to use an At-Will (base), Encounter (bonus), Daily (bigger bonus).  They will take their Attack value for that power, added the bonus for encounter/daily, and then roll against an abstract defense of their opponents.  This isn’t so much to abstract their ability to hit as it is to abstract their ability to do damage.  Encounters and Dailies = more damage output.

Enough failures and they will be forced to expend a surge for each round. Â  So the most they can cost themselves is 3(4) surges per A.C.E. which isn’t out of line with a trivial encounter.

But we also need a way to more equitably spread out the surges lost.  As we all know barring really hard fights it’s typical for some (defenders) to go through an asston of surges while classes that can remain out of harms way might spend none.

So as a first draft let’s see how this flies -

Abstract Combat Encounter System or ACES

Purpose:

To simulate resource drain for a fight the party is expected to win without much risk but without having to take the time to move to a tactical simulation.

Procedure:

The party will negotiate 3 rounds of abstract combat.  In each round each member of the party will pick one of the following, At-Will, Encounter, or Daily.  They will roll a d20, compute their attack roll and compare it to the appropriate DC for the encounter using the AC/F/R/W values as set by the DM.

On any round that there failed rolls are equal to or less than successes the members of the party will lose one surge.

On any encounter that the party does not garner at least one success they will be penalized an additional surge.

Details:

Characters /Attacks -

During each of the ACES rounds each member of the party will choose one of their powers to use.  If the power is an attack power that targets a defense, the character must roll against the appropriate DC/Defense as set by the DM.

If the power also enhances another member of the party then the player may grant/add a +2 bonus to another character’s roll using the Aid Other rules.  If the power does not make an attack against an AC/F/R/W attack but it grants a benefit to another character then the player rolls against a DC+encounter level.  If they succeed then it counts as a success and grants a +2 bonus to the other character’s roll.  [NOTE: Yes this grants higher 'value' to non-strikers in general but what the hell let's give them a time to shine.]

If the power is not an At-Will the character receives the following bonuses where appropriate:

• Encounter +5 to attack roll / Additional +2 bonus Aid Other.
• Daily +10 to attack roll / Additional +4 bonus Aid Other.

Monsters / Defenses / DCs –

The DM will determine the defenses / DC’s of the encounter using the average AC, Fortitude, Reflex, Willpower of the encounter creatures.  You can also use the following values as an overall average across all monster types

• AC = 14+Encounter Level
• F/R/W = 12+Encounter Level

All encounters are assumed to be at the Easy level.  If you wish to simulate a normal or harder fight then add +2 per increase in difficulty that you wish to portray.

Experience / Loot-

The party will earn loot for the encounter just like they would have if it had been played out tactically.

They will earn full experience of the encounter divided by 3 multiplied by the number of rounds they succeeded at with a minimum of 33%, even failure teaches us something.  i.e. if they only succeeded on two rounds then they get 2*33% or 66%.

If they win two out of three rounds they’ll also typically earn some mundane items of value.  By winnign three out of three rounds they’ll also earn some items of higher value or items of a magical nature.

Sacrifice –

One per encounter a character can elect to sacrifice a surge and take one for another member. Â  More than one character can sacrifice for a member but each character can only sacrifice once per encounter.

Major Failure / Death-

If the group fails all three rounds then one player determined randomly is assigned a Death Strike which counts toward their three death strikes for the day and as such can only be removed after an extended rest.

Long Term Usage / Wave Attacks -

Sometimes you might want to simulate a lot of minor attacks, wave situations for instance where the party might have to face 5-10-20… etc trivial fights.

In this case you could instead of each encounter being three rounds, you just decide how many rounds per wave you want simulate. Â  Each round rather than once per encounter a player may sacrifice a surge for another player.

If a character runs out of surges they’re considered out of the combat and the remaining characters incur a cumulative -2 penalty per out of commission character on their die rolls to simulate them being forced to ‘take up the slack’.  If all characters are reduced to 0 surges the encounter is considered lost.

High Level Example: Goblin Warrens for Level 1 Party

Setup: The party has been tasked with cleaning out a goblin warren on one of the caravan trails.  The creatures have been causing issues with the caravans, stealing things at night from the strong ones, attack and pillaging smaller ones after driving off or killing the guards.

Attacks against the goblins have proven of little use with only a few killed.  But now the location of the warren where they’re holed up has been found and the party has been sent to insure that one way or another the raids stop.

It’s assumed that trying to deal diplomatically has failed and there’s no point in talking to anyone but the leader of the goblins and the outside chaff won’t talk.

So the DM figures it’ll take 3 minor encounters to get to the inner sanctum of the goblins.  He chooses to do this with ACES to leave time for the big boss fight whether that turns tactical or roleplay.

The first two encounters are truly easy so the DC’s for those are going to be AC: 15, F/R/W 13 as they’re level 1 encounters.  The third one will see the goblin boss throwing in some of his personal bodyguards so he’s going to crank that difficulty up one notch and that fight will be at DC’s of AC: 17, F/R/W 15.

The final boss battle will be played out normally.

Encounter 1 – Party of 5:

• Round 1 – 4 successes – Result: No loss
• Round 2 – 4 successes – Result: No loss
• Round 3 – Only two success – Result: 1 lost surge

Total: 1 surge lost.  The paladin elects to sacrifice a surge for the cleric and loses two and the cleric loses none.  Experience gained equals 66% of the total.

Encounter 2:

1. Round 1 – 3 successes – Result: No loss
2. Round 2 – 4 successes – Result: No loss
3. Round 3 – 5 successes – Result: No loss

Total: No additonal surges lost. Full experience gained.

Encounter 3:

1. Round 1 – 2 successes – Result: 1 lost surge
2. Round 2 – 2 successes – Result: 1 lost surge
3. Round 3 – 3 successes – Result : No Loss

Total: 2 additional lost surges per party member.  The fighter sacrifices for the wizard and loses three surges while the wizard only loses 1.  The paladin does the same for the cleric losing three surges and the cleric loses 1. Â  Only 33% of the encounter experience gained.

ACES results –

• Wizard – Down 2 surges
• Paladin – Down 5 surges
• Fighter – Down 4 surges
• Cleric – Down 1 surge
• Ranger – Down 3 surges

Comments? Thoughts?

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Continue reading »]]> Found this post and it’s one of the better alternates for adding guns to a fantasy world that I’ve come across, not OP like many or just horrible implementations like some [the one that every shot creates a cloud of smoke cover, I'm looking in your direction, as well as the ones with a random chance to blow up, yeah you too].

Given I’ve got an artificer and they’re going to be searching for artificer type things something like this might actually find a way into their hands.  Given the secrets of the powder manufacture is currently lost it’s a automatically self limited resource.

Obviously the superior ones would require a feat for all to pick up and use well and the martial ones would require a feat for most.

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Original idea presented by DMEric on the official WOTC forums -

The goal of my firearms was to make ones that had a historical basis, but presented an interesting option to players as opposed to either an overpowered “must have” item or a slow loading piece of junk outclassed by bows. The martial level of items represent what, stat wise, amounts to a martial level crossbow. The superior level ones are essentially a superior version of the Repeating Crossbow.

Blackpowder is a rare and “expensive” item from the perspective of a peasant(or lord trying to outfit an entire army), but still trivial to any adventurer past the earliest levels, or very well funded mercenaries, pirates, etc.

My firearms come in two varieties, Martial and Superior. I haven’t designed feats yet, but I think in all likelihood they will just share feats with crossbows, since they are used in a similar manner.

Martial Firearms use breech loading mechanisms (they are loaded from the rear- either from the side sort of like a bolt action rifle or from behind like an old style shotgun), and they use paper cartridges with minnie balls. A minnie ball is a special type of bullet that when fired expands slightly to grip the rifling, allowing one to load the weapon at the speed of a musket, but fire with the accuracy of a rifle. (Historically, the difference was that rifles had “rifling”, tiny ridges that spin the bullet, inside the barrel, while muskets were smoothbore. However, rifles took a much longer time to load than muskets since the bullet had to be very carefully seated inside the barrel w/ a rifle, while muskets could use paper cartridges and just be quickly jammed in.)

• • Pistol  +2  d8 5/10   50gp   2lbs Firearm  Load Minor/High Crit
  • Musket  +2 d10 15/30  75gp 4lbs Firearms Load Minor/High Crit

Superior Firearms are special weapons based on the designs of the famed artificer,Vicento Leorezzi. These weapons, while using a smaller bullet, utilize magazines preloaded with primer, cartridge, and shot, allowing the user to reload the weapon from the magazine by way of the weapon’s finely tuned internal clockwork mechanism. In addition, the improved barrel design alows for accurate fire at longer ranges than conventional firearms. Each magazine holds ten shots, costs 3gp, and requires a standard action to remove the spent magazine and load the fresh one.

• • Clockwork Pistol +2 d6 10/20 80gp 2lbs Firearms Load Free*/High Crit
  • Clockwork Rifle +2 d8 20/40 105gp 4lbs Firearms Load Free*/High Crit

Continue reading »]]> It’s been brought home to me recently again just how much better your custom content can be if you spend just a little time each day between sessions thinking about what you have going on in the world, past, present and future.
I can’t stress enough really that if you’re going to be creating your own content you really don’t ignore it until game day.

As much as everyone gives lip service to a ‘sandbox’ world, “OMG you’re railroading them!”, etc. as a DM you, IMO, HAVE to railroad to some extent in order to give them the best possible gaming experience you can.  Mature, complex, interesting campaigns have a hard time finding fertile ground in a sandbox.  Sand just isn’t conducive to growth.

A sandbox is “Hey peasant, where’s the nearest dungeon?  No we already cleared that one, where’s the next one.” typically.  Or out of character, “Okay guys I have three modules for your level, which one do you want to do?”.  These can certainly be entertaining at the player level, social dynamics, the mechanics of the fights etc. But they’re hard to engage the characters.

I can improv aka play in a sandbox as good as many, better than most I think but I can certainly tell a difference in the quality of experience I can give the players by just spending a few minutes each day thinking on how things are going in the world.

By devoting a few minutes going over current events (assuming you’re doing more than dungeon crawling, a fine past time in and of itself) and putting yourself in the shoes of your NPC’s and their interactions with the PC’s you can come up with some pretty cool stuff I believe. Â  As an example, Biminey has transcribed details of their trip through Darkmith and sold it to the Temple of Eris (god of knowledge). As I was documenting his payment (125gold for the curious) on the campaign sheet for Biminey’s character I thought about one of the high priests reading these descriptions and realized from my one line personality note I’d scribbled out on him weeks ago that this could have a profound effect on the man. Â  And that effect is now going to flavor and color multiple interactions  that deal with the PC’s in specific and the NPC’s in general that might be affected.  And flavor and color add a LOT to a session.  No one likes bland white toast all the time.

Your own content also really really has to be flexible. Case in point the group in our last session derailed my story arc by getting captured. [Through all fault of their own. ]

Luckily this happened at the end of our session or it might have either resulted in less interesting events than I think it will now or I’d of had two options. Either called a time out while I rapidly regrouped or improv out the remainder of the session, the first has the advantage of better results, the later of keeping the flow of the game going.

Drastic events like the party getting captured by the bad guys when you’re not expecting it can certainly throw a kink in things. Or perhaps you have one key character in the group that your story arc is founded upon and that character dies. Do you have a backup plan to keep the story on track? Or do you toss out what you have and work out another arc? Do you sink to the level of “A wandering healer comes across the scene and agrees to resurrect the poor man if only you’ll go fetch him 10 belts from the orc tribes in the next canyon.”?

You have to consider these things when you’re working on your storylines. And you cannot possibly consider everything that a group of players might do or things they might simply not figure out, or figure out wrong and be unable to see other clues as result of their wrong conclusion.  But by taking the time to build up this gestalt image of your world between sessions you have a much better stronger tapestry that you can reweave around snags in the thread that might occur.

That’s not to say though that as a DM you don’t have to be prepared to lose work, some things you’ve worked so hard for just can’t be salvaged after the party goes off on a tangent. And that’s okay. There’ll be other times, other places, other campaigns if needed for those events to happen.

Look at every side trek, every derail not as an issue, but as  an opportunity to weave a stronger storyline that integrates the characters’ actions into your world. And integration is something that will involve your players.  This issue with the players being captured in my personal campaign is going to I think really expand some NPC’s in an interesting way, create at least a couple of memorable encounters and has sparked an idea that will have a domino effect that might see wrack and ruin in the region from yet another possible source than those already planned and that might actually cause a redirection of a regional force into a force of while not good, at least not evil.

All this because the players split up like so many chickens with a weasel dropped in their midst during a fight and got taken out by a group they should have been able to beat.  Players definitely get a ‘we always win’ complex and as a result not really take tactics or even thought into consideration.  It’s nice to throw them a curve like this and drive home the fact that they’re not always going to win and there are going to be consequences to losing even if it was unintentional. Â  In this case they’ve lost 1000′s of golds worth of magical gear, not to mention their basic gear that will have to be replaced from very limited funds.

Improving though with 4th edition can be hard, especially if you lack experience with the system in specific or gamemastering in general. With older editions it was pretty easy to ‘fake it’ with monsters you had to add at a certain point. You just needed a to hit number, a defense and some damage. Monsters were boring, the vast majority of them simply swung, bit or clawed at the players for ex damage in a Flinstones Boxing methodology (aka stand there taking turns swinging till someone died) And those were very easily faked, especially if you had any experience with older editions as faking things is mandatory for a DM as the math was so broken overall.

But 4th edition improv is harder. Sure you can come up with a basic creature fairly easily, just use the basic monster value formulas and you’ll have balanced monsters quickly. They’ll just be a bit boring until you have enough experience under your belt to knock them out.  And remember battles that contain a single creature type can also contribute to boring battles so you have to knock out, print out, look up several creatures per battle.

As a result of the more interesting monsters in 4th, it helps if you have some basic creatures printed out of an appropriate level range for you group, pick a couple of of each type, then just ‘reskin’ them as needed. A level 3 orc can just as easily be a level 3 guard, a war dog, an undead abomination, whatever. Just print out a few in preparation just in case.

So to wrap this up, remember, think about your campaign when you’re not playing it, just a few minutes a day can work wonders.  Think about your NPC’s and what they might want and their reactions to the actions of the PC’s.  And be flexible, be prepared for the party to jump the tracks by having a good idea of the world in general and being prepared with materials as filler/stop gap to give you time to work the derailment into your campaign and make it stronger as a result.

A derailment doesn’t always have to mean a train wreck….

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Continue reading »]]> [Warning this is a rambling post that doesn't stay on topic very well or at all really...]

I was explaining my style of DM’ing to someone and thought it might be something that someone else might get some usage out of.  Or might just rile them up if they think differently but I’ve been riled up by the ‘wrong’ way that other people play only to eventually make a change in the way I play. [Ramble Alert!] As a prime example, I had a long discourse with someone about when to grant experience in Neverwinter Nights modules.  I was still very much in the ‘per monster killed’ mindset.  You kill a monster, you get experience.  His was you awarded experience when the players reached a certain point in the game.  Eventually, not then because he was being an ass about it but eventually, I decided that made a lot more sense to me as a DM.  It takes away the [True Story Alert] meta-gaming aspect of XP “I only need 10 exp to level?  I lean out the window and throw a dagger at someone on the street.” and makes it easier to balance things out if you have any kind of branching encounters planned.  If there’s no way the players are going to be anything but 5th level by the time they make it to the Sacred Tombs you can build the Sacred Tombs way in advance and not risk them being 3rd level or 7th level.

I really don’t do trivial encounters; even back under older editions I stopped pretty early.  I lean heavily toward combats that mean someone might get really hurt. (And yet I’ve killed fewer characters in 3 decades of GM’ing than I have fingers).  My harshness is I make the players work for their victories and I enjoy the reputation I have as being harsh and deadly in spite of the fact that in reality I rarely kill anyone.  I just make them know they were in a fight.  You do have to kill someone every now and then though just to show them that they’re not immortal…

4th Edition really lets me go to town in this regard.  Since the players are back to full after each fight and with limited options for them to spend their ‘working resources’ aka Healing Surges this means a) their work day is long enough that sleeping periods fall naturally rather than being forced by lack of resources and b) they can keep going typically for a few encounters even at the level+3, 4, 5′s that I toss at them.

Granted I haven’t really used a ‘dungeon crawl’ yet with 4th edition.  Where there are encounter after encounter after encounter.  But I have problems with those anyway.  I’m as guilty as the next person early on in my career of having a series of rooms connected by passageways with essentially random monsters tossed into each one.  Each battle very sandboxed, you fought these creatures and the ones just down the hall ignored the fight and patiently waited their turn to be slaughtered.  Part of that was definitely a bit of “Oooh the party hasn’t fought one of these before, or this, or this, or this.” and I’d munge them all together.

Then I started doing themed dungeons, waaaaay back in the day when even the commercial modules were still very much a list of encounters built by rolling percentiles.  The Swamps of [Clare] Grogan (Scottish actress that I thought was hot and I thought the name was very dungeony) which was a swamp themed dungeon, lizardmen (and women), giant snakes, crocodiles that went down for like 5 levels.  The Lair of the Eternal Trickster, a dungeon comprised of probably 50% traps combined with creatures.  Party would find or trigger a trap that alerted mechanical guardians or undead, creatures that could be ‘realistically’ parked in an alcove to wait for their queue and didn’t have any intelligence or programming that would allow them to respond to anything other than their set queues.

It was about this time that I started making dungeons smaller in terms of overall population and larger in terms of encounter population. Â  Or I’d do the ‘obvious’ and stream the bad guys in as a seemingly never ending fight.  Attack the guards in the front room and the guards down the hall would take a round or two to wake up, grab their gear and charge up, yelling for help which would get the guys in the next room up etc and so on.

I find myself now with fourth edition expanding further on this.  Fewer encounters but more meaningful encounters.  Perhaps I’m merely playing to my thoughts or the inclinations of my group but a series of trivial, everyone is down a surge or the cleric used up a couple of CLW’s fights bore me and I presume/assume they bore the players if there’s no story arc reason for the fight.

With 4th Edition I can fairly safely assume that the party will have a full set of hit points after each fight, when they reach the point they don’t then they’ll rest and recover them.  Sure they might be down a Daily power or out of their Action Points but numerically Dailies just aren’t that big a deal, sure they can cut a round or two out of a fight or if everyone burns them on one boss cut that fight out of the day in short order.  But they’re not a valid excuse to have a 5 minute work day.  The only real valid reason to extended rest IMO is when you’re out of surges, not because everyone’s burned their daily powers.

But I digress. [Hence the disclaimer at the top of the article now]

To get back on point, I don’t personally see a need for trivial encounters.  They spend valuable limited game time on something that is a foregone conclusion that the players will win and win without threat. Â  The only time I plan on using trivial encounters, trivial meaning anything that’s not on the Moderate difficulty scale at least, is when they’re strung together as a series of encounters without a break or when they forward the storyline or add another element to the story.

Case in point, the [I've Got Crabs] encounter in session 2 of this encounter (yes I give my encounters goofy names in my notes), it was a fairly trivial encounter, the party was never in any real danger.  But their focus on dealing with the crabs charging them rather than the crabs menacing the other huddled survivors of the slave ship on the beach cost one of those NPC’s their life.  Perhaps a point lost on the group but still a point that I wanted to make an effort put out there and try to broaden their scope and awareness.  Did it work?  Doubtful.  But I feel better for making the effort.

In my upcoming session I’ve got a skill challenge among others where the characters will try to escape the city.  If they fail on any of the three rounds (I use my own skill challenge design) then it triggers an encounter or two with the ferals of the city.  But these will be narrated out and the party will simply start the next round of the challenge a couple of surges lower.  This will continue throughout the skill challenge. Â  The only times I have planned to break out the miniatures is when it’s a fight worth playing through tactically. Â  There will be days in their overland trek that will have them facing encounters but these are again just narrated out, “Over the last three days the lands have changed from tundra to low hills as you continue your homeward bound journey.  Through the use of your skills you’ve managed to avoid most of the dangers of the lands although dusk of one night found you battling for you lives against a wolf pack lead by a strange black eyed wolf with boney spikes protruding from its joints.  They were fought off through the use of your talents and the black wolf seemed to really fear the Torel’s abilities that were infused by the power of his god.” [Just made that part up but now I'll use it Saturday.]

In this particular instance the success or failure of the challenge will cost them surges that they won’t have for the next round.  And of course, obviously?, there will be a tactical encounter at the end of the skill challenge and their success or failure at the challenge will have a direct impact on that encounter.  (in more ways than one but I won’t spoil that right now in case they read this before Saturday).

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Continue reading »]]> After 30 a lot years of this whole roleplaying thing.  Every time I type that I have images of french maid outfits.  Anyway I was thinking of the ways I’ve started new campaigns over the years which lead me to the whole, how would I do it now question.

I’ve literally done the a wizard has called you to the tavern to discuss a proposition with you approach but that was decades ago before it became a trope and number 1 on the “Ways you should never start a campaign.”

Another time I had the players start a campaign dead.  That was fun writing their charater background stories.  I can be vicious when I need to be.  Actually I should post those campaign background stories here.  It might be interesting to someone.

Let’s see, I’ve had the town attacked by some kind of attacking attacker and the members of the party were the best of what’s left to go rescue the captives.

They’re all strangers to each other in a caravan heading to somewhere and it’s attacked and they’re the only survivors and band together for strength in numbers.

They’re strangers or acquantances that are pastsies for a regicide and are forced to band together to clear their name.  Oh and escape very painful deaths at the hands of prince’s torturers.

They already are a adventuring band although that obviously takes pretty much no thought or planning.  “Okay you’ve all been adventuring for awhile now.”

Hmmm in all these years I guess I haven’t really started too many campaigns.  But then it wasn’t unknown for my campaigns to last 18 months of 4-6 sessions a month. Â  Long sessions, like 12-16 hours.  Long gone are those days though.  That kind of thing is for the younger ones without lives filled with outside demands.  Sometimes I miss those days.

I believe a campaing should have a good start, something unique, tailored to the characters and the players, a strong middle point that perks up the players after they’re starting to get blase about things and a very memorable ending that the players will be talking about 2o years later.

As a DM / GM that’s your job really.  To provide the framework that the players build on.  And a shoddy foundation is no way to build anything although with enough mortar and duct tape you can certainly add support to a shaky start.

If and that’s a damn big IF, if you can get it from your players, try to get them give you some idea of what they think their characters are like prior to starting on the heroic path.  Some event that occured during their characters life that is a high or low point.  Honestly it takes just a few minutes for a player that’s truly interested in their character to come up with this kind of thing.  And your campaign should be the better for it.

Have an idea where you’re campaign is going.  I know players tend to ‘miss the island’ and a campaign can definitely derail into another direction you didn’t expect at all but if you start with an idea where the players are going to be about midway through the campaign you’ll end up with a better one.  If you’re good at improv you can improv the whole thing but having the luxury of time to work on the midgame gives you a better campaign.

And definitely have an ending to it.  Whether they get their own castle, save the world, recover Vecna’s left testicle, whatever, have an ending to the campaign.  Don’t drag it out past your’s and the players’ enthusiasm.  Things need to have an ending or all the struggles along the way are pointless except for the purposes of survival.  And just surviving isn’t really all that interesting on a global scale.

Anyway, lacking anything better to post about, I thought I’d share this. As always it’s personal opinion and your opinion could and probably will and honestly should vary to some extent.  Don’t be a sheep after all.  If they spark an idea for you awesome.  If it wasted your time reading it, well not much I can do there.

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Continue reading »]]> Made a prototype of a smaller dice tower.  Things to note there’s a cut out for the tower to sit in when it’s upright, makes it less like to tip over. Â  This piece was made out of leftover scraps hence the odd grooves in places.

I really REALLY wanted to make a folding dice tower but it seems impossible to make one that both folds and hinges in the open position the way I want it and closes the way I want.  You can’t get here from there so to speak.

So I made it turtle style which isn’t too bad I suppose.  It actually ends up taller turtled than the bigger one because of the way  I had to put it together to make sure that my large casino d6′s would roll well through it.

Also the pegs run at a 90 degree angle compared to the larger ones.  With a more production style build I’d stain the tower black and keep the pegs white or viceversa for contrast’s sake.

The idea is a more portable dice tower in case I ever get to make trips to the FLGS to recruit new players (aka steal them from other DM’s. )

Continue reading »]]> I’m listening to a podcast and the group has an obvious new player into a group that’s been together for awhile.  Their character is playing essentially an ass.  This leads what are obvious to me listening to certain gaffes and reactions from players that match their characters and becomes almost painful to hear at times. Â  They can be asses to each other because they have long running familiarity and friendship with each other.  Someone for all intents and purposes they do not know who’s an ass to them is going to strike irritation which doesn’t make for a good time.

Listening to this has me pondering my own experiences.  Frankly even with long term gamers I’ve never found intra-party conflict to be viable. It’s just a lot better, in my experience, for the characters to get along so the player’s get along.

Having characters that are argumentative to other characters seems to be very dangerous territory because it invariably seems to lead to players that are argumentative to other players.

While it could be said I suppose that such parties are self correcting in that eventually the majority of the party that does get along will split off, arrange for the ass to die in some fashion or otherwise deal with it, this can lead to the group self destructing.

I know I’m likely to get comments about the “We had an assassin and a paladin and they hated each other and we played around it and it was a blast.”  But for every time that it works I wonder just how many times it doesn’t and groups split or break up.

I think most people tend to reflect their character, if someone’s being an ass to their character then it’s hard for them to disengage the player from the character and not take affront.

As a very strong warning sign if it devolves into one player rolling dice and going “would that hit them?” then you know you’re approaching the saturation point where character emotion becomes player emotion.

So I’d like to offer the thought for consideration, that as a player you maybe not play the lone dark elf with a chip on their should to everyone including your party and instead perhaps treat the other members of your party like the people that are literally going to save your ass.

On a related note, from a DM’s perspective, at least this DM, don’t be a ass to the NPC’s.  I have to either ignore it, or do the realistic thing and have the powers that be take care of the problem.  You don’t have to be nice to NPC’s but at least be realistic in your behavior. Â  Because NPC’s have feelings too and they might just have some pretty powerful friends.  And a knife in the back is pretty easy to arrange in a crowded street.  And since I use this house rule, it might mean a little more than 1d4+3 damage.

Of course your group may thrive on conflict but if it does I would wager a small bet that it’s a long term group.  For you new players to a group, I’ll offer this advice, ease into the group dynamics, let them get to know you, much like you’d ease up to a dog.  Until you know if it’s going to bite or not, why take chances and yell at it and hit it with a stick?

Anyway, just wanted to put it out there that in my opinion, a party that gets along with other and is civil to NPC’s is much more likely to be a long term group on average.

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Continue reading »]]> Saw a tweet that lead me to a post that re-acquainted me with a netbook for 4th edition. I have a much earlier copy but the current version has no less than 500+ pages of community created content for 4th edition, classes, feats, paragon paths, monsters, gear and phat lewtz and all that.

Highly recommended for any DM to peruse for use at their table.

There is considerable overlap in some areas with official content, now anyway, but when it was written it was just users filling in the gaps of the original 3 core books.

So while I’m rehashing other news (nothing new there right?) I would like to ensure that this does reach as wide an audience as possible as there’s a lot of work here that deserves to be seen.

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Continue reading »]]> SPOILER ALERT!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T LISTENED TO THE 10/16/09 #8 PA PODCAST AND PLAN TO –

Edit: i have since learned that was in fact the end of this series of podcasts so Aoefel’s death isn’t nearly as gruntling to me.

I will make a prediction that Aoefel will return as a warforged. The ambershards will take his remains from the acid and convert him to a warforged revenant. That’s what I’d do and it makes perfect plausible sense.

I listened to the latest episode of the Penny Arcade Podcasts last night. I thought it was pretty funny in a lot of ways, quite possibly to me the most LOL episode yet. My wife and I have been listening to DnD podcasts a few times a week for a little bit after putting the kids to bed and before going to sleep and all in all it’s pretty enjoyable way to spend an hour or so.

I was talking to her last night about Al’s death and thought it would make a reasonable blog post. Frankly I didn’t like it for a number of reasons and I’m harsh, note the byline of this site for goodness sake. I strongly believe that killing Al in that fashion, unrecoverable, hearkens me back to losing a corpse in EQ due to bugs with lava flows and losing a corpse in EQ meant you lost all your gear.

I would like to state up front that I could be wrong in my “What was he thinking?!” in regards to Chris Perkin’s because obviously we don’t know what happens next. So bear in mind I’m only basing my reaction on what I know happened so far.

When Whil aka Aeofel rolled that 18 to climb out of the pit I would have immediately retcon’ed the DC of the pit to a 15. No one knew what it was and it would have made for a good story. That would have been a instant reaction / no brainer move on my part. If he’d of rolled a crap roll, I’d of had him roll a Perception roll with a non-announced DC of 1 for him to notice where the acid was shallow due to bones or rocks or whatever and given him a place to stand and given him quarter or half damage per round rather than 12 damage per round. For a character that apparently has only 26 hit points (???) that was already wounded to inflict 12 points a round…??? That would have made for a good story too, the avenger trapped with his feet and calves slowly dissolving in the acid as his friends struggled to break someone free to go rescue him while the remaining two finished up the bad guys? Epic storyline.

And I would have done that as a reward for his roleplaying. An Avenger is a single target focused class. They pick a single enemy and attack it until it’s dead. Hell without buying a feat they can’t even shift the target of their Oath of Enmity which is their very schtick. The character was behaving exactly as it should have been doing, any other actions would have been OOC. You don’t punish that kind of play.

In addition I’m a very strong believer in not letting the dice force the story. Random is too random for a good story. Certainly the dice influence, flavor and nudge the stories I try to tell as a DM, most certainly they do. But I never let the dice dictate the story. And making a character’s permanent death hinge on a single die roll at fairly bad odds? I would guess he had less than a 25% chance at making that roll. That should have never happened.

Other reasons I’d of worked some way around it -

Aeofel is a very well developed, enjoyable and obviously loved character of the player. You don’t permadeath that kind of character. With the exception to fit storyline reasons at the end of a campaign storyline. That last I have done, several times.

The conditions of their play time/session time. The players and DM have all traveled to some central location to play this game which is a one off game with months between sessions. You don’t kill off one of the characters after 4 hours of game play in such a session by letting a single random die roll do it.

The permanency of the death. His corpse was dissolved by acid in the middle of a bad guy infested stronghold. There’s simply no plausible way to get that corpse back for a raise dead ritual before it’s dissolved into its component parts.

Now if Chris has some plan in mind, maybe he wanted Aoefel dead so he can bring him back in some fashion, perhaps a cyborg undead given the obvious artificer nature of the bad guy? Then I can forgive him some of this although a cyborg Aeofel would be directly ripping me off. Been there and done.

I would like to say in closing that I really like Chris Perkin’s. I think he’s a very good DM especially after he’s gotten used to his players, even in the first PA podcasts with complete unknown’s he was good and now with the third podcast they really gel as a group. I also want to say that it’s not Aoefel’s death that I strenuously object too (although killing a player in the middle of a game session under these session circumstances is bad), it’s the apparent permanency of it that bothers.

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Continue reading »]]> I had a random thought, where exactly does an Epic level (30th) character spend 3.125 million gold for a 30th level item?  That’s 31.25 TONS of gold. That’s  a cube of 24k gold almost 4 FEET on each side. (roughly).  So you could easily put that in a wagon.  But a wagon that can hold 31 tons? Good luck with that. You’re going to need a treasure train of 32 wagons to haul it to the vendor.

And why even bother buying that level 30 magic item when you can save 2 million and buy a level 28 magic item and hire several kingdoms worth of armies to keep the riff raff away.

I’ve always thought the economies of any system where you can live fairly well for about 20 gold a month and very well for 100 gold a month cannot easily absorb the influx of wealth that occurs because of treasure seekers.

Even if the merchants have two pricing schemes, one for normal people and one for adventurer’s they themselves will swiftly gain money to the point where other merchants will charge those merchants adventurer’s pricing and then so on.

A classic real world example is the issues of the U.S.’s Gold Rush in the 1800′s where gold miners (read: adventurers) brought in a lot of gold and destroyed local economies, towns sprang up just to deal with the miners at crazy prices.

A classic semi-real modern example that a lot of people might be familiar with is World of Warcraft.  I quit back during the Burning Crusade expansion and even then I could farm someplace like Shadowfang Keep for Assassin’s Blades and get two to three hundred gold for them for level 19 twinks.  Why?  Because the economy was screwed due to the influx of gold from long established characters raking it in at the high levels.  Low level gear was crazy priced to the point that new players couldn’t afford anything ‘cool’.

That same thing would happen across any fantasy world as adventurer’s hammered the local economies with gold without such modern miracles as global banking institutions.

Is there a solution?  Of course, hand wave it out the window and ignore the real world issues in buying and selling of things that cost more than a kingdom might have in total coinage.

Is there a solution that fits a fantasy setting?  Separate magic from gold completely.  Have your dragon hordes with 100′s OR 1000′s of golds, not 100′s of thousands.  Put in place rituals that let the characters power up their swords and turn them into something that grows with them or use any of the ideas to remove magic bonuses from items and give them to the characters innately and the magic items become flavor gear with bonus abilities.   The character has a flaming sword, not a flaming sword +1.  I understand the DMG2 has some guidelines on this now as well as the community stuff.

Anyway, that was my random thought about something to post today.

Continue reading »]]> Updated and sorted my miniatures list into one and organized them a fractional bit -

560    Â Â   Total Miniatures

10    Â Â   Goblin Archer   
4    Â Â   Goblin Adept   
6    Â Â   Goblin Picador   
6    Â Â   Goblin Runner   
6    Â Â   Lolthbound Goblin   
4    Â Â   Goblin Sharpshooters   

17    Â Â   Orc Raider   
2    Â Â   Orc Brute   
1    Â Â   Orc Mauler   
1    Â Â   Howling Orc   

10    Â Â   Kobold Archer   
5    Â Â   Kobold Trapmaster   
10    Â Â   Kobold Monk   
4    Â Â   Flamescorched Kobold   

15    Â Â   Bugbear Gang Leader  
5    Â Â   Bugbear Headreaver   
3    Â Â   Bugbear Strangler   

3    Â Â   Hobgoblin Marshall   
5    Â Â   Hobgoblin Impalers   
6    Â Â   Hobgoblin Impaler   
5    Â Â   Hobgoblin Guard   
1    Â Â   Hobgoblin Archer   
5    Â Â   Hobgoblin Warcaster   

7    Â Â   Halfling Slingers   
1    Â Â   Halfing Sneak   

10    Â Â   Gnoll Marauders   

6    Â Â   Troglodyte Brute   
2    Â Â   Troglodyte Curse Chanter  
6    Â Â   Troglodyte Bonecrusher   
1    Â Â   Troglodyte Barbarian   

9    Â Â   Orc Zombie   
2    Â Â   Orc Skeleton   
6    Â Â   Horde Zombie   
4    Â Â   Skeletal Dwarf   
14    Â Â   Boneshard Skeletons   
5    Â Â   Strahd Zombies   
2    Â Â   Skeletal Reaper   
11    Â Â   Gravetouched Ghouls   
6    Â Â   Chillborn    
6    Â Â   Spellstitched Hobgoblin   
9    Â Â   Deathlock Wight   
1    Â Â   Corruption Corpse   
2    Â Â   Terror Wight   
4    Â Â   Scarecrow Stalker

6    Â Â   Harmonium Guards   
10    Â Â   Soldier of Byztopia  
15    Â Â   Doomguard    
5    Â Â   Caravan Guards   
8    Â Â   Human Bandits   
8    Â Â   Duergar Slaver   
6    Â Â   Snaketongue Cultist   

1    Â Â   Hill Giant   
6    Â Â   Bladerager Trolls   
1    Â Â   Skalmad Troll King
1    Â Â   Hunched Giant
1    Â Â   Half Ogre Barbarian  
2    Â Â   Ogre Pulverizers   

6    Â Â   Unicorns    
4    Â Â   Infernal Armour   
1    Â Â   Large Brass Dragon  
1    Â Â   Small Black Dragon  
1    Â Â   Small Copper Dragon  
1    Â Â   Small Copper Dragon  
1    Â Â   Pseudodragon    
1    Â Â   Young Green Dragon  
1    Â Â   Elder Iron Dragon
6    Â Â   Guard Drake   
10    Â Â   Crazed Kuo-toa   
6    Â Â   Kuo-Toa Hunter   
2    Â Â   Grick    
6    Â Â   Blood Scarabs   
2    Â Â   Scythejaw Trap   
4    Â Â   Fiendish Dire Weasels  
3    Â Â   Direguard    
1    Â Â   Large Fire Elemental  
2    Â Â   Cockatrice    
4    Â Â   Gnaw Deamon   
4    Â Â   Runespiral Demon   
2    Â Â   Rat Swarm   
1    Â Â   Kruthik Hive Lord  
7    Â Â   Kruthik Adult   
4    Â Â   Kruthik Young   
3    Â Â   Ochre Jelly   
2    Â Â   Rat Swarm   
8    Â Â   Ravenous Dire Rat  
4    Â Â   Diseased Dire Rat  
2    Â Â   Cave Bear   
5    Â Â   Iron Defender   
4    Â Â   Giant Centipede   
4    Â Â   Hunting Hyena   
4    Â Â   Deathjump Spiders   
4    Â Â   Spider of Lolth
2    Â Â   Spider Swarms
2    Â Â   Hoard Scarab Lava Swarm
2    Â Â   Rot Scarab Swarm  
1    Â Â   Demonweb Swarm   

6    Â Â   Animated Statues   
1    Â Â   War Ape   
1    Â Â   Quaggoth Slave   
1    Â Â   Dracotaur Rager   
1    Â Â   Carnage Demon   
1    Â Â   Lion of Talysin  
1    Â Â   Digester    
1    Â Â   Xorn    
1    Â Â   Greenspawn Sneak   
1    Â Â   Fiendish Snake   
1    Â Â   Large Chaos Beast  
2    Â Â   Hammerer    
1    Â Â   Giant Centipede   
1    Â Â   Soulrider Devil   
2    Â Â   Cockatrice    

Player Mini’s
1    Â Â   Arcanix Guard   
1    Â Â   Wood Elf   
1    Â Â   Arcadian Avenger   
1    Â Â   Guard of Mithral Hall
1    Â Â   Grey Hawk City Militia Sergeant
1    Â Â   Warden of the Wood
1    Â Â   Autumn Wind Ranger  
1    Â Â   Elf Druid Female  
1    Â Â   Elf Archer   
1    Â Â   Gnome Fighter   
1    Â Â   Gnome Recruit   
1    Â Â   Halfling Paladin   
1    Â Â   Halfling Archer   
1    Â Â   Lidda Halfing Rogue  
1    Â Â   Sacred Watcher   
1    Â Â   Warforged Barbarian   
1    Â Â   Human Cleric of Bahamut
1    Â Â   Dwarf Maulfighter   
1    Â Â   Cliffwalk Archer   
1    Â Â   Eternal Blade   
1    Â Â   Halfing Enchanter   
1    Â Â   Tiefling Cleric   
1    Â Â   Tiefling Rogue   
1    Â Â   Captain of the Watch
1    Â Â   Eladrin Pyromancer   
1    Â Â   Golden Wyvern Initiate  
1    Â Â   Dwarf Raider   
1    Â Â   Wild Elf Raider  
1    Â Â   Hero of Valhalla  
1    Â Â   Skullclan Hunter   
1    Â Â   Voice of Battle  
1    Â Â   cleric of Pelor  
1    Â Â   Elf Archer   
1    Â Â   Dwarf Shieldmaiden   
1    Â Â   Everfrost Ranger   
1    Â Â   Defiant Rake   
1    Â Â   Tiefling Warlock   
2    Â Â   Prisoner    
1    Â Â   Half-elf Hexblade   
1    Â Â   Dwarf Mercenary   
1    Â Â   Dragonmark Heir of Deneith
1    Â Â   Dwarf Phalanx Solder  
1    Â Â   Whirling Steel Monk  
1    Â Â   Undying Soldier   
1    Â Â   Barbarian Mercenary   
1    Â Â   Warmage    
1    Â Â   Xeph Soulknife   
1    Â Â   Half-Orc Fighter   
1    Â Â   Royal Guard   
1    Â Â   Elf Stalker   
1    Â Â   Wizard Tactician   
1    Â Â   Vampire Hunter   
1    Â Â   Dwarf Battlerager   
1    Â Â   Shieldwall Soldier   
1    Â Â   Warpriest of Moradin  
1    Â Â   Cleric of Syreth  
1    Â Â   Earth Shugenja   
1    Â Â   Lantern bearer   
1    Â Â   Spirit Folk Fighter  
1    Â Â   Mercenary Sergeant   
1    Â Â   Half-orc Executioner   
1    Â Â   Devotee of the Silver Flame
1    Â Â   Knight of the Chalice
1    Â Â   Phalanx Soldier   
1    Â Â   Wild Elf Warsinger  
1    Â Â   High Inquisitor   
1    Â Â   Blood of Vol Divinity Seeker
1    Â Â   Swashbuckler    
1    Â Â   Duergar Slaver   
1    Â Â   Inspired Shock Trooper  
1    Â Â   Torturer    
1    Â Â   Dark Talon Champion  
1    Â Â   Tiefling Warlock   
1    Â Â   Cleric of Syreth  
1    Â Â   Wild Mage   
1    Â Â   Kalashtar Bodyguard   
1    Â Â   Xeph Warrior   
1    Â Â   Cleric of Pelor  
1    Â Â   Human Fighter   
1    Â Â   Cleric of Laogzed  
1    Â Â   Cloudreaver    
1    Â Â   Spirit Folk Fighter  
1    Â Â   Cleric of Dol Arrah
1    Â Â   Half-orc Paladin   
1    Â Â   Standardbearer    
1    Â Â   Anvil of Thunder  
1    Â Â   Regdar Adventurer   
1    Â Â   Scarlet Brotherhood Monk  
1    Â Â   Axe Soldier   
1    Â Â   Brass Samuari   
1    Â Â   Sharn Redcloak

Continue reading »]]> Just realized through a very roundabout way that I don’t have any mention of Masterplan on here.  (I was looking for the link to see if there was a recent update and my search came up empty on my site.  There is an update BTW).

Anyway it’s a campaign planner, has DDI integration, map maker and you can run combats in it and it has the ability to display maps to the players on a second monitor that are not filled in like the DM’s maps. What’s not to like?

And it’s free.  So what do you have to lose?  Go check it out.

Continue reading »]]> Okay I ran this playtest this afternoon with my wife running the characters.  The party was 6th level and comprised of a Assassin, Fighter, Warlock, Invoker and Bard.  None of the characters were ‘character op’ped’.  I quick built them in the Character Builder then went in and tweaked them where they needed it to make them realistically built.  Things like invalid weapon focuses or powers that didn’t work well with the stat builds and that kind of thing. Â  I also gave each one a ‘reasonable’ weapon and armour or implement and each one got some minor item that added to their combat effectiveness or recovery.

The set up was the party had been hired by a lord to track down and destroy a band of raiders that were destroying small villages with the usual results.  The lord had lost members of his family to this band and the PC’s were the fastest way to get after them while he raised a real fighting force to deal with them.

The party was closing in but at each village they trailed the raiders to they lost time searching for survivors and when they found them they had to deal with them.  This was the third such village they’d come to and they entered it to check for if there was anyone hurt but still alive.  Several huts were still burning or had collapsed into a pile of glowing embers.  Bodies were scattered everywhere, a large pile of them in the center of town where wagons and small stands cluttered up the area.  The town well’s walls had been collapsed into it and bodies thrown in.  It was not a pretty sight.  The smell of burning flesh filled the area as did a pall of choking smoke from the fires.

The ravens had already arrived and were pecking at some of the corpses, watching the party as they entered the town. Â  Some of the villagers had been strung up from the rafters gutted and left to die slowly.

As the fighter and bard led the group into the village they spotted movement among the pile of dead in the center and approached it, prepared to help or put out misery whoever was still alive.

Drawing closer they stopped as one of the prone figures stood and then turned to face them,  a woman, eyes put out and a jagged gash across her throat, her front covered with her blood.  She stared at the approaching party with sightless eyes and a savage rage filled expression contorted her face and she screamed, the sound a punishing blast of force that blasted the party backwards, hammering them with sound and knocking them down.

At the horrible cry bodies all around the village rose to their feet, hungry dead eyes lusting for revenge, fueled by rage and as one their heads swiveled toward the party.

The backstory is that the girl’s death, a warlock in life, turned her into a demi-lich of some kind and now she’s driven to protect the village against intruders, any intruders and has brought the other bodies back to un-life to help protect it.

Surprise round over we roll initiative and the combat is on.

The combatants included the five pc’s and one Tortured Remains, 2 x Steel Thewed Zombies, 2 x Hanged Ones and 20 x Pyre Dead. Â  This is obviously a seriously harsh encounter.  As a result I kept a fairly careful eye on things and the undead didn’t always use their most efficient abilities.  That’s part of my job as the DM, to keep things in check that way.  I would rather dump in an extra 10 minions at the start and finesse their combat output of the encounter as a whole and have them if I need them rather than run ‘light’ and have a boring fight.  Under normal circumstances this would have been a day ender anyway without a couple or three minor skirmishes leading up to with raider stragglers or wild life or some other natural hazard of the area.

The house rules that were in force consisted of these -

• -1/2 level to attack rolls and defenses and skills on both sides.
• +1/2 level in damage to one target of an attack and normal damage for the rest in the case of multiple targets
• +1/2 level to healing abilities like healing words, second winds and healing potions.
• +2 flat bonus to attack rolls
• And to try and reduce the impact of randomness, all attacks did average damage.
• PC’s at dying used the Mostly Dying rule (which came into effect once)

To cut to the chase, the end results were within acceptable ranges and added to the game IMO.  Yours might be different of course.

The fight went well, various AOE’s dealt well with the minions over the course of the adventure which I fully expected which is why I was about to dump 20 minions into this fight.  The Assassin’s Heart of Dust worked VERY well when used against the Tortured Remains which was surrounded by minions.  When the dot procc’ed it killed 5 minions.  Add in the Invoker’s Rebuke Undead and other multiple target attacks from the various characters and the poor minions died in droves the way they’re supposed to. Â  I did get more than a few hits on the player using the minions which worked well.  The 7 damage a pop slowly ate away at their resources.

All the characters bloodied and most were brought to single digits at least once, all of them used their Second Winds and 2 used Healing Potions, each character was assumed to have one.  The Bard used both his Majestic Words which since he had the Improved feat also granted 5 Temp HP’s.

The Tortured Remains was able to keep various characters controlled, either dazed, weakened or immobilized, but the players never really lost their full turn.  Even when the Invoker went down to 0 health she was able to use the Mostly Dying rule on her next turn to trigger her Second Wind and the turn after that was able to get back into the fight. Â  Without that rule in effect that character would most likely be dead. Â  The bard was trapped on the other side of the battlefield and would have most likely died from OA’s trying to get to her and since both his Majestic Word’s had been used the best he could have done was a Healing check to stabilize.

The Steel Thewed Zombies grab attack was successful a few times where they held a PC and granted CA for some of the other monsters and the Bard was tossed down the well once as a result.  The assassin was also thrown into the well from the Tortured Remains burst with push attack which was funny, at least to me.

The assassin knocked the last of the minions down into the well as well with a pushing power which was only fair I suppose. The Assassin as a whole wasn’t too impacting with the battle, he missed a lot but the one time he did manage a hit was with the daily and that cleared a big chunk of minions that would almost certainly have pulped the bard or the fighter on their next turn.

I believe in total the fight took 7-8 rounds and took an hour and 45 minutes.  That might seem long (or maybe it doesn’t) but this was an encounter with 30 total combatants and the characters were complete unknowns to my wife, she’d never played any of these classes before so she spent time looking them over each round to see what might be the best power.  Something that one would hope wouldn’t be the case with players who’d started with these characters and had played them up to this level.

Things that helped contribute to the pacing, hitting more often (10% more often due to the +2 static bonus), doing more damage per hit (an average of +3 damage per hit) and in all honesty not having to roll damage and using average damage for everything except critical hits (we only had one over the course of the fight) sped things up as well.

Although one test does not a conjecture prove, I would at this point be perfectly willing to continue with these changes in a real campaign, assuming I could find enough players to have a real ongoing campaign.

D

Continue reading »]]> I found several modules in the attic while I was looking for some speakers to use for my iPhone to play, ironically enough, DnD podcasts so I don’t inadvertantly blow out the speaker on the phone.

I ended up with A1-A4 the Slave Lords series, S1 Tomb of Horrors (I had Expedition to the Barrier Peaks as well but it wasn’t in this box), WG9 Gargoyle (Greyhawk based module), B1 – B9 In search of Adventure, G1 – G3 Against the Giants series, B6 The Veiled Society, U1 The Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh, C3 The Lost Island of Castanamir, N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God and good ol’ X1 the first commercial ‘outdoor’ module I ever owned complete with dinosaurs!

They’re in not great shape, I’d rate them as Poor or Well Used.  Still useable for the most part since they’re perfectly legible, they’ve just seen a lot of action.  The art pamphlet for S1 is missing, at least it wasn’t in the same box.

Anyway, I thought I’d show off my age a bit.  I was in high school when I picked these up and ran players through them first of many times.

Sorry for the graininess of the pictures, taken with said iPhone in a dimly lit attic.

Continue reading »]]> Just a quick post to record my mini purchases. I use the search function of the site to keep from buying something I already have.

The dragon is pretty cool and an exceptional buy at $4. The scarab swarms look like piles of coins. The scarecrows are good. The spiders of lolth look more like a cheap Halloween trinket. The giant is tilty like too many of their minis. The troll king is okay. He’ll go well with the last trolls I bought as a boss encounter.

1 elder iron dragon.
2 hoard scarab lava swarm
4 scarecrow stalker
1 skalmad troll king
1 hunched giant
4 spider of lolth
2 swarm of spiders

Continue reading »]]> Wizards has posted their fan site policy.  One paragraph in particular disturbs me greatly as it implies that it’s illegal for anyone to release any material, free or otherwise, to anyone else.

I’ve emphasized the pertinent bits below -

Please note that this Fan Site Policy does not allow you to publish, distribute or sell your own free-to-use games, modules or applications for any of Wizards’ brands including, but not limited to, Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. If you want to engage in any of these activities related to Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, such use is subject to the Game System License http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/welcome. For questions concerning digital rights for all other Wizards brands, please visit www.wizards.com/customerservice.

Is there any way to read other than if you write a module, using 100% of your own work from the layout to the creatures (or not), that you run the risk of the Wizards legal team from doing everything from a C&D to a full blown lawsuit against you?

So Asmor’s monster creature, being an application to create monsters for 4th edition is illegal in spite of the great help it provided to everyone?

An excel based character sheet?  Does that fall under the application rule?  So now you can’t offer those up for download?

Do home brew classes, monsters, spells, feats?  Is Wizards claiming those are illegal?

It sounds very much like they’re wanting to be the sole provider of anything D&D related. Â  You shant play anything but official material, read anything but official material or use anything but official material in your game.

Or maybe I’m reading that wrong, perhaps they’re not the newest [world war 2 organization reference] or [nutcase religious group founded by a crackpot reference that sues anyone and everyone] on the block.  Perhaps they’re not.  Time will certainly tell won’t it….

Image credits

Continue reading »]]> Found a source for some old school maps.  Pretty nostalgic looking at these maps as they’re typical of my first decade of DnD gameplay for me. Lots of rooms connected by the ubiquitous 10′ corridor, just the right size for a gelatinous cube to keep clean.  One room might have undead in it and the next room down might have orcs.

And there were typically no larders, grocery stores, bathrooms or whatever.  It was really one discrete encounter after another.  Which is why I laugh when people say 4th Edition is ‘combat oriented’ and ‘nothing but one fight after another’ or ‘kills roleplay’. Â  But that’s a dead horse of another color.

Anyway, more resources is rarely a bad thing. Unless you’re extremely indecisive and then I suppose having more options might be a bad thing.

Continue reading »]]> Mass Combat Rules

[Disclaimer:  This is a stream of thought idea, read it with that in mind.]

I had the thought of having a larger mostly melee based battlefield swirling around a party, an ‘epic’ encounter but at the heroic level.  The party would help direct the forces of the battle by using minor actions to make skill checks and these would add bonuses to the embattled forces.

To that end there needs to be some quick and fast rules for massed combat that are easy to keep track of and yet allow for varying degrees of ‘quality’ of the combatants.

Yes I know there are published rules for this kind of thing and they may be awesome but half the fun of a DM is coming up with your own stuff.

My initial though is each side will have units of troops.  These will be under the control of the DM but can be influenced by the players.

The units will make opposed rolls but their ‘turn’ takes place over the course of the players encounters so they’re several minutes long typically.

The players will be directly involved in a series of encounters, waves of the bad guys and will be performed as normal.  The other forces will have a single simple die roll that will be performed at the end of each of the PC encounters.  The players will get a 5 minute rest between waves.

My current idea is each unit will have an Attack and a Defense value.

These attack and defense values will range from 1 to 20 although I see typical units falling into the 1 to 10 range.  

When two (or more units) attack each other there they make an opposed roll, attack versus defense.  Each side can make this roll or not although obviously if neither side does then it’s a little boring.  But a side with a strong defense but weak attack may decided not to attack but only make defensive rolls.  If both sides want to make attack rolls damage is determined at the end.

The difference between the opposed rolls is divided by X .  For my needs I’m making X = 5, 1 for each minute of the mass combat round.

Both sides in a fight take 1 base damage.  The loser of the opposed roll also takes the computed difference. In the case of a tie, both sides take just the 1 base damage.

Once a unit hits 0 or less in both attack and defense they’re considered destroyed or otherwise out of the combat.

Example:

Kings Guard squad a A:7 and a D: 7
Bloody Hand Orc squad has an A:8 and a D:2

Both sides are going to attack so it’s two sets of rolls.

Let’s do the guards attack roll first – d20(16)+7 = 23
The orcs make a defense check – d20(6)+2 = 8

The difference is 15 and we divide that by 5 and end up with (15/5) =3.

The orcs currently will take 4 damage to their attack and defense at the end of the round and the guard take 1 for the base.

The orcs make an counter attack:

Orcs attack – d20(14)+8= 18
Guard defense – d20(11)+7 = 18

It’s a tie so sides take (base 1)+(0/5) or 1.

The orcs will take 3+1+1(computed damage)+( base damage).
The guard takes only the base 1+1 damage.

Round two –

Guard – A:5 D:5
Orcs – A:3 D:-3

Orcs attack –
Orcs attack is (11+3) = 14
Guard defense is (20+5) = 25

Defense wins by 11 so the orcs will take 11/5 or 2 damage +1 base or 3 total.
Guards take 1 base damage.

The guards counterattack –

Guard attack is (4+5) = 9
Orc Defense is (11-3) = 8.

Even results (1/5) = 0 so both sides take an additional 1 base damage.

That’s a total of 4 damage for the orcs and 2 damage for the guards:

Guard – A:3 D:3
Orcs – A:-1 D:-6

The orcs are decimated/routed/slaughtered whatever you wish to have had happened.

But the guard unit is not looking too good and if the orcs have another squad or two to throw at them then the guard could very easily go down and that wall of the keep could be ripe for the taking.

I need to actually try it out and get a feel for it.  It’s simple enough I suppose unless without be so simple as “This side beat this side, that side is destroyed.”.  It allows for units to be drained of power over the course of time and allows them to be ‘healed’ up by simply shoving men from the reserve units into their place.  

Probably needs defensive bonuses for cover.  Perhaps a +2/+4/+6 if they’re in cover but they can’t attack from cover only defend.

Bears consideration I suppose.

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Continue reading »]]> Just a quick session card to go with the Quest Cards to let the player build their campaign journal with.  Form fillable if you like or just print out a bunch and hand them out and let the players write on them in pencil (or crayon scribbles for that matter if they’re an illiterate barbarian or something…)

Like the others I plan on putting together a small binder for the players to put these in along with their quest cards so at the end of the campaign they’ll have a nice log of their character’s lives and times.

You can grab it here – [Download not found]

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Continue reading »]]> 77IM and Jurph have done the math in regards to Point Buy stats and come up with a big list of all the possible variations you can do with the default’ish 22 point buy as well as their ‘value’ in terms of bonuses.

As it turns out you can make some ‘bad’ choices in this regard and end up with a variance of +/- 4 bonus points to your starting abilities and powers.

The arrays that give you the most total bonus, +8 total, are as follows -

• 16 14 12 12 12 10
• 16 13 12 12 12 12
• 15 14 12 12 12 12
• 14 14 14 14 12 8
• 14 14 14 14 10 10
• 14 14 14 13 12 10
• 14 14 14 12 12 11
• 14 14 13 13 12 12

The first one isn’t far off the standard array that I use, 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 which is a +7  bonus.  I may instead allow players to just pick one of the above arrays if they wish as the most cost effective way to build a character. Â  With the racial bonuses the first two allow any character to get an 18 in a starting attribute if they want to go that route.

Any way, I thought this interesting enough to collect here for my further perusal.  Have fun with it if it also floats your boat.

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Continue reading »]]> Although you can get a copy of the original idea for these cards here, they’re too small for me.  My idea was to make half sheets and then put tin a 5×7 3 ring binder for the players as a kind of quest journal or quest log along with session note pages (not done yet).

So with that in mind I took Kiko’s basic format and just made a bigger version of it.   Nothing ‘awesome’ but it works for me.  And you might find it useful perhaps.

You can get it here – KOC Quest Cards (241)

The PDF is form fillable although you’ll need version 9.0+ of Adobe Acrobat to be able save the filled out version, otherwise you can only print it apparently in earlier versions.  Stupid non-backwards compatible issues.

Continue reading »]]> Honestly not sure if I like it or not so far but here you go.  I don’t like ‘reality’ tv, the island, bachelor, the survivors, oprah, american idol, cops, etc. ad naseum, all that crap, I don’t like, or even understand the draw. Â  And this is starting off with that same vibe, people being dramatic asshats and emo drama queens.  But your mileage may vary.  At least the purported spouses are reasonably hot.

Quote -

“There’s no I in team.”

“No but there’s a U in scrotum.”

Goblins and Gold – The DnD World Championships…

Continue reading »]]> Just saw this on TheKiko’s twitpic and decided to yoink the Idea myself. Posted here for yours (and my) future reminding.

The idea is, if you’re already using cards for things, have quest cards to remding the players of their minor quests.

In thinking about these I’m very inclined to expand the format to a 4×5 format for more room (i.e. bigger font size) and expand it virtually to include session recaps.  With a hole punch and 2 or 3 ring binder you could make a journal for the players that would have their campaign history on it in abbreviated form and all the quests they’ve done.  At the start of each session you hand them their card(s) that describe the last session, any quests they completed (I don’t know about you but I improv a LOT so there’s no way I could always have the quest cards pre-made) or are in the process of completing.  The party leader could read them out at the start of the session to bring everyone up to speed on what’s going on.

If you have ‘great’ players you could even have one of them do the recap and save yourself some work.  Back in the day in our group one person would be the session Scribe and would take notes during the entire session.  But then back then the GM/DM would also turn those notes into a full length story between sessions.  We had more time back then definitely as we’d produce real novels worth of fantasy fiction for our campaigns.  Good times….

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Continue reading »]]> I thought I’d ramble on about DM’ing. I’ve been listening to some podcasts from gaming groups around the world and as a non-participant passive listener it really stands out when things slow down due the players and the DM action and inaction and reaction.

Listening to these is a very good way for any DM to have an opportunity to sit back and go, “yeah I do that and I can see it’s hurting the flow” or “I need to avoid doing that.” or “That’s a pretty cool trick, I’m going to start doing that.”

I know I and many others have posted tips on how to make game play faster but listening to others you can really see how those tips might help out. One thing that really stands out as a big time waster is players who aren’t ready on their turn and DM’s that spend time asking the same question over and over again. I hear it time and time again,DM: “Bob, what do you do?” and then Bob: “Uh who’s left? How many hit points does he have left? Is Steve bloodied?” and it’s obvious that Bob hasn’t been paying attention at all the 10 minutes prior to that because ‘it wasn’t his turn’ yet and DM: “Does a 12 hit?”

And that really needs to be worked on. 4th Edition is the best edition yet in terms of rewarding teamwork other than “We all hit the monster.” With all the ways a typical party has to move, shift, buff and debuff each other and the monsters it simply stands to reason that the players SHOULD be interested even when it’s not there turn but they typically don’t seem to be.

One cause of this is definitely the DM is just moving pretty slowly overall and to some extent that’s excusable because the poor sap that has to be the DM (present company excluded, I love DM’ing) is running typically a large handful of creatures with an even bigger handful of powers and with even more targets to deal with.

But in other ways I hear them doing things that slow the game down. Slow games lead to player in-attention which leads to slow games. A vicious cycle.

A DM really should never have to roll a die and then ask a player if it hit. Every DM should have their players defenses on a cheat sheet right in front of them. Preferably in large type and color coded to avoid mistakes.

As the DM takes his turn all the players should hear is *dice rattle* “Bob the two plate wearing guards both try to beat your head in with a mace, you notice they time their swings so that as you dodge one, you open your defenses up to the other but only one connects with you. You get hit for 8 points of damage.”. (The guards get an attack bonus when multiples of them are attacking the same guy and the DM is letting the player know that without just coming out and telling him). Instead what I hear over and over is DM: “I rolled a 14 versus your… AC Bob, does that hit?” *pause while Bob looks it up* “Yes? Okay you take… 8 damage.”  Subtle or not so subtle immersion breaker and definitely a time waster with the later scenario.

Part of the problem also stems from the fact that players do now have options in combat other than “I roll to hit.”  They now have attacks that do big damage, or small damage plus some benefit.  Attacks that help a team mate out by making them stronger or by weaking their target.  They have attacks they can use all the time and ones they should really be saving up for the Big Bad.  So their options and choices are extremely more varied with this edition than any previous one. And this leads to Choice Overload that ends up with a lot of “Should I use this and get this or use this and get that?” conversations.  Which slows things down.

So I’d like to offer the thoughts that the DM should keep the game moving every way he can and that he encourage players to stay focused on the game at hand by keeping his side of the combat as fast as possible.  I don’t recommend that the DM roll one initiative for all the bad guys but rather one initiative per type of bad guy or per group of bad guys.  This interweaves the DM’s actions with the players so they have less of a ‘down time’ as a group and he has to deal with fewer things at one time.

I also really encourage a timer much like in speed chess either real or just guesstimated.  The player gets X seconds to describe what their character is going to be doing at least in general terms, “I’m going to attack that zombie brute that’s after the cleric.” but if they were able to say, “I’m going to use my Reaping Strike on the brute.” even better.

If necessary encourage them with in game benefits: “If you announce your characters full actions within 30 seconds of my saying you’re up, you get a +1 bonus on your attack roll as your enemies have a hard time dealing with your combat speed. If you take longer than 60 seconds then you automatically reserve your turn and the next person goes.”

It’s not so much that I want to play the game as fast as possible but I think a smooth fast flow keeps everyone interested and involved and that alone is worth the being considered a bit of a PITA DM.

And it would make the podcasts more interesting to listen to…

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Continue reading »]]> Okay I’m reading through the Village of Hommlet 4th Edition version which is not so much a conversion as it is a faithful xerox of the original but with 4e stat blocks.  I don’t have a problem with that, it brings back memories, good ones.  The giant frog swallowing the halfling whole and the look of surprise and shock on the player’s face? Priceless.

But in reading this it brings up just how flat out stupid the bad guys aka everyone not the players are.  As an example (duplicated partially here without permission) -

Writing Desk: This table contains paper, ink and several notes written to “L” from “RD”.  Also is a letter from “L” to “H” describing…

Okay A, why the HELL does Lareth sign his letters with an L and put Dear H on them?  He KNOWS who they’re from and he KNOWS who they’re going to.  The person who gets them?  They KNOW who they’re from.  I doubt if H gets a lot of letters from other people about the guard setup in the moathouse.  And I doubt, actually I know, that Lareth only gets reports from Hommlet from one person.

If this was a unique event it might just be a set of really stupid bad guys.  But it’s not.  Wizards especially loves the not so secret ‘note’ aka big flashing red arrow to tell the characters who the spies and secret traitors and such are.

I’d just like to call for a boycott on secret notes and journals that require a DC Easy to find to hand spoon information to the PC’s.  Make them work for it!  Have the notes be cryptic and not bluntly obvious.  I think in secret agent 101 one of the first things they tell you is “Don’t sign your notes.”.

Something a little more involved and that would give a valuable reason for a little roleplay is “As you read through the cryptic notes that seem to be describing recent events in a town, you assume Hommlet,  you see that whoever wrote it is concerned that ‘the baker’ seems suspicious and keeps nosing around.’ “.

Now you have a perfect opportunity for the players to go check out the baker and see who he’s been hanging around.  And what if it’s not the baker but actually one of the apprentices, the agent doesn’t really know the difference.  And what if the apprentice is actually just hanging out on his breaks near the agent’s place so he can watch a certain girl at the well?  Now you have a whole crazy mixup just waiting to happen.

Unless they’re just really low intelligence and wisdom and are young as in this is their first time bossing, most bosses are going to have at least some idea on an escape route.  They know they’re likely to get overthrown either by a younger, stronger, smarter creature in their ranks or by some do-gooder PC party.  As an example my Zizzor Hive Mother had a power “Preserve The Species” (see below) that allowed the Mother to move her full speed as a minor action, granting her 3 moves, 4 moves if she used an Action Point or 32 squares of movement as an Get Out of Jail Free card when combined with her Savage Cry. Â  The final Boss in that series of encounters had an extended Fade Away power, he was a Gnome, and as a standard encounter action he could sustain the invisibility (but it broke if he took damage) and would use that if things looked really badly. So some smart work on the player’s parts and they could stop both bosses from getting away but the bosses did have a chance to get away.

Using those kinds of options helps get your players in the mindset that the bad guys aren’t just meatbags of hit points and they’re destined to win.  After one or two bosses get away with smart tactics or preperation (or even better drive the players away with overwhelming force but that’s another article) then they might start thinking inside the box and planning on keeping the boss contained while they fight it.  Rather than just assuming it’s going to stand there and die for them.

As an aside, speaking of Hommlet, let’s try and avoid the Grab Bag Effect of monster placement too.  No goblins in a room next to Gnolls next to Orcs next to Undead.  4E gives us this HUGE ability, that no prior edition came close to, in having a themed set of encounters.  My Zizzor one off is an example, good I think but then I’m biased, of how you can have a series of encounters that are interesting by simply incorporating a different mix of subtypes.

I know that it large part the grab bag o’ monster encounters was forced on DM’s by the lack of variety.  No player wants to go through a dungeon and have 18 fights of the same Orc to face the Hill Giant that’s leading them.  So they added in a mish mash of encounters to make the encounter series interesting even if it made no realistic sense.  But we don’t have to do that now.  Have your first fights with goblin foragers with a goblin warrior or two, then some goblin archers or sneaks and a goblin shaman, the big fat goblin boss with the twin elite wargs as guardians. Â  It’s all goblin, it makes sense but each fight plays out different depending on the mix of controller, soldier, minion etc.

And remember to have that big fat goblin boss have a bolt hole in case things look really badly.  And honestly if the party has just ripped a new one through your entire crew, most bosses should be gone by the time they get there.  If they’re smart.

As a parting thought I give you the playbook for any boss – The top 100+ things I’d do if were an evil overlord.

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Continue reading »]]> FYI using magnet bases for conditions, marks and the like work a lot better than I was thinking they would. If you don’t have the time or interest in making your own then pick up a roll or two from Alea Tools along with a package of the stick on magnet bases for the miniatures. Honestly the GM01 pack and the Stack o’ Bloodied (stack of just red bases) and a package or 2 of the magnetic press and seal disks from their online store should be enough to most groups going for not so much money.  Probably less than most groups spend on soda, pizza and chips per session.

This isn’t a plug for Alea although they’re good quality items.  You can certainly make your own for a little less money with a little more work.  But the convenience factor may be worth it to you.

There are obviously other options, flags, soda cap rings, playdough etc.  Go with what works for you as always.

I think if/when I get a regular group going again I’m going to buy 2 or 3 or these and cut them as needed to fit my gaming table topper.  That reminds me, I really should cut about 2″ off the legs of my gaming table. Â  It’s just a little high for good seated gaming.  It works and it certainly helps to get people involved.

Continue reading »]]> I just wanted to jot this down after coming up with the idea for someone else.  It’s a magic item that lets people find people. Â  Or things.  It comes in several levels and it can only find someone of an equal or lesser aura (aka level).  It’s a rough draft and not following the specific magic item format, I just had a brain cloud of an idea for an adventure series that could use this.

Aura Compass –

Crafted from the cornea of a dragon, purple preferred, this arcane device is a exquisite device.  It is etched in gold with arcane sigils and runes, with glowing crystals formed of the tears of an invisible stalker on the cardinal points.  Although fragile in appearance the device is anything but.  A slender black thread, the optic nerve of a beholder is embedded inside.  A small cavity about the size of a four year old human’s end finger joint is cut into the size of the disk, stoppered by the central crystal.

Highly prized by bounty hunters and trophy killers alike these items are rare and unusual due to the cost in lives to gather the materials and the year long construction time.

If a fresh sample of a creature’s flesh, blood or secretions is placed in the cavity the thread will unerringly point in the direction of the creature forever after.

Level 6 – xxxx gold
Level 16 – xxxx gold
Level 26 – xxxx gold

Daily Power - Once per day this device, once activated with the appropriate material from a creature, can be directed to display show the direction, but not distance by the angle of the thread indicator line in the disk. Â  This indicator will stay focused for 60 seconds at which time it will again start to slowly swing in circles.

NOTE: The item can only locate creatures of its level of crafting or less.

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Continue reading »]]> It’s a recurring and oft occurring concern with combat in 4E.  With the increase in hit points and the decrease in ‘huge damage’ growth potential, fights are naturally taking more rounds.  Some argue each round is faster but that’s a personal issue, there are certainly things that can slow down a round and they are numerous.  Players who aren’t familiar with their powers, players who have to ‘do the math’ each and every time they want to use a power, players who’s class or build have very ‘mechanic heavy’ powers, DM’s speed of dealing with all the NPC’s, players who aren’t ready to go on their turn when it comes up.  And of course the basic hit point sink versus damage output issue.

Anyway a random off the top of the head list of things that can speed up play without major detriment to game play.  I’m sure there are other things but these are what I came up with.

The biggest thing is to find the worst offender in terms of time and fix that as best as you can, whether its one player who’s always slow, or the DM is always looking up stats or your battles are simply battles of attrition without any question as to the outcome, find the problem and fix it.

On the player side there are options -

• Each player should have power cards or a simple spreadsheet outlining their powers in a concise format.  In other words ANYTHING BUT having to look the powers up each time and then figure out what the attack bonus is and then figure out their damage. Â  The spreadsheet format is definitely the fastest option.  A player’s powers can be displayed on a single page with their Attack value, what defense the power attacks, the damage they do with their standard weapon, and a short sentence that outlines any special effects of the attack.
• Do the math ahead of time for ALL the player’s powers and basic repeating dice rolls.
• Each player should have a ‘worksheet’ that they can keep track of their surges, hitpoints, second wind usage, action points and death saves.  90% of the information on the character sheet is not needed 95% of the time.
• Each player who’s not ready on their turn reserves their action and the player is deal with while they figure out what they’re going to do or if they’re not ready then they use an At-will attack on their current or closest target if it’s possible to do so.
• Use tokens for things like hit points, surges, action points, etc.  A stack of white poker chips and red pokers chips (or nickels and pennies) for health (although this can get messy with high level characters obviously).  When they’re down to the red they’re bloodied.  When they’re out of yellow chips they have no more surges.  Three black chips (failed death saves) and they’re dead.

On the DM side -

• The DM should have all his material ready and printed out.  He should have cards or sheets that have the monsters he’s going to be using printed out and not be flipping back and forth through the books.
• He should have a cheat sheet showing the player’s base standard ‘all the time’ defenses so he doesn’t have to keep asking, “Okay the orc rolled a 15 Bob against your AC, did that hit?”
• Know your material. Plan ahead what tactics the npc’s are going to employ against the party.  Don’t spend 15 minutes figuring out what your bad guys are going to do.  If you don’t have a plan then just have them attack the nearest thing with their biggest damage.
• Have your mini’s or tokens or whatever you’re using grouped and ready to go.
• Buy a large sheet of 1″ chart board paper at your local office supply store and pre-draw your maps then whip them out as you need them.  They don’t have to be works of art but they’ll avoid that 5 minutes delay (or worse) while you draw the encounter area which can give players time to get distracted which takes time to get them back into the game.
• Look up the rules later, make a ruling now and retract it later if you need to. Keep the game flowing.
• Just say NO to toys.  Phones, laptops, handhelds.  Leave them at the door, incoming phone calls only.  No texting, no surfing, no playing super mario.  I can’t stress that one enough.  It’s just strikes me as disrespectful at worst and a major annoyance and waste of the other players time at best for a player who spends time texting with his friends/girlfriends or playing the latest ‘it’ game on his iphone etc.
• Reward speedy play don’t penalize slow play.  If a player is ready on their turn when their turn comes up give them a +1 to hit or a +1 on damage roll or a free minor action.

General -

• Roll your damage dice with your attack, saves you a few seconds each time that adds up over time.
• The DM should have several different color D20′s and roll them all at the same time, assign each player a color or just always use the same colors in the same order, whatever works for you.  Or go to random.org and generate a 1000 d20 rolls based on solar activity and just mark them off as you use them.
• 4th edition specific Combat speed ups-
• Increase all damage on the first damage roll of an attack by 1/2 per level.  (i.e. an AOE has one attack that does normal damage+1/2 level and the rest are normal).
• Reduce elite and solo hit points by 20% (easier math than 25%) and reduce the xp reward accordingly.
• Don’t use monsters that stun or reduce their stun to a daze.  It’s so NOT fun to have to sit out a turn because you were stunned.  Or stunned multiple times in an encounter.  This promotes players who aren’t interested in what’s going on which can distract other players and cause more delays.  Not to mention the damage or support value of the player who’s sitting this one out.
• If a fight is a forgone conclusion then end it quickly via narration and charge the party 1 healing surge per narrated away monster.  (or one for two or whatever seems appropriate).
• Don’t waste game time on easy fights, just narrate them out and charge the party healing surges as coin of the realm.   In MMOG parlance, don’t waste your time with yard trash.  Unless I’m showing new players the gaming system, all my fights fall on the high end of ‘standard’ in terms of XP budget. Â  You want each fight memorable.  Although some fights can be memorable by their ease, you don’t need to roll it out.
• Make fights interesting.  Get out of the mindset of older editions and games of “I roll d20 and do damage.  Monster rolls d20 and damage”.  Design the encounters with options, make them ‘action movie’ with chandeliers to swing on, barrels to roll, flaming braziers to tip over. And lead by example, have the npc’s do something other than stand there and swing.

Example Pointless Combat  – “Lara comes back and tells you there are two orcs dicing in the corner of the next room and another nodding off in a chair.  *party decides they’re going to attack and explains their battle tactics* The orcs are taken off guard easily as you flood through the doorway and although they fight fiercely for several moments your able to easily take the gamblers down and the sleeping orc never even woke up from the sword thrust through its throat.  Trask as the one at the front of the charge, you need to use a healing surge to recover the damage.  The fight seems to have gone unoticed thanks to the heavy closed doors leading out of the room although a distant rythmic thudding can be felt near the large iron door to the south.”

That fight although appropriate for the setting in that it made ‘sense’, took only a minute or so depending on how much the players talked about what their characters would do. Â  To play it out would have taken several minutes with the same result barring just silly ass dice rolling.

Unless your group enjoys the ‘fight’ keep pointless fights to a minimum. Â  Your fights should advance your shared storytelling, not just be a way to garner experience and loot.

Miscellaneous -

Speaking of experience, don’t get hung up on it unless your players are pretty much tied to it.  Just decide at what point in your storyline the party should level and level them then. Â  Checkpoint based experience IMO feels better and works better in terms of “Hey Dennis, I know with that last group we’re well over into 6th level and even though we’re in the middle of the session I want to level up my guy.”   But if instead you reward experience by ‘quest’ and not by ‘grinding’ then it becomes less gamist.  A classic quote from my group from way back in the day, “Shit I’m only 5 exp short, okay I lean out the window and use a throwing dagger to kill someone. Â  *DING!*”

If you make experience goal based and not mob based then you can end up with a lot more creative ways to accomplish a goal from your players rather than “they’re like experience atm’s, let’s stay here and let the coffins keep spewing more skeletons out at us, we could level up in this room easy.”

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Continue reading »]]> I’ve knocked out the first rough outline of the Running with Zizzors module I’ll be running.  It has 7 tactical encounters and 2 skill challenge encounters (each of which may include 1 tactical encounter).  For the most part the monsters are uniquely mine although I am using some basic creatures for two of the encounters, one of which has 24 hostiles (I have the mini’s for them so why not?).

The encounters are ranked (by exp) as Hard, Standard, Standard, Hard (boss), Standard, Standard, Hard (boss). Â  Both boss encounters included a Solo (with reduced HP but increased damage) as well as minions although they may not be minions but standards.

The terrain will run from thick muck to shallow water to a rooftop fight complete with swinging pendulums of death, doom, destruction, bad things, fluffy bunnies.

The bad guys run the gamut from firey avatars of the plane of ice to minor godlings of slow haste.  (Like I’m going to give them that much of a hint).

Anyway I hope to provide a level enjoyment with some tough fights, some hard targets and some mass wave attacks to allow everyone to enjoy their enjoyment. So to speak.

Later.

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In an effort to be extremely clever and witty I’m calling the module I’m writing for an upcoming session Running With Zizzors. Bow before my awesomeness and weep in joy. This module is for players new to 4th Edition and in the case of one, new to PnP RPG’ing due to hype and hysteria surrounding the hobby in it’s early days.  Ah those were the days, sitting around the pentagrams trying to summon Orcus using the spells out of the players handbook.  Sweet times indeed.

This is my current “Read Aloud” text that I will be presenting the players with at the start of the adventure -

œYou are all residents of a medium sized fishing village on the shores of the Timpani sea.  The climate is moderate with mild winters.  The fishing fleets go out every week and return loaded with fish.  These fish are preserved, some in heavy brine, others dried and the very best ones are subject to rituals by the village ritualist and his apprentice that slow their decay so they can arrive at the city markets as fresh as they were pulled from the waters.

The area has many dangers, bandits from the hills to the south like to prey on travelers, wild animals and worse wander the countryside™s thick forests and low hills making travel a very dangerous thing for the solitary or weak.  To the east lay the dense marshes of Fenglidden (Black Marsh) swamps.  Tribes of reptilian humanoids known as Zizzors live on the edges of these fetid waters and stories abound of the greater dangers that lay deeper inward.

It was a successful trip and you have good news to report to the village, disease has wiped out a good portion of the beef herds so meat is at a premium and your barrels of fish brought a good price. Youre in a hurry to get home and the three day trip seems to drag on forever but finally the trip is drawing to a close.

But what’s this? A sullen glow lines the night sky south.  And as morning breaks, you see billowing smoke columns are on the horizon from where you know your village lies although several hours distant at the speed of the wagons.  You draw straws to see who will take the few horses and hurry on ahead leaving the plodding oxen to continue pulling the wagons of empty barrels.

As you come over the last rise the village lays before you.  Several  houses on the east side are nothing but burning embers,  others further in are partially burned or scorched. Â  Two of the big warehouses and the docks are in ruins.

You hurry down, weapons drawn to find the a pile of zizzor bodies, easily 20 or 30 of them and many shroud covered forms you know to be the bodies of your friends and relatives.

Elders of the village fill you in and answer your questions, a large force of zizzors attacked in the middle of the night setting fire to buildings and destroying and killing.  The villagers fought back but took heavy losses much as the hated reptiles had.

The one thing that sticks out to you from the stories is that the Zizzors seemed to be raiding with a purpose other than just random pillaging. Â Â  A head count reveals that several children are missing and feared taken but the remaining villagers are too few and there are too many wounded and injured to go after them.

But now that youre here perhaps that can change, perhaps a quick chase could recover the children… or their bodies if the worst has already happened.

The party, in my case, will consist of villagers, the best of the best so to speak and as a result they’re the only ones on hand able and capable of going after the zizzors with any speed or hope of success. It could just as easily be a group that’s passing through the village in the time of it’s need by land or perhaps they pulled into dock after spotting the fires and smoke from the oceans, whatever the reason they’re here now and tasked with saving the children.  That’s the good thing about using children, everyone with an ounce of compassion is going to make the attempt.  If the zizzors had raided the Home for Criminally Insane then perhaps it might not be as critical to save them.

And here’s one of the many types of Zizzor’s that I’ve created, not sure why I felt the need to make unique monsters for everything for this module since the people playing aren’t familiar with all the 4E monsters anyway but what the hell right?

Zizzor Spinethrower

Continue reading »]]> Need to update my list of DnD Miniatures so I don’t end up ordering stuff I already have.  I want to say again that Auggies is a great place to do business.  Cheapest prices and I made two orders on the same day figuring I’d just eat the shipping costs (they posted some new ones after I ordered that morning) and someone there noticed it and refunded me the cost of shipping without me asking or anything.  That’s the kind of service I really appreciate from a company.

I really would hate to add up all I’ve spent with them because of the low prices and service.  It’s always $15 here and $20 there and before you know it you have a list like the below…  Insidious bastards!

Red = New Hires -

10 Goblin Archer
04 Goblin Adept
06 Goblin Picador
06 Goblin Runner
06 Lolthbound Goblin
04 Goblin Sharpshooters

17 Orc Raider
02 Orc Brute
01 Orc Mauler
01 Howling Orc

10 Kobold Archer
05 Kobold Trapmaster
10 Kobold Monk
04 Flamescorched Kobold

15 Bugbear Gang Leader
05 Bugbear Headreaver
03 Bugbear Strangler

03 Hobgoblin Marshall
05 Hobgoblin Impalers
06 Hobgoblin Impaler
05 Hobgoblin Guard
01 Hobgoblin Archer
05 Hobgoblin Warcaster

07 Halfling Slingers
01 Halfing Sneak

10 Gnoll Marauders

06 Troglodyte Brute
02 Troglodyte Curse Chanter
06 Troglodyte Bonecrusher
01 Troglodyte Barbarian

08 Orc Zombie
02 Orc Skeleton
06 Horde Zombie
04 Skeletal Dwarf
14 Boneshard Skeletons
05 Strahd Zombies
02 Skeletal Reaper
11 Gravetouched Ghouls
06 Chillborn
06 Spellstitched Hobgoblin
09 Deathlock Wight
01 Corruption Corpse
02 Terror Wight

06 Bladerager Trolls
06 Unicorns
04 Infernal Armour
01 Young Green Dragon
02 Ogre Pulverizers
06 Guard Drake
10 Crazed Kuo-toa
06 Kuo-Toa Hunter
02 Grick
06 Blood Scarabs
08 Human Bandits
08 Duergar Slaver
02 Scythejaw Trap
06 Snaketongue Cultist
04 Fiendish Dire Weasels
03 Direguard
01 Large Fire Elemental
02 Cockatrice
04 Gnaw Deamon
04 Runespiral Demon
02 Rat Swarm
01 Kruthik Hive Lord
07 Kruthik Adult
04 Kruthik Young
03 Ochre Jelly
02 Rat Swarm
08 Ravenous Dire Rat
04 Diseased Dire Rat
02 Cave Bear
05 Iron Defender
04 Giant Centipede
04 Hunting Hyena
06 Harmonium Guards
10 Soldier of Byztopia
15 Doomguard
05 Caravan Guards
04 Deathjump Spiders
01 Half Ogre Barbarian
06 Animated Statues
01 Large Brass Dragon
01 Small Black Dragon
01 Small Copper Dragon
01 Small Copper Dragon
01 Pseudodragon
01 Hill Giant
02 Rot Scarab Swarm
01 Demonweb Swarm
01 War Ape
01 Quaggoth Slave
01 Dracotaur Rager
01 Carnage Demon
01 Guard of Mithral Hall
01 Grey Hawk City Militia Sergeant
01 Lion of Talysin
01 Digester
01 Xorn
01 Greenspawn Sneak
01 Fiendish Snake
01 Large Chaos Beast
02 Hammerer
01 Giant Centipede
01 Arcanix Guard
01 Wood Elf
01 Arcadian Avenger
01 Soulrider Devil
02 Cockatrice

01 Warden of the Wood
01 Autumn Wind Ranger
01 Elf Druid Female
01 Elf Archer
01 Gnome Fighter
01 Gnome Recruit
01 Halfling Paladin
01 Halfling Archer
01 Lidda Halfing Rogue
01 Sacred Watcher
01 Warforged Barbarian
01 Human Cleric of Bahamut
01 Dwarf Maulfighter
01 Cliffwalk Archer
01 Eternal Blade
01 Halfing Enchanter
01 Tiefling Cleric
01 Tiefling Rogue
01 Captain of the Watch
01 Eladrin Pyromancer
01 Golden Wyvern Initiate
01 Dwarf Raider
01 Wild Elf Raider
01 Hero of Valhalla
01 Skullclan Hunter
01 Voice of Battle
01 cleric of Pelor
01 Elf Archer
01 Dwarf Shieldmaiden
01 Everfrost Ranger
01 Defiant Rake
01 Tiefling Warlock
02 Prisoner
01 Half-elf Hexblade
01 Dwarf Mercenary
01 Dragonmark Heir of Deneith
01 Dwarf Phalanx Solder
01 Whirling Steel Monk
01 Undying Soldier
01 Barbarian Mercenary
01 Warmage
01 Xeph Soulknife
01 Half-Orc Fighter
01 Royal Guard
01 Elf Stalker
01 Wizard Tactician
01 Vampire Hunter
01 Dwarf Battlerager
01 Shieldwall Soldier
01 Warpriest of Moradin
01 Cleric of Syreth
01 Earth Shugenja
01 Lantern bearer
01 Spirit Folk Fighter
01 Mercenary Sergeant
01 Half-orc Executioner
01 Devotee of the Silver Flame
01 Knight of the Chalice
01 Phalanx Soldier
01 Wild Elf Warsinger
01 High Inquisitor
01 Blood of Vol Divinity Seeker
01 Swashbuckler
01 Duergar Slaver
01 Inspired Shock Trooper
01 Torturer
01 Dark Talon Champion
01 Tiefling Warlock
01 Cleric of Syreth
01 Wild Mage
01 Kalashtar Bodyguard
01 Xeph Warrior
01 Cleric of Pelor
01 Human Fighter
01 Cleric of Laogzed
01 Cloudreaver
01 Spirit Folk Fighter
01 Cleric of Dol Arrah
01 Half-orc Paladin
01 Standardbearer
01 Anvil of Thunder
01 Regdar Adventurer
01 Scarlet Brotherhood Monk
01 Axe Soldier
01 Brass Samuari
01 Sharn Redcloak

Continue reading »]]> Just random phrases strewn together. Â  I’ve started construction of my wooden dice tower, in the end I’m just going with the simple box tower for now although I have visions of a circular tower with a spiral set of steps inside that the dice tumble down.  It’ll be made out of 1/4″ red oak and I’m just going to eyeball the measurements now that I know how big they have to be I can nudge those up a bit and it’ll work fine.

I have friends coming in from Georgia at the end of June and I’m going to run a first level module for them of my own making.  Since they don’t read this, I don’t think they do anyway I’ll share some of the details.  It’ll involve a race of marsh/swamp dwellers known as Zissors (Hint: It’s the way my children used to pronounce Scissors).  These will be reptillian in nature and right now I’ve got the following creatures penciled out, Spinethrower (artillery), Gatherer (minion), Creepers (minion), Swarmlings (minions), Clutch Guardian (soldier), Slimecrawler (lurker), Clutch Master (elite controller), Clutch Mother (solo role still to be determined).

The area will be in a swamp of course if you haven’t figured that out.  There’ll be two major skill challenges involved, one to find something and the other to find something. (Just in case someone does read this who shouldn’t). Â  The skill challenges will entail Endurance (or lose healing surges), Nature (avoid dangers of the swamps which can lead to extra encounters, I’m thinking gators or giant snake like creatures), Perception (keep on track or increase the length of the challenge), Athletics (general ability to traverse the swamp’s obstacles).

I have plans for an initial encounter of primarily Gatherer’s with a couple or three standards in it, a secondary encounter with higher XP budget, the skill challenge, another encounter with a wave attack and then a Boss encounter with a solo, guards and minions.

This will lead to a second skill challenge and another set piece encounter that just in case I won’t be divulging much about other than it’ll involve some grotesqueries of the necromatic arts and culminate in a boss encounter.  I plan on making sure the party levels to 2 by the end of the second skill challenge regardless of how much XP they earn.  I hand out XP by encounter and by checkpoint at various times over the course of my DM’ing career.

The party currently will consist of 4 maybe 5 players.  A Razorclaw Shifter Druid, a Halfling Ranger (Bow), a Half-Orc Barbarian, a Gnomish Bard.  The fifth player to be determined but I have a Longtooth Shifter Shaman rolled up for whoever it is.

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Continue reading »]]> After reading the dungeon craft features on Wizards that prompted me to go through my own setting.  I’ve posted a little bit about the world setting and some more about their specific starting town.

So with that said I thought I’d go through a little more on some things at the local level.  There’s only so much I can post here to avoid spoilers for my players who read this from time to time.

The Fearless Foursome lives in Stark, a town that’s dying in a world that’s dying. Or at least running down.  If you’ve read the Gunslinger series by Stephen King it’s the same feel.  Things are just getting… worn out.

The FF’s are all low level (duh) members of their guilds or of society in general.  The guilds and other organizations have more members than they can deal with as it’s a way to eat and have some sense of belonging which is important to some. Â  They are still paying off their infractions and have been grouped together because they worked so well in the sewer mission together.

The area around Stark is also a dark place.  Orc tribes roam the flats while goblins infest the the hills.  Bandits camp the trails, preying on anyone who doesn’t travel in force.  Of late it’s gotten darker still.  The orcs have gained new powers, powers over death itself in some cases and rather than simply disappearing, some of the overrun communities have shown up as undead, driven by a mindless need for violence and attacking their neighbors.  The goblins have gained new allies as well, their shamans and hexer’s now appearing with pet deamons in tow when they attack.

What is the source of these new powers?  Are the stories of a new leader with purple eyes that’s forging the orcs into a war band larger than any ever seen true?

Have the goblins truly gained access to the subterranean Temple of Kys and unleashed the creatures that were locked within.   Will the humanoids finally grow strong enough to overtake the small specks of civilization that dot the lands?  We’ll just have to see.

The old harbor, especially Overlook Keep is going to be a place to venture for the Four.  Fallen into ruin now, it sits atop the large hill south of the harbor and those that venture near it have reportedly disappeared without a trace or have reported seeing dark shapes flitting through the ruins and hearing screams of pain and anguish.  Probably just typical peasant talk one might suppose.

What of the tomb that was opened deep under the city?  Captain Tarkus of the Watch who led the exploration has vanished it is said after killing his wife and his adjutant who the story says were discovered by the Captain in bed together. Other stories wonder at that as his adjutant was known to prefer members of the same sex in his dalliances.

People still continue to disappear from the city.  Are the goblins they uncovered in the sewers still sneaking in and kidnapping people?  Or is something even more sinister going on?

No traders have appeared on the great trade road leading north west to Price in over a year and only one small part of a large trade contingent has ever returned from that road.  And those had no recollection of their journey or their past and had a pathological fear of the dark.  None of the six lasted long, each killing themselves within weeks of being found stumbling mindlessly down the road to Stark. Â  What dark forces are doing away with those that dare to travel the land between the two cities?  What broke the minds of those that went and returned?

This is going to be the groundwork of the small circle of the world that the players will find themselves in. Â  Unlike some I’ll level the areas I want them to venture into as they do so if they choose perhaps to go to Overlook Keep they’ll find appropriate level opponents and then decide to investigate the stories of the sources of the tribes different levels.

The only place they can’t go is the great trade route right now.  That’s scheduled for higher level encounters and greater dangers.

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Continue reading »]]> I’m having some issues of late with the ‘forced’ racial/class pairings that arise from pairings. Â  Heroes are supposed to be different, not the norm.  But if you want to be the best wizard you can be you take a race with a +2 intelligence.  Want to be all you can be as a strong Fighter?  You’ve got two options only, Dragonborn or human.  And if you take Human you’re giving up one of the bonus stats. Of course there’s the ‘monster’ races like Bugbear, Minotaur, etc but let’s stick with core rather than made up or unreleased or whatever.

The biggest issue I guess I have is if you choose to be a dwarf wizard then you can never ever be as good as a Eladrin wizard.  While as a general rule that might be fine.  But as a specific rule I think a player’s dwarf wizard should have every bit as much potential.

Pigeon holes are a bad thing and just lead to restrictions and twinking/min-maxing.  I’d rather players choose to play a Eladrin or a Tiefling because they want to, not because it makes the best numeric choice for the wizard they also want to play.

And to be honest I’d like to reduce the emphasis on stats.  Anyone remember 1st edition where stats were kind of pointless unless you had them really high or low?

Racial Bonii:

• Dragonborne – +2 Str, +2 Cha
• Dwarf – +2 Con, +2 Wis
• Eladrin – +2 Dex, +2 Int
• Elf – +2 Dex, +2 Wis
• Gnoll – +2 Con, +2 Dex (non core)
• Half Elf – +2 Con, +2 Cha
• Halfling – +2 Dex, +2 Cha
• Human – +2 any
• Minotaur – +2 Str, +2 Con (non core)
• Tiefling – +2 Int, +2 Cha

• CHA bonuses – 4  (Can we say dump stat?)
• Str bonuses – 1(2)  (only one race with a bonus to strength?)
• Int bonuses – 2
• Wis bonuses – 2
• Dex bonuses – 3(4)
• Con bonuses – 2(4)

Well what to do about it you ask?  Good question to which I only have thoughts. The most obvious is turn all the races into +2 any x 2. Â  So you pick the race primarily to be that race and secondarily because of the racial power(s). Â  Or if you’re a munchkin then the opposite.  But you don’t pick it to get that +2 Wis.

But letting the players add +2 to any two stats is a bit powergamey, perhaps more than a bit.  Honestly though they get to add +2 to any stat of their choice right now just by picking race so it’s really that second stat bonus that’s causing some issues for me.

So I think perhaps as a test I might go with as an option,+2 to any one stat and a +1 to any stat that the race is genetically inclined toward. Â  So you could be a Dwarf with a +2 str and a +1 con. Â  Or a halfling with a +2 int and a +1 cha.

I’m sure my players would go for it, hell they almost always play humans anyway, but this would make the choices a little less attractive in the ‘this is the best race for the class” and more attractive to play simply because you want to be a half-orc.

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Continue reading »]]> A simple first draft of the player introduction to their starting city.  It’s far from a nice place but then it’ll fit in the world just fine now won’t it? The players will start out at level 1 which is something I haven’t done in literally a decade or more with Dungeons and Dragons.  Level 1 DnD is so pointless it hurts.  I typically started them out at 3rd and the campaigns were generally over by 12th at the outside.

Stark is a place of little that’s black and white in spite of the name and whole elephant assload of gray.  The vet who had your back in that brawl at the Lost Anchor last night might be working for the guy you owe a lot of money to tomorrow and be coming for you with sharpened blade and heavy hands tomorrow.  Leaving the city you take your life in your hands but a man’s gotta eat and the food is all down at the fisheries at the mouth of the river and the communal farms in the flatlands.  Someone’s gotta move it from where it is to where it needs to be and someone else has to make sure it gets there.

The goblins in the hills, bandits on the trails and pirates in the seas all make this travel exciting to say the least.  But then if things weren’t exciting why would we even be here?

Up the river Danue from an otherwise unimportant bay on the coast of Karn in the territory of West Reach lies the city of Stark.  Although if one was to be honest it would barely qualify as a town compared to a century ago.

Once upon a time it was a city famed for its craftsmen in metals, precious and common alike.  Tiara’s that bore the crossed hammers of Stark have graced more than one king, dictator or despot.  Many a hero has borne a blade forged on the fires of a Stark weaponsmith, enchanted beyond the mundane by a Stark magesmith and the fabled mercenary band, the Sable Crows’ one unflinching requirement on every contract was that their employer outfit them in new arms and armour from Stark where needed.  Now those crowns and jewelry lay dusty in so many safes and strong rooms,  swords lined in racks, covered in oil soaked cloth like so many soldiers waiting for war, for without trade there are none to bear them.

It nestles in what was once the sheltering arms of the Grimpeak mountain range but is now beset from those very same arms as goblinoids constantly harry from the shadows and lurk in the darkness.  Where once multitudes of  manned watchtowers and guard keeps for leagues around the city kept it safe now those lines of defense have been pulled further and further inward as the numbers to man them shrink.

Trade routes are all but gone with the exception of the occasional ship that braves the dangers of the seas to come up the river to dock.  The tall anchor towers that were once rarely without at least one airship attached have had no need for the great mooring rings in over two decades.

Not a month goes by that another farm isn’t attacked or overrun, only those farmers that have banded together for protection into large communal farms have a survival rate other than grim and then only if they can hire away protectors that guard the very city itself.  The fishing fleets that take refuge in the decaying docks and warehouse at the mouth of the river are under constant assault from pirates along 

The city is a dark place where once it was light with an air of hopelessness that once was full of cheer and bustle.  Tradesmen and laborers go about their tasks silently and despairingly.  The stockpiles of silver and gold and steel from the mines has shrunk over the years with little replenishment as few indeed are those who will descend into the long winding tunnels that over the centuries of mining are so deep that some say they connect to the very center of the world, the domain of dark Karjear, god of the dead. Â  But with no one to buy their craftsmanship it is said and with some truth that even the peasants can afford to wear gold in a city that worries more where the next loaf of bread is coming from than how to get the best price for a pair of silver earrings.

Large portions of the city have fallen into partial ruin, home to strays, the poorest of the poor and worse.  Many a person has disappeared without a trace, with few to mourn and none to investigate.

The vast sewers below the city that once carried the wastes of tens of thousands and the output of hundreds of craft shops is now so dangerous that none venture below and during the rainy seasons disease runs rampant through the city as the sewers back up to dump fecund waste into the streets.

In this miasma of defeat, hopelessness and despair the populous gather in their sections and warrens and hives in a forced peace.  Where once those of orcish blood would be shunned, their trade is welcome as are their strong arms.  Elves now rub elbows with halflings and human and nod agreeably at those who still bare the scales of their ancestry for every one of them never know who might hold their lives in their hands in the future.  The haters and those that run solo, purged from the world for it is a world without pity or mercy for those without others to care for them, to protect them and prop them up.

This then is the city of your birth or simply the place you currently call home as you travel your destiny in life.  May somewhere a merciful god find the time to watch over you or you may find the end of your journey shorter than you’d wish for.

Continue reading »]]> I prefer the term Shards of Light as a shard is easily broken and destroyed leaving nothing but a slight crunchy noise under the feet as darkness rolls over it.  Points of Light might grow and expand to merge into one big field of light. Â  Shards rarely go back together and when they do they remain brittle, ready to break apart at the lightest touch in the wrong spot.

This then is the world as it exists today, the last remnants of the sun glinting from the final shards of civilization, broken edges dancing with tiny rainbows of all color before nightfall comes bringing with it all the fear and darkness and uncertainty of the unknown.

Those that prefer the light huddle over the remaining few embers of civilization as lonely souls caught in a blizzard of darkest snow huddle over their last precious sticks of wood while cold winds howl and tear at their fragile shelter.

The biggest cities, once jewels beyond description, have fallen into decay and misery; where once hundreds of thousands bustled and thrived in their lives, bare tens of thousands now trudge out their years.  Large cities hold scant thousands now with entire sections of city fallen into disrepair and squalor. Â  Untold numbers of towns, villages and hamlets have dropped from the face of the world, swallowed by the darkness unending.

The mighty airships that once traversed the skies carrying goods and passengers far above the dangers of the wilderness are seldom seen, the mighty rituals that empower them seldom cast, or perhaps the numbers of those with the power to cast them shrunk too far to do so.

The brave or reckless who still traverse the countryside to bring trade between the cities do so on foot and wagon and ships that fear to leave sight of land.  And their numbers grow smaller every year as each year sees more heading out, packs and holds laden with goods to never be seen again. And each year there are fewer who have the courage to take up the mantle of keeping the lines of trade and communication open.

The fabled city of Aredale, City of the Clouds is no more, the remains like the shattered golden bones of a mighty drake scattered across the grass covered fields of the Unending Winds with only scavengers to fight and snarl for rapidly spoiling fragments.

The black dank waters of the Bitterwater Swamps in the south creep outward a little more each year, eroding and poisoning the adjacent lands. 

With the shrinking of the Light so shrink the lives of those who turn their face to it.  A hand of decades perhaps is all most of those born human manage between squalling birth to whimpering death.  Where once populations boomed, they now decline and fewer are born into this world of darkness and fewer yet survive to adulthood.

Races that once shared an enmity against one another find little strength to hold their hatreds and most realize that only combined efforts hold faint hope of warding off the dark and little hope there is of pushing it back.  All those who turn their face from the darkness walk as equals and uneasy comrades as each shard is slowly worn down till it shatters.

Yes, this then is the world of Karn as it exists today.  Faint welcome you’ll find as you enter but perhaps, just perhaps, you will find the strength of will and heart and arm to help hold off the darkness for a little while longer, to perhaps give ease and succor where exists only pain and suffering.

 

Continue reading »]]> As usual, when Gleemax (official forums) is down then Enworld is down so [fill in the blank here] is also down because the user load is such that any one major forum going down takes out the others with server load.

So while I instead spent a little time shopping for mini’s.  The place with the lowest prices I found was Gamerocket and I was able to pick up a little over a 100 mini’s of various flavors for about $40.  Obviously I went with the cheap ones. I mean seriously, the red dragon is going for $80′ish dollars?  OMGWTF.

Unfortunately there is a dearth of skeleton and zombie types available as singles on any website at anything approaching a moderate price. Â  I also couldn’t find any significant kolbolds, goblins or orcs. Â  A mainstay of PnP gaming for sure.

I’ll let you know how it turns out, if they ship on time, if they ship in good condition etc.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> Found a whip article that got me thinking about how to add one of these things into 4th Edition primarily really just to give it to an NPC or two with some special whippin’ powers.  The discussions go through a lot of options and the one I think I’m going to end up with as something for players to use is along the lines of this:

Whip – Military Melee Weapon
Prof. +3; Dmg. 1d6; Weight 2 lb.; Group: “Light Flail”; Properties: Reach Special: Use Dexterity Modifier when determining to hit and damage bonuses

And then a feat:

Master of the Whip
Heroic Tier
Prerequisites: Dex 13
Benefit: When using a whip increase its damage size to 1d8. Gain +4 to Athletics and Acrobatics checks where you could use a whip to do so.

So anyone with the Light Flail group could use it and get reach.  And anyone that spends a feat on it could get 1d8 + Reach + skill buffs.  So combat wise I don’t think it’s OP’d.  As a basic non-feated weapon the longsword is +3, 1d8 without reach.

And that’s my take on the whip.

Image credits

Continue reading »]]> Here’s another good one from Enworld by ambulacetus that could come into play in a low level encounter where the party has come across a deserted little hamlet at dusk and all that remains is empty hovels and a corn field.  Perhaps they pass the cornfield on the way in and the scarecrow is described as a dark figure standing in the field and they go to examine it.  Either have the attack there and then or just maybe the party decides to camp in the area for the night and visitors come acallling at the deepest dark of the night.  Cawww cawww!

I must reiterate at this time that the 4th edition system like it, hate it or meh it’s just another game system surely does have some interesting monsters and the guidelines and design notes make it fairly simple for most people to come up with fairly balanced creature.  If nothing else Wizards gets a bit of a kudos for that.

While looking for an illustration on this entry (and that’s a pretty damn sweet one ain’t it?) I came across this blog with other nice images.  Feel free to go look.

Possessed Scarecrow Level 1 Solo Brute Medium Shadow Construct XP 500 Initiative -1 Senses Perception +0; Darkvision HP 116; Bloodied 58 (see Vengeance) AC 15; Fortitude 15, Reflex 11, Will 15 Immune Disease, Poison; Resist 5 Radiant, Necrotic; Vulnerable 5 Fire Saving Throws +5 Speed 7 Action Points 2 Rake(standard; at-will) Reach 2; +4 vs. AC; 1d6+3 Double Strike (standard; at-will) The possessed scarecrow makes two Rake attacks. Tainted Breath (Standard; encounter; recharge ) Close Blast 3; +3 vs Fortitude; 2d6+3 poison damage and Push 2;5 ongoing Necrotic damage (save ends) Miss: half damage and no ongoing damage. Vengeance (Free when first bloodied; Encounter) The Possessed Scarecrow’s Tainted Breath recharges, and the Scarecrow uses it immediately. Carrion Call (While Bloodied) At the start of the Possessed Scarecrow’s turn it summons two Carrion Crow allies.  The crows appear within three squares and remain until it is killed or the encounter ends.  The crows act on the turn immediately after the Scarecrow. Special: PC’s do not earn experience points for killing these summoned creatures. Alignment Evil Languages NA Skills Stealth +4 Str 16 (+3) Dex 9 (-1) Wis 11 (0) Con 16 (+3) Int 10 (+0) Cha 15 (+2) Equipment NA

Carrion Crow Level 1 Minion Small Shadow Beast XP 25 Initiative +3 Senses Perception +5 HP 1; missed attack never damages a minion AC 14; Fortitude 11, Reflex 14, Will 11 Speed 3; Fly 6 (Hover) Peck(standard; at-will) +5 vs. AC; 4 Damage Feast on the Wounded (Immediate reaction; adjacent enemy is first bloodied) The Carrion Crow makes a free Peck attack. Alignment Evil Languages NA Skills Perception +5 Str 5 (-3) Dex 16 (+3) Wis 11 (0) Con 13 (+1) Int 4 (+-3) Cha 8 (-1) Equipment NA

Tactics:

The Possessed Scarecrow lives on Fear.  It will haunt a small populated location walking the shadows and inflicting itself upon the people until they’re driven mad with fear.  It loves to appear and reappear to the same person time and time again in more threatening or mysterious fashions until they’re jumping at every shadow.  At that point it will move in for the main feast, sucking down the emotions as the target(s) of its attentions die painful deaths at its hands.

In combat against a party, It will try to use its high speed and action points to swiftly move into the best position against a group where it can afflict the most people with its Tainted Breath attack, knowing that it will likely get to use it again as its bloodied.  Once the party is reeling it will use its Double Strike ability to decimate the casters, targeting anyone that displays an ability to heal damage as a priority.

Once Bloodied it will summon its dark winged minions and direct them to surround what it perceives as the greatest threat.
Carrion Crow Lore
A character knows the following with a successful Religion check.
DC 15 Carrion crows are large malevolent birds, that, while native to the shadowfell, can sometimes be found in the natural They seem to have a particular taste for the flesh of sentient creatures. While they often feed on carcasses, Carrion crows are vicious opportunists and will not hesitate to kill if a meal presents itself. They are merciless in this regard and prefer to pick on already wounded prey.

Possessed Scarecrow Lore
A character knows the following with a successful Religion check.
DC 15 Sometimes certain malevolent spirits from the shadowfell can manifest itself in the natural world by taking control of an inanimate object. These spirits feed on fear, sorrow, and death and are often drawn to hosts associated with negative emotions. When possessing such an object (like a fear inspiring scarecrow) they are particularly dangerous.
DC 20 A possessed object can act as a conduit to the shadowfell and will sometimes allow the spirit to call forth lesser beasts when threatened.

Continue reading »]]> You can find a fencer class over here on Enworld by Khaalis.  It should be a fairly balanced class as it’s a hybrid between the Fighter and Ranger and for the most part just re-uses their powers at each level although there’s quite a bit of new powers listed to help differentiate it a bit.

The Fencer is designed to be a combination of Striker and Defender, higher damage but helps with party protection.  Think swashbuckler, think Robin Hood, Errol Flynn, leaping across the tavern to stick a rapier in someone’s ass just as they’re about to grab Miss Kitty the lady of the evening with the heart of gold.

Might be a good fit for you your players that want something more ‘bouncy’ than the Fighter but not as cut and dried in their roles as the Ranger and Rogue.

Plus it lets me use an image of a of a female swashbuckler.

Image credits

Continue reading »]]> We had another little test encounter last night. Laura and Scott made a Warlord and a Paladin, Tiefling and Dragonborn respectively. I also found out my wife is a serious min/maxing munchkin. We forced her to take non-optimal things. She was raised by wolves apparently or something like that in her Pen and Paper formative years. Our group has barring one exception been a lot more about the cool, nifty, or just peculiar character concepts. They tend to take abilities, weapons, powers etc because they’re cool or fit a theme or just never been done before rather than because if I take this feat, set these stats just so, take this weapon and these powers I can average 2 dps more. Hon it’s all about the cool, not the numbers…

Anyway building characters takes some significant time especially if you’re just familiar with the system and the players aren’t at all so it’s very much a bit of a learning curve still. But we persevered and got the characters statted out. Then I just continued the little Tower encounter with the two of them tagging out the Fighter and the Warlock to go downstairs and clean out the basement.

As they got to the top of the stairs and gazed down into the darkness of the steps leading down we realized that we’d neglected to equip them with equipment. At this point the Paladin kind offered to let the Warlord go first. A quick trip to the store and we’re back with a chain covered Warlord wielding a Maul (Why a maul you ask? Because it’s a 2d6 weapon.) and a Plate wearin’ Paladin with a Battleaxe, hand axe and crossbow.

They make a bundle of burnable stuff, light it and toss it down into the room below. A quick glance around and they see a room littered with dark shapes, barrels, boxes, piles of lumber and the like. Our brave Paladin heard some scuffling noises and was pretty sure that there were more goblins down there.

They descended the steps and out leaped five goblins and initiative was rolled. The group met near one side of the room and the goblins quickly ended up surrounding the Paladin in the first round with one keeping the Warlord busy. As the Paladin was dealing as best as he could a goblin blackblade emerged from the shadows and got in a good strike due to the combat advantage bonus they get.

But our duo was ready to rumble and through the use of the Warlord’s ability to arrange the battlefield they got the Paladin with his back to a wall next to the Warlord negating the upper hand the goblins were getting from flanking and they proceeded to destroy the goblins. The blackblade attempt to move in order to stealth behind some of the debris in the room but the Paladin had a watchful eye on him and his attempt failed. As the goblins dropped like rain (they were mooks), one turned and ran and escaped, another turned and ran and was cut down in its tracks due to attacks of opportunity.

The Blackblade was defnitely thinking stealth might be the better part of valor when a sling bullet hit him in the noggin which decided it for him. He broke and ran for the stairs and caught the hand axe in his left ass cheek as the Paladin let fly.

They gave chase but as they stopped to attack, the blackblade was able to put on a burst of speed and disappear outside from there it was over as there was no way they could have caught him.

All in all the Warlord is a pretty cool class IMO with the way it can direct attacks and shift comrades around although it does require a cohesive front line for some of its abilities to work well. Players scattered willy nilly negate a lot of what the Warlord can bring to the table. The Paladin was what it was, a big hulking tank, filling that front line and keeping the evil at bay.

If I get a chance I’ll do a fictionlized write up as well but don’t hold your breath waiting. My writing skills are atrophied and it’s slow going.

Obviously these two images aren’t quite right but lets see you find a Tiefling Warlord and a Dragonborn Paladin image on short notice.

Continue reading »]]> Found a link to one of the first 4th Edition modules from Dungeon magazine or e-zine or whatever it is these days. Seems to be some folks think it’s a little not good. Others are okay with it. I didn’t see anyone saying it’s great. The biggest problem seems to be implementation and rationale behind some of the encounters?

But hey at least it’s a module you don’t have to write yourself. And if you’re still playtesting then who cares how good it is, you’re still busy looking up rules and trying to get your players acquainted with their powers and such.

Anyway, here’s the link to the pdf for Heathen on Wizards web site. If the link doesn’t work blame them, not me! And of course the image and the pdf and the module and all the contents thereof are I’m sure copyright of Wizards so respect that as usual.

Continue reading »]]> For you’re bemusement and amusement here’s some Skeletal Archer’s I found in the official forums. Excellent job I think by ZakArntson. Makes me want to take some time out to just sit and design monsters.

Anyway these are obviously Artillery as they call them in 4th Edition and also obviously undead. These have some rather interesting powers that might make them a real pain in the ass for a party so some playtesting might be in order before you unleash them in full blown onslaught against your players.

Skeleton Archer Tactics

Like most artillery, skeleton archers like difficult to reach positions with a wide view of the battlefield. Because of their return volley ability, clustering archers is preferable, even if it makes them vulnerable to area effects.

Sample Encounter:

Level 2 Encounter (625 XP)

• 4 decrepit skeletons 100 XP
• 1 skeleton 150 XP
• 3 skeleton archers 375 XP

Skeleton Archer	Level 2 Artillery
Medium natural animate (undead)	XP 125
Initiative +4; Senses +2; darkvision HP 31; Bloodied 15 AC 14; Fortitude 14, Reflex 15, Will 14 Immune disease, poison Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant Speed 6
Longbow (standard; at-will) Weapon
+9 vs. AC; 1d6 + 3 damage; 20/40 range, see return volley.
Unflinching Shot (standard; at-will) Weapon
+9 vs. AC; 1d10 + 3 damage; 20/40 range.
Return Volley (immediate reaction, after an enemy attempts a ranged attack; recharge 5 6) Weapon
If the skeleton has more than 0 hit points after the enemy’s attack, the skeleton and one ally within 2 squares may make a basic ranged attack against any non-adjacent enemy.
Determined to Shoot (immediate reaction, after being hit by any attack; at-will)
The skeleton may shift one square away from the attacker.
Alignment unaligned Languages - Str 13 (+2), Con 13 (+2), Dex 17 (+4), Int 3 (-3), Wis 13 (+2), Cha 3 (-3)
Equipment Chainmail, longbow, quiver with 20 arrows

Continue reading »]]> Original monster idea credit: GrandNagusEli at this thread on the 4th edition forums. Some ideas and modifications based on responses by posters AdventChild, LFK and fauxgami.

For my own preferences I’ve made some modifications in the Attack VS types to things that make more sense to me but my logic could always be flawed and yours might be better for you. I’ve also turned the suggested leap attack into just a Movement power that the giant toad uses to escape in situations When Attacks Go Wrong.

Kind of like when I was playing World of Warcraft (oh boy here come the U bai Gold Now! ads from Google) and I was playing a shaman I had a cycle key that did a War Stomp to daze the things around, turned on Ghost Wolf which I’d specced to be a 1 second cast and then ran like a little girl. Or a big girl given my size. The toad is not a fight to the death kind of creature, he’ll strike at his prey and if he can swallow it and leap the hell away. Now those folks with Slows and Grapples and Immobilizes etc can get a chance to shine. Or at least those powers can.

Anyway here it is. Have fun with it.

Giant Toad Level 3 Solo Brute Huge Aquatic Beast XP 150 Initiative +3 Senses Perception +4; low-light vision HP 180; Bloodied 90 AC 19; Fortitude 22, Reflex 19, Will 16 Speed 6, swim 6 Action Points 2 Bite (standard; at-will) +10 vs. AC; 1d10 + 7 or 2d10+7 against grabbed opponent. Tongue (standard; at-will) Ranged 5; +7 vs. Reflex; 1d6 + 5 damage and target is grabbed. Effect: Str + 2 vs Strength, Success: Target is Tongue Tied. Failure:Target is free. Tongue Tied (immediate reaction, when a target is grabbed) Target is pulled 5 squares and grappled. (save ends) Down The Hatch (standard, encounter) ✦ Reliable +7 vs Strength or Reflex. On hit a medium or smaller target under the effect of Tongue Tied is swallowed and restrained. Target takes ongoing 5 acid damage (no save). Target may make melee basic attacks only with one hand or natural weapons. If the toad dies any creature swallowed can escape as a move action ending that move in the square directly in front of the one occupied by the toad. Deafening Croak (standard, encounter) ✦ Close Burst 2 +5 vs Fortitude, 1d6+5 and target is dazed (save ends) and deafened (save ends). Prodigious Leap (move, encounter) Shift 6 in an arcing straight line. Alignment Unaligned Languages NA Skills Athletics 15 Str 17 (+4) Dex 15 (+2) Wis 11 (+1) Con 20 (+5) Int 8 (+0) Cha 9 (+0) Equipment NA

Tactics
The Giant Toad is a stealthy beast preferring to lie in wait in deep water filled ditches or bogs near trails that are frequented by its prey. And its prey is anything that will fit in its gullet. It will attempt to surprise its victims by remaining concealed in the water with only its eyes above water. Once it sees a suitable target it will attack with its tongue trying to grab the creature and swallow it whole and then escape through the murky depths much to the consternation of any of the prey’s friends that might be present.

If cornered it will use its Deafening Croak to daze anyone near it and then use its Prodigious Leap to bound away and escape much preferring to live to try again another day.

As Giant Toad’s have no lair they tend to have no loot directly but scattered at the bottom of any of place they’ve hunted from over a considerable time will tend to have the bits and pieces of its prey scattered about. This can be hard to find and procure though as the giant toads tend to inhabit places that invariably have deep mucky bottoms.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve very quickly updated the Bard write up by going through and making sure that most of the Daily powers had either a Miss effect or a were Reliable. For those that didn’t know Daily powers can be used once a day and thus if you miss that kinda sucks because they’re your money shot powers that deal the most damage or have the biggest effect for good or bad on your friends or enemies. I also fixed a duped power.

I’m sure there are more issues with the thing and if you find some then please feel free to leave a comment or contact me. Although I’m not sure that I have a contact me on this site to avoid %@*)*%@ spammers.

I’ll take a look around and see if I can find a security enhanced widget or contact page for just such an emergency.

Dennis

Continue reading »]]> Okay so I promised a more in depth of the first play test.  Essentially I had two players for my first character building / play test.  A far cry from the eight at one time I had back in my ‘heyday’. Â  I actually prefer four players and one DM.  But that’s neither here nor there or anywhere to do a Dr. Seuss.

So Temple created two characters a Dwarf Fighter (amusing anecdote, my children call then ‘dorfs’) and a Halfling Warlock with a Fey Pact.  The Fighter went easily enough although we did have to do line items etc. to get through it.  The Warlock we had a little more trouble with because in the class description it reads something to the effect All warlocks get Eldritch Blast. Â  Then each pact has a line that says this grants X, in the case of the Fey it’s Eyebite. Â  Nowhere does it say anything else about starting skills.  So since classes get two At Will powers at 1st level I read that to mean that the Warlock’s starting two At-Will’s are pre-determined. Â  I really should do a Rules question on the forums.  (To make my now standard semi-disgusted joke, “If they’re working.”).

I picked goblins at random and then went through and figured out what experience a normal full party would get and just decided that 225 experience was fine.  Mainly because I wanted 5 mooks and 1 ‘standard’ goblin.  I have great respect for the mook aka Minion from True20 and they didn’t let me down here.

I set the party, all two members of it, outside one of the old watch towers.  They were out ostensibly ‘adventuring’ for lack of a better hook, hey it was a playtest not a campaign starter.  A small group of goblins had taken up residence here in between their raids on travelers.  It consisted of the 5 mentioned Minions and 1 regular goblin.

Our duo went up to the tower and Bessia noticed that the door looked of newer although crude construction.  She warned Ironfist, who really needs another name as there’s no diminutive for that and it’s really awkward to say.  I’m thinking of maybe having her call him Iffy just because it could be punny in character conversation.

Anyway lacking a better idea Iffy smashed down the door with his maul while Bessia ran covering fire.  Oddly enough I didn’t even have the goblins inside roll perception checks.  So they arrayed theirselves in order to get whoever was knock knock knocking at their door.

Once the door was knocked free we had initiative and the order was goblins, Bessia and Iffy.  Goblin minions attacked Iffy.  Goblin ‘boss’ threw javelins.  Iffy couldn’t swing for crap and kept missing while Bessia worked her ‘magic’ on the boss who also couldn’t throw for crap.  The minions ‘shifted’ to keep Iffy surrounded so they got the +2 to attack rolls.

Iffy tried using his Cleave but rolled a miss.  Then he did Sure Strike or whatever it was that let him trade damage for accuracy and was finally able to kill a goblin.  After the boss goblin took his screaming on eldritch fire tumble down from the second story the goblins began shifting around Iffy to go after the caster. Â  Iffy started rolling better although he was taking damage the whole time and was forced to use his Second Wind to recover some health. Â  As the fourth minion dropped, the last minion jumped and ran but Iffy was able to pull his crossbow (minor action) and TWANNGGGGG he rolled a hit on the minion and dropped it.

All in all it went a little slow in looking up things but I can definitely see some potential here for interesting things to happen in the future.

Continue reading »]]> Ironfist hefted the great maul in one calloused hand eyeing the steps leadiing to the second floor of the old Byagan watch tower. It had been decades since it had seen any maintenance and it pained the dwarf to see such good stonework falling into disrepair. He stepped gingerly onto the wooden bridge that joined the stairway to the porch in front of the door. The wood creaked and groaned but seemed firm enough in spite of its apparent age.
Bassia watched as the burly dwarf moved toward the door of the keep. She frowned, the door struck her as a little off, the wood not of the same age as the rest of the tower. She shrugged, different woods age differently. But still…
“Ssssst. This place may not be as abandoned as you might think. Be wary.” she said in a low voice pitched such that it carried only a few feet to the dwarf ahead of her.
“I hear ya lass and I see what you mean.” the heavy bass of the dwarf filtered back to her.
The dwarf stepped onto the porch of the keep. As he let his eyes flick over the door his hands absently swung the heavy crossbow around on its tether and worked the thick steel lever several times to ratchet back the string then clipped a bolt into the groove and locked the trigger assembly. The crossbow thumped reassuringly on his back again and he picked the large maul up.
He used the heavy weapon to push against the door which shifted slightly then hit an obstruction. He glanced back at the little halfing and shrugged, “This is gonna be gettin’ noisy in a few, keep an eye out if ye don’t mind?”
Bassia nodded and turned so she could watch behind them. A loud booming thud echoed from behind her and she winced at the noise as Ironfist hammered away at the door. She tossed a ball of eldritch energy from one hand to another nervously, the blue-green ball crackling with the power of the greater Being that she’d created a Pact with.
After several blows there was a loud crack of wood and she glanced over her shoulder to catch the dwarf looking back at her. The heavy doors hung crookedly in their frame, whatever was holding them closed on the inside now broken.
The dwarf grinned, “After me lass.” With a rusty groan the doors slammed inside at the dwarf’s shove revealing the inside of the tower which was littered with clutter but more importantly five pairs of bloodshot eyes glared back at him as light glinted from the edges of the shortswords leveled at him.
Five goblins stood arrayed around the opening, far enough back to avoid getting hit by the doors. Savage snarls filled the air as they lept forward, swords flashing at the dwarf.
Ironfist grunted with effort as he used the iron banded haft of his maul to block one sword thrust and dodged to the side to dodge another. The others slashed but their blades glanced from the dwarf’s armour.
A loud thud above him drew his eyes forward and up and he saw another goblin on a upper railing across the room and above him. A javelin quivered in the wooden beam framing the top of the doorway.
“Lass! Get the shooter above! I’ve got this dance down here!” the dwarf shouted as he bashed his maul into the swords thrusting at him.
Bassia knelt to get a better view into the room and up at the goblin on the railing. She swung an arm back and forward and a sparking ball of blue green lanced out trailing sparks that lit the interior with a dim glow. The goblin screamed in pain as the ball impacted on its head and engulfed it in burning flames.
“Nice one girl! Aww crap that hurt!” Ironfist shouted then reeled as two swords sliced into his body from opposite sides. The goblins were swarming around him like a pack of wolves, their swords flicking at him from every angle. The dwarf spun to the left and took a moment then smashed his maul into the throat of one and it flipped backwards off off the steps, its head flopping around, neck broken.
Another javelin slammed into the door as Ironfist pushed a goblin back into it shifting it seconds before the javelin hit. As he parried another sword down to spark off the stone of the steps another javelin flashed past his head.
“Uh Bassie, I don’t wanna be rushin’ you but a little help if you would!?” the dwarf grated out.
“I’m working on you bloody great lummox!” the halfing snapped back and loosed another blast then a savage grin flitted across her face as the goblin tossing the javelins slumped forward its head a mass of charred and blackened flesh and tumbled through the railing to land on the floor below.
The dwarf clenched his teeth as a sword slammed into his armour, “That’ll be leavin a bruise ye pox ridden pasty ass faced shit eater!”
His bloody maul swung around in a whistling arc, an arc that included one of the goblin’s skulls which exploded in a mass of blood, bone and brains. He shoved another back to get a bit of breathing room and even as he did two of the goblins slipped past him on each side.
“I be thinkin’ not me pretties, not on my watch!” Ironfist swore and spun to hammer his maul in the back of another’s head although it left him defenseless to the one still in front of him. Steel hammered painfully into his shoulder, bending the scaled plates protecting it.
Bassia shouted, “Down!” and as the dwarf ducked for an instant she loosed a blast of power into the goblin behind him burning a hole into its chest exposing its beating heart. She ducked herself a second later as a sword flashing over her head.
The great maul scraped for a second on the steps as Ironfist brought it up in a powerful swing that missed as the last goblin leapt backwards off the steps to land below with a gasp. It scrambled in the plant growth for a second then all that could be seen of it was a pair of flying feet and its retreating back.
“Oh tis a fast scamperin’ lil scuttlefish ye are!” Ironfist breathed as he dropped his maul at his feet and yanked his crossbow around. He breathed out then lead the running goblin slightly and then the crossbow shuddered in his hands as the powerful bow arms snapped forward. He nodded to himself as the bolt slammed into the goblins back and disappeared up to the fletching. The goblin crashed forward in a boneless sprawl.
The sounds of battle faded away as the the two stood back to back on the steps. As they caught their breath, the halfing asking quietly, “How bad is it?”
“Dinnae fash yourself lass, I’ve had worse from me brothers. A few bruises is all.” The dwarf listened intently but heard nothing over the faint susurration of the breeze coming in from the south. Somewhere to the southeast came the faint cry of a white feathertail.
Bassia let the power of the Fey slip away and her hands lost their glow as she stood straight. “I think we’re clear.”
Ironfist nodded then spoke, “Aye for now. I can see yon chamber ahead and there be nothing big enough for one of these things to be hidin’ behind and the upper floors fallen in except for that railing. Still might be something down below though. Usually a barracks down there on the bottom floor and a place to store gear.”
The halfling jerked her head in a brusque nod, “Then let us see shall we?” Her fingers closed on the smooth shaft of the short spear she carried and twirled it in a spinning move lit with trails of green sparks.
“Show off. Ladies first this time?” he smiled with an arched eyebrow.
The halfing snorted, “Since when ever have you seen me act the lady? Get your ass in gear, daylights burning and I want to be camped with something on the fire before dark tonight.”
“Aye then.” the dwarf said as he reloaded his crossbow. “Let us be about our business.”

Continue reading »]]> Well we had our first little playtest of 4th Edition. Temple and I went through the process of building a couple of characters using the standard method of stats of 16,14,13,12,11,10. The first character he built was a Dwarvish Fighter that followed the path of the Great Weapon, in this case a Maul. He carried a Heavy Crossbow as backup. I’m giving it the stats of +2, 2d6, 20/40, and reload is a move equivalent action. This is a first run and I might end up making it a Superior weapon but right now it’s just a Simple. We’ll see how that plays out, if it ends up abused it’ll get its string cut in some fashion. But realistically it’s big, it’s heavy, and the damage feels right compared to the others. Perhaps after playing we’ll figure out why Wizards decided to not put such a thing in but added a Hand Crossbow which has zero benefit over the simple sling for the majority of classes and in fact is better in several ways.

The second character was a Halfling Warlock with a Fey Pact given that Fey really fit the Halfling side. There’s still some question we have on power choices at first level that I’ll have to post on the 4E forums. Assuming they’re up and working. The Halfing went with a Spear of all things and is foregoing any ranged implements other than her own powers.

The initial encounter was the duo was outside the city, well town, okay large village these days and found one of the old watchkeeps which is essentially a single tower about 30′ a side. There is a ramp up to the door at the second story and the tower is approximately 35′ high including the crenelations. It’s seen better days by far, it’s been over a decade since military cutbacks have seen most of the watchkeeps abandoned. The outer wall, a wooden pallisade is almost complete gone and the tower itself is showing signs of neglect.

I’ll do a more indepth write up later but to sum up the warlock and the warrior found several goblins inside and were able to defeat them, in no small part due to the ineptitude of the leader inside. The minions were pretty sweet but then I’ve played True20 and have experience with minions aka Mooks.

The combat was more interesting for me as a DM with the goblin’s abilities and the same goes for Temple. Laura was also cutting labels (long story, don’t ask) and just Eldritch Blast’ed for the encounter.

Anyway, our initial bit of playtest shows some pretty fun potential. Again for all the haters out there, while you might have reason to hate, if you don’t at least get a the quick start thing that’s floating around and give the system a try you’re doing yourself a disservice. It’s like driving past one water park to go to the same one you’ve been going to because the new one has a different colored slide.

Continue reading »]]> Well here it is the first version of the 4th edition Bard. It’s based in very large part on Saric’s post on the 4th edition forums which are constantly broken so I can’t get the direct link now but there’s a link in the pdf that goes to him and from there you could look up the original posting. Assuming the %@*)*!) forums are working.

Gleemax officially sucks IMO. And I work as LIII IT support for a very large public firm with a web presence that sees a few million hits a month so I do have some basis with which to base my they suck opnion on. I’ll give them benefit of the doubt (okay not really) that they simply didn’t anticipate the volume they’d be getting but frankly the volume is still pretty damn small all things considered.

Update: Forums are kinda sorta working albeit intermittently so here’s the original if you’d prefer that.

I have made a few changes to the original posting, changed the way some of the powers worked for flavor although I’m going to go through and do some more of that, for instance the use of the old school spells like Grease and Otto’s Irresistable Dance bugged me a little. I fixed some cut and paste errors and change the category of a couple as well.

There’s also an issue in that this class has about 12-15% more powers than some of the other classes that I counted out like Cleric and Fighter etc so that might need to be adjusted or least try and get rid of some of the overlap? I think also that I may have moved or least made a note to move some of them into another level either to balance out the level load outs or because they felt a little over or underpowered to me.

Understand this is all based on reading the thing and not playing and play testing of course is the real crux of the issue.

Anyway, it’s here if you want it.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve started doing some more indepth looking at the numbers for the classes with a primary eye toward balancing the Bard class I mentioned earlier.  I’ve run some preliminary numbers on the official classes and just flat out there can be about a 10-15% difference in the number of total powers.  For instance one class might have 30 encounters and 40 dailies and another might be vice versa.  Given the power difference between encounters and dailies a class with 25% more dailies seems like it might be a little more powerful?

I was also looking at the Warlord and that class I think is deceptively low powered but almost every power grants bonues to the allies and grants the allies free attacks.  So essentially most of the warlords powers grants two or more attacks, usually with bonuses.  That can be pretty significant compared to the others.

I’m going to lean or taint the bard class towards more of a diplomat / spy / epic storyteller thing.  They can be the village storyteller or the king’s entertainer or Bond, James Bond, spy extraordinare.

Continue reading »]]> This is a little template I came up with to fit a little module I’ve written called Darkness Rises.  It’s actually a play test module that’s designed to help familiarize me and mine with 4th edition’s style, mechanics and overall feel but it could be expanded into a series of mini’s as well, there’s some hooks in it that can be used that way.

Anyway there’s a dark place somewhere inhabited by a few remnants of a very old race called Riders.  They’ve been hunted to extinction by the heroes of the past and are thought to be locked away forever and ever.  But as is always the case Evil can never be extinguished, only pushed back for a time.  Darkness always finds a way to come again.

A person who’s been taken over by a Rider is said to be Tainted and that taint grants the ridden some abiltiies beyond that of the normal.   Riders use the Tainted to spread chaos and misery in their back trail, using their hosts up to find another one as needed.   Riders prefer to entice and entreat their hosts to accept them at which point they subsume the hosts knowledge and memories.  If they have to fight their way into a host there’s usually extensive mental damage to the brain and the Rider has much less material to work with and a much harder time to pass as the host depending on how far spread the damage is.

In some cases Tainted can be created that aren’t controlled directly and these as well gain some dark powers as well as losing a lot of their higher reasoning powers.  As a result the uncontrolled Tainted rarely last long as they degenerate into a creature controlled by emotions and low cunning at best.  Many a ‘lunatic’ is actually nothing more than a new Tainted.

Tainted is a template you can add to any creature in 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons and is show below.

Tainted Template:

The Tainted have been infused with the vile essences of the Rider and their will and nature is no longer their own but instead they have become puppets of the controlling presence. A creature that has succumbed to the Taint can only be destroyed, its own aura, presence, soul if you will has been utterly destroyed and in spite of what hopeful friends and relatives might wish, death is the only release for their mortal remains.

Tainted in general do not have long life spans as the creature controlling has no regard for the form but uses it up before moving to another one. The controller does have access to the memories and knowledge of the host and will use that knowledge to help it spread chaos and misery in it’s wake.

In some cases a Tainted creature can be created that’s uncontrolled by proximity to a source of daemonic energy or by consuming tainted food or water. In these cases the creature will have a low cunning and be primarily interested in food. Such creatures rarely last long undetected and are easily dispatched by stealth or range.

 

Senses: Darkvision

Defenses: +2 AC

Resist: Necrotic 5

Vulnerable: Radiant 5

Saving Throws: +2

Action Point: 1

Hitpoints: As normal for creature.

Powers:

Tainted Blast (necrotic, standard, encounter, recharge 6)

Ranged 5/10, +10 vs Reflex; Target takes 1/4 of Tainted creatures hit points in damage and target is dazed and takes -2 penalty to attack roll (save ends) and Tainted creature takes 1d10 damage.

The Tainted creature vomits forth a greenish purple spew of energy at one targeted creature. The power of the blast is equal to 25% of the Tainted creature’s maximum hit points and it takes 1d10 damage from expending this energy from the stresses upon its own flesh.

Continue reading »]]> The community of course has already started filling in some of the gaps in the monster manual.  Some pretty good material in here as well of course as some things that need to be toned down or powered up but still it’s a great resource to start throwing in some cureballs to your players especially if they also have the books and are going through them.  I say that because frankly while the overall ‘flavor’ of most of the bad guys is the same, their implementation with the new powers and effects based combat system in 4th edition makes even the oldest most familiar all new again.

And it’s not that it’s ‘empty’ per se but the one book has to cover 30+ levels of moonsters so each level there’s a distressing few monsters to toss at your parties if you’re the GM.  Until the Monster Manual 2 comes out then community driven collections will act a lot like Jello brand gelatin and fill in those empty nooks and crannies in your gaming belly.

Of course as a GM I tend to do a lot of humanoid based mobs and just give them appropriate classes.  But now with 4th edition I don’t have to worry about classes.  I just give the mob what powers I want that are in line with the appropriate level skill challenge and then we can move on to the adventure so from that perspective 4th edition is simpler, faster and better and even the haters would have to agree with that statement.  To wit, in 4th edition the dm can come up with a more appropriate legal opponent for the party to face. And it also saves the community ‘time’ because they can’t go back and nit pick, “But that monster has 7 levels of this and his stats are thus so he can’t possibly have +5 on that [fill in the blank]!”

Sorry, I have issues with people who are fanatic haters of any thing and I’ll keep chanting the old mantra, “If you don’t like [Macs, PC’s, Windows, Linux, DnD, 3rd Edition DnD, 4th Edition Dnd, Fighters, Volvo’s, insert whatever is appropriate here for your argument.” then don’t use it if you can and deal with it if you can’t.

Continue reading »]]> Found a very well done Bard first draft on the 4th edition dungeons and dragons forums. Â  Gonna go through it and make sure it’s balanced compared to the others and then probably change some things around and make it a bit more musical and storytelling in nature.  Probably make more sustain type powers and the like and reduce the need to instruments or make them more for the daily type powers.

After haunting the forums for a few days I must say there’s some good ideas out there as well as a lot of critics and people with critical eyes.  In some cases they do find issues with the Rules As Written but in others they’re not seeing the whole picture or missing the rules that dictate why something is or is the way it is.

I’m going to try and get some characters made this weekend for play test purposes.  I’d also like to get at some point a random dungeon thing sketched out with enough encounters and traps.  I think that 4th edition would be a candidate for having a board game made out of it like Descent or some of the other ones with the powers and the like.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve gone to the trouble or joy depending on your viewpoint of writing a racial for the missing Half Orc in 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. It’s based in no small part off a couple of posts on the official forums under House Rules. I’ve taken those ideas, expanded and fleshed them out and come up with a race that’s a merge of human and orc that I like. The original poster’s idea for the racial just struck a chord in me and I can easily see the race ending up that way rather than the stereotypical stupid fighter types that seems to be the way they’re portrayed and played.

Anyway I’m posting the PDF here for download if you’d like to take a look at it and I have in fact credited the two posters in the PDF as well as the creator of the image I’m using. Since there was no fair usage rules on their site and frankly given the amount of traffic that will see it I didn’t see a reason to contact them about it. That may be wrong of me but if they don’t like then I’ll happily take it out of the pdf.

This is pretty close to a final version for me as it fits my ideas of a cool direction to take the half-orcs and the only changes I’ll end up making is if some things end up over powered. I still have some questions on the racial power as written but only a thorough play testing will tell if that plays out or not.

Anyway if you’re interested then download and view the PDF file.

Continue reading »]]> In an attempt to get started with playtesting the new Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition I’m writing a little test module.  It’ll be for two or three characters mainly because it’s going to be for smaller more technical testing than serious roleplaying endeavor.

I’m toying with calling it Darkness Rises because in this case that’s what’s gonna happen.  Clever eh?

The setting is some generic town, one large enough to have a sewer system underneath.  The synopsis is the party is a small group of rule breakers, they’ve gotten in trouble for something and have been assigned community service, in this case to help clean the sewers of… well sewage.  During the course of their cleaning they’ll run into a couple of minor encounters and then uncover a  much older tunnel that will lead to interesting things.

It’ll have a variety of things and help test out most of the systems in place, skill rolls, traps, combat, magic, resting although not so much of that as there will be a time constraint on the party before search parties start looking for them and those will take over the explorations. And it has a couple of hooks built into it for further adventuring escapades.

With 4th Edition I really want to get out of the “Fight, rest, explore, fight, rest, explore.” that the earlier edition’s and CRPG’s / MMOG’s have instilled in people.  I believe the changes in the healing and powers will help a lot with this.  Enough anyway that interuptions can push it the rest of the way.   IMO a party shouldn’t even consider resting unless it makes sense for the situation in terms of story or schedule or because they’re low on resources.

What I’d really like to have but I simply can’t justify the expense is building a touch based gaming table.  It’s emminently possible with the open source software out there along with a cheap web cam.  The expensive part is the projector and one o those would several hundred dollars especially one with a short throw and a decent resolution output. Â  But with that I could program up in Visual Studio, hell or even Flash a little app or two that could be used to keep track of things like healing surges, power uses, hit points and more importantly for some of my players a way to roll dice and not be able to cheat at it.  The cheating just to be cheating is INCREDIBLY fucking annoying pardon my language.  As is the lack of interest in anything going on unless it involves dice rolling and usually only if it involves personally rolling dice. Annoying to the point where I really have little interest in attempting to sit in the GM’s seat most of the time.  Okay that got a little specific so let’s regress a bit. Â  Or repress?  Whichever or neither.

A friend of mine, the owner of morpg.info has put in an ass load of work on creating ‘power cards’ for all the classes, well up to level 19.  These fit four a sheet on standard paper and you can print them out on card stock and hand them out to your players so they can visibly ‘tap’ or otherwise indicate when a power has been used.  They’re extremely well done and he’s working on backs as well so you could duplex them and have a pretty killer set of cards. Â  Get them laminated and you could also write notes on them in vis-a-vis markers (aka wet erase) as well.   Pretty sure he can’t release them to the general public but I can assure they’re pretty damn cool.

Okay this is enough as it is.

Piece out.

D

p.s. yes I know it’s mispelled.

Continue reading »]]> Well I’ve had a chance to look at the 4th Edition rules of Dungeons and Dragons and firstly for you all Haters, FFS give it a rest, yes it’s a new edition but you know what?  All those books you’ve already bought are still yours, you can still use them if you want to to run your existing campaigns.  You only have to switch if you want to, it’s completely voluntary.  Sorry but seeing the “I’ll never use/buy this!” and “I just spent thousands of dollars on x.x version!?  WTF?!” posts is a little puzzling.

Okay before I got off on my rant, yes 4th seems influenced (tainted if you fall into some camps) by MMOG based powers and effects but you know what that ain’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a different thing.  And FYI I’ve been playing since the original boxed set circa 1978/79.

Okay another mini-rant, honest this will be, probably the last one, for everyone going they’re turning it into a combat engine only, they’re getting rid of the role in role playing game.  Hey genius, you need rules to role play?  No, you don’t, that’s human interaction between the characters you create and the ones your DM creates and can be based on any mechanic you wish, its precisely the combat engine that needs rules and mechanics.  The rules have been simplified yes, that’s a good thing, combats that take up 3 hours to work out should go away and I think you’d role players would be even more for that since if your spending 3 hours a combat it’s time you’re not roleplaying.  Unless, “I slash the orc with my sword.” is roleplaying.

Okay, sorry I just had to start that with okay since it’s become a trend in this post, let’s get back to 4th Edition.

Now every character gets to pick from a set of powers as they level up and they activate these powers during play just like a set of powers in a MMOG.  And some of those powers have a cooldown of once per encounter, and others a cooldown of a day.  Even casters no longer have spellbooks per se, they have the ability to cast powers which equate to the same thing.

This helps standardize things across the board for classes so new players can a lot more easily shift between the fighter, “Just play a fighter they’re easy, you just roll to hit and if you hit you roll damage.” and the wizard, “Okay you have to spend time each day memorizing a subset of the spells you have in your spell books so you have to plan out your day, what do you think you’re going to need?”.  Remember those conversations when you managed to pull in a new member to the game and how befuddled they looked as they looked at all the paperwork to run a character?

So we have classes that have MMOG or perhaps a Magic The Gathering would be more appropriate feel to them, I actually plan on creating cards with player powers on them that they’ll ‘tap’ or flip upside down/over to indicate they’ve used them and they’re in cooldown.

The races are all universally buffed, not nerfed.  No more of this +2, -1, -1 crap per race for stats.  And don’t get me started on the Drow.  Over powered much? All races get equally buffed now two +2′s to stats or one +2 and some other benefit that should work out to something as equal.

All attacks now use a standard mechanism and there is now a considerable variety.  Fireballs for instance are an Intelligence versus Reflex attack to hit.  All standardized so combat is not a case of fumbling for rules or having to look up spell descriptions which were far from consistent.

Stat blocks are much much cleaner for monsters.   I can easily see making cards for those too and the DM just having an encounter ‘deck’ for that evening at hand to make it easy to see what the creature can do.  And most creatures get ‘specials’ which *gasp* helps to make combat a little more interesting even at first level than:

Temple: I swing at the kolbold, I hit.  It’s dead.  *yawn*
DM: Okay another steps up to fill that spot and swings at you.  It misses.
Temple: I slash at that one, hit, it’s dead.

Now you might run into a Kobold Slyblade:

Temple: I swing at the kolbold, I hit.  It takes 3 damage.
DM: The kobold you’re attacking deftly parries your attack causing it to hit one of the kobolds at its side and then shifts to a flanking spot on you (Uses Sly Dodge to redirect a hit to a minion as an Interrupt, then uses Shifty to move one square and gain Combat Advantage) and with a intricate flourish buries its swords in your side and opens a bleeding wound.  (Kobold activates Twin Slash, 5 Damage a Turn until saved against).
Temple: What the hell!?

Kolbolds don’t look quite so “Great another horde of kolbolds to wade through.” anymore do they?

There are a lot of little things that are designed not to ‘dumb it down’ but to streamline it.  Ranged weapons now have two ranges, short and long.  No counting out squares and trying to figure out what the range increment is.  A small thing, does not reduce the ‘felt’ realism and shaves a few seconds off of a combat round.

Anyway if you’re not just opposed and hating it because they had the gall to release another version so quickly after 3.5 which was released so quickly after 3.0 then give it a look.  But look at it with open eyes and understand it’s not the same game.  It has a lot of the same flavour but it’s not the same game and you’ll do well to consider that when you’re looking at it.  Just pretend if you must that this is a brand new gaming system, which it is, but one that has elves and dwarves and dragons and tarrasques and all that.

And of course if you disagree feel free to, that’s your right.  And if you want to boycott it or Wizards or whatever, again by all means.   The books are there if you WANT to try them, they’re not there to force you.  You do NOT have to have the latest and greatest to have a great time.

But if the rules and complexities of combat and spell casting and the inconsistencies of the previous iterations of Dungeons and Dragons are slowing down your game play and you find yourself trudging through combats to get back to the roleplay because they’re dull and uninspired then perhaps, just perhaps, 4th Edition might be for you.

Continue reading »]]> Well it didn’t go well this time. Our party recovered and went into the iron spike.  There they rather handily defeated the various encounters on the way up the sipke, that being the only option for them.  The bad guys for the most part weren’t close to being up to the task of stopping our intrepid force.  They had an interesting encounter with Death and a Deck of Many Things.  Unfortunately I didn’t have a deck of regular cards so that caused a bit of a scramble.  And even then I didn’t do it right so most of the party got off pretty easily.  Ghimli gained some nice cards though, a shower of gems, 50,000 exp.

But on the downside Ghimli had his alignment changed to Lawful Evil and lost the support of his god. This left him with only his current memorized list of spells.  On the plus side he had a mostly full spell list.

Have you noticed there are a craptastic amount of statues in this module?  This gets ‘worse’ the farther you get into it.

Our valiant warriors eventually made it to the top of the tower.   Where they met br’r boss.  An Encounter Level 16.   Even worse it was of course a cleric.   I even had his EL 14 secretary out on break and it was bad.

The cleric started throwing maximized Flame Strikes and Disintegrations and on top of that had a 36′ish AC.  What damage the party was able to do was taken care of by Heal’s and Cure Critical Wounds.  There’s a reason I normally play a cleric in CRPG’s based on DnD.   Most overpowered class in the game.

The first few rounds started bad and went worse.   Party members started dropping while the Cleric just got lower on memorized spells.

With enough whining and crying Ghimli and Jo somehow managed to beat a Hastened cleric downstairs to the doors into Leonid’s Mansion rooms on the second or third floor and go inside.  Ghimli then created a Wall of Stone to block the entrance.

While they were trapped in there the cleric ressed his Draganasaurus’s, called in a couple of Elder Elementals and has them playing cards just outside the door waiting for the cleric and the sorcerer to get hungry enough to come out or do a Donner Party.

Continue reading »]]> Well, our fearless quad once again entered the fray.  They decided to let bygones be bygones and moved on.  Once in the dungeon I fast tracked them through what are known in the MMOG world as trash mobs.  Again, seriously, 6 1st level human guards, in the part of the module that should be around 8-10th level?

I abstracted through most of the area between the main entrance, down to the Temple of Air, and then back to meet up with the Temple of Fire.  I ran a couple of encounters.  The creatures that used their sonic attacks to destroy metal were funny.  For me anyway.  They kicked the guys ass in the Temple of Air fairly easily.

After running back to town to sell their meagre loot and buy more equipment to replace what they’d lost they went back and headed inward toward the Inner Fane.   They came in through the Earth Door and just inside there was a elder Earth Elemental which ended up killing Gimmlet and Gnatsum.  But Jo in her invisible suit and Ghimli using his now might as well be permanent Air Walk killed it.

They went further in and met the two assassin’s both of which almost killed someone with their Death Attack but the party made their saves and thus didn’t die.  At this point in time.

Next up was the high priest who dropped a blade barrier on the party and forced them to retreat.  14d6 is nothing to laugh at even for Gnatsum.  While he held up the party the HP disapeared deeper into the dungeon.

Resting up in the ever popular Rope Trick they recuperated while they waited for the blades to disapear and then continued on where they entered the main chamber.  The cold was more annoying than debilitating.

Through the use of a stream of Divinations and Auguries they bypassed the 6 doors and the questions and entered the center of the volcanic crater.  The 3 waves of wights even 8HD wights were pathetic.  Between Fireballs from Jo and Flamestrikes from Ghimli almost no wights managed to reach the party.

They reached the center pillar and tried to get through the door at which point it started blasting away at them with spells.  This was a very puzzling encounter to me as there seems to be no way to get past that door other than breaking it down.  It has too many mad skillz to be able to tell who should be let past that trying to trick it seems impossible.

The Draganasaurus’s though were quite quite effective.  With a +24 for their bite and +19 for their claws and the amount of damage each attack did they decimated the party.   Gnatsum, Ghimlet and Jo’ died although they did manage to take down one of the guardian half dragon, half t-rexe’s and almost kill the other one.  With the last one extremely close to death the Door called it home to heal it back up.

Meanwhile Ghimli came down out of the clouds and Raised Dead on Jo’ who then used her Rope Trick to give them a safe(er) place to recover from the debacle.

So this episode Gnatsum and Gimmlet died twice, Jo died once.  At at half a level’s worth of experience per death and a Fort vs DC20 or lose a point of Constitution they’re weaker than they were when they got this far.

And with no way out except to keep going forward it’s going to be interesting….

Continue reading »]]> Session 12 got interesting.  Our party went back to the Fire Temple area and once again didn’t do as well as they’d of liked.  They did manage to defeat a really big fire elemental.  Oh let me back up, on the way to the Temple of EE they were ambushed by a mage while sleeping and much outrage was had. Â  The mage got away, hard to deal with an Improved Invisibility’ed, Fly’ed, mage when you can’t give chase and he’s got the whole world to flee to.

Okay back to the EE.  The party went back inside and found and delt with a huge, really huge, fire elemental that the high priestess had summoned.  Ghimli turned the fire undead so they were no threat and everyone beat on the elemental for awhile except for Gnatsum who ran for the door on the other side.  Once he found out that he simply couldn’t force it open (DC 37) he turned back.

The high priestess joined in on the fight and dealt Flame Strikes on groups as best she could and dropped one on Jo’ who was also under an Improved Invisibility spell but really when magic missiles start launching from mid air then it’s obvious that there’s someone in the general area and a 40′ flame strike doesn’t have to be all that exact.

Gnatsum went after the high priestess and ended up Blind and Deaf for his trouble after failing his saving throw.  He staggered around awhile swinging at the air while the priestess simple walked several feet off to the side and continued nuking people.

Jo’ switched to the priestess while Ghimli and Ghimlet continued with the elemental.  After taking some damage the priestess ran across the flames to the center alter and unleashed the eye and the tentacles and then was either killed and fell into the flames or simple rolled off into them, no one’s sure.

The elemental finally died as the black writhing tentacles kept growing longer.  The party had to split up with Jo’ finally getting Gnatsum’s attention by hitting him with a rope at about the same time the blindness spell wore off and he barely escaped the tentacles.  Ghimli and Gimlette escaped back out the front door while G and J went down a side passage.

G and G explored their way to G and J finding a dragon statue with big green eyes (emeralds) as well as two prisoners imprisoned in a torture area (The Play Room).   In the room that G and J were waiting in was a Evil black stone that tried to entice Ghimli to pick it up.  As far as anyone knows he didn’t do it…

They went back and rescued the prisoners one of who had been driven insane after months of torture and was pretty much a total mind burn and the other was an fairly recent capture as he put it and was a gnome.

They decided to head out to civilization to get the prisoner’s away.

On the way back the gnome stabbed Jo’ who was standing guard duty in the Rope Trick and instantly paralyzed her.  The gnome grabbed a pack that contained a book bound in human flesh they’d found in the dragon statue and vanished into the night.  The next morning when everyone woke up they cured Jo of her paralysis and after telling them what happened Ghimli decided to kill the other prisoner.

Well Gnatsum (NG) and Jo (CN) decided to not let that happen.  Gnatsum stuck in a hard place decided to grab the prisoner and leap down from the hole and run off.  Ghimlet followed him and then Ghimli jumped down as well giving chase.  Jo’ peppered his back with magic missiles as he ran out and Ghimli returned to threaten her then headed out into the woods in a random direction.  With everyone gone Jo divided up the loot and took what she could and stashed the rest.   Gimlet came back and got his stuff and Ghimli eventually returned and go his stuff.

Meanwhile Gnatsum’s ground eating long barbarian legs got him to town ahead of everyone and he had a Greater Restoration case on the human and set him out on his own with a handful of gold.

Jo’ showed in town and is walking around with Improved Invisibility cast on herself almost permanently.

Gimlet showed up and is searching through town for the others.

Ghimli finally wandered back to town and immediately headed for the bar and hasn’t been seen since.

Continue reading »]]> As usual the party had headed back to town to rest up and gear up.  While in town Gnatsum requisitioned a +2 Flaming two handed sword from the local mage-smith.  He paid his entire stash of gold as a down payment and promised to come back with the rest when it was done.

The party trooped back to the caves of EEEVVIL.  This time well supplied and fortified for their trip.  They arrived back at the major summoning circle without issue at which point someone did something that ‘crossed the line’ of the circle and ta dah, a daemon was summoned.  A massive nasty assed deamon it was too.  DR of +3/30 so Gnatsum and Ghimlett were both completely ineffective at least at the start.  Jo of course was dealing out damage left and right with her magic and Ghimli did his fair part too.  Then Ghimli was reminded by yours truly that he had a War Domain spell that would give a weapon a +1.  This was cast upon Gnatsum’s Sword of Earth and with the +3 enchantment.  Since the description only says the +1 doesn’t stack with a masterwork and doesn’t say anything about not stacking with a magic weapon and because otherwise they were going to die I gave it to them.

During the fight Gnatsum and Ghimli both lost their armour to the daemon’s spell rip shit asunder attack.  Although the description didn’t have any loot for them I felt that wasn’t right since they’ve not had a ton of loot anyway in the last 4 levels so I rolled some random loot on the tables for them.  They ended up with a +3 longsword that they gave to Ghimlet (notice how his name keeps changing spelling?), a Glove of Storing, a potion of some kind that I don’t remember and a Ring of Forceshield.

They gathered their loot up and headed back to town to buy some new gear.  Gnatsum also stopped in at the mage-smith and ordered an upgrade on his sword to a +3 given the circumstances of the fight they’d just had.  A deal was struck and with the first deposit and the inclusion of the Sword of Earth they were both happy with the deal.  This added another two weeks to the process though and it’ll be awhile before it’s done.

Back into the caves they went and continued their trek around the outer ring.  They came across the Fire area where they out of bandwidth destroyed several encounters. (Seriously WTH is up with 4 hit point encounters in an area designed for levels 8-14?)

They moved to the main fire area where they found the Fire Temple.  There they managed to release the ‘big eye’ to come looking at them but Gnatsum was the only one to not save against it’s EVIL gaze and he lost a level and much whining was heard.

While the party was dealing with Fire Stone undead the temple cleric came in through another route and started Flame Striking the party who were tied up with the burning dead.  But gradually they were able to shift damage to the cleric and in the end forced her to dive into the flame pit to get away from them.   With huge tenticles coming forth from the fire altar they decided that it was a good time to retreat.

Back in town Gimmlet had earned enough exp to level up and is now a warrior of massive thews.  Although Brandon is finding the limitations of those short little dwarvish legs to be a bigger limitation than he thought at first.

Continue reading »]]> Session 10 came and went.  In attendance were Gnatsum, Jo, Ghimli, Ghimlet and after Ghimlet’s untimely death Alhman being run by Ghimlets player.

As usual we started off in town and proceeded forth toward the ToEE.  The party used the side entrance they’d found from the Water Naga’s hangout to enter the system and avoid any reinforcements that might have arisen earlier. Â  They proceeded onward around the ring.  By this time you’d think anything that would have heard them coming would be running for dear life. 

They explored the water temple first, a fight that went really well for them.  Not.   Since the area was obviously forwarned I had someone having had already summoned a water elemental using the two horns so it was lurking.  They went back to the Sea Hag’s area to get the boat.  With Ghimli Air Walk’ing they went toward the temple platform at which point the three Skum in the water rose up and launched bolts from their cross bows.  That fight wasn’t too bad with Gnatsum spending a lot of time in the water fighting them.  With the -4 on die rolls from the EVILness of the area for good players and the -4 for fighting underwater it was a longer than normal fight.  Then the Huge Water Elemental woke up and surged up out of the water. Â  Ghimlet and Ghimli both took to the air using Air Walk (spell and potion) to fight the water elemental while Gnatsum and Jo both dealt with the Skum.

The elemental with its huge melee bonuses to hit pulverized the two dwarfs although it didn’t quite kill them with the use of Ghimli’s healing spells.  Â 

Once the Skum were taken care of Gnatsum pulled himself out of the water although not without risk as he accidently reached into the black water pool but he saved so took no ill effects.  With typical orcish thinking he grabbed the fish horns and blew them both at the same time which of course didn’t only not let him control the water elemental but summoned another one. Â  They managed to kill the first one before the second one really got started and then killed that one as well.

A well deserved rope trick rest later they came down and Jo touched the black pool on purpose and swiftly failed her save and started the whole lose Str and Con every day until curse removed effect.  With lightning quick thinking she stuck a finger into the clear pool at which point the acid dissolved her finger.  She forgo touching the green one at that point.  It doesn’t take much for her to learn…

Ghimli played with the green pool for a bit but they decided to leave it along.

At that point the sheer evilness of the area was getting to them and Ghimli did an Auguary to check in with his boss as to whether it was a good thing to destroy the crystal alter in the water temple.  Of course destroying Evil is good so he got the green light.  Gnatsum did the honors destroying the crystal sword with the scimitar they’d found on it.  As the altar shattered into a 1000 pieces so did the Sword of Water that Ghimlet had been using to such great effect…

And the tunnels started collapsing.  They went over to a side area not before a huge boulder fell from the ceiling and crushed them and their boat.  There they found what has become known as Octobob.  It was an “statue of an angry octopus worth 600 gold”.  Seriously, an “angry” octopus statue.

Gnatsum became enamoured of the thing and bought it from the group loot for his own personal use.  He hollowed out the body enough to fit it over his hand and now “Octobob” has joined the party and makes comments from time to time to time to time. Â  Octobob was quite cheerful with a little squeaky voice before I had to point out that it was an ANGRY statue.  So he’s gotten nastier and meaner. Â I can already fore see that this is going to be a huge mistake and something suitably nasty might have to take Gnatsum’s octopus.  And his hand.  And his shoulder for good measure.

They got clear of the cave-in and moved on.  The tunnels they were advancing into were low level to the point of ludicrousness.  So we bypassed them and did them out of context.  “Okay you come across a group of level 0 warriors with 4,6,8,5,7,4 hit points. Â  They died, you got the loot.”  Literally there was no point whatsoever to those areas.  They’re not even at the start of an entrance or anything.  And anyone who’s fought their way through one area and across the center and then back is going to be just a LITTLE bit tough for such encounters.

 An encounter with Blink Dogs was interesting and Ghimlet got to show his stuff. Â  Some Troll’s proved to be fun to deal with but with Jo casing Fireball’s machine gun fashion they didn’t stand much chance.

At this point they came across a Dire Bear chained to a wall.  The bear was sitting watching them.  Ghimlet, more than a wee bit cocky after the blink dogs and the trolls decided to go kill it. Â  Unfortunately for Ghimlet the bear wasn’t actually chained to the wall.  It grabbed him, succeeding with both paws and bite and had him dead in two rounds. 

At which point the others thought hey that’s not good and scattered.  The bear charged across the chamber and hammered Jo to a pulp in one round leaving her at 0 hit points.  Gotta love a monster that has crazy +melee bonuses and hits HARD.

Gnatsum and Ghimli engage the bear damaging it and getting it’s attention from Jo’ at which point they all realized, hey that 6′ by 4′ door we came through is probably too small for the bear to get through so how about we retreat out that way. Â  Ghimli grabbed Jo’ on the way and they retreated back into the corridor.  Using bows they killed the bear before it could retreat out of sight.

Ghimli healed Jo and Gnatsum grabbed the kind of squeezed to a pulp warrior.  Ahlman stepped out of the shadows and joined the group and they continued on for a little bit before coming across something that looked pretty nasty and decided to retreat back to town after some discussion on whether or not they could continue onwards one warrior short.

They made it back to town at which point Ghimlet was raised from the dead, Ghimlet had to spend all his gold and borrow a bit to replace his Water Sword with a plain jain +2 sword. Â  They found a little bit of loot, a Staff of Fireballs and a Wand of something or other and a small amount of gems and coin.  All in all this trip I believe goes into the accounting sheets in red ink.

 Just in an aside I’ve managed to kill everyone once I think.

Anyway that’s what happened and there you go.

D 

Continue reading »]]> While we did have everyone there we got started late because Gimmlet (Formerly Known As Porra) had football practice late.

We started off in town while Gimmlet got used to his new warrior.  On the way back from town Ghimli felt a powerful source of evil and they decided to investigate.  Led by the holy senses of the dwarvish warrior they came onto some old ruins and inside the signs of a fight.  While checking out the blood pools and dropped loot they were attacked by some giant dog like creatures that appeared half rotting and decaying.   The beasts were a pretty good fight although primarily a warmup really and the party downed them.

The beasts had appeared to be guarding a bit of a oddity. A  crypt that showed every sign of having been built only minutes before showing none of the ancient wear that the ruins that surrounded it displayed.

Gnatsum and Gimmlet both tried to open the door and both were tossed ass over teakettle when they so much as touched the door.  Ghimli communed with his deity and went over and opened the door.

A dank fetid odor washed over them as a white skinned creature with razor sharp claws and emitting a bone chilling cold leaped out.  Ghimli brandished the power of his faith and the Wight was forced to turn and flee.

Jo turned and started peppering it with magic missiles and everyone else wandered inside the crypt.  As the wight turned and came back Jo unleashed a fireball on it and turned triumphantly to the others expecting cheers and adulation only to find they’d gone on into the crypt and weren’t even paying any attention.

Inside the party found a set of stairs leading downwards into a large antechamber.  As Gnatsum entered the room yellow-green flames sprang up in niches set every few feet into the walls giving the room a decayed corpse color.  The sound of a door closing got everyone’s attention and they decided to check out that door and deferring the second door for later searching.

The door opened onto a corridor that was liberally strewn with traps but Ahlman was quite up to the task and found and marked each one.  At the end of the corridor it turned to the right and ended in a doorway.  Alhman checked it for traps and Gnatsum stood guard while he picked a lock on it.  As he pushed open the door it triggered a trap on the other side and the end wall of the passageway dropped away revealing several 10′s of small tubes which immediately launched metal darts coated in a viscous dark green fluid.   Jo, Ghimli and Gimmlet were all nailed with several darts each but saved easily from the poison.

Inside the room they found several sarcophagi which they started breaking into and a couple of smaller chambers.  They were attacked by a Ghost but no one had their levels drained, darn the bad luck, and the ghost was slain thanks to the magical weapons the party carried and Jo’s every popular Magic Missiles.

They found a strange yellow gem on a bone necklace that had a flaw inside it that gave it an eye shape.

They ventured back to the front chamber and as Alhman who was carrying the necklace walked past each niche flame it went out.  The second door out of that room opened without a sound as he drew close to it.

They pushed on and found a vile fountain of blood and gore with headless bodies draining into it.  After much discussion they poured several vials of holy water into the fountain and there was a huge explosion of blood and energy that flung everyone around and covered them in blood.

The invisible stream of Evil forces that had been streaming from the fountain flickered and went out and at the same time a huge undead creature appeared next to a throne in the room.  Modeled after a Nightshade it was a pretty nasty fight, one that left Jo dead and most of the others in not pleasant shape.

Picking up the corpse of their sorcerer they decided to head back to town to get her Raised and discuss their new found powers.

This little side adventure is based on a Neverwinter Nights side quest I created in my one released module and was pretty close to the module.  I wanted to set up an alternate protaganist as the blue dragon at this point was just way underpowered for them as a source of harrasment and they’ll be dead from old age if nothing else long before it’ll gain enough power to deal with them.  The recipient of that flow of evil power is most likely pissed right now and odds are he’s going to show up asking some questions about while some foolish adventurer’s shut off one of his power sources.  And they’re probably not going to be happy questions nor will there be beer and scones handed out during the conversation.

Continue reading »]]> No session 8.  Ghimli and Gimlet and Ahlman couldn’t make it and well that just leaves Jo and Gnatsum so not a chance.  I really do want 4 of the 5 to show up to have a game.  We can do the ‘ignore’ the missing party member for one per session but two is pushing it.  And really they need at least Ghimli, Jo and Gnatsum to be there for healing, nukage and brawn, so if those three ain’t there then life ain’t good.

I watched Dawn of the Dead just now and I really want to do some kind of end of the world zombie or twenty eight days later kind of thing.  Maybe I should just start thinking about a Hero system based thing for that although I really don’t like the complexity of the Hero rules in terms of having speedy combats.  There’s a sharp demarcation line between Story versus Realism type rules usually.  Story based is a lot more streamlined and simplified and is closer to the minimum you need to tell a story.  Fudge would fall into that category of course.  On the other side you have Heroes and Gurps (both of which could be simplified in many ways without losing anything).  The first one the actions characters can take is just too general for my tastes.  For the other combats can be a major drag ass affair and can easily tie up hours to deal with any combat of significance.

Anyway, that’s what happened or didn’t happen today.

Continue reading »]]> Well we finally got back into the swing of things over the weekend and got another session in. As usual we started with our party in town at which point they resupplied. We also got acquainted with the new character sheets as generated by PC Gen. It’ll still take some getting used to for everyone I’m sure.

The party got back to the main entrance of the outer ring and headed back up through the Earth Temple area and toward the Water area. Their first fight was done with Gnatsum having fallen down a 6