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. 

It’s not easy to upgrade to 2.9.2 on 1and1.com.  They’re using MySQL 4.0.x and 2.9.2 requires 4.1.2 and better.  But they do give you access to MySQL 5.0.x you just have to migrate your existing database over to it. Manually.

I was able to find some notes on workarounds but they didn’t work as well for me due to the size of my database.  I ended up having to create the new database in chunks, not difficult since I’m pretty familiar with SQL (certified by Microsoft even) but annoying.  But eventually I got it all working.  I think.

On the plus side I was able to do a lot of database cleanup, dropping old unused tables and optimizing existing ones so the new database is much cleaner and in theory should be a little faster.  Although it’s on different hardware so it’s a crapshoot.

I also took the downtime to update the ‘captcha’ mechanism which seems to generate less obscure, aka hard to get right, human verification checks.  But with 100’s to 1000’s of script based spam, primarily porn and grey market drugs, in comments a day I’m just not able to have an open comments (non admin approved before it posts) section or an easy to bypass mechanism.

In a year or so if they remove the DRM (and the price drops subsequently) I may consider it.

I have a ‘friend’ who bought Bioshock Uno and didn’t even unwrap it and instead downloaded a cracked version to avoid this bullshit.  My ‘friend’ refuses now to continue to support and pander to this kind of thinking.

<rant off>

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.   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.   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.   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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Darkmith by Day

[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.   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.   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.   The only times I have planned to break out the miniatures is when it’s a fight worth playing through tactically.   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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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.   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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But harsh?  Definitely.  I once had a specialist archer lose half his hand to critical fire damage (because he thought the flames were illusionary) and be unable to use a bow for half a campaign.  I once had a fighter lose his bonus attack for several episodes because he lost ‘his’ sword and had to make do with substitutes that weren’t as balanced or designed for him.  I once had a paladin pick up a cursed box and become a fighter until he atoned for his ’sin’.   I’m harsh, there’s no getting around it.

Players as a rule tend to push the boundaries of what they can and can’t do.  DM’s tend to push back to keep things in check.  It’s a lot like the parent – child synergy.  No you can’t stay out till 3 in the morning.  Yes if you’re back by 9:00 you can drive the car.  The primary reason is, or at least for me is, to keep the party in balance so that it doesn’t devolve into one person doing everything and the rest sitting back and playing second fiddle. So when the problem child wants to do a triple back flip through the bar and be able to backstab the BBEG because ‘he’d never expect it’ I have to raise the eyebrow and go “Orly.  You think that would really work? No.”

But I’ve mellowed with age. Or perhaps more factually I’ve got more experience at what will really unbalance a campaign and block it and what would simply be unrealistic, cool certainly, but unrealistic and go ahead and allow it.

And you should try to hit the same balance.  It can be a hard line to stick to and fraught with peril.  Allow something too overpowering and the player is going to want to do it all the time.  Don’t allow anything and you’re stifling the creative flow and removing those ad hoc high points that get talked about for years.

Sometimes you don’t see the ramifications of your actions and have to retro them out somehow. As a example is the one time I actually played in a campaign the DM gave the dagger specialised fighter a ring of vampiric regeneration.  This made the fighter invincible as long as he hit about one out of two times he’d get back any lost hit points.  This nullified both the encounters and the other players as it became a “Let Temple get them all, we’ll sit back here playing chess.”  The DM solved the problem by having a fish leap up while were were crossing a lake and bite his finger off taking the ring with it.

As a general rule, you should try very hard not to lock a player out of playing.  This means no long term stuns or disabling conditions.  Don’t kidnap one player and not the others.  Don’t ’steal’ items from them for anything but very short term.  Keep an eye on your monsters so that they don’t have uber defenses against what the party is putting out.

A player’s turn shouldn’t consist of making a saving throw or worse being able to do nothing but wait for someone else to get to him.  Granted this is going to happen from time to time but do what you can to reduce the frequency of it. You can’t always save the stupid though. Some players (or characters) are just not bright and as a result they will through their own actions lock themselves out of playing.  And that’s okay.

I’m very much not a fan of the Stun condition in 4th Edition and I’m retconning it out as dazed on every monster power. I’m not a fan of the Dying condition and the death saves to be honest which is why I came up with the Weebles Wobble rule where I came up with a Mostly Dead condition.  This lets a player be dying and still be an active participant in the game.  I’ve had a couple of notes from people that have tried it with pretty good success and their players reportedly really approved of it. And it makes for a pretty cinematic visual.  Rarely in action movies do you have people laying around dying and not doing anything.  But tons of examples of the heroes limping forward barely concious, blood streaming off them but refusing to lay down as they blow some rubber suited monsters cojones off and snap out a one liner as they do so.

So in closing, don’t screw your players.  Let them play, it’s why they’re there after all.

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As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  You’re not going to be the sole focus of attention so when it’s not your turn let someone else have a bit of spotlight. It’s discourteous to the other players to not give them their chance at the mic.

As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  Step up and be heard, get involved.  Don’t just sit back observing or staring off into space. It’s really discourteous to your DM who’s gone to the trouble of creating something for you to ignore it.

I’ve had to deal with both types in my career as a DM/GM.  They’re both more than a bit of a pain after months and years.

Things I’ve found annoying from players in large quantities, and that based on the voice inflections and reactions from Dm’s in the podcasts might be fairly universal.

Constantly going “No he can’t/doesn’t/wouldn’t” to the DM in any form as a common reaction to the DM.

• DM: “Okay the fell necromancer shifts his gaze at you, Alofel and necrotic energies flare up and blast outwards at you.”
• Player: “No he doesn’t.  He doesn’t have that power any more.  It’s a typo.  Wouldn’t he hit Steve instead?  He misses.  I duck out of the way.  I’m immune.”

Once is okay, twice is within reason but constantly over and over ‘retorting’ with some variation on the above every time the DM announces a NPC’s attack gets old fast.

Immersion breaking ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ between a character and an NPC.

• DM as Necromancer: “I shall have your soul chained in a everlasting fire for daring to interfere you pathetic mortal.”
• Player: “U r gay.”

Once in a while, sure it CAN be funny.  But constantly chanting how gay what is supposed to be some scary evil dark wizard is, gets very unfunny pretty quickly to most DM’s I’m betting, myself included.

Most DM’s do what they do to bring to life a cooperative story set in a ‘real life’ world where characters, pc and npc, act in realistic ways.  It takes interest and energy to do all the extra work involved.  Players who show up so they can be the asshole (or pschopath/klepto)  in the game they can’t be at the office tend to be a bit of a burden on the creative energies and interest required to be a DM.

What I call psuedo-cheating (don’t get me started on real cheating).

• DM: “Does a 22 hit you Barkil?”
• Player: “No.”  a minute goes by, “Yeah it hits.”

• Player: “I rolled a… 23.”
• DM: “Okay that hits.”
• Player: “No it was really a 3.”
• DM: “*sigh*”

Please remember during my little mini-rant, that I’m ranting about consistent, frequent, constant behaviour of this type. Like any decent DM I can overlook, ignore, or go along with a reasonable level of this kind of thing.  But constantly doing it gets old.

And no this isn’t some sly subtle jab at my players, due to RL, lack of interest, medical reasons, I don’t have enough consistent players to have a group of players that I can enjoy being with to have a RPG group going on.  At best I get to DM the occasional one-off or playtest or ‘delve’.

As a player remember the DM is supposed to be having fun too.  Try to gauge his or her reactions to your behaviour and adjust accordingly.

Because if the DM isn’t having fun, especially over the course of several sessions, then you’re going to be looking for a new DM.

Any gaming group whether it’s chess, bridge or rpg’s is a social group with the implied social contracts that are always the price of being in that group. You have to be social and sociable.  If you like roleplay then deal with there being rollplay going on.  If all you want to do is roll dice then deal with there being roleplay going on.  And as a DM I know this can change per player on a session basis.  Sometimes a player just wants to roll dice and loot the corpses of the bad guys.  And sometimes they just want to sit back and have an animated discourse on the qualities of the rope they’re purchasing.  But remember you’re one of a group and they also vary in what they want to do.

Know what your character can do.  I personally find myself questioning why players want to bother showing up when they show no interest in the mechanics of their characters much less the game system that’s being played.  Constantly having to wait for a player every session while they ‘re-learn’ their characters abilities or worse, just ’spam’ a single abilitiy over and over regardles of its effect or efficiency simply because they don’t want to be bothered to learn more can be annoying.

It’s not very enjoyable for DM’s who spend excess hours over and above the actual session hours coming up with the adventures, plots, hooks, bad guys, who have the not so easy task of juggling tens of ‘characters’ during every combat, of keeping things in balance for the players so it’s not a cakewalk as well as not instant death, of remembering what’s happened before, what they want to happen and steering a plausible path between those points to have players express a serious lack of interest in what’s going on at the table.  [Massive run on sentence of the day.]

I have a saying, “Looks like apathy has reared it’s head, we’re done for the night.” and it’s had to be brought into play more than once.  When computers started to intrude on gaming sessions, whether it was Doom when we first got PC’s or Ultima Online when we first got MMOG’s  or whatever.  Once the conversation’s saturation point became something other than the game at hand, I’d shut it down.  When I’m running something, I’m there to run it, not talk about the current hot topic.

So as a final wrap up, I think this can mostly be summed up with “As a player in a group game, be courteous.” or in layman’s terms: “Don’t be a dick.”

Or the odds are very good there won’t be a social group anymore.  At least for you.

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I can and will provide more detailed pics on request.

Current supply limited to these and first come first served.

Contact me for more details or with questions.

If you’d like to ask questions on how you can make your own I’ll be happy to answer those as well.

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As they’re ‘alpha’ bare bones basic designs I’m thinking $25+shipping ($5 to $10 depending on zip for USPS) for them, its roughly $12 for materials counting waste and the rest is for my time which works out to well below minimum wage on an hourly basis FYI.  You’d need to have a Paypal account in order to pay for them as that’s the simplest and least risky for me and it’s strictly as supply is available on a first paid for, first served basis.

If the $12 seems high for materials well you try cutting 3/16″ slots in 2′ boards that are straight and uniform using nothing but a circular saw and see how much waste material you end up that’s good for nothing but template spacers.

The tower will include a catch tray that will be of a size that tower will nest into it when you’re not using it.  You could line it with cork, rubber, foam or felt to reduce the clatter noise but I’ve found personally that the noise isn’t too bad and anything but hard polished wood just causes the squarish (d6’s, d8’s, d4’s) dice to tend to pile up at the mouth of the exit hole.

They may be unstained or stained with black walnut or golden oak depending on what I want to try and will be coated with two coats of polyurethane (either gloss or semi-gloss depending on my on hand supply of poly).  The plexiglass will probably be left clear although I’m going to try a frosted look using an orbital sander on the inside portion and see how that looks.

If you contact me while I still have unfinished towers then you can try requesting specific finishes and stains.   As mentioned the only stains I have on hand are black walnut and golden oak (I might have a honey oak somewhere) and for finishes I have semi-gloss and gloss in polyurethane and I might have a  semi-gloss in crystal coat which adds very little coloring to wood unlike poly which has a tinge of yellow.  Really on matters for unstained wood in either case.

If you’d simply like a more detailed photo log of  the process I use to make them so you can build your own I’ll be happy to post that if there’s any interest pending me getting more raw materials as all the material I had on hand I cut already over the weekend.

Use the contact form to send me an email or you can send it to my anti-spam account which is spam at armsnake dot com.

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[Note: I have tried the tube tower but the lack of a drill press leaves me with lopsided holes making it tough to make pretty.]

It started with a piece of 3.5″ x 48″ x 1/4″ birch from the local handy Lowes.  Cost about $4.  I added a piece of 8×11 Plexiglas roughly 1/8″ thick which cost like 99 cents which I think I also picked up at Lowes.   I bought two pieces and lucky for me I did as I learned how to NOT drill thin plexiglass with the first piece.

I started with the piece butted up to another piece and that butted up against a thicker piece to act as a guide rail for my circular saw.  No I don’t have a table saw. I had to add two shims about 3/16 of an inch to gap it out so that the notched I was cutting would hit the right place. 

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Down one side and up the the other and a couple of other cuts and I ended up with this.

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Next up was coming up with a pattern for the dowels and trying to drill those in the plexiglass.  I scribed the plexiglass in half to get 4″ x 11″ pieces.  I then had to trim roughly 1/2 an inch off the ends to make them fit in the grooves I cut in the side pieces.

First I tried drilling them just clamped down to scrap wood (both at the same time mind you to insure perfect alignment).  The plexiglass broke as the drill would catch in the hole right as it went all the way through.

But clamping the two pieces of plexiglass between two scrap pieces of wood and drilling through all four pieces I ended up with good holes.

4

With the addition of a few bracing pieces cut from 5/16″ square stock and 17 pegs cut from 1/4″ dowels I ended up with this -

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6

7

So for about $6 in parts, about 1 hours worth of work (not counting drying time for the glue and polyurethane ) you too can have a pretty sweet dice tower.  Note I haven’t yet made a catch tray as I want to see if I can make a heart shaped one.  This tower is for my wife after all.

So one Silver Sharpie later most of my large groups of miniatures have a number on their base.  I don’t have the best penmanship, comes from years of writing books, modules, dungeons, notes and all that longhand but hey I can probably read it most of the time and hopefully if I misread it I’ll misread it all night.

These are a couple of Gnolls, #8 and *15 I grabbed out of the gnoll bin in one of my humanoid cases.  I highly recommend you pick up these compartmental cases, it makes it way easy to pick out what you need.  I have cases for mass humanoids (orcs, goblins, kolbods, gnolls etc), a case that holds nothing but undead, cases for PC figures (male/female), a ‘beast’ case, a ‘Icky” case (oozes, bugs, wth) and so on.

All this so a player can go “I hit Gnoll 8.” rather than “I hit the gnoll next to Tak, no the other one, no the one between him and Tik. Yeah that one.”

And yes I’ve bought a lot of miniatures.

I do have some caveats -

The sessions are at my house and I have three small children that will be around during part of any session.  Not only do they like to observe gaming sessions their computers are in the same room that I game in.  As a result there are certain ground rules on behavior and what I’d be looking for:

• Language and social behavior is an issue in general with me and in very specific when my children can hear and observe  it.  If you can’t keep it clean then you’re not a good fit for me.
• Must be able to play without arguing,  cheating or lawyering up.
• Must be able to tolerate children in a civil manner.
• A relaxed casual player would be a much better fit than a hardcore.
• No mind altering substances tolerated.
• Must provide own transportation.

About the group/gamesstyle/times -

• Sessions are Saturdays from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. and 2 to 4 times a month.
• Location is in the Tulsa / Broken Arrow area of Oklahoma.
• Existing participants (3-4) are older, 40+ years old.
• Held at a private residence with 3 small children on site.
• Game system is 4th Edition DnD (no knowledge of system necessary).
• Dinner (pizza) and basic refreshments (tea, water) provided.
• Good aligned and action party only, no chaotic psychopath rogues or lawful stupid paladins.

So if you’re in the general area, think you’d be a good fit, then contact me and we can schedule a trial run.

keywords to influence searching returns:

Looking for players tulsa

Looking for DnD players

Looking for players broken arrow

DnD in the tulsa area

dungeons and dragons tulsa oklahoma

*Dick Tuna – Phrase coined by Wil Wheaton, Penny-Arcade and PVP-Online players during their podcasts. Funny but not appropriate for a 5 year old.

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Using any combination of 3″ PVC + Couplers + Reducers + Elbows a person could EASILY make a dice tower or as I’m calling it now, a Chaos Cylinder.  Since it’s a cylinder shape and the dice would bounce chaotically around in it. The only really hard part would be a base for it to stand on but a piece of 1×4 and some hot glue or screws and you’d have a decent base.

My thought was something like this.  Take a 3″ 90 degree elbow ($3) and a piece of 3″ tubing (10′ for $6) cut to the height you want.  Drill a series of holes around the 3″ tube and insert some wooden dowels ($2-$4).  Glue a 3″ to 2″ reducer ($3) upside down on one of the 3″ tubing, this gives you a ‘feed tube’ and makes for a neater appearance (as in cleaner). Stick your elbow on the end of the tube as the ‘outflow’.   Now mount this to a base of some kind and work up some kind of catch basin, a simple box made of a pice of 1×4 or 1×6 with some 1/2″ square hobby boards used to build a fence around it. and then mount a 1×2 on one side and clamp your tower to that.

Another option would be discard the elbow and cut a 45″ slope on one end of your tube.  Now take a piece of 3″ post  and cut it at a 45 degree and put that in the bottom of the tube so the dice hit it and fall out.

So for about $20 give or take and a little work you too could have a Chaos Theory Cylinder…. *dun dun dunnnnn*

If there’s any interest I could do one of these with some of the options and post some step by steps.

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I like to 3D stuff before I start conspiring to build it as it just helps me visualize things and greatly decreases issues with the design in terms of workability.

I think it’s hilarious when you google dice tower pachinko my site is (or was at the time of this writing) number 2 in the results.  You know how many people kill for page 1 google results. 

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’.   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.

I ordered ’sample’ pack of the Alea Tools, specifically “One-Inch Neo-Markers – Game Master Pack 01″ and “One-Inch Neo-Markers – Red 10 Pack” along with some of “Miniature Conversion Circles – One-Inch”.  The order was shipped prompty and correctly.  Each set came in a clear plastic tube with a higher quality than average stopper.  Odd thing to notice I know but there you go.  The tube itself was typical of the type and if you’ve ever bought a tube of dice you’ll be familiar with it.   Each set of markers also included a few of the conversion circles.

Quality on the markers was decent but it’s hard to be awesome or crappy with what’s essentially a molded two part plastic disk.  Each has a ‘rare earth’ magnet inside that allows them to stick together.  The magnets are fairly strong and I had no problems with their stickiness.

The conversion disks are essentially the same flexible magnets you’d find in any craft section of a department store but with an adhesive backing that’s pretty good or seems to be.  There is an issue, not with the quality but with the purpose.  They’re designed to stick to the bases of the miniatures.  Well the bases of the miniatures are ANYTHING but standardized and on many (most?) you’ll find the magnet is too big and sticks out a bit.  That’s a fault with the lack of a standard base size on Wizards part and not with the idea directly.

Another issue that may come up is that the bases have a lip on the bottom of them.  So when you stick one of these magnets to it, you really have a very small surface area that is going to be attached.

But they’re cheap enough I suppose that eventually if you do lose some you can replace them.  I will offer the observation that if you filled the bases of your mini’s with something, maybe Mighty Putty (RIP Billy), they’d probably be a lot more secure and probably permanent.

All in all I’d recommend them, they make marks, status effects and all that very easy to keep track of.

Now on to the Magna Maps.  These were as well shipped promptly and correctly.  I ordered two of the 2′ x 3′ maps because that covers about 75% of my map surface.   My map level on my gaming table is roughly 35″ by 55″ so I did have to cut one inch from the long way but it cut very easily.  And now I have two two foot rows of 1″ squares I could use for something.

The material is very much the same rubberized substance that refrigerator magnets are made of. Except it’s not magnetic per se. It’s also not terribly ’sticky’ in terms of magnets sticking to it.   The more powerful rare earth ones have a decent grab to them but the weaker ones like the conversion disks barely stick at all.  I think that’s a combination of two factors though, the material is just iron impregenated rubber, not iron and the conversion dicks are also just iron impregnated rubber albeit magnetic iron (or something to that effect).  Two weaks don’t make a strong in this case.  But if you’re using Alea’s Neo disks or something similar then they’ll stick well enough.

With all that said I think they’re both useful.  Are they worth the money? Meh, you can certainly get by without them.  They add a bit of geek chic to your table but that’s about it.  But sometimes geek chic is worth the cost to me. You’ll have to be the judge of that for yourself.

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[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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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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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 – [Download not found]

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.

But for some people it’s not as great an experience.  They have the DM who TPK’s them their first session.  For other’s they have players who power game to the point of complete imbalance or just flat out cheat.   I really hope that most people fall at least somewhere in the middle if not on the good side of the curve.  When everything ‘clicks’ a PnP gaming session can be a truly awesome thing.   When it ‘unclicks’ it can end any chance of another one.

My last DnD campaign ended with a TPK because after several months I was tired of the cheating, the bickering, the attempts to not play nice with each other.  So I quit fudging the dice, this was under 3rd Edition and a DM who didn’t fudge dice invariably stood a good chance of wiping out a group when the group had no concept of being overmatched.  And that’s what happened.  I let the dice roll in the open and fall as they would and unsurprisingly enough the bad guys slaughtered them.

For awhile now my group is too small and sporadic in attendance to play anything RPG’ish.  I prefer 4 to 5 players + 1 GM/DM.  I’d like to add a couple of players.  But I cringe at trying to find two people who’ll fit our playstyle and not be asshats.  So I was thinking what about a not so implied social contract?  Something up front that both sides can actually read and have a good idea of what they’re getting into.

So I rough drafted the below, it could stand refinement, not so wordy and all that but at least it’s a stepping off point.

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Dungeons and Dragons – A Social Contract

As a DM I will endeavor to provide each player with an entertaining event.  I will strive to insure that all characters receive an equal amount of the spotlight and will do my best to provide sufficient variety to tax the needs of each characters potential and abilities.  I will work to corral players who go off on tangents to the detriment of the session.  I will show up on time and prepared to play, I will not let rules get in the way of fun and will use the rule, “Say Yes for now.”, in the case of a disagreement on rules.  I will acknowledge that without the players there would be no game.

As a Player I will endeavor to be interested in the events that are transpiring in front of me.  I will attempt to not waste time due to inattention, lack of preparedness or attempting to lawyer up on rules. I will show up on time and prepared to play.  I will make an effort to engage all players opinions on how the group should proceed and not attempt to overshadow any or all of them.  I will reign in my ability to design powerful characters for powers sake with the knowledge that too broad a disparity in power makes the game less fun for every one else including the DM.  I will not bend the rules or cheat.  I will acknowledge that without the DM there would be no game.

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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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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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.   It’s just a little high for good seated gaming.  It works and it certainly helps to get people involved.

So while it’s not ‘awesome’ it works, it’s acceptable for playing and it’s sturdy enough for what I need it for.  These pictures are with the lighting on and with it off because of the flare out when it’s on.

I hope to use it in the next week or two with a some new players as well as a couple or three of the old ones.

Unlit

Now that I’ve done it once what I like to do is use frosted polycarbonite as the table top and base and put lighting inside it to really make a decent glow and indirect lighting effect that would be pretty cool I think.  And with the right lighting setup I’d be able to cycle the lighting to different colors for dramatic effect.  Yellow for daytime and cycle it to blue for night, red for battle and green for happy times, things like that.   I think big.

The reason it’s white for the curious is that I needed/wanted it to reflect as much of the light as possible to make it easy to read otherwise I’d of gone with ‘good wood’ and stained it to match the original table style.

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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.   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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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.   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.   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.   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.   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.   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.   *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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Side View

Anyway, I didn’t have much else going on that I’m willing to share but I thought people might be interested in the status of the new gaming table.  Well the top to it.

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It’s constructed of two sheets of 1/2 ’smooth one side’ or rought craft grade plywood.  I went cheap here for a couple of reasons, one they didn’t have 1/2 oak or birch plywood at the store, I’d of had to order it special and I didn’t want 3/4″ as it was too thick.   Two, the top piece is going to be covered in something with a plexiglass mapping sheet on top of that so good wood would have been wasted.   The bottom piece I’m going to paint white for light reflecting purposes so again we’re wasting good wood under paint.

Now the center piece that separates the two pieces of plywood I did make out of oak, primarily for strength and just because I was able to get precut pieces that are perfectly square which makes the parts go together stronger.

The two sheets of plywood are exactly 35″ by 64-3/4″ and fit inside the well in my gaming table with about a 1/16″ gap on all sides to allow for expansion and easy removal.

I’ll be screwing the center divider down onto the lower piece of plywood.  The top will be attached to the divider by a peg and wedge system so that I can take it off easily just in case.  I’ll attach some 2x blocks of oak to the underside of the top that will fit inside the divider snuggly and then drill a hole through the divider and into the blocks and use pegs to affix them to each other.

The reason I want to be able to take it apart is I’ll be mounting a power strip inside the divider and running the wiring into it so there’s only one cord coming out of everything to power the lights.

The light is a cheap little 24″ flo I got at Lowe’s for $9-$10 as a test to see if it works well enough.  It’s not actually that ‘hot’ a light, the picture just contrasts it that way but still I’m not sure if I’ll be adding one to each location or one to each side.  (4 lights versus 6).  6 would work ‘best’ but not sure if it’s necessary until after I get the wood painted white and see how it all reflects.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing with my evenings the last couple.  Working with wood is a slow process as you’re always waiting for glue or stain or poly/varnish to dry before you can continue working and those generally run into the 24 hour blocks for best results.

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The encounters are ranked (by exp) as Hard, Standard, Standard, Hard (boss), Standard, Standard, Hard (boss).   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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Things to take away from this first attempt, don’t use cork for the catch basin, the sharp cornered dice, like my big casino d6’s catch on it and tend to pile up at mouth of the tower.  Also the ’super heavy duty sticks anything to anything permanently’ contact adhesive I have isn’t all that super duper. I know this because I was able to peel the cork from my catch basin quite easily.  That’s been stained and poly’d so it’s fine if not as ‘finished’ looking.

Because of my haste in making the tray (i.e. plan three times, measure twice, cut once) and lack of testing my tray doesn’t attach per se.  So I think right now I’m going to epoxy a couple of the little neo earth magnets I bought to the tray and the tower so that the two pieces stay together that way in either the ‘game’ or collapsed position.

Tower 2 will I think be more like a pachinko machine inside and round(ish), at least something more interesting than a square tube looking think.  But T1 is functional and semi-stylish if boring and that’s what matters does it not?

Inside

Latest Minis

Bug Hunt

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Dice Tower Stage 2

I decided against the drawbridge approach for a couple of reasons.  I wanted to get this project done so I could in good conscience start on the table add on until I clear some of the wood working project backlog and my wife wants to do a drawbridge for hers so I don’t want to step on her toes in that way.   This will be a tower and ‘box’ design although there’s now way I’m going to make my catch box as long as the tower is tall so I’m not sure how I’m going to work that.  I might do a V shaped catch and then have a wooden dowel that pins it to the tower that can be removed so that the tower and tray can be stored in less space with less chance of major breakage.

Vertical Open

Ramps

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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

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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).   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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The topper will be constructed of 1/2 plywood probably oak but maybe birch.  One piece will fit into the existing playing field indent to bring it level with the rim of the table.   I may leave it ‘unfinished’ i.e. just sanded, stained and then a few coats of poly on it to protect it or I might use some poker ’speed’ cloth on it since it doesn’t pill up.

The bottom will be screwed and glued to the stand which will be 8″ high.  The stand will be cross braced and corner braced (I hate fragile things) on the interior.  This will then have another sheet of plywood screwed and glued on top of that.  I’ll then cover that most likely with green felt that I have left over from another project that will wrap around the edges.  The stand and underside portions I’ll sand and prime and then paint a bright white for light reflecting purposes.

For lighting I’ll put in a 40″ (ish) inch florescent fixture on the sides and a 16″ (ish) fixture on each end and mount these under the edge.

And that should give me the functionaly I’m looking for.

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Right now there’s just too much contention for map space from player’s paperwork for any encounter room of significant size. This gets their items off the actual map field and if nothing else adding lighting directly over their bits and pieces makes them easier to read.   And it’ll give them a creature’s eye view of the battlefield which might be interesting.

It’s going to be damn heavy though.  I build things tough so there’ll be something like three sheets of hardwood plywood there.  1/2 inch minimum.  I want it to be removable you see so it has to be tough enough to handle being taken off and put back for when I want to use the table as a board game table or card games etc.

Anyway, just thought I’d share.

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Here’s  the quote:

Now I’m sure someone is saying “What if I want to take a less effective power in favor of more flair or role-playing reasons?”

My response is – it depends on your campaign, but for me role-playing is usually not done during a combat on a level where powers are used.

A less nice way to say it is “You are stealing the XP your teammates earned because you wanted to try something ‘cool’”.

The emphasis is mine. This to me helps reinforce my personal belief that MMOG’s have definitely interacted with all facets of gamers.  It seems that the almighty Treadmill ideal is now insidiously embedded across genres.  It’s no longer the journey, it’s been ingrained in many (most?) players that it’s the destination.  Gotta get that XP as quickly as possible and get to the end game.

And that I feel is where players can be potentially missing out.  It’s not the destination, its the journey on the way.  Does anyone remember the fight where everyone just did their attacks one after another?  Or do they remember the fight where “someone tried something cool” and it failed or not.

Anyway I just wanted to comment on the post.

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I wonder if I get more traffic when the forums are down?

In working on custom critters for 4th edition, I’m struck once again just how much cooler these are than the old days when it was usually just a simple Hit, Claw, Bite, Breath for 95% of the monsters with the odd exception of the magic using ones.   Now every thing has ’something’ it can do that’s more than just “roll d20, roll damage”.

I’m still waiting for the Monster Manual 2 to come out so I can see how the power creep is creeping along.  I think I’ve said it before but I would like to see all the powers of all the creatures loaded into a readily available database that could be searched for things like ranged, melee, burst, multiple, single, dazed, etc and ranked by damage output.  So if I wanted to see examples of ranged powers I could just search the databse with a checkbox for Ranged and then sort by level/damage.

I’ve glanced through Arcane Power and it looks okay, didn’t get a chance to really go through it since I don’t have my own copy.  Since I’m not actively playing right now, well GM’ing since I rarely play but you get the idea, I didn’t want to spend money on something that isn’t ‘core’ and that I don’t have a ‘need’ for.  I like quotes.

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Here are some ‘during construction’ shots as well.  The prototype is made of 3/16’s foam core board available at any office supply or craft store or you might find some at a Walmart or Target style store sold as a science project folder.  It cuts easily with any razor style knife, I used a rotary wheel cutter as I find that’s vastly superior for cutting long straight cuts that you need to glue together without any wavy edges or slanted butt surfaces.

As you can hopefully see from the below I went with 4 ramps and a drawbridge front rather than a tower and tray approach that many have.  Once I finalize on a design it will of course have a closed front, I just didn’t want to waste foamcore to fill it in when all I really needed was a couple of bumpers to keep the dice from flying out.

Raw Goods

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

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I’m prototyping one now out of foamboard.  I picked up some quarter inch red oak boards to make the real one out of but prototype once, measure twice, cut once is my motto where possible.   A big sheet of foam core costs $4 and I can prototype 2 or 3 designs out of it easy.  Red oak boards cost about $4 each and I’ll need 3 of them for the final project so $4 versus $12 is an easy call to make.

I’m not sure if I’ll end up with a tray + tower or a drawbridge design.  Laura is also making herself one and she’s going a little crazy in design in terms of paint and flocking and stones and the like.  Myself I’ll probably use a dark stain, almost black after a couple of coats myself.  I did have thoughts of putting a little clock in it just because it seemed a good place to put one but changing the batteries would be a pain in the ass unless I make one side removable in some fashion, maybe a hinge?  That’s what prototyping is all about.

In other news I got my shipment of tiney biney magnets.  OMG they’re strong for something that’s so small.  I just need to figure out what I’m going to use to hold them in place in the disks.  I picked up a bunch of 1″ wooden disks for a couple of bucks to try on them.  I wouldn’t mind getting some polycarbonate clear disks but we’ll see how cost effective that might be.  If I end up spending as much as on Alea Tools the it’s kind of a wash other than the fun of actually making them which does count for quite a bit with me.

The image in this post is an example of a dice tower, one of the more crafty ones, it is NOT mine.

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There’s a post by one of the AT people on the forums so I looked for their site again and saw where they’d changed from using ceramic magnets to rare earth to help get rid of the sideways attractions. Now 10 bases for $8 seems high to me especially when you want a few of several colors. They do have the GM packs but those provide X bases of Y colors and do you really need all those colors? They really should have a basic ala carte system and would probably attract more customers but I digress.

The comment about switching to RE magnets had me browsing and I found these magnets, 50 for $8.50, $15 shipped and they take Paypal.  So I bought some.

I plan on getting some 1″ disks either wood (can dye/paint/stain whatever colors I want) or some cheap-o poker chips.  The wood disks you can buy at any craft shop or make yourself if you have a saw (band, chop, table) out of any 1″ dowel and some sandpaper.  The poker chips, well you can get these dirt cheap these days thanks to the popularity of Texas Hold-em.

Stack up a few and then put a quarter inch drill in your drill or your press and they’ll have a hole in them just the right size for holding the magnets.  A dab of 2 part epoxy to fill the hole and seal the magnet in and voila you have yourself some Alea Tool style magnetic bases for a fraction of the price.

I think I spent about $3-$4 for wooden disks of the 1″ size.  $15 for the magnets and for $20 I have 50 bases in whatever color or striping mechanism I want for very little work.

The magnets I ordered are also small enough and strong enough that in theory you could put one on the base of your mini’s either under or over.  Maybe use some Might Putty from Billy Mayes to mount them or simply some gel Krazy Glue.

Anyway, if the idea of these things ‘works’ for you but the cost is prohibitive then there are options that might not have an embossed logo on them but given you’re never going to see that logo, do you care?

Dennis

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The short version is 3 to 6 players are teamed up to fight their way out of a cavern and face 9 random encounters.  During the encounter each player plays an ‘attack’ card.  These attack cards either deal damage like Attack 30, or set up a move for the next turn Focus Strength – Your next attack is +30 damage.   In addition you can play Action cards which might change things up, cause cards to be swiped or perhaps just steal some phat lewt from of of the other players.

Yes this is a PVP but team oriented game.  The player who gets the most points which are primarily only rewarded to the player who deals the death blow to the monster is the winner.  But you have to keep your team mates alive on the fight out of the dungeon as the creature’s strengths are based on the number of players that started the game, not how many are left alive at the moment.   Let your team mates die off early (or help them along) and you have to face the monsters with fewer people and a TKO becomes a very real possibility.

The game is diceless but there is a random element in that you have to draw cards.  But at the end of a round you can discard up to your entire hand of 7 cards and draw new ones so you can try to build a winning hand for yourself.

The encounters are varied as well, with some monsters not taking damage from powerful attacks, only low damage ones hurt them, others always attack back the person who did the most damage to them, or the least or etc.   So there’s strategy in building your hand and in choosing which attack to use which isn’t revealed until its your turn.

Each round the inititive order is random (although some action cards let you swap your initiative with someone else) so you never know where you’re going to be.

There’s quite a bit of strategy involved and all in all it was a very fun game and we had a good time with it.  If you’re into board games then I can definitely recommend this one.

Dennis

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Doubt if I’ll add chat because well with various VOIP systems there’s not much need to have text chat for remote gaming.

Between the die roller and a web cam I think a remote game could work fairly well with one remote user.  More though and perhaps it’s getting into things.  The biggest problem with remote users is they’re remote and at their computer which means there’s a lot of readily available distractions.  I mention this from experience trying to play over WebRPG where there’d be many ‘moments of silence’ because people would get distracted by something on their side and not be paying any attention to the game.

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Damage – Add 1/2 level to damage rolls across the board to a single target per attack.  I had some initial thoughts about how to deal with blast, burst, single attacks that target one or more targets but aren’t AOE’s and in the end I think I’m going with this.  This applies to both PC and NPC  -

Damage: All powers that require an attack roll and deal damage gain a bonus damage of 1/2 level that is applied to the first target of the attack.
Special: The increased damage must apply to the closest target from either the center or starting square of  burst or blast attacks, when more than one target meets this requirement the character can choose which target to apply the extra damage.

Healing Surges – We need to re-balance healing so let’s start with the Surge mechanic.  This one is pretty simple really and there’s a direct counterbalance to the increase damage.

Healing Surges – When you spend a healing surge, regain 1/2 your level + 25% of your normal max hit points in hit points.

Wizard Problem: Wizards feel… lite.  They certainly don’t feel very controllery.  Hell the cleric with its Guardian of Flame is more controller than wizards and fighters are WAY more controller than wizards are.  Wizards primary ‘controller’  function seems to be killing minions, which if you don’t have many minions in a combat  isn’t that great a function.  Single target damage is subpar, AOE damage is subpar with smart targets which I typically do because bunching up is almost ALWAYS a bad idea and anyone who survives to adulthood will probably know that.  They don’t feel very controllery either in the much more accepted use of the term as applicable to online gaming.

Answers (more like things to think about) –

Bump Magic Missile to use d6’s not d4’s.  The d4’s feel like a holdover from the g.o.d. (good ol’ days) to keep it feeling like magic missile and frankly I just don’t like d4’s with their pointy little ass shape.  It also doesn’t increase in power till level 21?  WTF? That makes it less and less useful for 20 levels?!  An average of 5 + Int against a level 19 monster is a little… well you get the idea.  Also as a controller while every power doesn’t need mass controlling abilities I think a force based attack might have a little bit of impact to it.

Magic Missile (KOC Rewrite) –

Magic Missile
At-Will * Arcane, Force, Implement
Standard Action        Ranged 20
Target: One creature
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: 2d6+Intelligence modifier force damage; target of size medium or lower is pushed 1 square (save avoids). Increase damage to 3d6+Intelligence modifier at 11th level. Increase damage to 4d6+Intelligence modifier at 21st level.
Special: This power counts as a ranged basic attack.  When a power allows you to make a ranged basic attack, you can use this power.

Scorching Burst – Let’s make it more of a controlling spell rather than simply a minion killer. Have it create a 1 square  zone at center square that burns for a full round.  That lets the wizard keep a square of fire up as kind of minor wall of fire with really weak damage to damage creatures or more importantly force them to go around it or shift out of the way.

Scorching Burst (KOC Rewrite) –

Scorching Burst
At-Will * Arcane, Fire, Implement
Standard Action   Area burst 1 within 10 squares
Target: Each creature in burst
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: 1d6+Intelligence modifier fire damage.
Increase damage to 2d6+Intelligence modifier at 21st level.
Special: Creates a 1 square zone at the center of the blast that lasts till the end of the wizard’s next turn.  Any creature passing through or ending its turn in this zone takes fire damage equal to the wizard’s Intelligence modifier.
Increase zone damage to Intellgence modifier x 2 at 21st level.

Cloud of Daggers (KOC rewrite) – Add a sustain on it.  This would let the wizard have up to 3 of these up but at that point they’re not able to do anthing else.  If they ‘juggle’ the CoD’s they can then constantly keep bad guys moving around, forcing shifts which opens up OA’s and the like and makes them much more controllery than before.

Cloud of Daggers
At-Will * Arcane, Force, Implement
Standard Action    Area 1 square within 10 squares
Target: Each creature in square
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: 1d6+Intelligence modifier force damage
Increase damage to 2d6+Intelligence modifier at 21st level.
Effect: The power’s area is filled with sharp daggers of force. Any creature that enters the area or starts its turn there takes force damage equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum 1).  The cloud remains in place until the end of your next turn (see special).  You can dispell it as a minor action.
Special: You can sustain the Effect as a minor action.

The whole purpose of these changes is to make the wizard more about control, if not the actual creatures at least their avenues of approach and direction of attack.  While yes there’s now some overlap with Scorching Burst and Cloud of Daggers,the fact that you can now sustain Cloud of Daggers with a minor makes it a different power niche IMO.  And to be honest Laura (Darta) doesn’t have CoD so it’s a moot point, I’m just adding it here for completeness.

Dailies – Allow the Wizard their normal uses per day but instead of memorizing from their selection set they get to choose at any time.  While the ‘have to memorize per day’ is yet another nod to the g.o.d. as a DM I’m just not really liking the flavor of it.  It requires way too much guess work and when you guess right then it’s just an “oh okay” feel but when you guess wrong it’s a “well fuck” feel and as a result not fun.

Word Spells (KOC rewrite) - To further add some re-balance to the adding +1/2 level to damage I’m going to change Healing Word and Inspiring Word (and any other word as such) and I’m making them Immediate Reactions – Triggered by damage, that I hope helps re-balances them versus the amount of damage that the players may be incurring from the 1/2 level bonus on the monster attacks.  I’m also boosting the number of them over the life of the character.  I may change the boost to 3 times per encounter though and reduce the need for healing potions as  a means to keep fighting and help remove a gold sink.

The reason I’m making them Immediate Reaction is the minor cost is really pretty pointless, how often does a healer not have a minor action to burn?  The immediate reaction is to allow them to more quickly get a ally back on their feet when needed.  Laying on the ground unable to do anything waiting for the healer’s turn is not fun and not fun is something we’re trying to avoid.

Healing Word
Encounter(Special) * Divine, Healing
Special: You can use this power two times per encounter, but only once per round.  At 11th level you can use this power three times per encounter, at 21st level you can use this power four times per encounter. 
Immediate Reaction Close Burst 5 (10 at 11th level, 15 at 21st level)
Trigger: When you or an ally is wounded.
Target: You or one ally
Effect: The target can spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6+your Wisdom modifier hit points.
Increase the amount of additional hitpoints regained to 2d6at 6th level, 3d6l at 11th level, 4d6 at 16th level, 5d6 at 21st level, 6d6 at 26th level.  In addition the target will regain additional hit points equal to the cleric’s Wisdom score from Healer’s Lore.

Inspiring Word
Encounter(Special) * Martial, Healing
Special: You can use this power two times per encounter, but only once per round.  At 11th level you can use this power three times per encounter, at 21st level you can use this power four times per encounter.
Immediate Reaction Close Burst 5 (10 at 11th level, 15 at 21st level)
Trigger: When you or an ally is wounded.
Target: You or one ally
Effect: The target can spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points.
Increase the amount of additional hitpoints regained to 2d6at 6th level, 3d6l at 11th level, 4d6 at 16th level, 5d6 at 21st level, 6d6 at 26th level.

Lay on Hands
At-Will(Special) * Divine, Healing
Special: You can use this power a number of times per day equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum 1) but only once per round. 
Immediate Reaction Melee touch
Trigger: When you or an ally is wounded.
Target: One creature
Effect: You spend a healing surge but regain no hit points.  Instead the target regains hit points as if it had spent a healing surge+your Charisma modifier.  You must have at least one healing surge remaining to use this power.  You may use this power on yourself.

Paladin Marking (KoC Rewrite)- A simpler mechanic that incorporates the 1/2 level rule  Now the paladin merely challenges one target and as long as he doesn’t attack another target that target is marked and stays marked.  If the target attacks something else it takes damage from the paladin’s holy might.  Seems simpler by far than the original to me and scales better.

Divine Challenge
At-Will * Divine, Radiant
Minor Action      Close burst 5
Target: One creature in burst
Effect: You Mark the target.  The target remains marked until you use this power again or you attack another target. This mark overwrites other marking effects.
While the target is marked it suffers a -2 penalty to attack rolls for any attack that does not include you as a target.  Also it takes radiant damage (minimum 1) equal to 1/2 your level + your Charisma modifier the first time it makes an attack that does not include you as a target. 
Special: This ability is based on a magical compulsion and does not require the target to have intelligence or an ability to understand your actions or words.

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As it turns out I’m pitifully short on female archers.  In looking at the mini’s there’s a Wood Elf Skirmisher that would work well for my wife’s elvish ranger, currently she’s using a Cliffwalk Archer I believe which is one of the very few female mini’s with a bow, but unfortunately no one seems to have any. Which is odd for an uncommon I would think.  There’s also the Autumn Wind Ranger but they’re Rare and as a result they’re pricey.

Another one I’d like to get is the Warden of the Wood.  But alas, no one has any.   I’d like to get a Healer, Mina the Dark Cleric,  Inspired Lieutenant but again rarity and or costs are a factor.

So I’ll have to make do with my pitiful amount of miniatures.

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The reason for this is I now have a fairly significant collection of DDM that I bought for playing D&D, not for the mini’s game.  And I have one son who enjoys chess and RTS’s like Supreme Command, Warcraft 3, Command and Conquer, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 etc.  He’s six by the way.  When he was 3 or so he’d sit on my lap and watch me play and by 4 he was building his own theme parks and dominating the world.  I also have a pair of twins who are 4 years old who enjoy playing World of Warcraft, (I run a private server for them) and the like.

Why not combine the two?  The kids and the mini’s that is.  Because only my 6 year old can really read well (and he can read very well) I’m not using any of the card data.  Our DDM rules are simple, the mini’s they choose can move 6 if they’re humanoid and not undead, 5 if they’re bugs, 4 if they’re undead.   The ranged characters have a range of 10.   For attacks we use d6, I have some big craps dice.  A ranged character can hit on a 6, melee can hit on a 5-6.  All characters are treated as minions, one hit and they’re dead.

My oldest would probably not have any problem with powers, defenses, and the like but the twins are still not ready for that level game mechanics.

We split up into two groups of two and each get 2 – 4 mini’s.   Other than that we use the standard terrain rules, walls, difficult terrain, victory points etc.   Victory areas are worth 1 point per turn, a kill is worth 1 point.

So far they’ve killed me off first and the group I’m in has lost every time. 

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I just watched the monster builder tutorial and it was fairly inclusive and seemed feature rich.

It’s java based *boo hiss* but seems fairly quick in spite of that and of course that typically means it runs on windows and macs and linux and whatever.

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I don’t usually do editorials but I thought I’d ramble a bit here about the high art of being a DM or GM.  Most people are happy to be players, especially those that have tried the DM chair, being a player is fun.  You get to control one person or perhaps a couple if you do henchmen or no one wants to play the cleric and as a result someone gets ’stuck’ with playing a secondary character which is easy.  You also get to kill monsters and who doesn’t like that? You get phat lewt and again who doesn’t like that.

The DM on the other hand has to control a world at both the macro and micro levels.  Whether planning and plotting out the political tensions between the City State of Kray and the city of Afar and the brewing rumours of war or deciding just how many goblins are under the orders of the ogre that’s currently raiding caravans shipping much needed foods and medicines to the plague stricken town of Shikant where three quarters of the gnome population has succumbed to the Grey Death and if they don’t recieve help soon the secret guardians of the Dakbeth’s Portal might be no more and the ancient evils there-in sealed will find their release upon the world.

Frankly being a DM is a shit pot load of work.  Back in the day I’d spend hours every week drawing maps, laboriously and lovingly populating dungeons that made no sense (“How come the goblins in this room haven’t killed the kolbolds in this room and taken all their stuff?”) although in my defense they made a lot more sense than many, perhaps most as even back in the day when Dungeon Crawl was created, I had thematic dungeons and layouts with food stores and kitchens and ZOMFG they have a place to go take a dump?!  Ever notice how no dungeons ever have bathrooms?  Even disregarding the “ewwwww” factor it’s just dangerous health wise.  No wonder heroes have such an easy time with clearing out dungeons, 9 out of 10 of the inhabitents are already dying from dysentary, diarhea and in general spewing from all orifices.

As a DM you want to challenge your players and their characters.  Give them choices, sometimes easy, sometimes hard to make.  You want to make many victories easy enough that they talk about that one time on that island at the end of the world?  When those head spiders were chasing us and Leoss the Magnificent Hypnotic Patterned them and then fell on his ass three times running down the tunnels to safety and almost died from tripping and falling?  Oh man good times… good times….

That’s why most players play, for those moments I think.  There’s something about a shared good time that you remember for years to come and trot out when you get back together with someone “who was there time that the first time Paladin ran away from the evil rather than toward it?”.

As a DM you play because you enjoy challenging people, you get a sense of reward from their entertainment and enjoyment.   You put up with having to buy all the crap so you have a big enough pool of stuff to draw from, the hours spent reading and outlining and thinking and detailing, the players who are asshats.  You put up with all that just so you can enjoy watching someone else react with delight or horror or bemusement when you trot out a custom monster that they’ve never seen before with powers that tax them to their limits and someone makes that one saving throw or that critical hit that saves the day for everyone.

Or at least that’s me.  You might be different.

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One thing that some people are doing is ’speeding’ up game play.  This has taken a slim variety of paths but it seems to fall into the allowing players to use their encounter powers more than once per encounter and their dailies more than once per day.  Getting rid of or altering healing surges is another prime candidate for change or using them as currency to allow more frequent usage of their powers.

One thing that struck me as interesting is one group’s removing the long rest and instead make their powers ‘episodic’.  You get what you get at the start of the gaming session and you don’t get more until the start of the next one.  BUT they’re also doing average damage (end result is the same but it does remove a great source of low and high points to me) and they’re making Dailies once per encounter, Encounters at-will.   They seem to be having fun with it but the DM admits his group is a bit on the power gamey side.

I think, now that I bother to think about it, that most of the people for whom ’spamming the same two attacks at-will) is lame, lame, lame are the ones who’s idea of RPG’s are MMOG’s.  Anyone brought up old school where every combat round was, except for the mage and to very lesser extent the cleric, *roll d20 and see if I hit* and just repeat that for however many attacks they got.  The cleric was typically, roll a d20 to hit maybe, run around and cast Cure [blank] Wounds primarily.   To us actually having two different attacks on top of the basic attack which is all anyone ever used to get triples our options.

If you’re a fan of Zombies, computer games and first person shooters then Left 4 Dead can’t be recommended enough.  And you can get it from Amazon right now for only $46 which is a small bargain with free shipping.  Of course you could get it from Steam for $49 and not have to pay shipping either or taxes or wait for it to show up in the mail.

If you have a friend or two then I’d recommend getting your own dedicated server.  They’re $12 a month most places and you’re gaurenteed low latency, availability and the like.  Split that 4 ways and you’re only paying $3 a month each.  Unless you have a horse of a machine and a lot of outbound bandwidth trying to run a listen server on your desktop while you play is going to suck for anyone trying to connect, not to mention going to the trouble of getting the right ports forwarded through your router and unblocked at  your local firewall etc.  Heck for $12 I’d rent my own personal server if we didn’t already have a group one.

I’ve been working on hacking L4D mapping out while we wait, impatiently, for the real mapping tools to be released and have working maps but they’re not quite ‘there’ yet.  The navigation tools aren’t working so you can’t build your navigation areas quite properly.

Any maps/campaigns I do I’ll post here for your bemusement as well.

The car picture is an example of the 67 mustang I’ve got and working on restoring.  It’s a slow process, I’m spreading out the expenses of parts over the long haul and the waterfall costs never seem to stop.  To run a set of air tools and possibly repaint the car back to it’s original color is going to need a good sized air compressor.  That’s going to require a 220 volt circuit in the garage.  That’s going to require a new sub panel off the main panel and wire run from pretty much as far a point in the house as you can get.  The panel is on the diagonally opposite side of the house from where the outlets would be needed.   Of course a 220 would also be needed for a decent mig welder.  So it’s always one thing after another.

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We ended up fighting the Were-wolf and it literally came down to the last roll.  Being the wise but utterly suckstastic Playwright I didn’t contribute much in this fight, my high non-combat skills didn’t come into play at all.

But eventually we forced a showdown with the wolf although not until after he managed to kill two of the city elders and we had two rounds.  He dropped us one by one but we were chewing through the 30 health he had by the time we managed to track him down and on the last roll he dropped the fighter played by temple who had four attack rolls and needed to get a 5+ on three of them in order to take out the were wolf’s last three health and I’ll be a son of a bitch if he didn’t do it.  So the last member of our party dropped and the wolf collapsed on top of him.

The remaining town elders, there were only two left by then, rescued us from death and gave us a party and we were heroes.

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All together it’s pretty close to the original although they had to give up a lot of the classic names you’ll remember if you ever played.

We, Temple, Laura and myself all played a game, with 100 tons as the limiting factor. They both took Atlas’s, single 100 tonners with a main weapon of an Autocannon 20 and LRM launchers.  I took three mechs, two 35’s and a 30′.  By 35’s both had two PPC’s on them and enough heat sinks to fire them both, the 30 tonner was just very fast with a 8/12/8 movement.

It was a FFA match but the two of them teamed up for awhile to beat on me until Laura launched a salvo when he got close. I’d already beat them both up, her more so than him and he was able to take her down.

I’d already got him once in the head and one of Laura’s SRM goups got him for another head shot.  With her down and him mostly intact and my little mechs hiding it looked grim.

Then I nailed him with a PPC blast into his almost completely unarmoured cockpit and vaporized him leaving a pretty much otherwise fully salvagable mech standing there.

I collected my downed 30 ton and both of their 100 tons and called in the Union I had waiting in the wings to evac us out of there so I could start a tear down and rebuild.

So now I have 280 tons (lost 20 due to damage) of mech I can used to barter and build my way to a properly designed battle unit.

In other news, I picked up a Touch of Evil and the Growing Hunger (I think it’s called) from Flying Frog.  I’m  a big fan of Last Night on Earth, easily the best Zombie game I’ve played and I’ve played a bunch.  ToE is a victorian murder mystery monster kind of thing.  A better description might be Arkham Horror Lite.  I haven’t had a chance to play yet.  GH is an expansion for LNoE and brings a lot of goodness to the game.

So much so that I’d really like to see LNoE 2 created using the tweaked rules and cards that GH brings.

Between one thing and another, Warhammer Online, In-Laws staying at my place, BT, and Life, I haven’t had a chance to peruse for news of the DnD kind but I’ll get to it.

Dennis

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I may grab some of these and the red skull or ‘obvious death’ markers.  I treat two bodies in a square as difficult terrain and being able to drop a big ol’ skull in the square rather than a couple of /’s to make an X would have greater visual impact and make it very obvious that hey someone died there.

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It has a lot of interesting information that would be of use to most DM’s I think in some degree in terms of fashioning their world in a Points of Light theme.

IN LANDS WHERE CHAOS REIGNS

Many Dungeon Masters have a lot of trouble handling the myriad components of their Campaign and this has often detracted from their quality. Certainly Dungeons & Dragons is much at fault considering the continuing need for personal scholarship amongst Dungeon Master and Player alike to simply fill in the blanks. Considering the concepts forwarded in Rich Baker’s POINTS OF LIGHT article will dominate the development of the 4th edition game, this is a good time to improve those campaign handling skills.

PART A – IMPROVED SETTLEMENT DEVELOPMENT

The earliest settlements emerge in the Neolithic as gatherings of famil

ies and soon grow into a Commonwealth – Large villages of families governed by family heads. They band together in common defence yet retain a propensity to family self-sufficiency. The Commonwealth Period gives way to inequality based in Specialization. Centralized Government and Religion begins its rise to the detriment of the Commonwealth. Unfortunately Specialization has its failings.

SPECIALIZED INDIVIDUALS

Within a community it creates a dependency amongst everyone in the community. Everyone must do their job but they require access to a common communication network to function within the community. Communities become divided with specific families devoted to certain tasks. Eventually these family divisions of labour can become geographical boundaries within the limits of the community.

SPECIALIZED COMMUNITIES

As Settlements and City-States become Nations encompassing many communities, they begin to specialize in certain tasks where other settlements specialize in an adjacent task.
As a consequence a community devoted to one specialized task requires communication with others who produce what they require and require what they produce.

Settlement vulnerability stems therefore from a dependency on the continuous function of the specialized system and its structures.

SETTLEMENT SPECIALIZATION

Specialization of the community (as opposed to specialization of the individual of the community) creates a dependency on those dwelling beyond the walls of that single community.
There are many such functions and their presence defines where they need to be located, what they must have access to, and how they function.

• Dispersed holdings – isolated independent farms with a selection of skills necessary to support their independent nature. There is little social interaction <Farm, Plantation, Ranch, and Dairy-farm>.

• Local market – a centralized community focussed on the collection and distribution of local produce. This type of community can function in isolation while access to a communication network is vital for the export of surplus produce <Granary, Barrel maker, Marketplace, Smokehouse>.

• Industrial – a community concerned primarily with the processing of raw materials into manufactured goods. Some will specialize in a single end-product. They have access to the resources necessary to process raw materials including labour, power (water for mills). Industrial communities require a communication network to function <Mill(water/wind/slave), Charcoal Furnace, Potter’s Kiln, Glass Furnace, Smelter, Distillery>.

• Commercial – a community involved in trade and financial activities (banking and money lending). They do not require traded produce to pass through the town and may be sophisticated enough to deal in document based trade and financial transactions. A communication network is critical to the survival of this community <Guild Hall, Bank, Moneylender, Roadside Inn, and Tavern>.

• Mining – this is involved in the extraction of minerals. It will be located where the minerals are and that can be anywhere. It requires access to a communication network <Clay pit, Stone Quarry, Peat Diggings, Salt Mine, Open Cut Pit, Obsidian Scrounge, Mining tunnels>.

• Administrative – this is the seat of government, whether the capital city or a local administration. This community will sit at a centre of a provincial or national communication network <Parliament, Council Hall>.

• Culture/education – these are centred on universities and colleges. They are centres of learning and have a selection of appropriate crafts to support the development, recording, and storage of information. There is some need for access to a communication network <University, School, Bard’s College, Wizard’s Tower, Theatre, Arena>.

• Ecclesiastical – religious centres drawing pilgrimage, or housing religious associations or shrines. These require access to a communication network <Church, Temple, Shrine, Sacred Grove, Altar, Religious School, Abbey, Monastery, Synod Council, Paladin’s Training Hall, Barrow, Burial Mound, Crypt, and Graveyard>.

• Primary Residence – this is the residence of a Ruler (Whether President, Emperor, King, Duke or Baron). It is a palace or castle and requires some access to a communication network <Castle, Palace, Keep, Whitehouse>.

• Resort – baths, recreational districts, retreats. They require a favourable geographical location that provides both safety and healing. Resorts function on a communication network <Bathhouse, Boarding Houses, Bed & Breakfast, Recreational Lake District, and Public Gardens>.

• Port – located on the coast as a fishing community, a centre of sea trade and travel or located on a river for the movement of goods and people by river. A port requires communication networks that extend over water and land <Fishing Village, Ferry, Boathouse, Ocean port, River Port, Siding, harbour, Docks>.

• Residential – these are designed to provide urban peoples with housing away from polluted, corrupted, or expensive urban centres. This specialization requires a second specialized centre in close proximity <Estates, Manor Houses, Suburbs, Ghetto, and Shanty Towns>.

It is because many of these specializations require access to a communication network to remain functional that they might easily become isolated and fall. Roads might be cut by armies or other disasters causing a land-locked community to decline. Ports on the other hand have access to communication networks over water and land and loosing one is not a total disaster.

MULTIPLE FUNCTION SETTLEMENTS

More familiar is the Specialization of groups or families within the settlement. A Large Community might be a port, a seat of a monarch, an administrative centre, a cultural centre, an industrial district, a commercial district, with ecclesiastical centres and outlying residential areas all rolled into one.

CRAFTING A SETTLEMENT

We blend the basic information available to us in the Dungeon Master’s Guide with our information to produce several different Settlements.

• The Farming District of Andemun. This “Village” consisting of some three hundred and twenty people (+20% children) where the most expensive item in the district is farmer Erasmus Shaw’s magnifying glass – which amounts to about a hundred gold pieces in value. Applying dispersed Settlement, Mining, and Port to our “Village”, we have a multifunction settlement occupying a reasonably safe region (mainly because a dispersed settlement is far more vulnerable to hostile intrusion than a centralized settlement – it is for this reason that our “Village” is not too isolated). Its level of isolation offers us a community upriver from the capital and down river from a major river port controlling a substantial farming district. There is regular traffic on the river offering regular news (perhaps a week old at most) from the capital and the port upriver. It is a settlement in its own right. Farms harvesting timber for firewood; a small granite quarry (employing five stonecutters) with a river siding where a merchant house from the Capital has arranged to buy direct from these “Farmers” straight onto its riverboats. Our “Village” also has a prospect for the future. At the current rate of forest clearing, the district will be ready for dairying in ten years. There is little happening here and when it does it is going to be pretty minimal. Perhaps the PCs might find themselves employed to run off some predators bothering the farmers to be paid in produce for their trouble.

• The Blackdog. This roadside Inn sits on a crossroads with access to a communications network (basically a regularly used corridor of information transfer). Information may come in and out from an assortment of locations on a regular basis and it sits on a trade-route where supplies can be bought from passing merchants and then sold to travellers for a marked up price. For adventurers it offers a respite before deciding which direction to go, or a bolthole where they can wait for information to fall into their laps.

• The Drift-port of Shadow has no real fixed population but numbers about five hundred on average. It drifts somewhere in the Rip (a Sea that flows north or south between the Island Kingdom of Ingoil and the Iron Kingdoms (this edge of the continent of Grun – The Rip is known to change direction)). It is a commercial centre and port involved in the trade of pirated loot and money-lending. At any time the Drift-port might consist of up to thirteen ships lashed together as the core trading port with up to thirty docked in port.

• The Temple of Dhurn, now buried under a landslide was dedicated to the forgotten God. It was a centre of Pilgrimage for its many practitioners and they brought many weapons here (which were dumped into the Peatbog) in sacrifice. In its day it had a population of six priests and thirty servants who tilled farmland in the valley of Penn to produce food, and tend the clergy’s every need. Currently it is un-active – being abandoned when the hillside washed down on it a thousand years back.

• Maidenshead is a small town of nearly two thousand citizens.

– The Serfs Quarter has around one thousand serfs who are crowded into many of the small, tightly packed mud-brick dwellings that dominate this large walled in part of the town – they toil in the fields, cut wood, and excavate clay from extensive diggings beside the river.

- Apothecary Row where several herbalists have residences/shopfronts to one side of a narrow, walled lane.

- The Baron’s Castle where the Baron, family, and some servants and administrative staff live and work.

– The Garden of Ash seems impersonal and abandoned considering it is a walled in bare gravel piece of land with ash, and charcoal marks where bodies are simply piled up with wood and burned.

– The Dogwall, (a walled off residential area providing a class with residential isolation from the urban centre) a walled ghetto where the Halfling populace of Maidenshead are forced to reside. Previously it was used to kennel the War-dogs of an early baron. Currently there are under a hundred Halflings crowded into the Dogwall and the gates are locked at sunset, and opened at sunrise each day. The only access to the Dogwall is direct to the Merchants Quarter.

– The Merchants Quarter is dominated by artisans involved in Pottery, and there are numerous Charcoal production furnaces and large scale Pottery Kilns burning (in some cases) all day.

Maidenshead sits on a clay brick mound on a plain of cleared ground at the outer edge of a river bend and while it over looks the river and any traffic there, it does not have a port (although travellers by boat might pull their vessel easily onto the bank and walk to the town. Maidenshead is linked to the Capital by road only.

THE DEBRIS OF ABANDONED SETTLEMENTS

When settlements are abandoned, due to what ever reason, many components are left behind. These components are often the hardest to remove (they are also characteristic of the settlement purpose) and will last centuries beyond the abandonment of the settlement.

• Carved Stone Obelisk, Steele, Monument, and Statue.

• Mine, Quarry, Smelter Pottery Kiln, and Blacksmith’s Forge, Charcoal Production Furnace.

• Stone Well, Irrigation Canal, Agricultural Field, and Plantation Crop.

• Stone Docks, Bridge, Stone Paved Road, Causeway.

• Cemetery, Barrow Mound, Outdoor Altar Stone, Shrine, Buried or Concealed Temple, Druid Grove, Ancient Tree, Ring of large Stones.

• Signal Tower, Watch Tower, Lighthouse.

• Fortified Cave, Bunker, Dungeon, Torture Chamber, Underground Laboratory, City Sewer, Catacombs.

• Castle Ruin, Foundations, Fitted Stone or Re-used Rock Wall, Chimney, Fireplace, Partially-buried Brickwork.

Consider the previously mentioned settlement of Maidenshead. Five centuries after the Baron was overthrown, all that is left is the foundations of a ruined castle with buried dungeons and treasure vaults, and the village of Dau’wal which is now located by the River. The old stone walls have been stripped down to their foundations (they are now used as road-ways separating extensive clay-diggings) and the rubble used to build a substantial trade dock and village foundation. Most homes are a mix of Adobe and fired brickwork representing the descendants of the original Slave and Halfling Population.

EVERY POINT OF LIGHT, ITS MIDDEN

By its nature we are as likely to find the forces of evil present within the dispersed settlements of our Civilization as loitering in the mud beyond its walls.

• The Barony of Melina is being terrorized by a “huge black wolf”. The predator is attacking lone travellers along the road that skirts the western edge of the hunting preserve of Baron Rugen along with the occasional peasant caught out on moonless nights. It makes its lair in the caves beneath Castle Witch-grave which sits atop the mountain. This hound shaped Iron Golem is bound with the soul of a werewolf, forged for Baron Rugen.

• Living on their isolated farm by the old road, the Jandemos are known to be the oldest farming family in the district and are greatly respected for it. No-one knows that the Jandemos have spent centuries abducting and eating stray travellers – their victims’ remains they dump in a deep cave on the ridge above their farm. Travellers go missing all the time in these parts but the Jandemos continue to go about their way of life without drawing much attention.

PART B – HANDLING CAMPAIGN EVENTS

It is at this point that many Dungeon Masters find themselves in trouble. Many don’t know how to keep track of group objects nor reason group-dependant event outcomes.

APPLYING A MESH

We apply a mesh to our campaign map linking every point of light including the small isolated locations that may have already fallen off the map. A temple buried millennia beneath a hill of dirt and trees thanks to a landslide far in the past may not seem like a point of light but it is as much a point of light as a cave behind a water fall and a fishing village on a stretch of isolated coastline. This allows us to use a simple hexagonal grid which we can lay over the campaign world.
We can also apply this mesh to a city and place on it the diverse buildings and locations relevant to an adventure.

POINTS ON A MESH

Just because a location is a point of light in a wilderness of chaos and darkness doesn’t mean it is any safer. So we are free to pretty much put every location that is known and leave holes where anything could be going on because even a ruined castle can be safer than the village it overlooks. For the most part those points on the mesh are stationary but not always.

• The peatbogs located at the south-east end of pen valley which conceal an entrance to the shrine currently buried beneath the hill beyond it.

• The point in muddy wood where the trail from the village of muddy meets the old road.

• The horse fair located outside the walls of Ryun (which can move to another settlement if Master Thaket decrees it).

OBJECTS IN MOTION

These are the source of those events that will affect all those points of light to be found sitting across your mesh. When they are interacted with during the ongoing campaign and under what grounds they will show up.

A CATACLYSM COMMETH

It is best to work backwards from the big picture, so let us look at the end of the World. Our cataclysm choice for the coming millennia of the campaign setting is the death of the Moon. Now we look at the role of the moon in our campaign setting. She keeps the tides moving in and out and the Werewolves get one night a lunar month to roam the country side; but what of our Cataclysm?
Something is hurtling out of the darkness of the heavens and it will collide with the Moon and destroy it utterly. The PCs will have front row seats to the destruction of their home world.

THE FALLOUT

This is the world affecting stuff that is going to happen in our campaign world as a direct consequence of the destruction of the Moon.

• Freed from the lunar cycle that has dominated their world since the beginning, Werewolves are now unleashed to transform freely every night. No longer will they be the enraged and rabid beast with little to no control over their actions.

• Every night will become a Moonless night. This will make every night a night in which the forces of chaos are able to move about freely. The imbalance that once favoured Civilization is now balanced out. Chaos once again rules the night.

• The tides cease to function as the lunar cycle ends. From this point onward, oceans begin to stagnate and corrupt. This is going to be the basis for the emergence of a dark and corrupt sea-god later in the campaign.

There are many effects due to the presence of the Moon but these three will immediately exert themselves on the campaign world so they have the most relevance to the lives of the PCs.

LARGE OBJECTS ORBIT THE HUGE

Now that we have our world-shattering Cataclysm, we can look at the large objects in motion about our Cataclysm. These create change on our campaign.

• The Warlord of the Shad has been troubled for several months by dreams that he is going to be attacked by Werewolves in his bedchambers. He has decided to invade the Kingdom of Isolde and (having armed his Skeleton Woodsmen with Axes of Axe-stone) log the forest of Wolves in order to exterminate the Werewolf population that is known to dwell there. Secondly, all harvested wood found there will be converted to charcoal for use in the smelting of iron ore and the manufacture of iron weapons to fight the War he knows will come from his actions.

• The worshipers of the Stranger have roamed the world in search of the ancient temples that existed when the forgotten one was known. They know that the coming of the Stranger will not go unnoticed. A number have financed bounties and others have advocated the slaughter of known Witches (they have done this through agents in assorted churches and merchant houses over the last few centuries) creating a culture of religious paranoia and fear in many towns and villages. Witch burnings have been on a slow rise and what records there are describe most as children who have gone insane – a few spoke of dreams about wolf-men on a moonless night, others screaming, driven mad by the lack of sleep, but many more were simply the victims of hysteria.

THE SMALL ORBITS THE LARGE

The players will notice otherwise localized events are appearing on the mesh at odd moments and locations. Small objects are orbiting a larger object and every so often the larger object changes dropping these small objects onto the mesh where they create events related to their nature.

• Thanks to the war, werewolves have been pushed across the border into this kingdom because their forest has been cleared for firewood by the raiding army. They have attacked the village of muddy and the entire village is infected. They have come through muddy wood down the old road from Kailsford (the citizens there are still being terrorized by attacks). The werewolves have cut the old road at the north end where it passes through the Muddy-wood. Isolated Kailsford sits on the old road about halfway through the Muddy-wood.

• The kobolds sniffing around the peatbogs at the far end of Penn valley are looking for ancient weapons abandoned in the bog. they are resisting the presence of the werewolves in the Muddy wood (our local area – near the old road where it cuts north into Muddy-wood. They can become part of the PC’s dynamic depending on how the initial interaction is handled. Good diplomacy may provide intelligence, trade, and even a future of relations. Violence on the other hand may provide may provide little more than a few very old bog-weapons. destroying the kobolds will remove their presence as a resistor to the activities of the werewolves in this region and will ultimately prove to be a problem at a later date when the pc’s are too overcommitted to hold back the tide of evil on multiple fronts.

• Slavers have been active in the last few months just north of the river Kail. Currently they are planning to sweep up the old road, enslave the populace, and invade our local valley. They will then pull out all the stone plundered from the castle ruins to build some of the village buildings (in our village of pigpen) and rebuild the castle. There is enough stone to build a small castle, and they will use labourers to fell pines for the construction of a wooden wall and dirt palisade. The villagers will be located to a slaver stockade at the foot of the old quarry face below the castle.

• The green smoke coming from the ruins is Sherm the gnome is brewing green ale. He must brew the ale in the ruins for several reasons. Firstly because the village elders banned him from doing so in the village limits and secondly because of the green slime found a dungeon wall below the surface. PCs or some militia NPC may think that Sherm was acting with the slavers to draw off the militia. At the time of the attack. Sherm claims the ale has been ordered by a wizard living in a tower somewhere in the forest because his regular supply has been disrupted.

OBJECTS ORBITING THEMSELVES

Of course there is always a group of objects orbiting a common centre where no such larger object exists. This can be seen as unrelated events interacting with each other to make it look like there is a larger conspiracy going on yet it can be the orbital debris of a previously functional object.

• Bounty hunters looking for a single individual by the name of Kurr Arran begin raiding villages and interrogating their citizens. Someone has offered a bounty of a hundred thousand gold pieces for Kurr Arran to draw attention from the bounty on their own head.

• A farmer named Kurr Arran lives near the village of Pigpen (the name is common in these parts – one of the PCs is a cousin). He must be protected from bounty hunters who are moving through the region.

• In the village of Dogwater, a man named Kurr Arran is killed and his head taken. Adventurers might be called in to investigate the murder.

CHANGE AND THE DEBRIS OF CHANGE

When an object changes, there are several important effects.

• That which it used to be collapses. This means it vanishes from the past, present, and the future. This can be seen as confusion in the part of soothsayers who were predicting a certain event and suddenly they no longer see that event in the future.

• It leaves behind debris which provides a connection to the moment of change. If this debris can be found in the past and future then a massive object might alter events by causing the object of the war to become a suborbital. An opportunity presents itself where a powerful individual might make the war their own and shape any changes to their own ends.

• Those left behind are effectively locked out of accessing the past before things changed and will only have access to the debris of possibility in the future. Perhaps an individual or group might sack a temple full of gold that avoided being sacked because the larger object changed direction.

• Small objects orbiting the large object might suddenly appear on the mesh as free objects or as a consequence of a direction change. Slavers might become free agents or the warlord might provide them with new resources consistent with the larger change.

RESISTANCE AND THE ALTERNATIVE

With the PCs thrust into a world of change, they are presented with a few options as to their own future in this world. They must make choices as to which side they are on because that is the nature of their situation. Resist the change that is happening or be prepared to accept it. In both cases there will be consequences to their actions, and their world will never be the same again.

RESISTING

Resisting these minor effects will only prevent them from happening locally. While they are unique to the larger cause, these events are recurring and will continue to emerge elsewhere. Overly large and successful resistance itself will change future events in the local area. The larger object will alter minor objects and sent them against the source of resistance but it also changes direction.

• In response to victories against the slavers, a large band of raiders are sent to crush resistance in the Penn valley and claim the castle which is regionally significant to events yet to happen.

• Displaced peoples converge on this bastion of resistance seeking refuge and safety but they are not all coming for the same purpose. Some will be the worst and some the best.

• The kobolds seeing the help the characters gave them in cleansing their forest of the threat of lycanthropy may decide to become scouts for the PCs as long as they are in-charge of the region and find fair treatment and benefit from the ongoing relationship.

GOING WITH THE FLOW

Of course resistance is not always the path chosen. The PCs sensing the enslavement of the village might decide not to save the day. This can have consequences later.

• The party decide to flee for the coast and make their way to Ryun. The fact is that they might in the course of their adventures discover that the region is about to become involved in a war that they want nothing to do with.

• The party might make them-selves available to the slavers becoming a sub-orbiting object.

• The party might become a roving war-band like the many bandits and war-bands now at large in the Kingdom and find themselves classed as outlaws and Bandits – even to the point of being hunted by Bounty Hunters and Killers.

AN INROAD TO ADVENTURE

So there are a number of ongoing events in the Valley of Penn when the PCs start out. For the people of the Village of Pigpen, these events are for the most part seemingly ordinary events that might appear unrelated to each other or even larger more obscure events, yet they can be the tip of larger campaign icebergs, some of which have been in motion for a long time.

• Kobolds have been seen loitering near the peatbogs. Kurtis Strang (a peat digger) returned from the bogs yesterday complaining of Kobolds. A group of miliia will be dispatched to the peatbogs to find out what they are up to and drive them off.

• An eerie green smoke has been seen coming from the ruins of castle Penn since the morning. A few militia reserves will be sent to investigate the ruins and make sure it isn’t the Kobolds sniffing around the peatbogs.

• A child named Kaiya is turned into the wilderness as a witch by the village elders. She has been troubled by dreams that an elderly lady is murdered by a stranger in a tavern in some unknown village or town. A band of militia will be tasked with taking her by palanquin to a location beyond Muddy wood and abandon her on the old road.

DELVING DEEPER INTO THE CAMPAIGN

As the party (and others) move through points on the mesh they exert change on objects they encounter. Object shadows sit waiting to be interacted with while other events can already be underway and exerting their influence on the surrounding areas.

• Visiting the town of Kailsford and putting a stop to the werewolf attacks can open the way for alternative events to reveal themselves. These events may well have been pushed aside or overshadowed by the presence of the werewolf. Perhaps a few of the werewolf killings were in-fact assassinations designed to take advantage of the situation.

• Overthrowing the slavers and claiming the stronghold opens the prospect for population growth as people seeking safety and refuge (they are in fact changing direction in response to the existence of your stronghold) arrive.

• Aiding the kobolds in their fight against the werewolves occupying muddy wood and the village of Muddy (or having killed the kobolds, face these dangerous opponents without this unlikely support).

NEVER A CLEAN VICTORY
Ultimately once the larger event (the war) ends, these minor events will disperse leaving some residue of their passing. Either the war is successful or it fails.

• Numerous bandits made of displaced peoples will continue to roam the region even after a few have gone off to settle in safe areas with their accumulated wealth.

• mercenaries who feel that they have better prospects by not staying with the enemies who employed them, or departing for elsewhere when the local king is done employing their services might become free-roaming war-bands or settle in the area. Either way, they are free men who band together in unity and will resist a return to serfdom.

• Lycanthropy will never be gone, even when the party thinks it has exterminated the last werewolf. The same can be held for the many plagues that will surface during the campaign.

QUID PRO QUO

Of course there is always a trade-off. Improving your understanding of Points of light, and how they interact as well as improving your tracking of group objects is going to require a higher level of mental discipline, organization, and pre-game preparation on the part of the DM. It will develop your storytelling skills yet force you to base your actions on a consistent rule-set.

WRITTEN BY: S.R. Meaney 2007

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Fireguy

Nailer

Chainsawer

Image Credits – Fireguy, Nailer, Chainsawer

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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.   I also couldn’t find any significant kolbolds, goblins or orcs.   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

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In the picture here the top safety film is still in place so it’s a little hazier and less translucent that it will be in actual game play. With three small children used to playing on the gaming table with my miniatures, dice, their miniatures etc. I left it on so the first actual game usage would be relatively scuff, fingerprint, and scratch free. After that it’s all bets are off as usual around here.

I drew a grid on the ‘underside’ of the lexan using metallic sharpie. I tossed around the thought of using a dremel tool in a little homemade jig and a routing bit to scribe lines in the lexan to make them permanent and probably a little better looking but the plastic isn’t that thick to start with and I could easily see it just fracturing along those scribe lines when I lift it up to put things underneath it leaving me with a bunch of broken pieces.

So one asstastic amount of grid lines later I’ve got the tabletop on the table and it doesn’t look too bad. Given the size and the fact I was doing this on the floor not all the lines are perfect and the ink flow from the metallic sharpies wasn’t all that standardized so. And one of the pens had a very hard time writing on it. But over all I think it came out very much okay.

Cheat Sheet

I still need to ’stonify’ the gray matte paper underneath, but I need to do some testing to figure out what I can use that won’t eventually or immediately stain or discolor the lexan that’s going on top of it.

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So several scores down the length of it using my largest metal ruler (6′) I snapped off the excess.  It was pretty clean but I ran the random orbit sander down the edges to ensure there’s no pointy bits that are going to be breaking off.  Although given the insetness of the sheet it’s not a major issue but using a finger to pry it up could get nasty.

So now I’ve got a piece of clear plastic to fit in my well on my gaming table and then I realize black grid on black pokercloth isn’t going to work well.  So another trip out and I get some gray matte board.  I’m going to use some sponge technique’s to ‘roughen’ it up so it looks like stone.  Geeky eh?

Then I’m going to use metallic pen markers to draw a grid on the underside of the plastic.  So the grid will sit under the part where I’ll be drawing maps.

And the point to this all?  I can now put cheet sheets, character sheets and all that under the map, you can read it through the map and yet I can draw over the sheets to map.

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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.

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As it stands there’s roughly a 10% chance that 1st level party will win a 1st level Skill Challenge.  1 in 10.  Now as a DM that’s horrible.  I have to plan on the players failing 9 times in 10 every skill and frankly that’s horrible.

I’ve found a couple of alternates as a very rough way to ‘fix’ the problem you could just reverse the successes needed versus the failures.  So 2 success versus 4 failures.

But there are some alternate options that completely replace the existing system and I’m posting the simpler one here.  The more complex well detailed one is also interesting but detailed isn’t always a winner in my opinion

Anwyay, click the more below to see this one.

Stalker0’s Skill Challenge System

Stalker0’s Obsidian Skill Challenge System
VERSION 1.0

UPDATE!! There is now a beautiful pdf version of the system, which is far easier to read than the forum. So save your eyes and take a look! Its at the bottom of this post

Welcome to the latest in my attempts at a new Skill Challenge System for 4th edition! Unlike my previous skill challenge ideas, this is a complete revamp from the standard system. So, the first question is who should consider using this system?

Consider using the Obsidian System if you believe in the following:
1) Players should always be included in skill challenges, but shouldn’t always get to use their best skills. A social character should shine in social encounters, and an athletic character should shine in athletic encounters.
2) Players shouldn’t feel that their participation is actually hurting the party’s chances of succeeding at a challenge. Players should always feel that they are helping the challenge, even if it’s to a smaller degree than a character with better skills.
3) A skill challenge should work as a decent encounter, but be easily scalable to a much longer and epic scale.
4) Players should spend more time describing their actions, and less time trying to find ways to use their best skills.
5) The skill challenge math should be solid enough to allow DM tweaking without causing problems.
6) The standard skill challenge system for whatever reason just isn’t for you.

If you’re still reading, here’s the deal. I will post the basic system in the first post. I will then post more advanced options for those who would like to use them in the second post. And then in the third post I will go into a detailed discussion of how and why the system works like it does. So basically, if you’re not into the nitty gritty just read the first or second post. The deeper you go, the more technical it becomes.
First of all, I need to give a special shout-out to Fredrick Svanberg. He was the first one to create the idea of doing skill challenges in rounds. From that idea, I have created a system I hope many can enjoy.

The Basic Skill Challenge
3 Segments: Every skill challenge consists of three segments. Each segment can last as long as the DM desires. For many challenges, a segment will be a single round. In others, it could be an encounter or several hours of work. During each segment:

1) Each player describes an action that his character is doing, whether it’s tumbling past a guard or talking with a duke. Players are free to describe actions that directly contribute to a skill challenge, or that simply help their fellow party members succeed. Both actions are considered equally important for the challenge.
2) The DM and the player work together to decide the right skill check for the action. In general, a player should be using skills that fit the challenge type (see Types of Challenges below) though the DM is the final judge whether a certain skill can be used.
3) If the player gives a particularly good description or role-plays well, the DM can give him a +2 to the skill check.
4) All players roll their skill checks versus the DC of the challenge. The DM counts up all of the successes that are made.
5) Steps 1-3 are repeated for the second and third segments of the challenge. The DM totals up all of the successes made, and then determines whether the party failed, obtained victory, or only obtained partial victory. See the “Winning and Losing” section below or more information.

DM NOTE: “DON’T CHANGE THE NUMBER OF SEGMENTS”. Increasing or decreasing the number of segments will have a very large impact on the system, and is not recommended. If you wish to have a longer skill challenge, take a look at “larger skill challenges” listed in the advanced options.

Player Options: While playing in a skill challenge, players can use the following:
Bold Recovery: A player may spend an action point to reroll a skill check they have made, before they might know if the roll was a success or failure. The player must take the result of the reroll. If the skill challenge is particularly long, the DM may grant the players the option to use additional action points.

Critical Success: A natural 20 on a skill check is an automatic success. In addition, the player may reroll the skill check. If he beats the DC with his second check, he receives another success. If a player rolls multiple 20’s in a row, he may continue to reroll and gain additional successes.

Primary Skill: For most challenges, the DM assigns one or two skills as the center point of the challenge. Players using that skill receive a +2 to their skill checks. Example: In a negotiation with a Duke, diplomacy would be the primary skill. In a scene where the party sneaks into an orc camp, stealth would be the primary skill. If the players were researching a secret from ancient arcane texts, arcana would be the primary.

DM NOTE: Primary skills are designed to encourage players to use the “the right skill at the right time”. Further it allows players with weaker skills a chance to have a decent skill check to make. However, not all skill challenges must have primary skills. If you do use a primary skill, make it well known to your players.

STOP!!! If you’re a player, that’s really ALL you need to know to use this system, really. Feel free to keep reading, but note that most of the further information is about setting up a skill challenge.

Determining Skills Allowed and Setting Difficulty

What skills to allow?: One major difference between the standard 4e skill challenge system and the Obsidian System is that in the standard system, all players are assumed to use their best skills in the majority of skill challenges.

This is not the assumption in Obsidian. If players are in a social type challenge, they are expected to use social skills for example, even if they aren’t the best at it. This gives players that are good at certain skills a chance to shine and also lets each player roleplay their character at their best and worst moments. In general, use the Challenge Type (see below) to determine what skills to allow players to use. However, in some cases a player may make a very good case to use a different skill. As the DM, feel free to allow new skills, especially for creative, innovative uses.

As a good rule of thumb, only allow a player to use a nonstandard skill once per skill challenge and only if the player is creative with the skill.

Example: During a chase scene (a physical challenge) the rogue asks the DM if he can use bluff (a social, not a physical skill) to psych out the guards and escape. He gives a really good description of what he wants to do. The DM allows it, but for the rest of the challenge encourages the rogue to use physical skills (like acrobatics).

DM NOTE: “Why Intimidate is not a bad skill!” There are some skills that DMs have trouble relegating in their skill challenges. For example, if the party is in social challenge with a noble, the DM might think that intimidate is just going to anger the noble and so shouldn’t be used for the challenge. Whenever possible, try to think broadly when considering skills. For example, while a player directly intimidating the noble might not work, intimidate may work in a more subtle way. For example, the noble raises his voice and yells at the party, trying to get an advantage. However, when he looks over at the intimidating demeanor of a PC, he realizes such tactics won’t work, and he backs down (the player just rolled a success using intimidate). As a DM, if a player is trying to use a social skill for a social challenge, work with him to create a skill use that fits your story and lets the player use his skill.

Setting Difficulty: A standard skill challenge’s level is the same as the party’s. Table 1 below gives the DC’s for the skill challenge at each level. If a DM wishes to change the difficulty, a +1/-1 to DC changes the difficulty of the challenge by about +/- 10%.

Table 1. Difficulty Class at Each Level

Level DC
1	18
2	19
3	19
4	20
5	20
6	21
7	21
8	23
9	23
10	24
11	24
12	24
13	24
14	26
15	26
16	27
17	27
18	28
19	28
20	29
21	30
22	31
23	31
24	32
25	32
26	33
27	33
28	34
29	34
30	35

Winning and Losing
Once the DM has totaled up all of the successes for a challenge, he compares the total number to Table 2 given below. The table shows how many success rolls the party needs for partial or total victory. If they get fewer than that, they suffer a failure. The number is based on the number of players that are in the challenge.

Table 2. Successes needed for Victory

Players	Victory P. Victory Failure
2	5+	3-4	Less than 3
3	6+	4-5	Less than 4
4	7+	5-6	Less than 5
5	8+	6-7	Less than 6
6	10+	8-9	Less than 8
7	12+	10-11	Less than 10

Failure “Guys, we have a problem”: The party has failed to acquire the goals of the challenge and/or has suffered a significant setback in the process.
Partial Victory “Its not over yet”: The party has accomplished most of the goal, but there’s still more to be done, or there are loose ends to tie up.
Victory “A job well done”: The party has completed all of the goals of the challenge, and is ready for a new adventure.

Types of Challenges
Every Skill Challenge has a type chosen by the DM. The type determines what kinds of skills are generally appropriate to the challenge, as well as the consequences of success and failure. There are three possible kinds of challenges:

DM NOTE: The challenge types are designed to be a quick way for players to know what skills to use, and a guide for you to design the results of success and failures. However, never feel stifled by the challenge types; use them to your own benefit.

Mental
A Mental challenge lets the players using their minds and their senses to gain clues and to find their way around the world. DMs can use Mental Challenges to describe large scales of scenery and give players a chance to work out clues to obtain victory.

Example: Finding your way through an old forest, determining the secret entrance to the underground city, solving the puzzle of El-Karad, or finding the last ingredient for a ritual in an old library are examples of a Mental Challenge.

Standard skills for a mental challenge include:

Arcana (Int)
Dungeoneering (Wis)
Heal (Wis)*
History (Int)
Insight (Wis)
Nature (Wis)
Perception (Wis)
Religion (Int)
Streetwise (Cha)^
*When dealing with anatomy or medical insights.
^For navigating urban terrain or gaining information on the street.

Failure: Failing a mental challenge often means you arrive at a different location than the one you had intended, or that you obtain a piece of information…only to later find out it is incorrect.
Partial Victory: You gain some of the information you need, but need more. However, you know where to go to get more information. You successfully navigate the terrain, but are greatly delayed, or miss out on a special place as you make your way.
Victory: You gain the information you need and solve the puzzle. You navigate the terrain quickly and easily, and find a special location along the way.

Physical
A physical challenge often is the most versatile of challenges. It can include subtle stealth or outrageous stunts. Players are encouraged to describe their actions in detail.

Example: Scaling a great cliff, sneaking past a group of guards, and crossing a raging river are good physical challenges.

Standard skills for a Physical Challenge include:

Acrobatics (Dex)
Athletics (Str)
Endurance (Con)
Heal (Wis)
Stealth (Dex)
Thievery (Dex)
Social (cha)*
Knowledge (int or wis)^
*Social skills can sometimes be useful in physical challenges against other creatures. Using bluff to throw off a group of guards as you make your escape is a good example.
^Knowledge skills can sometimes be useful in physical challenges that involve certain environments. Using nature in a chase scene that involves the jungle is one example.

Failure: Failing a physical challenge usually involves physical fatigue and possibly great peril. Examples include every party member losing two healing surges. Or each person in the party loses ¼ of their hit points, and then is forced into a combat.
Partial Victory: The party has overcome the obstacle but may have created new obstacles in the process. For example, the party has to climb a rock wall in a way that leads to other hazardous terrain. Or the party completes the task but suffers fatigue in the form of losing 2 healing surges each.
Victory: The party overcomes the obstacle, fresh, strong and ready for the next one.

Social
A social challenge generally involves talking and a large amount of roleplaying. Players are encouraged to use eloquent words, bold statements, and outright lies to win the day.

Example: A negotiation with the Duke, talking your way past the guards, and convincing an old hero to take up the cause once again are examples of social challenges.

Standard Skills for a social challenge include:

Bluff (cha)
Diplomacy(cha)
Insight (wis)
Intimidate (cha)
Streetwise (cha)
Knowledges * (int or wis)
*In some cases, some knowledge skills can be useful if they are particularly relevant to the challenge. Example: Using religion in a social challenge that involves a priest.

Failure: Failing a social challenge normally means the party does not get their desired help, and often the other group’s opinion of the party has dropped. If the opposing group was already hostile, it may result in combat.
Partial Victory: Generally the party gets what they want, but the other group wants something too. Good examples are a rare treasure, some key information, or a favor. This can often led to another quest.
Victory: The party gets what they want. In many cases the other side will feel greater respect (or awe) for the party.

Same Scene, Different Skill Type.
One DMs social challenge is another ones physical challenge. Most environments could have any of the three challenges. The question you have to ask yourself is, “what is the main challenge my party is trying to overcome?”

Example: The party is traveling through a forest. What challenge type would that be. The answer is….it depends!!

Scenario 1: The Forest of Wonders (Mental)
The party is traveling through an ancient forest. The forest moves and often those that enter it are lost forever. The party must use their woodsman skills and their knowledges to figure out the clues of the forest, and ultimately the way out.

Scenario 2: The Treacherous Forest (Physical)
The party is traveling through a forest that is more like a jungle. The heat is intense, and the humidity large. Disease is rampant, and the trees are so thick at times the party must cut their way through. The party must endure the harsh conditions of the woods in order to make it to the other side.

Scenario 3: The Druids of the Forest (Social)
The party is in a mysterious wood and can’t find the way out. They find a group of druids that may have the answer. But the druids will need convincing, and the wrong word could spell doom for the party.

Awarding XP
For a basic skill challenge, give the party the same XP as you would if you were using a complexity 5 skill challenge in the standard system.

That’s it!
So that is everything you need to know to run the Obsidian Skill Challenge System. However, should you desire some more advanced options, including larger skill challenges and skill challenges during combat, check out the next post!

ADVANCED OPTIONS

Everything you need to run a basic skill challenge is given above. However, the system has a lot more options in store for DMs who would like them.

Optional Rules:
Roll before the Action: In some cases, the DM may desire the players to roll before they describe their actions during a skill challenge. This can be useful in social challenges, as the players can then “act out” the results of their checks.

Rolling Initiative: In the standard system, players are assumed to describe their actions in whatever order is appropriate and roll simultaneously. However, feel free to have the players roll initiative if it helps you run the challenge.

Total Victory and Total Defeat: In some challenges, a DM may not desire partial victory, instead wanting either complete victory or complete failure. In that case, remove the success number from the challenge, and just use the partial victory number. From there, feel free to change the DC to suit your desired difficulty.

Going for Broke: This rule gives players more control over their actions in a skill challenge, and allows them to come back from greater failure. During the third (and last) segment of a skill challenge, players can take a -5 to their skill rolls. If they still make the DC, they receive 2 successes. Players must choose whether to go for broke before any players have made their skill rolls. In general this will give the players fewer partial victories and more full successes.

Same Skill as long as a Different Description: Once the DM has decided to allow a skill, the system allows the player to use that skill over and over again for every segment of the skill challenge. However, if a DM wants to encourage more creativity, he can rule that a player can only use the same skill if he comes up with a new description for it, or continues to roleplay the skill appropriately.

Skill Challenges equal More Combat: In general, skill challenges provide an alternative to combat. However, in many cases combat is a big part of the fun for players, and while they are happy to win a challenge, they may also secretly have wished to fail if it provided a combat.

When using this option, place a combat at the end of your challenge regardless of whether the players succeed or fail. Instead, have failure provide them a -1 to their attack rolls in combat, partial victory give them an extra action point they can use (or an extra second wind perhaps) and a victory provide them a +1 to their attack rolls.

Larger Skill Challenges
Sometimes, one skill challenge isn’t enough! There are three general instances when a DM would like to have more than one skill challenge:
1) Partial Victory. By their nature, partial victories invoke unfinished work, which could mean another skill challenge for the party.

2) More in-depth challenges. The DM would like to use skill challenges as a large quest or an epic journey.

3) Mixed Challenges. A DM wants to use a wider range of skill challenges, including mental, physical, and social challenges all in one.

Building off a Partial Victory: Feel free to create another basic challenge for the party, and insert it later in the adventure to tie up the loose ends they left in the first challenge. In this case, you may want to use the “Total Victory and Total Defeat” optional rule listed above so that one way or another, the party will be done after the second challenge.

Building a larger challenge: This is very easy in the Obsidian system. Just follow these steps:
1) Choose a basic skill challenge, and give it a type.
2) If the party fails the challenge, don’t give them a standard penalty. Instead, they receive a -1 to all skill rolls involved in the next section of the challenge.
3) If the party gets a victory, don’t give them a standard bonus. Instead, they receive a +1 to all skill rolls involved in the next section of the challenge.
4) If the party gets a partial victory, they receive no additional bonus or penalty, and proceed to the next phase of the challenge.
5) Repeat steps 1-4 to add as many sections to the challenge as you like. Feel free to use different types as well.
6) For the final challenge, provide failure and success benefits as normal. You may wish to make these grander than normal, as the final result is the effort of many challenges.

Example Large Challenge: Escape from Jail.

Section 1 Breakout (Social Challenge)
The party is in a high security jail, but one of the guards is sympathetic to their cause. With enough persuasion, the guard might let them out.

Primary Skill: Diplomacy

Failure: The guard sets a trap for the party to teach them a lesson. The party is released, but many guards are waiting for them. They enter the next challenge with a -1 to all of their skill checks in the next section.
Partial Victory: The guard lets the party out, but only seconds before security is alerted. The party must proceed to the next section with no bonus or penalty.
Victory: The party enlists several guards to help, and manages to escape well before security is alerted. They receive a +1 to their skill checks for the next section.

Section 2: The Chase (Physical)
The party is on the run, being chased by the guards. They must make their way to the exit of the city and escape.

Primary Skill: Athletics, Endurance

Failure: The party manages to escape the city, but is terribly winded from the chase, and the guards are not far behind. They receive a -1 to all skill checks for the next section of the challenge.
Partial Victory: The party escapes the city, but the guards are not far behind. They proceed to the next section of the challenge.
Victory: The party is well ahead of the guards. They receive a +1 on their skill checks for the next section.

Final Section: Forest Walk (Mental)
The party must navigate the forest of Myar, which surrounds the city, with the guards on their heels and patrols in the woods. They must find the quick ways through the dense forest, or be overtaken by the patrols.

Primary Skill: Nature

Failure: The party is surrounded by guards and asked to surrender. The encounter is extremely difficult for the party, and may result in several deaths. The players can fight or surrender. If they surrender, they are taken to the city magistrate.
Partial Victory: The party escapes most of the patrols, but one lies between them and freedom. Set up a standard encounter for the party. If they succeed, the party is free, but tightened security will make it extremely difficult to enter the city again.
Victory: The party makes it by all of the patrols, and escapes without incident. In addition, they manage to find a dropped report that gives detailed information about the security of the city, which would assist if the party decides to return there later.

Skill Challenges in Combat
Sometimes, a DM would like to combine combat and skill challenges into a single encounter. The Obsidian System only needs a small tweak to make this happen.
Follow these steps:

1) Create a basic skill challenge, and assign it a type. Generally, combat skill challenges are physical or mental ones.
2) Each player can make one skill check for every move action they spend. So a player could make 2 skill checks in a round, or 3 if using an action point.
3) Decide failure, victory, and partial victory normally. In general, activate the effects of a partial victory when it happens, and then add in the effects of the full success if/when the party obtains it.
4) For XP purposes, treat the skill challenge as a complexity 3 if you were using the standard system.

Optional Rule: “No time limit”. In some cases, the DM doesn’t want failure in the challenge. The players’ use of actions is enough of a payment to overcome a challenge. In this case, don’t use the standard 3 segment rule. Let players continue to make checks as they desire until the overcome the challenge.

Example: The trap (Physical Challenge)
The party is facing a series of monsters and a metal disk trap that is a serious hazard. They must overcome the monsters but if they don’t disable the trap it will become even deadlier.

Primary Skill: Thievery

Failure: The trap ramps up, gaining +2 to its attack and damage rolls.
Partial Victory: The trap is weakened, taking a -2 to its attack and damage rolls (this occurs immediately whenever the party reaches the required number of successes).
Victory: The trap shuts down completely (this occurs immediately whenever the party reaches the required number of successes).
Using the “No Time Limit” Optional Rule: The trap does not ramp up. It continues to attack the party until the party gets the required number of successes to weaken or disable the trap, or until the party leaves the trap behind.

Adjusting the Difficulty of the System to your party.
The system assumes that for a 5 man party, against any challenge a party will have:

1) ONE good skill user, who has a high stat and training in a skill useful to the challenge.

2) TWO average skill users, who have training, but a lower stat (or an armor check penalty).

3) TWO poor users. These guys have no training and a weak stat in the skill.

With such a party, the system gives around a 30% failure rate, a 30% partial victory, and a 40% total victory rate for an equal level challenge (so 70% of the time the party is winning something)
DMs may wish to tweak the system to mold it better for their party. In general, adding +1 to the DC increases the challenge of the system by about 10%. Further, every +1 each party member gains to a skill increases the party’s win chances by about 2%. That means if a player gains a +5 to a skill (such as by skill training) then increasing the DC by 1 will balance out the challenge.

If a DM wants a different tweak, he can increase or decrease the victory number without touching the partial victory number. This will change the ratio between partial and total victory, but the party’s failure rate won’t change. Note that this effect is actually quite large, if you increase the number by 1, you decrease the total success rate by 16% (and increase the partial victory by the same amount).
IMPORTANT NOTE: The 3 segments are an important part of the system. Changing the number of segments in a skill challenge block will greatly change the system, and is not recommended.

So that’s it. You know have all the weapons in the Obsidian system. If you want even more information about the system, take a look at the next post.

The Nuts and Bolts of the Obsidian System (Version 1.0)

This section is just detailing how and why the system does what it does. This is all COMPLETELY OPTIONAL INFORMATION! Please don’t feel that you have to read this to understand the system.

Why the name Obsidian?
I would love to tell you all it represents the polishing of a rough system into something smooth and wonderful or something like that. But the honest answer is it popped in my head, and it sounded so cool to me I had to use it!

Changing the Paradigm, why did I choose to create Obsidian?
Unlike my other skill challenge system, Obsidian represents a very different way of thinking about a skill challenge. People may be wondering why I went this direction, especially considering how much time and effort (and snacks!) went into creating my other system.
The answer is NOT that I’m unhappy with my other system. I think it is a great step forward in the skill challenge progression, under the paradigm of success/failure complexities.

The answer is that as my group started playing skill challenges, several things came out that they disliked about it. It had nothing to do with my tweaks to the system, but more to the core mechanics of the system, which are as follows:

1) For most skill challenges, every player should get the opportunity to use one of his best skills.

My group had several problems with this. First of all, we don’t like the idea that everyone is awesome at every moment. It goes to the quote from the “Inevitables” movie, “If everyone is special, no one is.” While we like the idea of every player participating in a skill challenge, we didn’t want every player to participate equally every time. The fighter should be great in physical time challenges and not so great in social ones. However, one of the benefits of 4e that we like is that because the skill discrepancy isn’t as large, while a fighter isn’t as good in a social scene as the rogue perhaps, the difference isn’t so large the fighter may as well not be there. He can still help, just not as much.

Further, we noticed that players trying to use their best skills started feeling “mechanical”. In 3e when we would do a “social challenge” the party would talk to the duke, we would roll a diplomacy check, and be done with it. In 4e the wizard is thinking how his arcana will work, the fighter is trying to think of some crazy thing to do with athletics, the cleric wants to talk about his god as if that will automatically help, while the rogue just sighs and rolls diplomacy. In the challenge, we wanted people to be roleplaying and rolling diplomacy, intimidate, and bluff checks. And if every character isn’t the best at that, that’s okay, the party should still have a good chance of winning the challenge.

2) A player’s effort can actually hurt the party. A failed roll can “ruin” the challenge for the group.

In combat, generally the worst thing a player can do is do nothing. He misses with his attack, doesn’t take any hits, and just basically contributes nothing to that round of combat. However, in the standard skill challenge, you can do worse than that. Your rolls can actually hurt the party’s chances of success. In the worst case scenario (complexity 1 for example), two players can end the challenge before the other players even have a chance to go.

We noticed at our table that players didn’t like that. In some cases, the players would rather have not gone then rolled badly for the challenge. Aid Another is a fix for that, the problem is aid another is such a powerful mechanic mathematically that if you allow it freely the math gets screwed up. Don’t allow it, and the failure problem raises its head.
With these problems in mind, I set out to create a brand new system that would keep the core benefits of the skill challenge system (multiple rolls for success and failure, everyone participating) but could knock out these drawbacks.

No more complexities, the 3 Segment System
In doing work on my other skill challenge system, I learned something early on. Complexities are…complex! Mathematically when you start messing with complexities things get hairy very fast. This system is no different, and so I was prepared to delve into the depths of crazy math once again.

But wait I said! Does it have to be that way? One of the things my group wanted was “not everything should be a skill challenge”. Sometimes its okay for the party’s face to say a few words, roll a diplomacy check, and everyone goes on their way.
That led to the first structure of the Obsidian system:

OBSIDIAN POINT: A Skill Challenge should represent a significant encounter to the party. Quicker actions should be handled by single skill rolls.

With this in mind, I tossed complexity 1 and 2 challenges as too fast for a skill challenge. So I begin work on fewer complexities. But then I thought back to Problem 2 listed above. There’s nothing less fun than a player not getting to go in an encounter, yet with the standard system this will happen from time to time. I did not want the same issue to happen in my system, and suddenly things started coming together:

OBSIDIAN POINT: Time with the DM is one of most important “fun currencies” a player has. While each player will not have equal success in every skill challenge, they should have equal time.

I decided right then and there that complexities would go out the window. Instead, there would a single, solid system around everything was based. And so the 3 segment system was born. And it provides a load of advantages:

1) Consistency: When a DM calls for a skill challenge, every player knows what they are doing. They will describe their actions, roll 3 checks, and the DM will total it up and determine victory or failure. The DM has a core building block to work with, allowing him to focus more time on describing the challenge, and less on determining the mechanics.
2) Mathematically Elegant: Once I took out the complexity factor in the math, everything became much smoother. I no longer had to consider rules that would act differently at different complexities. Everything is tailored to the 3 segment system.
3) Easy to Scale: The core system provides a “building block”, one a DM can combine with multiple blocks to create as large a challenge as he wants. Further, the system is easy to scale to larger or smaller parties.
4) Equal Time: Every player receives the same number of rolls. While some players will naturally do better in certain challenges, every player gets the chance to describe his actions and see the results.

Player Options, Injecting a bit more Fun
My goal was to keep the game very simple to the players. They are to focus on the roleplaying, and let the system act as a backdrop. However, I wanted to give them a few things to do above and beyond just roll a die.

Primary Skill: If your researching ancient text in a library, athletics isn’t going to help you. Players are encouraged to use knowledge skills for such a challenge, and I wanted to provide an incentive for that. In addition, some skills are better than others for different challenges. For example, if players are sneaking in to an orc camp, athletics may be useful, but probably not as useful as being good in stealth. I wanted to highlight that.

So the Primary Skill concept was born: It gives players a carrot when the use the skills most appropriate for the challenge. And it ensures that if a player has no skill useful for the challenge, at least he will have a +2 to help him out.

Bold Recovery: This is a carryover from my other system. Players always enjoy the chance to redo their mistakes, and it give players a way to comeback when they do badly out of the gate. This mechanic has gone through many revisions, and in the Obsidian system it works with an action point. The reason is the action point is a core mechanic that already lets players go above and beyond. Further, its expendable, meaning players won’t just use them willy nilly. And lastly, because if I didn’t do it, someone else would.

Players are going to naturally ask if they can use action points to do something in a skill challenge. If I didn’t put an action point mechanic in the system, many Dms would just create something off the cuff. Good DMs can do that with ease, but I wanted the mechanic to be core so DMs know that a reroll with an action point is okay with this system. From there they can change it if they want.

Critical Success: This mechanic is hardly new, but it works well with the Obsidian system. The way the math works out, it provides a small yet noticeable bonus to the party. And no party will forget the time Skilly McAwesome rolls 3 natural 20’s in a row and wins the skill challenge.

Determine Skills Allowed, the Great DM Decision
In any skill challenge, probably the hardest (and most contested) decision a DM will make is what skills to allow for the challenge. After all, the skill the party uses is the heart of the challenge. Further, players naturally want to win, and so will want to use the best bonuses they can get their hands on.

This is the great schism between the standard system and the Obsidian system:

OBSIDIAN POINT: Not every skill works in every challenge. Players should focus on their actions, and not in picking skills. Use social skills for social challenges, physical ones for physical challenges, and mental/sensory skills for information challenges.

I have repeated this point in the core mechanics as well. The reason is I want the DM to feel empowered to disallow skills with this system. Its not about knocking the players down, its about giving everyone a different chance to shine and getting the players past the mechanics and into the roleplaying.

Winning and Losing, the clock becomes the new villain.
Nothing will stop a player’s action faster than telling him he’s about to screw the party. Whether it’s a helpful nature or simply raw peer pressure, most people aren’t going to actively hurt the party with their actions (except you Kender people, you know who you are). However, in the standard system this happens. If the player isn’t using his best skill, he might get a failure (A BLACK MARK!) for the group. Correcting this was of primary importance.

OBSIDIAN POINT: The party should win and lose together. Each player should feel his rolls are contributing to the party’s success, and not in any way be a determent.

Now, the reality is that failure IS a core part of the system, so the idea that individuals aren’t failing, it’s the group, is a bit of an illusion. Take a combat for example. Let’s say you have 5 players, but one player isn’t as good in combat as the others (harder to do in 4e then previous systems but still possible). The Dm throws 5 monsters at his 5 players. Next session the 5th player can’t make it, so the DM only uses 4 monsters. The party may actually do better without the 5th player.
The same happens in the Obsidian system, but it’s the perception of things that is important. The party is facing a skill challenge, and needs all the rolls it can get, whether it’s the smooth talking rogue or the bumbling fighter.

Further, in the standard system, the “enemy” of the party …. Is the party. The party can only lose when it rolls. That mentally encourages lack of action. In the Obsidian system, the “enemy” is now the clock, the 3 segments the players have to complete their challenge. Nothing brings a party together more than a common enemy. Every player will roll and hope for success, because in 3 segments they will have failed if they do nothing. This encourages players to be proactive, roll and win, don’t roll and fail.

Partial Victory: “Its not over yet.”
Keith Baker (who worked on the 3e Ebberon System) wrote an article about the standard skill challenge system. In it he mentioned one of the best ways to run the system was to include partial successes in the mix. I really took that point to heart.

OBSIDIAN POINT: Not all skill challenges are win/lose. Sometimes a party completes dominates a challenge, and other times they find they have more to do. A skill challenge system should encourage further adventuring.

Partial Successes give DMs a nice hook to further adventures in their campaigns. If players do really well, they can pat themselves on the back and do something different. But in many cases, the reward is more adventuring.

Further, partial successes allow more gray areas for the DM to work with the party. It lets him say, “you guys did good, but not perfect”. Players can feel good that they accomplished something, yet still be hungry and hope that next time they can completely win a challenge.
Also, it gives DMs a way to tweak the difficulty of the challenge. A DM may not want the players to “fail” but he doesn’t want them to completely “win” either. Partial Successes allow the DM the middle ground.

Challenge Types: The Guidebook for Players and DMs alike.
One of the things my group greatly desired was a system that was a bit more invisible. The players should think less about the system and more on their actions.

Obsidian Point: A skill system should allow players and DMs to quickly figure out what they need to do, then forget about the mechanics and focus on the actions and roleplay of the challenge.

I created the idea of Challenge Types to let the DM zero in on what kind of challenge he wanted to do, and then instantly communicate that to the players.

When a DM says, “This is a social challenge”, the players instantly know they should be thinking about making diplomatic gestures, intimidating looks, or clever bluffs. Conversely, if it’s a “physical challenge” the players put the words away and think about acrobatic stunts and stealthy maneuvers.

Further, it gives the DM some general boundaries on what skills are allowed. A players should expect most mental skills to be allowed in a mental challenge, but should except it when a DM says no to a nonmental skill.

The Straightjacket, the danger of challenge types. Obviously the danger of challenge types is players and Dms feel too restricted by them. Its important to note that this mechanic is a guidebook, it is not the ultimate authority of the Obsidian system. Dms should always have final say over what skills work for what challenges.

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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.

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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.

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The good, the combat is different although ‘twitchy’ and requires the dexerity of a three armed monkey, the graphics are good, it has naked boobs in it along with decaptitations an in general so far has had a very smooth launch.  Granted I haven’t yet tried a full open retail session yet so that might change.

The bad, it requires the dexterity of a three armed monkey, you can only have eight total characters across all servers and they have 12 classes.

We’re on a RP-PVP server and the gankfests so far have been there but not horrible yet but then again I think most people are just trying to level so they can get high enough to come back and gankfest people on.  I don’t get it myself, I enjoy PVP more than most but jumping someone 10 levels lower or after they’re 3/4 dead from fighting a mob all with the razor thin rationalization of “I’m roleplaying a psychotic killer.” just really makes me wonder about society.  Remove the threat of penalty and consquences and all that.  If you want more information on that just google it, smarter folks than me have done master thesis on such behaviours, all I know is that it sucks.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say I’m orgasmic like some MMOG hoppin’ monkeys tend to get but it’s so far a fairly stable, so so polished game at a time when I haven’t played a MMOG for about 18 months now so it’s mildly entertaining.

Your Mileage May Vary of course.

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Game two was again me as Zombie master and we played Destroy the Spawn Points.  Zombies won overwhelmingly as sundown approached with the heroes way out of position to blow up even one spawn point although in their defense they did have enough materials to do it.  Then Sally lost her revolver trying to clear a path and zombies came pouring out spawn points blocking Jake’s ability to move and it was all over.

Games three and four were more teams with two players playing Zombies and two playing Humans.  Zombies obliterated the humans in both games mainly due to “This could be our last night on earth…” cards which nailed two of the humans in one square for not one but two turns both times which allowed the zombies to converge and consume.  But hey at least they went out with a smile on their faces.

Next time I think I’ll try them out on Arkham Horror although it might not the best game for this group.

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The game is quick and easy to pick up even for novice players, one game max should have you familiar with the rules.  Where it can get tricky is that for inexperienced humans the zombies have it pretty good and things can certainly seem a bit overpowered toward the zombies.  But once the humans ‘get it’, in that they NEED to find some ranged attacks, do NOT try to go hand to hand with a zombie then it makes it a lot more balanced.  This kind of thing isn’t readily apparent at first glance though which I believe why some people play a game or two and then give up on it.  But once the players understand the game it’s almost a whole different game.

Anyway it’s IMO the best zombie game out there right now, definitely it has production values out the ass, extremely high production values on everything related to the game, very heavy card stock, glossy finished for everything, individual molded models for the hero models and all in all a high quality class act in terms of what you get.

Just remember it’s a beer and pretzels level game really and it’s all about the experience of having a rag tag group of just ordinary I guess humans trying to get through a day with an inexhaustible horde of zombies after them.  If you’re looking for Squad Leader or with 197 pages of small type rules or Apples to Oranges you’re not going to find it here.

In this case I was the Zombie Master playing against 5 heroes, yes I know with six players there are supposed to be 4 heroes and 2 zombie masters but what the hell, right?

Things started off as usual, the heroes trying to scrape up some weapons and the hordes of zombies pushing forward at them.  All to no avail really as by turn 7 (counting backwards from 15) I had killed my second hero and turned them into Zombie Hero’s and technically won the game. But we kept playing with my growing army of undead and it was on turn 1 (aka turn 15) that one of my Zombie Hero’s used the Meat Cleaver to lop off the head of the last surviving player.   It wasn’t the last dice roll of the round or anything but it was getting closer as there were only two more rolls after that that we could have killed the last human.  Of course then night would have fallen and the dead would have really started rising and overrun the place.

I think as some house rules I’m going to add in these:

“For each hero that is unable to start in their stated starting location each player may roll a d6 and if they roll equal to or under the total number of heroes starting in a neutral square they may draw one Hero card as a normal Search.”

“If two or more heroes are in the same or adjacent squares they may take their turns in any order THOSE players decide otherwise play will proceed in a clockwise fashion.”

“Double sixes when rolled by players will always kill a zombie even if they would not normally have.  This will not though prevent the player from taking a wound in the event the Zombie rolls a six as well barring the use of another card or ability.”

“A hero may throw an item up to one square distance to another hero and must have line of sight that does not go through a wall.  The receiving hero must roll a 3+ to successfully catch the thrown object.  If they miss the item is considered lost or damaged beyond usability and is placed in the discard pile.  For example it drops into the grass, goes through a window, lands on the heating vent etc.  Special Note:  If either the thrower or catcher is the QB then success is automatic.”

“For each 2 or 12 rolled by the Zombie Master for the amount of zombie spawn a Zombie Hero is spawned instead of the normal spawn if any at the Zombie Master’s choice.  This Zombie Hero obeys the normal Zombie Hero rules.”

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Sharn Female

Around the year 1200 [Editor: All dates +/-20 years] a rift in the fabric of reality occurred on the planet known as Earth. The very substance of time and space was altered for a brief instant and in that instant a new timeline was formed.

In the country of Araby lands were shifted with the space occupied by another. The resulting transference generated huge amounts of energy that were released in cataclysmic explosions which greatly altered the land mass and the resultant debris released into the atmosphere dramatically altered the world’s atmosphere and air streams.

Storms raged across the world and the skies were perpetually dim for decades before the last of it fell back to earth and blue skies were known again.

By the year 1300, many civilizations failed, unable to support themselves from the shorter weaker growing seasons. Others became aggressive and took what they needed. The countries of Europe ended up stronger while Britain almost faded completely and is nothing more than a series of small villages where dirt poor peasants eke out a living from the poor soil and poorer climate.

The major forces of the world after the dust has settled, to make a bad analogy, are Australia where many refugees fled, Spain, and China. France, Germany and Italy, once major players on the world’s stage were ravaged by the changes in climate and each was subjected to destructive forces in the shape of tornado, hurricane, tidal wave and constant rain as applicable to the point where they are little better off than Britain. The boot of Italy is more of the stub of an amputated leg now after a tidal wave of monstrous proportions erased half the land mass one crisp autumn morning.

Colonies of refugees braved the storm tossed seas to flee the storm ravaged lands of their birth and invaded the Americas with its relatively mild climates and grow stronger with each passing decade. Fleeing as they did before the storms they arrived with less religious fervor than they might have and have crafted more beneficial relationships with the native societies and together both move forward in the new world order stronger than they would apart. More than a few of the pirates that slip along the ocean’s surface come from these colonies where they raid fat merchant ships for goods of all kinds to bring back to their ports of call. And more than a few American Indians climb the rigging and spars of those ships and lend their bows to the ship’s power. And if truth be told, more than a few Spanish or Australian scalps dangle from a pirate’s weapon or belt. Although not a major force on the world they are a growing force and one not to be dismissed out of hand.

Out of the dust and debris arose another stranger couple of world players. The transfer of space also transferred several large cities almost intact from another place. These cities contained occupants that for all intents and purposes in appearance might as well be called Orcs although they call themselves the Kron and another that’s almost indistinguishable from the human races at first glance which go by the racial name of Shar. With mottled green-brown or gray-brown skin, a legacy of evolution that left their ancestors able to hide in their environment, the males average a little over six feet in height with a very muscular build. Evolved for strength and stamina rather than speed and grace the males of the race have a simple outlook in life, “Kill what the women tell us to.”

The females of the Kron tend to be the leaders. They have a cunning and wit that the men disdain and it is the women that one normally deals with in trade or politics. The woman average five and a half feet and are more slender of physique than the males.

Both males and females share certain distinguishing traits, typically fangs or tusks that are prominently visible when they open their mouths, noses that are flatter than a humans and eyes that can range in color from black to browns to greens. Their hair color ranges can vary from light brown to gray to black. Neither male or female typically has any body hair other than that upon their heads. Both tend to wear their hair pulled back into ponytails and for members of some religious sects among the Kron the length of the ponytail indicates their status in their organization.

The Shar are human in appearance although capable of very unusual eye coloring from a startling turquoise to an icy blue-white that almost appears to glow in dim light. Their pupils tend toward slightly oval with the widest part of the oval running horizontally. Most Shar have a medium bronze skin color although the possible ranges are a light gold to a deep brown.

The Kron and Shar’s first contacts with humanity went about as well as expected from humans. The resultant conflicts though convinced those who brought aggression to the table that perhaps diplomacy might be a better option.

By the year 1600 which is where we pick up our story, the Kron had carved and hacked a place for their selves as elite warriors and mercenaries and many a large force has Kronnish females as tactical advisors or even commanders and Kronnish males as shock troops.

Although tensions exist, many a religious order has painted the Kron as the spawn of whatever source of evil resides in their particular mythos, most are not fanatical enough to do more than preach from street corners about the green evil from hell. The worst of the bunch are the followers of two anti other groups that go by the names of, The Cleansing and True Humanity whose tenants have among them, “We shall not suffer a greenskin to live.” Thankfully they are very small right now and the Kron are more than capable of dealing with them. But their power and influence grows with each passing year as they gain the ears of those with true power or work their ways up through the rank and file to a position of power.

The Shar, mostly an intellectual race, have set themselves a Great Task, one that calls for their finding out what happened and determine a way to go home again. Excellent researchers and scientists the Shar with their ability to blend into humanity can be found toiling away in the world’s universities and places of learning and exploring the world to add to their stores of information.

Neither race, Shar or Kron, is inter-fertile with humanity although more than one human has been accused of being a Half Shar bastard because of unusual eye coloring. And in some areas this makes the Shar especially highly prized as slaves and whores as it removes that annoying pregnancy issue.

Along with the already dramatic changes in the world another more subtle and even mystical change has occurred. Call it magic, call it force of will, or call it faith, whatever the name placed on it, it comes down to the final point that reality is no longer quite so solid as it used to be.

Religious ceremonies that used to at best be a way to comfort or placate the masses and at worst a way to keep them docile now can hold actual powers. One of the worst kept secrets of the world is the fact that at a burial of an arch bishop of the Church of the New Earth, his secretary, a man of ambiguous sexual preference and more than a little derangement leapt into the arch bishop’s casket during the funeral and plunged a dagger into his own heart as he looked up into the sky and beseeched his god to take him in place of “this great and good man”. As his heart’s blood spilled out onto the corpse of the arch bishop, even as he himself became a corpse the arch bishop’s body stirred and quivered and as the hysterical onlookers watched, sat up in the casket and then asked, “What’s all this then?”

In the islands of Carrib, voodoun priestesses find themselves able to animate the dead and converse with the spirits of the loa.

In the outback of Australia, tribesmen have discovered their ancient dances now bring fuller crops and fatter animals. And weaker enemies.

Druids that walk the green hills of Ireland and Scotland carry in their hands the power of healing now, healing of the people and the lands. And with some the power to destroy.

Shamans and wise men of the America’s can slip their skin and walk the earth as the Trickster or send their spirits soaring across the world and it’s possible their ghost shirts actually can turn bullets.

All across the world, one can find people for whom the mundane is no longer so quite so mundane, people for whom reality is not quite so real any longer.

And for each of these people there are those who cry, “Witch!” and “Hellspawn!” and seek to destroy them for being different and others who put them on pedestals for worship. And those of more mercenary bent that merely seek the best way to capitalize on them.

Metagame issues….

Adepts are uncommon in the world and the adept role cannot be taken at first level and a player must alternate adept levels with either Expert or Warrior and obviously cannot take more than 10 levels of adept by level 20.

Personal weapons consist of blade, blunt and guns. Guns are usually flintlocks for personal weapons and the very first percussive cap guns are being made in the fabled armories of Spain and Switzerland. Guns are inherently inaccurate and have very short range increments although masterwork or better quality weapons can overcome this limitation to some extent.

Guns take three full rounds to reload by someone familiar with them. It is possible to reduce this loading time by 1 round by taking the Quickdraw feat. Quickdraw can be taken twice to reduce the total loading time down to one full action.

Guns are also unpredictable and unless very recently loaded from properly stored powder will have to make a roll versus a variable DC of between 5 and 20 at the GM’s discretion based on the condition of the powder and how long the powder has been in the gun.

In addition an attack roll of a natural 1 the gun will either not fire, misfire and leave a ball in the barrel or even explode based on an additional roll on a misfire chart. This affects both personal guns and larger weapons like cannon.

The adventures will follow the cast and crew of a small pirate ship along the trail of an legendary treasure map. The crew will be comprised of a melting pot of peoples from the world. The ship’s port of call will be dependent on the player’s preferences. Their options will include various ports that cover most countries. At the start they won’t be hated by anyone in particular so the world’s their oyster in this respect. This will change over time pending the player’s actions.

The ship’s crew other than PC’s will be comprised of minions as needed although a few regular ordinaries will be used as necessary to fill out the officer’s ranks as needed.

Certain feats and skills are required in order to run a ship, or at least run it successfully, they will be handled by minions as needed in case these options aren’t attractive to the player base.

An additional list of feats and skills are available with a reasonable balance among the roles to round things out and to fill perceived gaps.

One such that might be of especial interest is a Time Shaping adept power which among other things allows slowing the effects of time on items. This could mean that gunpowder pulled from a Time Shaped powder room is always fresh and powerful, cargo’s of perishables get to their final desitnation as fresh as the day they were picked etc. In certain major ports this service can be purchased although not usually cheaply. In other certain ports someone with this power is not welcome and as a result the service isn’t available. And in some ports the unwelcome part might consist of being burned at the stake.

And there you have the first draft of the World as I see it. Subject to change of course.

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Through the use of Time Shaping and Metal Shaping it’s possible, in my opinion anyway, to have better shipping and better guns.  Cargo’s that can be picked and put into a slower time in a ship’s hold can arrive much fresher at market.  That’s a good thing.  Also with the abilty to shape metal in ways beyond mortal man I’m introducing breechloaders way before they should have entered the world.  And without chances for breech failures or blowback.   Any ship with those will find themselves reloading faster.  And reloading faster equals more balls tossed into the face of fat merchants.  If you know what I mean.

I’m not sure I’m going to make a racial template for either the Kron or the Shar.  My rationale is either the stats are balanced in which case the player will adjust them as they want which means the template doesn’t matter or the stats aren’t balanced and you start the campaign either favoring a race or screwing a player for taking the race.  None of those appeal to me pretty much.   NPC Kron males will naturally have a point of Str and be missing a point of wisdom or inteligence.  The Kron females, again NPC’s, might have a higher than average intelligence/wisdom or charisma and a lower constitution or strength to balance that out. 

To start with I’m going to run the Fury in Freeport adventure since with very little modifications I can substitute their widgets for my needed widgets and work it all in quite easily.   During the course of their adventure which is to get everyone used to the True20 way of doing things they’ll come across Kreech’s map and the Eye of Kreech which is the necessary token to start the main plotline.

I’m also seriously considering, to the point where I’ve changed my character sheet (publisher format if anyone wants a copy), removing the stunlock situation that T20 embraces.  The stunned/dazed lose a turn, get stunned dazed, lose a turn situation that can quite easily occur.  Indeed the combat example in the base book shows this problem exactly.  The PC protagonist spends much of the combat stun locked and unable to function.

Yes I know you can use Conviction to get out of that situation but that’s not a very heroic expenditure if you ask me.

I propose to instead implement an inititiave hit.  Any condition that has you losing an action instead causes a -10 initiative penalty.  A condition that costs you a full turn instead costs you a -20 inititiative penalty.   And by spending conviction you can get rid of that penalty if you want to.  That gives the players a better choice in my opinion, they can get stunned and go, most likely, at the end of the turn and save their Conviction for niftier things.   Or if they absolutely have to go first when in this condition they can buy their way out of it.

That’s a better bargain IMO than sitting there not able to do anything for turns in a row because you’re out of Conviction to buy your way out of it and usually die as a result, or you can go last each round and at least get to do something.

Losing several or even a few turns in a row in a PnP game is very Not Fun.   And things that are Not Fun need to go away.

D

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By the year 1105 though, the skies had began to clear and the chaotic weather patterns settle back down.  Not without some changes, major in some areas but at least civiliazations no longer seemed on the brink of utter collapse.

And then came the reports of beast men.  Sailing ships and explorers came back bearing fearsome tales of even fiercer tribes of what they called half man, half beast.  Their tales spoke of a race of creatures that seemed manlike but who’s skin was a distinct brownish green and in many instances mottled like an leopard or fawn. Creatures with fangs and tusks like a boar and shaggy beards and hair pulled back into club like tails of a green that was almost black in color.

As contact with these tribes grew their stories spread.  They knew not where they were only that the skies were different.  They were quick to learn the toungues of the sailors, the females more so than the males.  Their culture was one of males providing the strength of arm to take and to hold and the females providing the cunning and quick wit to outsmart those they arrayed themselves against.

Although the inevitable conflicts arose from those that pronounced anything different to be dealt with harshly  to those who saw their tusks and swiftly labeled them as spawn of Satan or Shaitan or pick your religious anti-in favor figure these over time quieted down.

The newcomers to the world, known to some as ogres, others as orcs from the tales of H. P. Starin’s novels carved out a place for themselves in the ranks of the world’s civilizations.  Their strength of arm and their knowledge of the ways of warfare kept those that sought to destroy them at bay long enough to build their own villages, towns and eventually fortified cities.

Many a kingdom now boasts of having groups of these Orcs as members of their elite forces and in many cases they provide protection for the king and family solely.  More than one battle has ended in a quick surrender when one side learned that the opposing force included forces of orcs on the payroll.

These changes cause no little amount of tension and the world at times seems a powderkeg awaiting merely a single match to set it off.

In the year 1649 one can find orcs scattered across the globe although still very much a minority member of the world in numbers they more than carry their own weight.

Along with the changes wrought by the strange green race there were other more important changes.  Followers of ideals have began to find that their rituals of prayer and ceremony, rituals that were once designed to merely comfort their followers and keep them appeased have now begun to have actual effect on the world.  Fields and pastures blessed by certain followers of the old Druidid ways in Ireland have begun to yield amazing amounts of crops that remain free of insects and disease while fields that run next to them might be ravaged by such things.

It is said that on some islands where followers of Vodou hold sway, the living dead work the fields and gather the food under the control and dark loa slither in the shadows.

The Holy Church has reportedly witnessed more miracles in  the last century than were reported in all the time from the birth of their religion.

A strange time and a time of strangeness is upon the world.  A time that some delight in for the good that it might bring and others conspire in to hide their acts from the light of day.  A time that some attribute to the evil that men do and many are the shouters of Doom and the End Days across the world.

But one thing is certain, it is a time of mystery, shrouded in a cloak of mist and fog and for those that live through it, they will have such tales to pass on to their children that will make those told by Scheherazade seem the ramblings of a child.

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I plan to have the ship’s officers of course handled by the players although they can elect if they wish to be a less prestigious member of the crew.  I’ll be using True 20 to run the game.  There is magic in the world from Faith magic of various churches, to ritualistic magic of shamanistic tribesmen to the dark energies of those who walk the thin line that separates the mundane from the Other Side.  But such magic is pretty uncommon of course.  It will be possible for the players to take levels in Adept but only one per X levels of another role.  X will probably be 2 or 3 but still undecided.

Weapons will be both blade and gun.  Guns will be flintlock or even matchlocks for the poor folk who are still rich enough to own guns.  Reloading takes 3 full rounds although with a feat or two you can reduce that down to one full round. But even so I figure it’ll play out like it did in ‘real live’ in that people will carry 2 or 3 pistols for up close things and most fighting will be done with blade or blunt. The guns will be inherently inaccurate with a pretty awful range increment.  Smoothbore muskets are just not accurate by design.

I’ve got what appears to be some nice ship stuff that other folk have come up with.

Swashbuckling is getting the nod simply because it’s a setting we’ve never done in our 20 years of roleplaying.  But another option I’m still tossing around is a modern thing but I’m now interested in possibly basing something loosely on The Lost Room from the Sci Fi channel.  Horrible acting for the most part and pretentious script writing but the concept is very interesting.

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With the Modern Horror it’ll be a, trite and cliched, shadowy organization who’s purpose is to prevent another shadowy organization from doing Something Very Bad and altering life as we know it. They’ll go on spy missions and rescue missions and Secret Agent stuff. They’ll get Gadgets and Guns and have shootouts in the streets and on the highways and in the alleys with automatic weapons and take out guards from the shadows with knives. They’ll get to globetrot around the world visiting strange climes and cultures. And if they fail then it might continue with a post apocalyptic setting ala Dies The Fire or World War Z or whatever and however the world ends, final plot point still undecided and even if it was I wouldn’t post it here.

On the other hand we have our Swashbuckler Horror. Less global in impact our fearless crew will be the owner and operator of a privateer. They’ll sail the Seven Seas in search of booty, fame and booty. They’ll run into ancient curses and unearth lost treasures. Swing from the yardarm to board another ship with a cutlass in one hand and a flintlock in their belt. Chase down fat merchant ships and unload broadsides into hostile country’s naval forces that try to hunt them down. Come afoul of vodou priestesses and fight dark loa. And just maybe they’ll get to walk a plank or two.

This will be done using Tru20. As you might have guessed it’s my current favorite gaming system and that’s all without having done more than playtesting it solo. I just like the fact that levels are primarily done away with, combats are faster, darker and grittier and a player’s ‘level’ doesn’t dictate godhood at the far end of the spectrum in terms of how much damage they can take but rather is an increase in how much damage they can put out.

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It’s a lot like some kind of undead variant on BattleChess although that’s not really a good analogy. There are two sides, Undead and Human with up to two Undead and up to four Humans. Game set up is randomized as to terrain and the human’s involved. So far we’ve played the basic Kill X Zombies Before Sundown and Defend the Manor House. The first Kill X game was the ‘learning’ game and I don’t remember what happened other than we didn’t do it quite right. The second Kill X game came down to the last dice roll on the last turn but the Humans (played by Gnatsum/Temple) won. My poor poor undead were one attack away which was pretty cool.

The second game, Defend the Manor was less close with Gnatsum winning but because I didn’t read the scenario card properly. We were playing with the Two Humans Dead = Loss from the Kill X which wasn’t right. In the DtM it’s until sundown or all players are dead. If we’d of kept playing I believe the Humans would have won handily.

In Order Of the Stick game I won (go me!) and that one came down to the wire as well. At first we thought Laura (Jo) had won but I forgot my two points for escaping first from the dungeon. So the final tally was 28 for me, 27 for Laura and 26 for Temple.

We just played to 3 levels plus Xykon’s level. Much like the last two times we’ve played we found Xykon in the very first room.

We also played pretty much Co-Op except for after we found Xykon.

All in all a pretty good time was had by all.

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Our first session went fairly well although it’s kind of humourous that there’s essentially a small silver ball in it.  Which is an in joke with our group and is much too long to go into here.

My character is based on being able to bend time and space to her will and I’m going to have to redo it some extent, put some powers into a multipower or two so that she can afford them and in general make her character as tough as some of the others.

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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….

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undead9pa.jpg

The game falls strong on the Storyteller side of the fulcrum rather than the Simulation side.  The rules are designed to be easy(ier) to pick up than most systems out there (No AoO!) and do a better job of depicting heroic Average Joes rather than demigods like DnD does for example.

A level 1, especially a level one that starts out at range (with a ranged weapon) has a chance of killing a level 20.  A small one granted but it’s a hell of a lot better than a level 1 does in DnD or most systems for that matter. 

Fearory the mighty level 1 Mage looses his mighty Magic Missile at the level 20 Warrior Kara who is standing 20 feet away.  Kara irritated already at the price of ale and now suffering the equivalent of a cigarette burn turns and glares at Fearory who immediately drops dead, pierced through the heart by the fierceness of such a look.

In true20, Fearory with a Beretta 93r (or an Empowered Fireshaped Elemental Blast both attainable at level 1), and a couple of lucky rolls could conceivably be looting Kara right now.

The basic six stats, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Charisma are ubiquitous in their presence.  You get 6 points to ‘spend’ on stats. All stats start at 0.  T20 is based on modifiers, not 3-18, which never really come into play anyway anymore so why bother with the ‘inbetween’ numbers so they just went with the modifiers.  

You can lower stats into negatives to get more points to spend on other status. 

You cannot spend more than 5 points on one skill.  You cannot lower a skill below -2 and cannot gain more than 5 points by lowering skills.  Each point costs one point no escalating stat costs to deal with.

All scores have some value so lower them below 0 at your own peril.

You get to pick from one of three roles for your first ‘level’.  These are Adept, Expert and Warrior.  Adepts are the casters, psychics etc, Experts are your rogues, scientists, rangers, Warriors are your fighters, marines, etc.

There are rules in the Companion book on how to create your own roles with a point buy system so they’re naturally balanced and optional rules on how to sub-divide some of the things like the combat chart in each role to further specialize so you have your defensive tank and your dps tank for instance.

You get one feat or in the case of Adepts one feat or power every level and 4 feats to start with although Warriors get 3 feats plus Weapons or Firearms Training which is mandatory for them. 

Each role has it’s own set of feats along with a fairly large General pool.  Adepts can either take a feat or take a power as their choice.  Most feats have no pre-reqs either so the character customization is a lot larger than in standard DnD.

Your first role is critical as that will define your ‘core ability’ which grants you a special ability for the life of your character.  Adepts can spend a point of Conviction to gain the use of a Power they don’t have for the duration of one encounter.  They can also spend a point to get rid of fatigue which plays into how long they cast spells.  Experts can spend a point to gain a bonus 4 skill levels in any skill they possess or don’t.  Warriors can spend a point to get rid of bruised and hurt penalties.

All characters have the same basic damage tree.  Their Toughness which is based on their stats and level etc determine how often that they take damage when they are hit. 

As the damage tree gets higher they get more and more debilitated and this directly affects their dice rolling.

A player can mix or match roles as they want to without any penalties although only the first role you take determines your core ability.

A player gains levels when the GM gives them.  There are no experience points to deal with.

There’s an alternate damage system created by a community member that has 99% of the same results as the more complicated official one that is very easy to deal with and greatly speeds up game play which was already fairly quick.

Each character gets one attack per turn barring special circumstances. 

There is only a d20.  No other dice are used.

Weapons have a base damage not a range of damage.  Damage has two flavors, Lethal and Non-Lethal.   Both have their own damage tree with variable results.  Lethal damage though always inflicts the equivalent of Non-Lethal damage conditions.

This does lead to some issues I have with the difference between guns and other weapons.  Shoot a deer with an arrow and barring a spinal shot you’re going to follow the blood trail till it dies.  Shot the same deer with a rifle in the same spot and odds are it’s going to drop dead on the spot or very shortly afterwards.  The system doesn’t deal with ‘shock’ values or have a good disparity between those kinds of things.  A quick house rule I thought of though is to have guns deal the next higher Non-Lethal damage condition and then you don’t have to deal with modifying damage values.  So a sword going through your side is going to hurt but a .40 calibre bullet doing that is going to also stun you instead of a daze condition.  Playtesting will determine practicality.

Combat is an DC check of your attack value versus the targets total defenses.  Equal or beat that DC and you hit.  Then a damage roll is made versus the target’s toughness rating.  Beat that and you do damage.  How much you beat that by determines how much damage you do.  This is using the alternate system.  The original has a escalating DC checks that changes based on your current health condition which requires bookkeeping each round.  The alternate changes that so that all the bookkeeping is ‘front loaded’ so it’s a simple check every round.

To hit is always determined by Dexterity Bonus (with some exceptions based on feats) and Damage is always determined by Str bonus (and you guessed it some exceptions based on feats).

Defenses can be strength based (Parry) or dex based (Dodge) and it’s your option as the target which you want to use for each attack against you.

Technically every roll in the game is simply a Difficulty Check.

There is no alignment; every character has a Virtue and a Vice.  Giving in to your vices or following your virtues is how you recover Conviction.

Each character gets a Conviction pool that lets them do ‘heroic’ things.  Spend a point of conviction to have an attacker re-roll a damage roll and take the lower or re-roll a roll of your own and take the higher.  Spend a point of conviction to get a ‘free action’ recovery check to turn Dying into Disabled.  Stuff on that order.

Skills are your basic D20 skills with a few tossed in to cover most situations from Fantasy to Sci-Fi.   I would house rule in some things I’ve come up with my meanderings with systems like Proffessional Skills versus Knowledge Skills.  PS’s let you ‘do’ something while KS’s let you know something.  Too many skills systems break down into just enough detail to be pointless IMO.  Oh look a Computers skill but no Mechanical, Electronics, Chemical etc. skill.  So I just came up with a catch-all Professional Skill with a variable base ability depending on what the skill is.   Want to know how to program computers?  PS – Computers (Int).  You can clean up every skill list I’ve ever seen by a lot by simply having those two variable entries.

Powers that Adepts wield are more GURP or Champions ‘ish although not nearly to that level of spreadsheet requirement.   The use of a power has the chance to cost you a level of fatigue.  Get too high on the fatigue chart and you’re out of juice for at least an hour of rest and that depends on how well you roll your recovery.   Although if you still have Conviction points to spend you can start trying to recover faster.

You can base your powers on any of your stats or even have one power based on one stat and another on a completely different stat.  Want to be a Dexterity based Fire Shaper with your Warding based on Charisma? Weird but okay.

The powers are not completely balanced but this is version 1.0 and there are several suggestions on the forums for how to balance things as they currently stand which mainly ends up being how to tone down Elemental Blast for the end game.  With two feats a level 20 adept can have an attack that does 20+ damage and a warrior for example would need to expend 6-7 feats to get the same level of damage.  Aka that’s roughly the equivalent of 10d6 in DnD terms.

In addition Dexterity is the Champion’s Constitution of True20.  It’s balanced in a fantasy campaign or in any campaign that has armour.  But people are finding that in a non-armour setting like say the Musketeers or Swashbuckling, that Dexterity is pretty high up on the list of stats to take since it affects the most dice rolls (to hit, dodge, reflex saves etc).  There are feats though that let you switch to using Str as your To-Hit bonus that can help balance that out.  Or you can simply have most people (i.e. read your npcs) involved have better than a 0 dexterity.  

They have a ‘Mook’ rule where the GM doesn’t have to keep track of damage for the Mook’s.  Once they take a hit that would give them a certain level of damage they’re taken down. 

There are some nice ‘collaberation’ rules too that let players (or Mooks) take down bosses (or players) by ganging up on them.

The books are very light on examples almost non-existant actually although they are laid out in a intelligent and easy to read manner with very good use of consistency so you can tell charts from optional rules from standard etc.

Although technically you only need the one rule book “Adventure Roleplaying” the Companion and Worlds of Adventure go a long way toward making the system a whole in terms of expanding things and making it more comprehensible by giving very good examples of alternate settings from mecha to cthulhu to Sinbad stuff.  By reading those you’ll find yourself going “ohhh right so that’s…” 

The Worlds of Adventure is worth the price for the Agents of Oblivion world setting and the Sanity rules it brings to the table.

There’s a Bestiary as well that has translations of all the basic (SRD) DnD monsters as well as others along with some templates and mass combat guidelines as well.  The mass combat seems similar but not the same as the mass combat in Black Company d20 and without playtesting could be quite good at letting your PC’s take part as leaders in larger scale battles.

There is also True Sorcery which does a good job of converting DnD spells over to this system.  So a group could get three books, Adventure Roleplaying, Bestiary, and True Sorcery and run their DnD campaigns this way.  You’d have to convert material over though of course for your already existing modules but there are some decent guidelines on the conversions that make it as least tedious as possible.

Anyway after going through Call of Cthuhlu, (both old and new), WFRP, Big Eyes Small Mouth, GURPS, Heroes, D20 et all, Black Company, Iron Heroes, UA, Exaulted, Unkown Armies, Fallout RPG, Serenity, and who knows how many I’m forgetting over the last year, True20 has definitely captured my interest more than any of them in terms of what I want from a system.

Aka, no cookie cutter characters, fast(er) combat, easy to explain to players, no extreme power disparity from end to end, able to handle pre-modern and post-modern settings especially horror based ones with aplomb.  Just enough detail to make telling a story interesting but not so much that players get so bogged down with coming up with the ultimate builds that game time is wasted and party balance is drastically affected with one person able to do 80% of the parties damage output.   

That last was a big deal with some players *cough*dave*cough* in our Hero’s based games as it was quite easy to have a HUGE power difference between characters and still have legally spent the exact same amount of character points on your build.  And yet you hated to nail him on every little point as that was what he truly enjoyed doing, building the most cost effective powerful character he could by splitting things down to the tenth of a point out of a 150 point builds.  But when other people are spending 20 points on being able to turn wood into cheese because it was funny it makes it hellish hard to run as a GM.

Anyway you could do worse than take a look at True20.  There’s a freely downloadable ‘lite’ version on the site for your perusal.

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That spelled doom for the Shining Light  of Truth, Justice and Good Things in General.  A 3 on 2 game in Zombie Town is devastating.   And teams are inevitable I think.  So going forward I believe we’ll enforce teams and have a dummy hand to be played by a team who’s short a player if we have an uneven amount of players.

Gimmlet in the end won but we all learned a bit and we all have some new strategies in mind for the next one.

It’s not perfect by any means but it ain’t bad at all.

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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.

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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.   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.   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.   

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.   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.   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.  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.   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.   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.   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.   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.   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 

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If I get the time this week I’m going to write, direct and produce and stick in a little side adventure as well while they’re on their way back from town. If you’ve played my only released NeverwinterNights module it’ll be based on the crypt sequence I put into that one.

As for yesterday we played Munchkin of which everyone won one game and someone won two. Who the someone was I don’t remember other than I don’t think it was me but I could be wrong. We played Super, Star, Impossible, Fu, hmmm maybe everyone only won one game as I can’t remember the other type of Munchkin we played. Oh well.

I think I’m going to pick up Zombie Town (ratings)as well. If nothing else it gives me 100 zombie miniatures to use in our DnD campaign. And from the people who bothered to review it, they enjoyed it. What’s not to like? It has zombies and PVP?

We tried again to find the Order of the Stick boardgame but were unable to. We’ll probably have to just buy the silly thing from some place like FunAgain which I’ve used in the past. Reasonable prices and so far at least reasonable customer service.

Anyway that’s how we spent our third weekend in a row without any campaigning because too many people couldn’t make it at the same time.

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But now we should at least be a little closer to being legal in our game play.  But really we play for the camaraderie and the sheer fun of it, not to garner the most loot or level our characters or whatever.

Anyway, if you can stand to have a JAVA app on your system complete with all the bullshit of which virtual machine etc. it takes to run it then I recommend PCGen.  It’s decent enough and for the price you can’t beat it.

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This little program, Battlegrounds, looks pretty promising. I’ve been experimenting with online aids to run a PnP game all the way back to IRC Chat, through WebRPG (gone), OpenRPG, and that very pretty little one that I forget the name of right now, ah right, Fantasy Grounds and even started a couple of times programming my own little client server app to do what these does although without all the flash and polish.

Battlegrounds doesn’t appear at first glance to be as polished in appearance as Fantasy Grounds but it has some interesting features in my opinon and it is very genre independent since it’s more of a map/dice program than strictly an aid to help with Dungeons and Dragons.

Anyway give them a look if you like that kind of thing.

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In the interests of speeding things up they went to the fantasy equivalent of Wal-mart to stock up. They sold off their loot so far and I believe garnered a total of around 4000 gold which was split into 800′ish gold for each member of the crew. They bought a few things, nothing major obviously. Some masterwork items and some ‘magic’ arrows for Porra and some firebolts for everyone with a crossbow. The bolts have a glass vial embedded in them about halfway down the shaft that contains a few ounces of Alchemists fire. They got 30 for a bit over 200 gold. They do regular bolt damage and then 1d4 of fire damage. Just something different to add some flair to combats really. A few potion bottles and it was back to the tunnels. Or so they thought.

On the second night out they were attacked at four in the morning by a squad of half orcs warriors [Ed: level 2 fighters] who had obviously been equipped and paid to take them out as all 6 were wearing shiny new armour and weapons and each had 100 gold in a pouch along with assorted loose change scattered here and there. During the fight the blue dragon from moat house swooped down and hovered over the fight and used its breath weapon to toast three of the party and one of the 1/2 orcs. No deaths although it was a very close thing and the three party members, Jo, Porra and Ghimli ran under the cover of the thick trees to get out of sight.

At this point two of the three surviving 1/2 orcs decided the pay wasn’t worth it and ran off into the darkness and the last one was killed out of hand. As Ghimli and Jo started peppering the dragon with Searing Light and Magic Missiles the dragon flew off. Ahlman spent most of the fight trying to Sneak around to get behind someone but it just never gelled for him. Perhaps the dragon’s intentions were to try and take one of the party out while they were occupied. Perhaps it had hired the 1/2 orcs. Perhaps…. well who really knows [Ed: I do! I do!] but I’m sure it’s not the last we’ll see of that blue.

As it had been only 4 days give or take the bad guys hadn’t really moved anyone up into the currently empty area, the various sects in the complexes don’t really cooperate as you know if you’ve read the module and it takes a few days before they get organized to fill in the gaps. The party went NE from the main entrance and went through the Troglodyte area or part of it anyway. They cleared up through to around rooms 230′ish and retreated back to an empty (now anyway) room and used Jo’s Rope Trick to hide out and rest and recover. That’s one handy ass spell actually.

After they got their resources back in order they pushed on deeper into the area where the Temple of Earth folks hold sway. They fought the Swordmaster who almost ate Gnatsum’s lunch but Ghimli was right behind him healing him and the priest kept Gnatsum alive long enough to keep the Swordmaster occupied while Jo’ peppered him with Magic Missiles. Poor Ahlman who’d been sent to investigate the other branch of a Y tunnel came back in time to take one AOO from the Swordmaster trying to get by him to get in position for a back stab and then failed to stab the guy out of several tries. Poor Ahlman had lousy rolls most of the night. Then it was a few bothersome individual trogs and some traps and such and the party ran into a couple of more ‘bosses’, both trog clerics who gave them a bit of trouble. The female trog used earth powers to put a wall of stone between her and the party and then vanished from a dead end room. Ghimli found a section of curiously smooth stone on one wall that lead him to suspect the cleric had gone through it. [Ed: Which she had, no big shock there.]

They then ran into the other ‘head monkey’ in the area the male trog cleric and defeated him but not after he’d charmed Gnatsum and made him his buddy. Gnatsum turned and charged Jo but Ghimli was able to use Dispel Magic and remove the Charm before Gnatsum could do any damage. And a good thing as Gnatsum I believe would have taken them apart. With Gnatsum back in the party once more they killed the cleric and looted his body and treasures.

With a slowly growing stockpile of magic items they decided to retreat once more to Big City and let Jo’ Identify their loot and sell and restock. They came away with the Sword of Earth, a Ring of Sustenance, Gloves of Dexterity +2, a Key of Earth, a cursed amulet, one piece of Incense of Meditation and maybe one or two other things that I’m forgetting. As always for anyone following along with their own copy of Return To The Temple of Elemental Evil, some things have obviously been changed along the way by me to either make more sense either my own or just out of ‘realism’ or just because I like to change things. For the most part things go down as they do ’stock’ but I’ve been doing this a long time now and I have certain thoughts along dungeon design and such.

DMs Note: 
For those of you who may have played RTTTOEE or simply have it and following along you’re probably shaking your heads.  Well I’d probably agree.  One possible path that’s in there that’s been completely ignored seems obvious to me.  I’m going to go ahead and put this little note here since the players have all read this already and are unlikely to come back to it.

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I also found out why I never seem to win at Munchkin. Everyone else cheats like a sumbitch. These people are playing cards when they shouldn’t, holding like 8-10 cards in their hand which is just supposed to hold 5 at a time. This goes a long way to explain why my wins can be numbered on two fingers out of probably 30+ games in the last few months. Sheer statistics (Munchkin is extremely luck oriented with a tiny bit of skill involved) dictated I should have won 3 or 4 times what I did. Now granted cheating is not only allowed but even encouraged in the rules but idiot me thought that was hyperbole and played well within the rules.

So from now on every time I catch someone cheating I’m going to hit them with a brick. And not one of those fluffy throw it at the tv and watch it bounce off as you get rid of some id based anger.

Cthulhu is also the first with some truly significant additions based on cards in the rules. Actually playing it made me want to start a Cthulhu based campaign (which came in a d20 flavor which is no longer publishes as well as a collectible card game). I’m an old hand with Lovecraft and familiar with the ‘world’ as it were. And of course I have Arkham Horror as well. Isn’t Wikipedia great for putting in random links in bullshit articles? Kinda like images.google.com works for snagging a quick image to embed in each one of these.

D

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