Continue reading »]]> Session Report

Don’t Rest Your Head

I ran my first for real session of DRYH or Dont’ Rest Your Head last night. It’s a strong narrative, light mechanics system set in a dark surreal land of horror and scary things that really do live under the bed, things that are all pointy bits and razor edges.

In attendance were +Laura Dollins (my lovely wife), +Scott Stone and +David Warren friends who I’ve shared gaming tables with for 20+ years. Two other players +Temple Smith and +L. Scott Rubin were unable to make it but hopefully next time.

Laura and Scott had already created their characters and we were able to go through Dave’s pretty quickly. The mechanics are easily explained and eventually learned. I’ve read a lot of game systems and the dice mechanic is unique in my experience.

Laura turns out to be a young woman named Sophia, a serious social misfit and introvert who’s secret hatred of people turns out to fuel her Madness Talent although it got little use last night. Her hatred of others is contagious and she can make them so hate themselves that they… well let’s just say you wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of this woman.

Scott is a mature man, a salesman by the name of Jimmy who can sell anything to anyone, even himself at times as he covers up his horrible self image with flashy material goods. The power to Forget his Madness talent, when pushed he can reach into the past and make a person forget to have locked a door and by pushing to the limit his Madness talent could literally do something like make gravity forget about him for a short instant while falling 40 stories to the ground.

Dave is a older fellow with a lot of suppressed rage. A german butcher by the name of Klaus from a long line of butchers it’s not surprising that in the end, his Madness talent is The Knife. It’s always there, in whatever form it needs to be and it knows even before he does when he’s going to need it. Push him too far and the Knife can sever the tie between your mind and body and leave you in a rather bad way.

Each character had their opening scene, based on their character questions and their What Just Happened answers.

These are the results of those opening encounters. I’ll follow up with the rest of the fallout later on this week as well as the player’s reactions.

Assuming the recording didn’t jack up, I’ll get the podcast cleaned up this week hopefully and posted for anyone that wants to listen.

————————-

The fated evening started quietly enough with a authoritative knocking at Jimmy’s door. Peering through the peephole he sees two policeman. Being all to familiar with debt collectors and eviction notices, Jimmy’s not too keen on opening the door.

“Who is it?” Jimmy calls.

“The police. We need to ask you a few questions sir. Please open the door.” The stilted way the one policeman was talking had images of James T. Kirk and a T-101 running through Jimmy’s mind.

“Jimmy doesn’t need anything officers.” he replies. His odd way of talking about hismsef in third person creeping in.

The the wierd way the the police have of talking and the high sheen on their skin was definitely freaking Jimmy out a bit.

He calls 911 and requests assistance but the police outside seem to have some urgency to talk with Jimmy and start to break the door down.

Jimmy attempts to block the door with furniture but in the end decides to flee, grabbing his new jacket ($399 custom fitted and brand new that day bought on the last of 10 credit cards that was still working) he flees through the window of his 8th floor condo. (“A decision I think I’m about to regret, after stating he lived on the 8th floor earlier”)

The two policemen give chase but they’re slow and Jimmy flees down the snow covered escape, breaking windows and arousing an outcry as he passes them. He ducks back in on the 5th floor and then takes the stairs down.

“Hi John, Mary, just passing through.” he says with a bright salesman’s smile as he crosses in front of the couple watching the latest reality television show. “He’s never going to win you know.”

Outside there’s a police car parked at the curb, an odd one, one more fit to be seen on the streets of London. And even odder, there’s a large, slowly turn wind up key sticking up out of the trunk which brings back childhood memories.

“That’s something you don’t see every day.” Jimmy says, bouncing from one foot to another, filled with nervous energy.

The few other cars (“No I’m currently in between cars.” Much like he’s in-between jobs…) on the street are snow bound and besides Jimmy isn’t a car thief. But that police car running at the curb, headlights on attracts his attention and as heavy footsteps each from inside the building he dives in and decides to head out. The two police come back and Jimmy, in an unusual fit of rage, throws the car in reverse and speeds back the way he’d just come, deftly flipping the wheel at the last minute to spin the car and catch both cops with the side of the car. Metal crushed and clanged and the cops went flying heavily through the air to burst through the front of a building.

With air leaking through the damage doors of his acquired cop car, Jimmy proceeds to head toward the river with the idea of ditching the car and catching a water taxi.

—–

Sophia on her way home spots something really odd in an alleyway, a man who appeared to be shoving his arm through another man’s chest. “Serves the bastard right I’m sure.” she mutters, hating him instantly for attracting her attention. Head down she trudges home in the heavy snow from her minimum wage job at Walmart. Oblivious to the figure that’s now ghosting along the dark streets of this run down section of town behind her, one that minutes earlier was doing… something to another man in an alley.

Her crappy apartment building, never warm enough to drive the chill of Boston’s December chill is waiting, empty and silent. Even with her employee discount TV, much less cable is out of her budget so after a quick raman noodle dinner she heads to her bedroom to try once again to make a futile effort to sleep while listening tot he radio. Her inability to sleep is perhaps what allowed her to hear the window in the living room roll up or perhaps it was the cold draft that whistled through the rooms.

Regardless the heavy maple baseball bat was a comfort as she moved to the door. She reached through the opening and flipped the lightswitch. Rising up from where he’d just crawled through her window is a man. Her second floor window although it didn’t occur to her to question that was a man in a dark floor length overcoat. His face was oddly hard to focus on, as if her eyes couldn’t… or wouldn’t… focus on it. His right arm is stained a deep crimson almost to the elbow.

“Oh that’s fucking it!” she swears and steps forward and brings the bat around in a blow that had every bit of force of her sinewy muscles in it. The deep cracking thud as it hits the man in the side of his head echoes through the apartment. His head snaps to side and his vertebrae crackle. He folds like a wet dishcloth and lands on the floor.

She looks for her phone, realizes it’s in the bedroom and heads to go get it. Hating that her night is going to screwed up dealing with this crap.

As her hand picks it up from night table, her bedroom door shuts. She turns and the man from the living room is standing there and takes two swift strides and grabs her by the shoulders.

Something inside her flowers and one handed she hammers his hands away and then brings it back and down on top of his head. The wooden thud is if anything louder than before and he staggers and falls.

She flees the apartment and into the cold air outside. Not really dressed for the outside now, she pushes through the piled snow to find a working street light three blocks away. Calling 911, she waits for someone to show up, hating the cold, the bastard who drove her out of her apartment and every son of bitch that conspired to have standing there shivering in the snow, bathed in the sickly yellow of the arc light above her head.

————-

“Godamn bitch, I should throw her in the locker and set this place on fire.” Klaus muttered as he drove his cleaver through the side of beef and hard enough to embed it a solid inch in the old butcher block table top. Another 16 hour day, one in a long series of them to try and make a better life for the two of them and then she up and runs off that creepy bastard and his gods be damned expensive cars and townhouse.

The little silver bell over the door rang out in the shop. The same bell his great grandfather had brought over from the old country and his butcher shop there.

“Closing up in 5 minutes friend.”

“No hurry Klaus, this won’t take a moment.”

Klaus recognized the voice immediately although he’d only heard in the background after talking his wife. He moved around behind his counter before turning, his right hand closing on the walnut hilt of the .357 magnum he kept by the cash register. He’d acquired it through a friend of friend after getting robbed twice and ironcially had never had a need for it afterwards.

Jack smiled at him in passing, his glance moving around the shop taking inventory, appraising it.

Something broke inside Klaus, the predatory way this son of a bitch was looking around was the straw. The straw that broke the dam holding his rage back. He pulled the gun up and centered the barrel directly over the man’s heart. “What do you want?”

The man smiled, seemed unperturbed in the slightest by the sight of the huge silver pistol. He carefully reached into his suit and pulled out some folded papers. “I just need you to sign these Klaus. Won’t take a minute of your time.”

“What are those?” Klaus said through clenched teeth.

“A bill of sale. For the shop. You see I need money and the money your wife brought wasn’t enough. Ergo I need your shop.”

Thoughts raced through his head, red thoughts, red broken glass and metal fragment thoughts. He nodded, “Fine, let’s go to my desk and I’ll look at them. It’s through there.”

Jack sighed in exasperation, “Fine, whatever.” He opened the indicated door and found himself staring at a meat cooler, heavy iron hooks suspended from the ceiling.

Klaus said, “The desk, back corner.”
Jack advanced into the cooler, “Odd place to keep a desk Klaus.”

Klaus followed him in, closing the heavy insulated door behind him.

Jack looked around then said in a musing voice, “Those look like they’d hold a lot. Your wife, she dresses out at what? 130lbs or so?”

Klaus barely heard the words, his concentration on his right index finger, feeling as if he was an outside observer as the finger continued it’s slow pressure and it came as no surprise at all when the revolver bucked like a kicking mule in his hand.

The heavy slug punched straight through Jack’s spine, expanded and then exploded out from the center of his chest to spray heart and lung tissue all over an side of beef. Jack toppled forward and his chin fell onto one of the hanging hooks and his body dangled there as blood ran out of his chest in a quick torrent of crimson.

Klaus looked at the body, then the pistol and then around. He stepped outside, no one appeared to have heard anything. He flpped the closed sign and locked the front door. A last glance out and the streets were still empty.

Swiftly, working on auto pilot from long practice he went into the cooler, strapping on his tool belt that held the various tools his trade. In the meat locker on the prep table he began to work. The meat was swiftly boned and then processed through the industrial grinder, the end product making a fine sausage like grind. It was as he was reaching for his spices that some level of sanity returned and he stopped.

Using waxed cardboard boxes and butcher paper he boxed Jack up and then moved him out to his car.

Heading to the river he drove slowly and carefully, the driving patters of a sedate middle aged man and so ingrained he couldn’t have hurried if he’d wanted to.

———————-

Continue reading »]]> [Warning, I'm rambling as I tend to do. If I come off as an asshat, that's not my intention. ]

With player engagement a big part of why I wrote (am writing) LCA! my own RPG system I find myself listening to podcasts by other groups and literally shaking my head going no, you’re doing it ‘wrong’, you’ve already lost them at this point.

I think it’s easier to hear player disengagement as a third party than the GM sitting at the table can even though they’re there and have so many other cues to go on.

Primarily because the GM has sooo much on their plate. Trying to keep their planned story straight, trying to juggle the numbers and plans and tactics of the endless lists of bad guys, weaving plot lines together, all the while trying to keep the players entertained. If you’ve never sat in the GM’s chair then take some time out to be nice to one. If you have GM’d then you know what I’m talking about and should already be doing it to someone who’s willing to GM for you and put up with your crap as you surf the web looking at football scores while they’re trying to run an adventure or playing doodle jump on your phone.

Anyway, I’m currently listening to a podcast by a group at a con and I keep waiting for the GM to grab these people by the throat and send them on a wild roller coaster of emotional highs and lows given the subject matter and it keeps just kind of fizzling.

I think our player groups of today, even though a whole lot of us are the same people that were playing 20-30 years ago, we’re simply not the same players we were 20-30 years ago but I keep listening to GM’s doing the same style of gaming.

We, the old timers and the new players, are more comfortable with shorter sessions but packed with more flavor. The really pointless encounters that have no bearing on anything should be minimized. Both sides know the players are going to win them. It’s only a question of how many healing potions, spells, surges, cure light wound wand charges are going to have to expended at the end.

Just hand wave them, if the encounter is nothing but combat? By that I mean it offers no background, no information/clues, no quest items,no phat lewt etc, it’s just combat for the sake of filling session time. Then I recommend don’t having that encounter at a tactical level, just narrate it out.

[Disclaimer: If a pure dungeon crawl is the point of the session then of course by all means have encounter after encounter, just be sure to make them hard or you'll lose your players through most of them. "My turn again? Okay who did what?"]

For today’s players you really really have to have a big opener, a Trinity against the Agents or the Expendables on the ship encounter. Something with bombs, guns, kung fu, either literally or figuratively to get your players attention. Then you can slow it down with some filler, background, color and backstory before you heat things up again with another explosive encounter.

If you’re going to strand some people from a plane wreck in the amazon, then open with the storm that takes down their plane and the big crash and dash as they struggle to recover enough gear as it slowly sinks in the swamps and go straight into a fight in the jungle with the natives as the rains lash around them and lightning flares in the skies.

If your’e going to plan a jewel heist then the first scene should have U.S. Marshals or the Feebies breaking downthe door to the building the group is planning their strategy out in and have the group have to disengage and get away while sub machine gun fire Brrrrraaaaps through the air.

We’re a different bunch than we used to be, tailored that way with the movies we watch and the books we read.

Watch movies from 20 years ago, or 30 or 40 and you can see the stark contrast in the way the popular moves of each decade have changed.

To get back to the point, (You have one Dennis?) I find myself telling the GM I’m listening to, Dude, you’re at a con, you have at most 4 hours and probably less than 3 to engage these people and show them a good time. Don’t blow the first 30 minutes on the ride just to get to where the action might eventually start. Specifically in this instance I was all “Man, throw some scary ass shit at them now, throw a silver eyed clown at them peering through a sewer grate, or a black shadow with razor sharp talons and red glowing eyes briefly glimpsed out the corner of their eyes. Have the guy in charge shimmer revealing a creature of such unimaginable horrific visage that everyone who glimpses it has to make a fear check or huddle in the corner for an hour.

And then mellow their shit out with descriptions of how idyllic the place they’re going to appears and how serene it is on the surface even as the stench of evil and decay and danger wafts over the french vanilla of the air freshener fastened on the rear view mirror.

And if you made it this far in this post then you have a lot of stamina or mroe than a bit of a masochistic streak.

Continue reading »]]> 6d6 core system by http://6d6rpg.com

Disclaimer – This first glance is based on the open source core ruleset as presented on the wiki by the developer/publisher located here http://6d6rpg.com/wiki/doku.php?id=open:mechanics:core:start

As a result I won’t/can’t make any comments as to the layout, index, ToC, graphics etc of the system given my source.

I have no personal or financial affiliation with the developer or publisher.

Random thought – I wonder why 6d6 fireball when if memory serves wizards got fireball at level 5 making their first fireball a 5d6. Perhaps just the symmetry of two 6’s.

Initial thoughts (pre-playtesting)

My initial thought was it’s a CCG RPG but it’s not really. It does have an air about it of the MtG if you’ve played that game. Your character is very similar to a CCG deck where you put together the best mix of cards for your particular design goals. In this case to build your character’s skills, abilities and equipment.

The basic mechanic -

At any given time the typical character can have a ‘hand’ of four cards that you adjust as needed from your deck of cards and in addition you have another pool of cards, specifically those with the Static keyword that are always available to you until they’re used.

If you read that you’re probably going, WTH? A CCG mechanic? Well yes and no is my answer so far. Yes it’s kind of like having a hand and a deck in any given CCG. I should probably expand that for the 1 person who may not be familiar with the term, it means Collectible Card Game of which Magic the Gathering by Wizards of the Coast is quite possible the most well known in the U.S.

But it’s more a similar but different thing. The cards simply represent all the stats and values that would normally be on a character sheet in an RPG but with the pretty cool feature that you as the player get to literally build your ‘powers’ on the fly by combining them in different ways as long as they make sense. Perhaps you want to use a combination of Speed, Brawn and Sword as a charge across the tavern? As long as it makes sense then it would be allowed.

And by make sense, it’s pretty much anything that the majority of group agrees makes sense, the Game Leader is more an arbitrator or tie breaker for these kinds of things and simply provides a final sanity check on those times when a player tries to combine Reflexes and Diplomacy when they’re trying to bribe a guard to let them pass. Although I suppose one could argue that some sleight of hand and magic tricks might be useful to garner some favor with a bored guard.

On your turn you can play none, some, or all of the cards in your two pools, the dynamic (4 card hand) and the static (any cards that have the Static keyword) assuming they’re applicable to your action. Each card adds some value to your overall action dice roll, from a small +2 to a basic 1d6 and on up to a massive 1d6+6 or even higher. You compare your roll to a target number which might be a flat value or Resistance (aka Target Number or Difficulty Number) as determined by the Game Leader (aka Gamemaster, Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Keeper, Loremaster, Director) or it might be an opposed dice roll.

Oddly there are no recommendations for suitable static Resistance values in the document that I could find, only an example where a book was given a 10 Resistance for the purposes of deciphering it. We can assume perhaps that in most situations a character can bring 3 1d6 cards to bear on a problem on average and thus assume a 10.5 as the average and round down to 10 giving the player a slightly better than even odds of success. But the lack of a chart of any kind does mean you’re going to be winging it you try to use just the core system as outlined in the wiki. The pay to play version or the settings rulesets may include these charts.

Obviously some cards work for a given situation and some just wouldn’t. Let’s suppose you’re a warrior in a fantasy setting about to whack a goblin with your sword. You can add say your Brawn (1d6) + Short Sword (1d6+1) + Sword Expertise (1d6) and roll those dice and total them up. The Roll With the Punches (1d6) card also in his pool is probably not applicable to an offensive attack.

(Please note that I’m making several of the cards up off the top of my head and they’re not necessarily indicative of actual cards that might be published.)

The goblin is going to try to resist getting hit and might select from his pool to use Small (1d6)+Shifty Bastard (1d6+1)+Leather Armour (1d6) and roll the those and add them up.

This isn’t to say that you always use 3 cards, you can use none to the limit of cards you have in play but there’s a catch to that of course.

All the cards used (simplified) get tapped or sent back to the character’s deck of cards. This comes into play in the next round. In this case the sword being a physical object is just tapped and the expertise being a innate ability is also just tapped but the Brawn is moved back to the deck. Tapped cards untap at the start of the warriors next turn and they can spend ‘flow’ to move cards from their deck back into their hand.

So the Catch is – Cards that are in the player’s deck or tapped can’t be used until they’re returned to the player’s hand or untapped. A character can at most return or Flow two cards from their deck to their hand on their turn and to do that they must give up their ability to move on the field as Flow also provides movement. This certainly can add a tactical element to choices, do you use several cards trying to go for the knock out blow or reserve some to use in your own defense in case you don’t manage to take the creature out.

The goblin’s Small and Leather Armour are both persistent advantages and neither tap or move to his deck but his Shifty Bastard trait does.

For the attack to succeed the instigator, in this case the warrior, has to beat the goblin’s roll, ties go to the defendant.

Let’s say the warrior hit and beat the Resistance roll by 10 points. The goblin now has to discard 10 points worth of life cards. If he’s out of life cards, then you can guess what happens next. Note that if the goblin had say 3 life cards worth 4 points each, obviously worth 12 points or 2 higher than he needs to discard, he still loses them all, you don’t get ‘change’ from spending life cards.

Action continues in this way until someone’s out of life cards or the conflict is otherwise ended.

This same mechanic is used everywhere you’d normally make a skill roll in any RPG. Want to bribe a toady to get an audience with the CEO? Then use your Bribery+Wealthy Backer+Persuasion cards against him.

Or say your character is caught in an earthquake and about to go on a journey deep down below and needs to do some white water rafting? The GL could just assign a flat resistence that you have to beat.

Or a little more cooler, the GL could treat the white water just like a creature and assign a pool of cards, perhaps cards for Swift Currents (1d6), Boulders (1d6+2), Submerged Tree Trunk (1d6), Water Spray(1d6), Whirlpool (1d6+2), Large Drop (1d6+4), Waterfall (1d6+6) and give it a pool size of 3 and flow of 1.

The player in the raft would then ‘fight’ the white water by using purely as an example their Reflexes, Brawn, Driving – Rafts, Awareness, Sharp Eyes and Lucky Bastard or whatever they have that’s appropriate.

If the player wins the ‘fight’ then he sails out at the end of the section of white water alive, if the river wins, he sails out at the end of the section of white water a corpse.

Which anyone has to admit is a pretty damn cool way to do what would be a flat skill challenge in other systems.

As you can see there’s definitely a flavor of the fairly common Traits mechanic from say Spirit of the Century / Fate derivatives to the system although the mechanic is different enough to be it’s own unique thing.

The system is fairly inclusive in provide rules for the most typical needs in a generic setting, the setting rulesets would expand as needed for specific rules covering things like detailed Magic or Cybernetics etc.

Movement, Damage, Healing, Weapons, Social interactions, Skills etc are all handled in a pretty straightforward manner and should be pretty clear to anyone. The only complex part that I came across is when dealing with range modifications to dice rolls when the target is resisting it or when there’s cover involved on one side.

I was able to, I believe anyway, pick up the general gist of it with a single read through and although I’d have to go back and look up various specifics to actually play it, that shouldn’t be necessary more than once or twice. And not even that much if you happen to have a better memory than myself, I’ve got rules for over 200 core game mechanics rattling around in my head, colliding, merging and juxtapositioning with each other until that section of my brain is just a chaotic mess.

The Pros -

The pool and flow mechanic is fairly elegant and self balancing so that character’s tend to be level across the board in terms of power. A very huge thing for me in a game system, I dislike systems that allow some players by accident or design (i.e. power gaming) to be significantly more powerful/useful than others.

Character creation also seems reasonably balanced and pretty simple and straight forward.

The concept that everything costs in some fashion is a good one because it provides the players with discrete choices that have impact.

The card mechanic lends itself nicely to having interesting creatures for the GL to engage the players with, much like DnD 4E did, with creatures combining their cards in nifty ways. Additionally it can work very well with adding flavor and color to challenge sequences like the white water rafting I mentioned above that in many systems would be a dull series of dice rolls until success or failure was achieved. “I roll my nature skill, yay I got a success, how many more do we need?”

There are a few one-shot adventures for free to anyone that can be played along with the openly available core ruleset to give anyone who wishes to try the system out, the chance to do so.

Additionally there are some example rulesets that provide, well examples I guess, of how the system can be extended to add things like a Shadowrun feel with body augmentations.

The Cons -

Note while the con section is longer in word count, overall I’m still highly in favor of the system as of right now.

The core rule system is fairly bare bones but really what do you expect for free? I’d be curious to see how much more information the paid versions have. Perhaps if a playtest shows promise with my players I’ll indulge myself.

In terms of dealing with the core rules and card design might start to get unbalanced for cards that have multiple keywords or advanced keywords. The designer states that designing cards is an art which I can understand.

Personally I prefer a more hard system in that respect or at least a few pointers. And again the paid for version may have all this.. One of the reasons I enjoy 4E for example is the creation system simply works from the DM’s viewpoint. Previous editions did require experience, the more the better, in designing content for the players to engage. 4E made it simple(r) for anyone to pick up the DM hat and go to work.

I’d like to see some general guidelines on how much keywords that add/subtract/impact Flow are ‘worth’. It’s well and good to say it’s an art and I think after 30 years of using RPG’s I could do a reasonable job, someone with less experience might end up floundering a bit.

I think personally I’d start with each advanced keyword adding a 50% cost to the card with some unique keywords costing double for instance Persistent which as I read it means that card never taps or returns to your deck and thus is usable over and over. Obviously Persistent would be mostly restricted to things like Armour.

The Rotate keyword that lets you tap a card but otherwise leave it in your pool for use on your next turn, thus not costing you any flow to return it from your deck is fairly powerful as is the ability to use flow to untap it on your turn and use it again. So a character could for instance, again as I interpret the rules as presented, have a Sword card with the Rotate keyword and attack with it, spend one Flow to untap it, attack again, spend one flow to untap, attack again.

Granted the character is giving up their ability to move, but once combat is engaged, how much movement do you typically do? And while they probably don’t have a lot of cards to combine with each attack, neither will the defender have a lot of cards to try and resist each attack. And remember if you beat the target’s Resistance roll by even 1 point, they have to burn a full life card to cover the damage.

As written/read the Rotate ability is pretty powerful stuff. As intended the mechanic might be different, perhaps you can only use a card once on your turn and being able to spend flow to untap it (un rotate it) is just designed to let you use that card defensively when you’re getting attacked. It’s not written that way though and as written as best as I can determine a character could attack up to four times on their turn assuming they have two weapons with the Rotate ability, either use both and untap each one once or use both and untap one twice. Personally that seems a little over the top and is a huge advantage to whoever wins initiative. I believe I’d simply use my own rule from my system and say in general any given item/skill can be used once on any given turn as a house rule.

The gun/ranged weapons as listed lack any modernization and have a strong old west or even further back leaning to them such as having to load bullets one at a time and the ranges are extremely short. A modern ruleset may resolve that minor issue and of course it’s an easy fix to bump the ranges up and adding the concept of magazines to the reload mechanic for firearms.

Final Verdict -

The system is definitely something I’m going to work into our rotation. I believe the card mechanic can simply work for a lot of gamers and the ability to combine the cards to perform actions as well as the costs involved give the players some really cool decision points.

I think there are a few minor places where I’d personally house rule some things but really who doesn’t end HR’ing stuff?

This is a system I definitelyrecommend checking out, especially given the price of admission to see what it’s about.

Continue reading »]]> Obviously not a lot of awesome updates to post the last couple of weeks.  It’s all been minor cleanup on LCA! and working on the sample scripts.

I’ll be using the included Zombie Apocalypse script that will be included with LCA! as a general play test that I’ll podcast in the upcoming weeks.  Getting the group together is proving to be troublesome and on top of that I need to delay the test until the current project has run its course.

In addition Skyrim has captured a sizable portion of my free time the last week or so along with the holidays which is never good for productivity.

The Change Log  for the last few iterations, I change the revision every couple of days on average.  Just so you can see the pure ‘awesome’ changes that are being worked on.  Yes awesome was meant sardonically or ironically or even sarcastically.  Take your choice.

0.763
Updated references to skill rolls to allow the addition of the base stat.  This will need playtesting obviously.  Power gaming is a big concern.
Dropped the total skill and attribute values to allow for room to grow.
Added skills for Fortitude and Resolve.   Physical Strength

0.762
Script work
Minor clean up in various places.

0.761
sample script work.

0.760
Additional work on zompoc script.
Added noise/attraction system for zompoc.
Revamped the carry system/encumbrance system.  It was way too detailed for my needs with too much math.

0.759
Additional work on zompoc script.

0.758
Increased critical failures to equal an unmodified 5 or less on the 2d20 dice.  This equates to a 2.5% chance per dice roll.  Frequent enough to come up once a session but not so frequently it fucks with people too badly.
And 5 or less ties in with the multiples of 5’s I use.

Simplified Improvised weapons.  They deal the same damage as normal weapons so no confusion but their damage dice do not explode and they’re ruined if you roll a critical failure on the attack roll.

Unarmed damage I’m going to settle on it dealing 1d6 and 2d6 damage.  You can Knack up to get skill at killing people with your bare hands but without a knack or a weapon you’re just not going to hurt people very easily.

0.757
More rewrites in section two.
Overhaul of boosts and handicaps.
Changed Evasion penalty from Armour to 2 for 1.  With the change to 2d20 it’s necessary to balance out.
Extended human attribute range out to around 8.  Might make it 10 for the pinnacle of human possibilities.   Would need to extend supernatural creatures out to 20.
If that’s the case then will have to make Strength worth half damage.   Still pending consideration.
Added Drifting as a drive/motivation actually an anti-drive motivation.
Lots of clean up in the Powers section.

0.756
Lots of rewrites in the various skill sections  in sections 1 and 2 for clean up/streamlining purposes.
Wielding Heavy weapon one handed is changed to -5 after doing the math.

0.755
Pass 2 through Section 1 started
Added Mini Powers to powers chapter secton 2
Play Examples to section 1.

0.754
Work on zombie script

0.753
Work on the Zombie Apocalypse script in preparation for playtesting.
Changed bonus/penalty to boost/handicap

0.752
Added synergy mechanic for skill checks to allow AOE’s to be used as bonuses for regular skill checks or vice versa.

Continue reading »]]> This is a quick demo interplay using the Don’t Rest Your Head gaming system in a play by post format, some of it was typed on a phone so the quality can be hit or miss…

It’s a highly narrative but with dice system that allows for very freeform gameplay.

*Opening Scene – *

As mentioned, you haven’t been sleeping lately, at all. Sleep terrifies and you’ve been living on whatever it takes to keep from falling asleep. You’re starting to get worried though that the lack of sleep is starting to affect you mentally.

On the way home from work you saw a building you’ve never noticed before, an alleyway that you don’t remember, an intersection that had two manhole covers where you only remember it having one. You’re debating which is worse, going crazy or dying of fright in your sleep.

Your house thankfully looks like it always has and you make dinner, well put it in the microwave at least and go eat it in front of the TV, watching re-runs. As you flip through the guide you spot a new channel but it’s blank at the moment and idly wonder if they’re going to raise your cable bill to pay for it.

Eventually you make your way to the rest of the house but stop as your bedroom door comes into view. What the hell? There’s a section of a sheet from a newspaper stuck on it with masking tape. Flipping on the hall light to get a better view the headlines read “Satan Slasher Nabbed!”

Below that is a picture of you, face contorted in anger, a picture you simply do not recognize. It’s a tight shot, showing you being shoved into the back of what can only be a police car. Someone’s playing a prank on you surely, one of your so called friends is being a prime asshat.

You go over and read the article which looks like someone spent some time manufacturing, it reads like a real article. Describes how the alleged [your name] was arrested at the scene of another slasher attack, lists the history of the slasher [13 young women found so far, more assumed.]

But the date on the paper is for tomorrow and the name of the paper is the local one like you’d of thought for a joke but is for some paper called the Daily Oracle.

Ripping the sheet down, angry, you stop short as a bloody hand print hidden under the newsprint comes into view. The blood [surely it's fake] still fresh and red. You touch it, its tacky and it ‘feels’ like blood.

You push your bedroom door open. One of those cheap Walmart flex neck lamps is next to the bed, the light bent around so it illuminates the sheets. You’ve never seen that lamp before. [Or have you? whispers some frightened back part of your mind.]

Sprawled out on your bed is a body, naked although most of the flesh is covered in red. Long slash marks criss cross over the body, forming symbols although most ones you don’t recognize but there’s no mistaking the pentagram carved into the chest. The sheets are soaked with blood, the edges of the wounds glisten.

And protruding from the center of the chest is your best chef’s knife, the one with the ceramic blade you spent your whole bonus on this year. And on white texture handle is a bloody handprint that somehow you know matches the one on the door. And somehow you fear

You’re not sure how long you stare, brain clouded with shock when there’s a loud pounding from the front room, a heavy fist on your door. An authoritative sound, one heavy with meaning.

A stilted voice, barely muffled by the solid door echoes through your house, “This.is.the.police.. Open.the.door.”

Player -

Oh crap. Do I run out the back door or window? Do I try to overrun the cops? I didn’t hear a siren. That’s not good.

I gotta run. There’s no way in hell letting the cops take me will be good for me.I’m heading into the bedroom, try to lock the door, block it with a chair. Then I’m going to wrap the chef’s knife with a t-shirt, pocket it, and head for the window. My goal is to get away. ASAP.

Narrator -
[Notes: The player won a conflict roll but Pain dominated causing him to lose the knife.]

“You quickly but trying to be quiet close the bedroom door and drag a chair over and shove it under the door knob. A t-shirt is ripped free from a hanger and with no small amount of squeamishness you pluck the knife free, the metal grates on the bones of the rib cage, sticking.

For a terrible instant you think it’s not going to come free but the sound of your front door being smashed open gives you encouragement to yank it out hard. It slips from your tshirt covered hand and slides across your floor leaving a streak of red. The sound of footsteps storming in has you scrambling and you lunge toward the window as your bedroom door thuds and the wood of the chair creaks.

Player C-

Realizing I don’t have time to return for the knife, I open the window, duck out, and close the window behind me (hey, it might confuse the cop if he’s a dumbass). The fire escape gets me down to the ground and I’m off at a run. To quote Umberto Eco, “if you’re running from the police, head for an alley. No police force can cover them all.” I do not want to be picked up. I’m kind of pissed at myself for dropping the knife; a key piece of evidence and a handy weapon. I have a sinking suspicion it has my finger prints on it. And that’s got me a bit worried. Crap, and I forgot the damn newspaper, too. I’m going to toss the bloody tshirt in a dumpster somewhere along my escape route. hopefully, my uncanny intuition [cause-effect power] will help me run away from the cops and not into them. “Trust your feelings Luke,” was probably never meant to cover escaping from a murder, but hey desperate times and all that.

Narrator -
[Player won conflict again which reduced the obstacle he was facing down to a single cop at the moment]
As your feet speed over the concrete you hear the sounds of a whistle split the air behind you. It’s echoed instants later, once, twice from the direction of your house.

You glance back and see a cop lurch into view right before you disappear into the dark mouth of an alley. Did he see you? Then just what you saw registers. The cop had a large key sticking out of his back. Slowly turning. A wind up key.

You pound down the alleyway. It seems dark. Darker than it should be. The air is filled with foul odors and you stumble and are at risk of falling.

A whistle blast echoes and reverberates down the alley. Behind you! You spin and outlined against the street lights is a dark form running in a jerky gait but one scary. A pair if red glows, they can only be the cops eye gleam at you as he runs after you.

Player C-

Glowing red eyes and clockwork keys are not a good thing. The gamer in me has lots of ideas on how to react. The character however wouldn’t be so analytical. Flight or fight here. If the alley is narrowing, dead-ending, or etc. then I’ll have to face the thing and try to disable it. Somehow. The key being the obvious, um, well, key to disabling it. If the Alley continues, then I’m going to keep trying to lose it. Knocking down trash cans, etc. to try to make pursuit more difficult. It’s gait is jerky. That implies that this thing isn’t graceful or highly mobile; time to start looking for a third dimension to my escape: going up and over obstacles rather than just pounding the side walk left or right, forward or back.

Narrator -

“The alleyway walls seem to close in, perhaps it’s the darkness, perhaps it’s actually getting narrower. Two red eyes are drawing closer and far in the distance you can see two more pairs of them, mere pinpricks. That’s when it hits you, this alleyway has gone on for a very long time with only the occasional door on the brick walls and the occasional fire escape, rusted and decrepit hanging down.”

Player C-

I use it’s lack of speed and fine motor control against it instead of treating it like a human. I grab a trashcan lid and throw it at the thing’s face. While it jerks to react to that, I duck behind it and twist the key out of it’s back. Sadly, this doesn’t turn the damn thing off like I’d hoped. But it does seem to slow it’s reactions; maybe it’s winding down without the key? I don’t have time to figure it out. Instead, I shove the thing into the wall, hard. It slumps down awkwardly off balance. As it starts trying to right itself, I take off back the way I came. Shit. The alley has gotten longer since I ran in. Righto. Time to find a door that’s not locked and try my luck along that path!

Narrator -
[Player won the conflict roll again but again Pain dominated the interaction which is blended into the narration]

“With the key removed there’s a viscious ZZzzzzzzzziiiipppppppwwwhhhrrrrrr sound, as if a giant coiled spring was unwinding all at once. The cop who at all appearances aside from the red eyes appears to be otherwise normal starts spasming, his limbs moving at lightning speed, flailing around.

You can’t pull back in time and one arm smashes into your side and you go flying sideways to smash into the wall. The cop spins and twitches like a man caught in a lightning storm for several seconds, the length of time it takes you recover and sit up, gasping for air. Chips of brick fly up pelting the walls as it smashes them and then quickly it starts to spin down.”

“You climb to your feet, only then aware you still hold onto the big silver key. Inscribed across its face is a 6 digit number, 815631 and the words “Property of Officer Tokk”.

You start to head back the way you’d just run, but spastic footfalls echo faintly in the distance and there in the far distance you can see two angry red glows, two pairs of angry red glows.

There’s a click, much louder than it should be from a little way down the alley and a door opens up and a man steps through. He’s dressed in a wrinkled suit although expensive and carrying a briefcase in his hand. He looks around, spots you. In his other hand is a piece of paper and you can see a photograph on it along with blocks of text. Light streams from the through the doorway along with massive crowd babble and noise.

He looks at it and then at you and nods to himself and then checks his watch. He drops the page and it falls neatly into his suddenly open briefcase which snaps shut with a disquieting organic sound Mmmmm.

He gives you a nod and then steps back through the doorway which starts to slowly shut behind him.

Your ribs flare in pain and the jerky sound of footfalls grows closer.

Player C-

Keep the key. Follow the man through the door.

Narrator -

A blast of exotic odors assails your senses as you step through the door, lights flare and scream for your attention, voices call out to come see their wares, cajoling, insulting, calm or excited, whatever the seller thinks will work.

You’ve emerged into the middle of a teeming crowd of people, all kinds of people, it’s like a madman’s nightmare of an ancient persian bazaar that cuts across centuries.

To your left a ancient old hag who hasn’t seen 100 in years leans forward, “2000 for 5 years dearie! You won’t find a better offer! What’s five years of your life, you’re still young, 5 years will only make you more mature! Okay 2100, final offer!”

On your right a suave ivory skinned man, literally the color of old ivory, stands naked except for a necklace and an obvious display of excitement. His face is rather dreamy and vacant and he smiles, his under lit by the the rainbow colored glow of the necklace. He catches your eye, “Pleasure necklaces, finest in the bazaar. You won’t need seek out companionship every again. All for the mere cost of a few memories sir. Come, avoid frustration and disappointment in seeking solace in others. He opens a case on the counter before him, the case bears a tri-part symbol in yellow and black on it. Lifting out a necklace similar to his own he beckons you, “A 60 second trial, guaranteed to be the best 60 seconds of pleasure you’ve every experienced. All for the worthless cost of the memory of your first kiss.”

Suddenly something hits you in the back and your ribs feel like molten metal charged with lightning as the pain flares.

“Well well, lookie here boys. Fresh meat.”

Behind you are three biker types although their flesh is pierced all over, chains, nails bent in rings, spikes protrude from everywhere. Their heavy leather clothing has bones attached to it, finger bones or even larger and each wears a necklace of teeth, human teeth and things like look like pieces of dried fruit, things you find yourself avoiding looking at too closely.

“And what do we do with fresh meat?” the one in the middle asks.

And in sync the other two growl, “We eat it up yum!” and flash smiles filled with teeth filed to needle points and razor edges.

Player C-

Yeah, this is going to go badly.

“Hello boys! How’s business? Everything going well these days? No run-ins with Officer Tokk, I hope?” While I’m spinning that inane prattle, I reach out to the leader and whichever of the other two goons looks biggest. I find the most strategically placed piercing — the one that seems to be tapped into the most nerve bundles. And as I say Tokk, I grab those two piercings and I pull down as hard as I fucking can. Then I run through the Bazaar. After the man I was following, if I can see him in the crowd.

Narrator -
[Player invokes his Madness talent which allows him to see cause and effect in detail.]
“Something flares inside you and your field of vision is filled with numbers, percentages, forces, vectors and links between everything you can see. The world is frozen for an instant but it’s way more time than you need and you’re ready when everything snaps into motion again, almost bored by that time.

You punch out with the key directly into a piercing on the goon to the left and then drag it sideways into a bundle of metal located near the collarbone of the leader. The first one is just reacting as the pain reaches his brain and he screams and spins. The leader drops to his knees just in time to catch the jagged shiv held by the first in the throat. A spray of arterial blood blasts out drenching the face of the third.

He screams and staggers back, crashing into the old hags counter and smashing it flat. She screams in anger and clamps her hands on his head and you see him visibly age as she grows younger almost too fast to see. The first completes his spin in time to stab it into the thigh of a heavily armed passer by who without pausing pulls semi automatic 12 gauge pistol and there’s a huge boom and when the smoke clears the headless corpse of the first goon topples backwards.”

Player C-

The fight seems to have been fun while it lasted… but I’m going with flight. This shit is too freaky to hang around waving my privates in the air.

Narrator -

“Lost by the sudden massive violence you’ve been subjected to, from finding a body in your bed to fleeing from wind up cops to opening doors into other worlds by all appearances to being able to with two single light touches cause the deaths of three people, you find yourself suddenly in the center of an empty space with bodies bleeding out while a crowd gathers to watch. You hear murmurs, “that’s a key, a cop key.” and as that whisper races like lightning through the crowd they start to look around, raising up on their tip toes and as if on cue you hear a whirring clicking noise in the distance and the jerky thuds of feet pounding the pavement.

You put your head down and push your way through the crowd, they split before you like the red sea before noah or perhaps more correctly, like an ancient mariner who killed a albatross…. You run until your lungs are gasping and you’re coughing up blood and still you run until you find yourself in a dank, run down section of urbanism. Strange graffiti mars the walls, layer upon layer of it. Some of it glows with an unhealthy purple hue. Mold covers the walls and the air is damp and you just know it’s unhealthy to breath. But at least you appear to be alone, perhaps there’s safety in being alone. ”

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…from Google+

Continue reading »]]> DRYH characters have two talents, one Exhaustion and one Madness.

The Exhaustion talent is something any normal person can do, it’s just for that character as they get more tired, the more Exhaustion dice they have in play, they can do it better. To pick an Exhaustion talent if you think of any standard Skill in any given RPG, you’ll be in the ballpark. So your Exhaustion talent might be Diplomacy or Mechanics or Melee or Shooting or Persuasion or Perception etc and so one. As you add Exhaustion dice to your roll, the better you can talk people into buying snake oil or ice boxes, or the better you can see and hear until eventually you can hear a fly stumble in mid-flight or read the fine print of a contract with Satan.

The Madness talent is more uber. It can be something as mundane as Flight or Teleportation if you’re really stuck for creativity. Just pick a power out of any super hero rpg and go with it. The problem with those is they end up very unitasking. If you were to take say Energy Blast as your MT, it’s not going to be much use for you when you’re trying to sneak into the Daily Oracle to try to stop the presses before the evening edition with the headlines of your death are printed. And the Oracle only prints true news stories.

But if you’re feeling a little more creative I’ve outlined examples of Talents below and the various effects you might get by burning Madness on them.

Madness Talent 1 -

Flavor:

“No matter where she went, the clicking of nails soon followed, echoing down alleyways, around corners in halls,always out of sight but never out of mind. In the distance were always the sounds of yips, barks and growls, playful, neutral and aggressive and everything in between. And the odd thing was the sounds mimicked her own emotional state.”

Use your Madness:

1-2 dice – canines are friendly to you, regardless of their training or instructions. They show up as you need them, a bloodhound if you need to trail someone, an attack dog if you have concerns for your physical being, a golden doodle if you’re feeling down.

3-4 dice – packs of dogs stream from just off camera to your aid, your own senses sharpen and your teeth extend and sharpen, you can run fast and forever and if you wish assume the classic half man/half wolf shape.

5-6 dice – Cerebus and Fenris are yanked to your location in an instant to deal with your problems, you can assume the shape of any canine, command any creature with any relationship to dogs who is instantly submissive to you

What you are becoming:

If you use your power too long and too hard your humanity begins to fade, you spend more time in dog form, around dogs and less time among humans. In the end you become The Den Mother (or if you’re male, The Alpha Dog)

Madness Talent 2 -

Flavor:
“All your life nothing’s gone right for you in the little ways and the big. Your tv breaks the week after the warranty expires. Your cars are always lemons. If someone finds a pie, you find an empty plate. But lately things have taken a turn for change and the shoe is on the other foot.”

Use your Madness:

1-2 dice – Minor things go wrong in your favor. The cop’s radar gun fritzs as you go past at 100mph. Traffic lights get hung on green. The systems go down at work just when you needed a day off. The mugger’s gun misfires blowing his hand off.”

3-4 dice – The welds give out in a lamp post just as you’re accosted by three gang bangers and it falls critically wounding them. Your bosses pace maker shorts out right before he was about to fire you. A computer glitch causes an ATM to spew itself empty as you try to take out $20. A fire breaks out in the apartment due to faulty wiring of the man who stole your woman killing him allong with everyone else.

5-6 dice – Everything that can go wrong, does in a city block. Utter chaos ensues yet leaving you untouched.

What you are becoming:

As bad luck surrounds you it starts to stick to you, forming an every larger bubble of bad luck. Little things go wrong to those around, friend and foe alike without your control until eventually you become a pariah, unwanted and unloved by anyone. You have become, The Murphy.

Continue reading »]]> Just a short video of my table in action.  I got the lasers calibrated this weekend.  Still needs some carpentry work to lock down the U channel that keeps any stray laser light from leaking off the edge of the table.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTe15HvXOw0

It’s based on Laser Light Plane technology or LLP and I’m using 4 x 850nm IR lasers, one in each corner that use a beam spreader to convert the laser dot into a 120 arc of IR light.   This is project just above the surface which is two sheets of polycarbanite and a sheet of vellum sandwiched between them as a projection surface.  I’ve tried other surfaces and broke ass cheap vellum is by far the best on the ‘reasonable’ side of things.   Sure you could go with the $40 a foot projection film/acrylics and get superiour results but on a cost effective basis I’ll take my $2 sheet of vellum any day.

When objects intersect the laser field, they’re first cut in half like in Resident Evil no wait, that would be cool but they’re not.  What really happens is the laser light hits the object and then reflects off it.  That reflected light shoots off the object and a good chunk of it goes down into the interior of the table where it’s picked up by a PS3 EyeToy camera with a custom lens and that has had the IR filter removed and a visible light filter added that filters out everything but the laser light.

This creates bright blobs in the camera view and a couple of pieces of software turn those blobs of light into something that act like mouse cursors.

The image is just Microsoft’s Surface Globe app that comes with their Surface SDK kit.

The primary use of the table should be pretty obvious.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve decided to switch to using IR Lasers to make a LLP or Laser Light Plane style table.  I’m just unable to get IR LED’s to work the way I want them to due to the size of the table.

The LLP method should work and is cheap enough to experiment with to see if it does and if the experiment works then I can pick up a couple more frickin’ lasers to make it a fully functional massively multi-touch.

I’ve got a couple of 10mw IR lasers in the mail somewhere on their way to me that are in the 850nm range.  I could have gone with the cheaper 780nm lasers but I already have a camera that filters for 850 and 850 works better with ambient light and allows for lower wattage lasers.

I’m doodling with how to set them up so that they can be adjusted for pitch/roll/yaw and remain ‘locked’ in after finding the right setting.

If these work then I can also pick up a sheet of tempered glass to put on top of the table surface to use as the touch surface.  Glass is easier to clean and way less scratchable than arcylic is.

Continue reading »]]> Okay I’ve switched to rolling 2d20 for skill mechanics.  It’s an odd choice I know but it makes the math pretty on the back end and I like pretty math.   It also lets me fall back to a unified “Any skill roll on your turn takes a standard action” rather than “All skill rolls except in the case of duel wielding weapons”.   And its more likely that any given player will have 2 d20′s versus 3 d8′s.  And you can buy a bag of d20′s, but not a bag of d8′s.

Continue reading »]]> [Just an FYI: After discussing this with my wife who will be using this system I'm leaning heavily on a single attack roll at +2 bonuses to attack and damage.  A character dual wielding the same type of weapon i.e. two melee or two ranged can make a single attack roll at +2 attack and +2 damage when attacking one target.  If they want to they can make a split attack and make two attack rolls at -1 each and will know that long run that's the worse solution by the math.  If they're wielding a ranged and a melee then they have to make a split attack.  Of course making a ranged attack while in melee range causes OA's so I don't think it'll come up that often to be honest but I didn't want to just flat out ixnay a character being able to split their attack.  Against minions it might make perfect sense to go for two kills rather than a more assured single kill.]

As luck would have it with my near obsession with having a trued up base foundation to build LCA!’s mechanics on, I unovered a problem with the current system for Dual Wielding.

The mechanic of the day for dual wielding is they make two attack rolls, one for each weapon and suffer a -1 penalty on this.

This has some issues -

1. It complicates the Action definitions and action economy.   All standard actions are one action with the exception of dual wielding which is two sub-actions.
2. It slows down combat that extra little bit as the dual wielders have to make two attack and two damage rolls compared to other builds making one.
3. As skills go up equally between the Dual Wielder and the 2-Handed wielder the odds shift in favor of 2H.  At the end of the skill scale the fights are 60/40 in favor of the 2H wielder.  At the start of the scale they’re 50/50.
4. It’s balancing with penalties rather than bonuses which is perceptually not as good.
5. It complicates the attack roll ever so slightly as people have an easier time adding than subtracting.

So I looked at duplicating the same mechanic that other systems have used, i.e. making dual wielding a single attack roll with bonus(es).   FYI, none of the ones I’m familiar with that use this method give you enough of a bonus to make up for the difference.  Typically they give you a +1 or something silly like that.  It doesn’t come close to balancing when the average damage on a hit between the two weapons is significantly better than the typical 5-9% that a +1 adds depending on the system.

Anyway to get numbers that balance up and down the skill levels so that the two types of warriors remain evenly matched, assuming no other changes, I have to offer a total of +4 to the dual wielders attack mechanic.

This +4 can be a +4 on damage, or +1 attack roll and +3 damage or +2 attack roll and +2 damage.

The most balanced (for obvious reasons if you’re mathcentric) is the +4 damage.  The other two options are not quite as balanced but are within acceptable margins.

So the question becomes, do I keep the current unbalanced system (depending on skill levels) or do I drop the two attack rolls and make it a flat bonus.

The down side is as I see it -

1. Dual wielding doesn’t necessarily feel like you’re dual wielding any more
2. You either hit or miss with ‘both’ weapons.
3. Adding bonuses to attack rolls results in fewer misses.

The numbers and background data -

LCA Melee Basics:
1H weapons are 2d6 and max at 4d6.
2H weapons are 3d6 and max at 5d6.
Trained Melee skill ranges from Rank 0 to 5

I can offer the following options (stats down below)

Dual Wield with seperate attack rolls at -1 penalty
Dual Wield with one attack roll at +4 Damage
Dual Wield with one attack roll at +1 Attack, +3 Damage
Dual Wield with one attack roll at +2 Attack, +2 Damage

Dual Wield with 2 attacks is okay at low skill numbers but as the skill increases on both sides the numbers start to significantly favor the 2H warrior.

The stats (100,000 fights at each combination)

————-
Using Dual Wield = 2 attack rolls

Both attacks suffer -1 penalty
With Rank 0 on each side the ratio is 50/50 win/loss between the two builds.
With Rank 5 skill ratio is the 40/60 win/loss in favor of 2H builds.

So between two equally skilled opponents with everything else equal the 2H just got a +20 boost in win rate.

————-
Using Dual Wield = 1 Attack Roll

1 Attack at +4 Damage, no penalty or bonus on AR.
With rank 0 the ratio is 50/50
With rank 5 the raito is 50/50

End result both builds benefit equally from skill and equally matched up and down the skill range.

————–
Using Dual Wield = 1 Attack Roll
1 Attack at +1 Attack Roll and +3 Damage

With Rank 0 the ratio is 51/49 in favor of dual wield.
With Rank 5 the ratio is 51/49 in favor of dual wield.

—————

Using Dual Wield = 1 Attack Roll  (Probable winner)
1 Attack at +2 Attack roll and +2 Damage
With Rank 0 the ratio is 53/47 in favor of dual wield.
With Rank 5 the ratio is 50/50 tiny favor on dual wield

 

Continue reading »]]> I’ve recently had a chance to page through The  One Ring RPG manuals.

The books are pleasant enough, seem to be quality printed.  There’s not a ton of artwork, no full color spreads that I can remember now, just a small quarter panel scattered every couple or three pages.  I’m fine with that myself.  They do use a fairly heavy texture graphic under all the body text which personally I hate.  Anything that makes the text harder to read is a bad thing to me.

The artwork is more watercolor’y rather than pen and ink but pleasent in most cases.

Without more extensive viewing than I got, I don’t remember it being badly copy edited, nothing jumped out at me in terms of typo’s grammar or spelling.

Their system has a LOT of similarities to LCA!, the system I’ve been developing for the last 6 months.  Under no circumstances am I implying that is anything more than a coincidence.   I just find it very interesting, it’s almost like reading a paraphrased version of my various design versions.

For example when you get wounded their mechanic calls for underlining a box on the character sheet when you fail a healing check so that you know to wait 24 hours before you try again.  I was going to go with putting a \ through a box to denote a wound and then if you failed the roll to heal you put a / to make an X to indicate you need to wait a day before trying to heal it again.   I recently changed my damage system to something else but still it’s odd reading something so similiar.

They also have the concept of Focus Skill, I call them Heroic Skill and Focus Skill.  These are the skills that you’re particular good at.

They use the term Degree of Success, up until a week ago I used the same term but I switched to defining success by Level a few days ago.

They use the term Target Number, as do I.  Not a big thing obviously, Difficulty Number is the most common other option.

They also have 5 stats well 3 character stats and 2 that are statish.  Until very recently I had 5 stats.  They generalize even further than I do with 1 stat for all body/physical , 1 for all mental, 1 stat for all spirit.  It would equate to my Strength+Grace, Intellect+Empathy, Resolve+Fortitude, roughly.

They have 3d6+1d12, i went with 3d8 for better scaling but I offer an optional box for how to convert to 3d6 if you’d rather use d6′s for everything. You lose some granularity and have to make some adjustments to various numbers but it’s doable.

I kick their ass in Skills though, they only have 18, I have 25, 2 of those are open ended and can be anything a player might wish to be skilled at.

They also use Traits although theirs are canned like Herb-Lore or Smith-Craft.    The One Ring’s Distinctive Feature’s are much closer to my Trait system although again theirs are canned, as in pick from this list.   Rather than give you hard list of things you can use, I prefer to leave it up to the player like so much else of LCA!.  I want players to make their characters Their Own, rather than being fighter_001 with Longsword and Chainmail.

They have am Emdurance system which is similar to my Vitality system although theirs is more complicated and detailed and is almost a damage system by itself.  Technically I guess mine is as well but mine’s more abstract.  Actually their damage system comprised of damage and endurance is very close to my Stress + Trauma system.   In their system your’e more likely to get ‘tired’ to death than killed to death, much like in my system you’re more likely to get knocked unconscious than killed.

Their treasure system is kind of cool and avoids having the ‘bag of 1800 silvers’.  I might borrow that concept for a setting expansion.  Assuming I ever do a fantasy setting expansion.

Before I forget, they have special dice symbols on their dice.  I didn’t even consider going that route.  For good reasons, not because I’m teh dum.

The combat system has shades of deja vu although they have a Stance system for everyone that determines how hard you are to hit.  Yeah, I have Stances too that you can buy as Knacks.    They add the target’s parry to the TN though which seems wrong to me for ranged attacks.  Not that many people would be able to Parry an arrow coming at them assuming they even knew it was coming in.  That doesn’t reflect reality very well at all in my opinion.  Not that a game system has to.  It just seems that it makes ranged weapons nothing but melee weapons that you can use at range.

Do you see where I’m going with this?  If you like the One Tree RPG mechanics then you should find a lot of things to like about LCA!

If you’re fan of the Hobbit / Towers setting then there’s a lot to like about the system.  I can’t not say that given the similarities after all.  Personally I’m not a fan or a detractor of the world and given it’s mostly the setting that I’d want from a book I didn’t buy them myself.  But if you see a Fellowship in your future then you could do worse than The One Ring.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve decided to settle on 3 second turns.  I know, radical departure from the standard 6 second turn but 3 second turns work better for me from a realism perspective.  The ‘average’ person can sprint roughly 14-18 squares (5′ per square) in a 3 second turn.  The typical character using LCA can run about 16 squares on their turn if they Run twice also called a Double Move (clever name eh?), a slow one 10 and a fast one 18.  A high level character built for speed could achieve about a 26 square run in one turn which again is fairly realistic.

And I’m using the 5′ square simply because it makes for brain dead easy math to convert squares to feet and feet to squares.

So 3 seconds works very well from a ‘realism’ perspective.  Not that I care all that much for realism per se but rather the semblance of realism is a vague goal.

So we can assume the more average slow jog of a combat at 6 squares per turn for the average character falls right in line with reality as well.

LCA isn’t the same as say 4th Edition or Hero System where you move then attack, or attack then move, or old school DnD where you moved then attacked and couldn’t move after you attacked.   In LCA your move occurs over the entire space of the 3 second turn and you can take other actions at any time during the move.

I debated briefly on having actions cost you a movement point.  So if you were to attack during your move and you had a base speed of 6 then you have a speed of 5 for that turn but it added a minor complexity to the turn without adding a lot of interest in my opinion so I shelved the idea.   I might return to it later and see how it plays out.

In other news I’ve updated several powers with minor adjustments, against based on playtesting results and simplifed some Knacks and made a couple more attractive by removing some of the limits on it.

I’ve also done some work on the Dodge mechanic and dodge knacks and added “Neener neener!”, a combat knack that once per round, when you’re missed with a melee attack you can shift as a free action immediately after the attack.   It’s a knack I added for mobs and it adds some unique mobility to a character that takes it and works very well for an ‘assassin’ or rogue type build that needs to maneuver more than most so they can get that bonus damage that build can garner.

I’ve dropped the bonus on the Signature [blank] Knacks from 2 to 1.  I’d boosted them from 1 to 2 because otherwise the only reason it made any sense to take Signature Weapon for instance is after you’d hit the skill cap.  But a +2 seems like too big a boost.  So to make Signature weapon attractive, at least at some point in a character’s career is there’s +1 damage knack that’s dependent on having Signature Weapon.  So if you want to open up the + damage knack line you have to have a weapon that’s uniquely yours.

I’m considering limiting the exploding dice to one explosion per dice to help calm down the damage rolls a bit.  Double (or more) explosions don’t happen so often that taking them out would hurt too badly but they happen often enough that combat is turning out pretty risky.  Not necessarily a bad thing but it puts more importance on saving Rewrites for Shake It Off rolls than I’m liking.  I want Rewrites to be available for re-rolling attacks when you really need to hit or re-rolling damage when you flub a 5d6 attack and end up with 6 damage.

Between the Dodge mechanic, the Parry mechanic,  the Dodgy Bastard knack and the Wired focus players need to remember to speak up before hearing the numbers.  Dodge and Parry have to be announced before the attack roll is made, and Dodgy Bastard and Wired have to be announced after an attack hits but before the damage is rolled.

To insure that combat isn’t nothing but Dodges and Parries, those two functions allow a character to add either their Grace or Intellect in the case of a Dodge and their Melee skill in the case of a Parry as a penalty to the attack roll coming their way.  But they themselves take the same penalty on any skill roll they make on their next turn when using any Grace or Strength based skill.   So you’re trading off the hope you’re going to get missed because you’re dodging or parrying and that you roll well enough on your turn to offset the same penalty.

It becomes a tactic to Dodge or Parry, primarily when you’re skill is higher than your opponents or they have a low Evasion or when you’re just trying to tank and keep aggro from some mobs while your friends run the DPS train on the bad guys.

Dodgy Bastard lets you retroactively add a -5 penalty to an attack roll but you’re rendered Off Balance (-2 penalty to you).  You choose to activate it after the attack roll is rolled.  Since it’s something you spend character points on it has to be more powerful than the basic Dodge available to everyone.

You can Dodge or Parry once per turn, not both and not multiples.

With Wired, which is a focus you set when you build your character, once per encounter you can dodge an attack entirely but you have to choose to dodge it before damage is rolled but you do know that the attack hit or missed.

These are all, reasonably, balanced I think so if you don’t use them and want to simplify your combat, then you don’t miss out, but if you do want to go for a more complicated fighting style then you can add them to your repertoire.

That’s another design goal, I don’t want the rules experts to be an order of magnitude more powerful than the casual player.  I want to avoid the ‘must have’ character options or the “Imma Demigod!” build.

Which all comes back down to making my life easier as a gamemaster.  Lopsided power output in a party is such a major pain in the ass and you spend too much time trying to make the game a fun and enjoyable challenge for both the casual player and the hard core player and in the end it’s impossible to do it in many systems.

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

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

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

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

Downtime -

This is a big one to me personally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Setting –

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

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

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

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

The System –

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

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

Modern Day Reality –

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

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

So What Can You Do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading »]]> I was looking for a multi-touch driver to use in Windows and it took some looking obviously enough to get one that worked the way it should be.   One that emulated the touch ability of a typical Windows 7 tablet.

This is for my Multi-Touch Gaming Table experiment.  Speaking of which I do have an update, Deal Extreme takes forever to ship.  It was over a month from the time I placed my order before I received the 48 IR LED security lights.  Both of which worked by the way, I cut the existing plug off and used an old PC power supply (i have a lot of them) to power them.  Just wire the red wire from the lights to a yellow wire from the power supplies main lead (the big mass of wires) or the supplemental power lead (small square plug).  Then wire the black wires to any black wire for a ground.   To get the power supply to turn on short circuit the green wire in the main plug with any back wire. I just clipped and soldered them together.   Unfortunately the lights help but not enough.

I’m thinking I may have to just bite the bullet and get a piece of Endlighten and some strip lighting and deal with the loss of Fiducials.

Anyway, after putting the table on hold for a month waiting for the IR lights I went back to getting it working again using some IR pens I made.  It’s not great but it’s better than nothing right?

So I found this - http://multitouchvista.codeplex.com/ The instructions on the site are for getting it working with multiple mice.  I offer the following instructions instead since they’re not obvious nor posted anywhere.

Install the driver as posted on the site.   Then run the two console files, the MultietouchDriver.console and the Multitouch.Service.Console.  I DON’T recommend the open Pen and Touch and then checking the show mouse box that is listed on the site, that puts a virtual mouse on the screen.  Not really what we’re looking for here.

Then open the MultiTouch-Configuration.WFP app and click TUIO and then the obvious option.  At that point the WFP file crashed on me but it did flip it from MultiMice to TUIO input.

Now close the driver and service consoles and fire up CCV.   Calibrate it as normal and minimize it or whatever.

Now re-run the two console apps above.   The reason you don’t want them running when you calibrate CCV is it turns the long press of the calibrate procedures into right mouse clicks and if there happens to be anything on the deskop, a window, icon, whatever it jacks around with you by right mouse clicking it.

With those simple but not obvious steps you should now be able to use touch on your table and control windows.  A double touch is a left mouse click, a long touch is a right mouse click.

I’m having issues with calibration at the moment.  I get steady seeming blobs with the pens, the ID doesn’t change but it can take an ass load of attempts to get the calibration to work as each point requires a bunch of attempts to try and get the blue sweep to go all the way around.   Annoying as hell.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve heard of a dice mechanic that I found interesting after some deliberation.  I don’t think I’d ever use it as it’s too much like a combination Heroes’ speed system and Action Points of CRPGS.

But it comes down to time is set up in blocks of x units.  This block of time is divided into rounds.   Your speed determines how many of those rounds you get to act.  (Disclaimer, I hate the Heroes speed system).  In addition you get a pool of dice to use that’s associated with the block of time.  You can spend as many dice as you wish on an action, obviously the higher your dice roll the better your chances of winning.

Its interesting in that it adds tactics and deferred risk to the player’s decisions.  Do they portion out the dice in singles and doubles hoping to get a lot of actions with good rolls, the quantity over quality path.  Or do they dump a lot of dice on fewer actions going for quality over quantity.

It could make for interesting play from the players side although I see it as being a big PITA for the game master trying to keep track of dice counts for multiple NPC’s.  Even if you do something like “All minions only get to roll 1 (or 2 or 3) dice on the rounds they can go” you still have to add non-minions and that brings piles of dice laying around to keep track for each one.

The overhead involved I don’t see as being worth what it adds to gameplay but who knows it might be cool.

In other news I’ve been listening to various podcasts, it’s kind of what I do in the car and I just have one thing to say, “Post editing is your friend!”.

Blimey but some of the latest ones I’ve listened to have so much filler i.e. non-game stuff that I can’t keep interested in them.  It’s 15 minutes of mundane real life chat, idle commentary and/or questionable humor, usually bathroom or homophobic based for the all male groups and flirtatious for the mixed groups for each 2 minutes of gaming.  I can literally hear and feel the frustration in these game masters as they try to run a game when everyone is too busy bullshitting to remember why they’re in theory all sitting around the table.

I know everyone has sessions that everyone is there just to get together.  I’ve had them, but I also would early on close all my books and say “Disinterest has reared it’s head, we’re going to table this for another time.”  Not mean or accusingly or anything, just factually.  And we’d sit around and bullshit, make fun of Star Wars movies or whatever.   And some of these sessions could gain from that.   Just sayin’.

Continue reading »]]> I really should change the name of these posts but this at least keeps them all the same.  I could I guess globally swap the name out and I might at some point.

Let’s see what’s changed…

Modified the damage tracks and recovery methods to further differentiate Physical from Fatigue to Mental damage.   Physical damage, as the most common damage source has two methods of recovery, an immediate ‘interupt’ action on your part when you get hit with damage (much like Savage World’s Soak roll) and then you or someone else can (preferably someone trained in it) can work on the wounds during the downtime between fights.   There are limits, if you attempt a first aid roll and fail, the right most box on the damage track gets an X in it and it requires an extended rest (8 hours, once every 24 hours) before that box can be tried to heal again.

I think that will increase the value of First Aid such that someone in a group really should take it, preferably more than one.   And it allows for lingering damage.   Because the penalties are really kind of low from any of the damage tracks it’s not so much the penalties that get you, it’s the loss of the length of the track.

Fatigue damage occurs for a few things but typically it’s applied from the following, for every two scenes your in without a significant rest (2 hours) you incur one level of fatigue.  If you’re not actually in a scene but time is passing in game and you’re awake you incur one level of fatigue every 12 hours.  So most people can go about 48 hours before they drop down unconscious from being too tired.   In a setting that allows the Healing power, having Healing used on your incurs a level of Fatigue as Healing is simply revving your body up to regenerate in my system.  The person with the power can spend more power to offset that and block the fatigue buildup or they can elect to take the fatigue on themselves and spare the patient.   I try to have options.

There will be other sample sources for fatigue as well, bad air will incur a fatigue level every X unit of time depending on how bad it is, some poisons might cause Fatigue as well extreme labor, and it’s possible to ‘push your run’ to move faster for a turn and pick up a level of fatigue that way among others.

Fatigue is recovered one step by 2 hours of rest and doesn’t require any rolls, it’s just automatic.  So a full night’s rest will refresh and revitalize anyone.   It’s my systems answer to Healing Surges from 4th Edition, a way to regulate an adventurer’s work day.  It helps to avoid the 5 minute work day and the 5 day workday.

Mental damage, as the rarest form of damage (in most settings) is a lot like Physical damage in most respects except for the recovery time.  There is a way to mitigate mental damage as it happens and characters have mental damage resistance and mental evasion.   The biggest way they differ is that you can only recover mental damage after an extended rest, not a short one.   And if you fail the recovery then you get an X in a box that lasts for a week before it can be recovered again.

The mental damage is primarily of use for horror settings, Cthulhu, Zombie Apocalypse, adventures and settings where the characters are subjected to all kinds of mind breaking sights and encounters.

Because of the way the system works in such systems it’s quite likely that a character will go insane so it’s a lot more ‘pure mythos’ than survivable.

It’s possible to buy knacks that offset the penalties that can accrue from the damage tracks as well boost your ability to better mitigate the damage when it occurs and even extend one or more tracks with an extra buffer step.    And the inverse, to take a character flaw that makes you weaker in one area, removes a buffers step of your track, makes it harder to mitigate the damage or increases the penalties you suffer.   It’s all about being able to build a character as close to your concept as possible.

So that covers the current way to track character damage.   Each track is the same length, six boxes, well 5 since the first box is implied as it means you’re at full.  The last box means you’re incapacitation in some fashion and out of play.

I’m currently working on a sample adventure that incorporates the Extended Skill system, combat encounters with Extras alone and Extra’s + Villainous Stars.  It’s set in the 1930′s Egypt and will include horror elements to show mental damage and periods of work that will show the buildup of Fatigue.

Unfortunately due to my adventure concept I have to essentially write two adventures since it can divert pretty much right at the start into two paths but that’s okay, I like that kind of thing.

I’m toying with the idea of trying to playtest online with random folks using Maptools to do the map and some VoiP conferencing system to put everyone in voice communication.  Since I don’t see the sample adventure taking too long I think it would be possible to keep everyone entertained for the duration, and the system is hopefully fast enough that player downtime won’t be too burdensome.   Like most, I’ve found the more downtime between your turn, the much more likely you are to be disengaged.

Game systems where individual rounds take forever (relatively) find players not paying attention to what’s going on when it’s not there turn.  In great part that’s why I turned to Savage Worlds after a long 4th Edition DnD campaign in an effort to keep players engaged in what’s going on.  And disengaged players just exacerbate the problem since it takes them longer to get bakc in the game when it is their turn and that just causes more downtime for everyone so everyone disengages even more.  It’s a vicious cycle.

And in full part why I decided to write my own game system in an effort to keep that same speed of play, just with my own take on balance, options and mechanics.

Continue reading »]]> Received my PS3 camera with m12 2.5mm lens and 850 nm IR filter as well as a 25 LED module string of IR lights and a roll of Vellum from Dick Blick Arts.   The vellum provides a pretty nice projection surface although of course it’s going to be prone to picking up finger oils and dirt but it’s certainly cheap enough to replace as you need to.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the touch working.  I tried putting the string of IR lights about 12″ down from the top aimed out and that didn’t work, I angled them up and that worked better but the slightest bend in the acrylic from pressure causes the lights to show up as blobs.   I then as a quick experiment tried using regular paper as diffusers over placed above the LED’s which did help to eliminate the pressure blobs but regular blobs didn’t work that well.  Stability was a major issue with the blobs flickering like mad and getting it down to just finger tips was very difficult.

So I pulled the LED’s off the wall and trailed them on the floor of the box aimed up and was back to the least pressure caused the LED’s to pop up as blobs as the angle of the acrylic changed minutely.

At that point I called it a night and played some Portal 2.   I’ll go back to it tonight.  My current thought is to put the LED’s higher up, next to the acrylic aimed across and put diffusers below them to block them from directly shining into the camera.  I’m also going to try moving the camera higher up so it’s not reading the sides of the box so much.

Continue reading »]]> More work on the making of the multi-touch functionality to get it working.  Running some issues that I think are attributable to my tablet pc which has multi-touch on it already.   Currently in the process of building a working system from spare parts I have laying around.  Will be far from awesome, a dual core AMD and an old radeon 4550 or something in that neighborhood.  I don’t really let good parts sit around, I put them to use for myself or others.   It’s been awhile since I did a hardware refresh on my primary box so maybe I should do that and move the current one over into the table.  That would give me a reasonable i5 OC’d by about 20% with SLI 8800 GT’s and 8gb of ram.  That should be able to run most things at the 1280×800 resolution the projector puts out.

I ordered a PS3 Eyetoy camera and some right angle connectors for the projector to let it drop down a bit to widen the image.  You might think that the 1″ gained wouldn’t be all that much but with a super short throw projector 1″ will equal a couple of inches in display size which is about what I’m short overall.

Sadly my vacation is over tonight and I have to go back to work so work on the table will probably slow down but I should be able to get back to the RPG system I’ve been working on using off time at work so there’s a little tit for tat.

Continue reading »]]> Technically this is from yesterday but what the hell…

I cracked the case on my logitech 9000 pro and was able to easily remove the IR Filter in spite of various postings on the web that it was impossible to do without destroying the camera.  Not difficult although you need a soldering iron and very thin pointy object.  Simply remove the screws holding the case together, then open the camera casing.  I removed the microphone lead and the ‘button’ lead.  Remove all the screws you can see to get to the back side of the circuit board then the two screws holding the camera lens on the pcb.   Heat up your soldering iron and briefly touch the two leads for the autofocus and this should let you pop off the lens assembly.   Now use your thin pointy tool to pry at the edge of the IR filter, the red coated lens on the bottom of the lens assembly.  Be very careful here but you should be able to pop it out with just a little encouragement.  NOTE: it’ll probably break the IR filter, it is very thin glass after all.

Then put it all back together, put on a visible light filter, I used a couple of layers of exposed negative and you’ll have yourself an IR camera.   NOTE: Most lights give off IR light so don’t be surprised if you can still see with it.  Try turning off all the lights at night and then you can use your tv remote as a flashlight.

Now FPS in the multi-touch software isn’t great, 16fps but I’m not sure where the limitation lies.

Continue reading »]]> More progress was made.  You can see pictures of the stages on the DGT page but to sum up, sanded, routed, puttied, sanded, stained, acrylic cut, access hole cut, ventilation holes cut.

I’m going to be using magnets, rare earth magnets to be exact and steel bolts to keep the access door closed rather than hinges and a latch of some kind.  It seems a little niftier.

Right now I’m going to have two inflow fans near the bottom of one side and an outflow fan right above the projector so as the heat rises from it’s exhaust it’ll hopefully get sucked directly out and the two inflow’s should create a positive air pressure in the box, slight though it might be and help create a cool to hot heat loop so that the heat escapes.   If necessary I’ll cut a series of 1″ holes near the top of the box which should provide enough ventilation to keep things cool.

I still need to cut some access holes for wires in the bottom corners and near the top where it sits above the shelf.

Oh due to the ugliness of the staining I went with a faux finish.  Now I hate faux finishes but I find it less ugly than the splotchy stain soaking.  If you squint hard enough it looks like burled walnut.  But you have to squint.  And use your imagination.

I was thinking for the Mark 2 that I might go with a steam punk look.  Not sure if it’s worth it, the ‘omfg awesome’ factor would get old quickly I think and then you have all these bits and pieces sticking off it that become annoying or get in the way.

I do think for the Mark 2 it’ll be a complete design job rather than re-using the existing table which can go back to being a dedicated poker and board gaming table.

Continue reading »]]> Got some more work done, added the fourth wall missing from yesterday, added trim work to the base, created the capper, sanded everything with some rough grit to get it semi-smooth.   You’d think I’d of gotten more done today oddly enough after thinking about it.

There are a couple of new images on the dedicated page for the gaming table now.

Continue reading »]]> Good news, I was able to make a visible light filter out of a piece of old negative, screenshot attached.  I know it’s not the ‘best’ filter for this but it’s the best free filter and free goes a long way with me.

Those two ‘eyes’ are the IR LED’s in the cable remote I’m using and as you can see nothing else is visible in the pretty well lit room I’m currently in.

Bad news, with that I was able to measure out the FOV on the logitech 9000 Pro.  At the roughly 33″ height from floor to surface the 9000 can only see roughly 20″ to the side on the long axis giving me a FOV of about 40″ wide.  What that means is my maximum possible image can only be 40″ x 25″.   It’s a minor setback from the image size I was shooting for, 46×29 usable with a max of 48″ by 30″.

As part of that bad news, using the extreme edges of any camera is apparently iffy in terms of reliability (about like the edges of my Nook come to think of it).   So if this works and works well enough that I keep it, I might end up having to spring for a PS3 camera or a pair of them and stitch the image together.

On the up side is, using a digital mapping took and virtual tokens, you’re not limited to the 1″ = 1 Square typical of any gaming system.   So while 40″ x 25″ would be roughly 200′ by 125′ at normal scale, you could simply zoom out in the app and easily add 30%-50% to that size and be able to display 300′ by 190′(ish).   And when was the last time you were able to use a map 300′ long? (Don’t bother me details about how often you NEED a map that big.)

Continue reading »]]> I’ve picked up the lumber to make the box for the upgrade to the gaming table.  I just saw a new video about DSI style multi-touch tables like the old video that uses the FDI or shadow method rather than DI or FTIR reflected IR light.  Since it only requires some software (freely available), a webcam (already have) and some time (on vacation) I think I’m going to try to go that route instead of the wiimote.   The wiimote would require me to build at least one IR pen, not hard or even costly, but if I can avoid any cost, the better.  And if I can get it to work then I get multi-touch without pens which is a big bonus.

I just tested my camera, a Logitech 9000 Pro, and it’s definitely IR receptive.  It’s also high res but I’m not sure about FOV based on the size of the opening, I’ll need to do some testing there.  In the picture at the left I’m pointing a standard remote at the camera and pressing a button and the two blue lights are what the camera sees which means it’s seeing IR light.

Now I need to find some pieces of exposed negative to block the visible spectrum and allow the IR spectrum.  It’s not the best visible filter but hey it’s free assuming I can find some old negatives.

I’m still debating the final size of the display and the height, I think I’m going with a 28″ x 44″ visible viewport which leaves me room to overlap the acrylic for support purposes and leaves a smidgen of room around the long edges of the table perimeter for papers and stuff. I’ve got some ideas there for lighting as well.

Continue reading »]]> My gaming table is going to get a digital option.  If you’ve been a regular visitor over the yeass you’ve watched it go through a few upgrades, the original, the new table top and then the double decker topper.

Now I’ve decided to move to the digital age.  I’m going to remove the double decker topper and then the padded poker table insert, even four years ago I was thinking ahead as it’s completely removable.  Then I’m going to cut a hole through the underlayment such that I can have a usable digital surface 23×36 or  30″ by 48″.  For obvious reasons I’ll probably go with the bigger one.

I’m getting a very short throw projector, it only needs 1′-11″ to do the 30″ by 48″, add in the 9″ of depth and the projector surface only needs to be 33″ (+1″ for cables etc) from the floor.  I’ll need to do some actual measurements as the calculator at ProjectorCentral may or may not be accurate plus there’s usability checks.

I’ve only been thinking about this for roughly 4 years now so it’s not a rash decision or one I’ve taken lightly obviously.  It’s a luxury for sure and the ROI is unlikely to ever pay out but I’m in a position where I can do it without sacrificing so it seemed like a good time to go forward with it.

One thing I’ve seen with ultra short throw’s using the various tools is that it’s difficult to impossible to add a mirror.  But with a 33″ high table I don’t know that that’s an issue.

My playable surface is around 30″, it used to be 33″ but I removed 3″ of foot to allow the double decker topper to be more usable.   Easy to take it away, hard to add it back.

So what I’ll end up with is a box that comes up through the center of the hole and extends above the surface.   I’m going to be making the box out of MDF since I don’t really envision this as being a final table.  I’d like to go back to the drawing board on the entire table at which point I’d make it out of wood but for my needs here MDF should suffice.

The geek in me expects to make the table interactive although in all honestly I don’t forsee it being used much except as a geekgasm issue.   Rather than going full multi-touch with a DI (preferred by me) IR setup I’ll just use a Wiimote and an IR pen that will function as a mouse on the table’s surface.  So in theory you could use the pen to actually draw maps on the table.  That should help a lot with forgetting to wipe up the old marker between sessions.

Right now I expect I’ll be using MapTools to display maps and for tokens although there are several options these days although a lot of options have gone by the wayside.  But for what I’d need MapTools should work.  The biggest reason to use it is it’s free.  And I’m not happy with other options like Fantasy Grounds II (no link, I don’t like it that much) which I find the UI to be horrible, I want functional user interfaces not fanciful.  And frankly it’s too gd expensive to get a fully engaged group.   D20Pro seems too focused on Dungeons and Dragons and doesn’t have full 4E support and you have to have licenses for everyone and I won’t be going back to older editions so that leaves that one out.  And others are a worse option in terms of features or costs.

I’ll most likely either run two instances of Maptools on my tablet (HP TouchSmart TM2), one GM and one Player, gm on standard monitor and player output to projector.  I could just set up another machine,Laura has an identical tablet and there’s enough parts laying around here to build one or two desktops, to drive the projector but I worry about crowding at the table.

I’ll be documenting the steps of the conversion from analog here like I do with most of my gaming paraphernalia and if you’re interested check back.  I’m adding in a new category, Digital Gaming Table, that’ll make it easier to follow as well.

I was just able to successfully pair one of my Wiimotes to my tablet over bluetooth using the native bluetooth driver using Smoothboard and WiimoteConnect.   With Smoothboard I was able to use a cable remote as an IR source (just hold down a button) and get it to move the cursor around, albeit erratically.

If you have any tips, ideas, comments or questions please feel free to let me know.  Especially tips or software advice.

Continue reading »]]> The Monster killing hero’s spent a couple of weeks in Aralton soaking up praise and free booze.  Brok and Guentar [Dennis] were looking for a new creature to hunt and kill, with no success.  Luther and Abida [Scott] have been enjoying full stomachs and clean places to rest.  Arual [Laura] waits for her new monster scale armor and is constantly on the look out for the enemy.  When into town rides the cattle dealer they sold their reward herd.  He brings a letter to Brok from the minor noble.  Clintaur was the one who provided the reward and now needed the help of the hero’s.  The cattle dealer tried to keep the gold bar that came with the letter, not knowing it was mentioned.  Broks dagger and a little jabba jabba action got it back.  With a new quest at hand the five ride off in search of adventure, or at least gold.

They arrived at the Clintaur Safehold the same time as a dark shifty looking man named Chay [David] who was looking for his brother.  They heard the story of the raid that killed many people who worked here.  And that the nobles second wife and daughter were taken away.  He offers a reward for their return 1000 gold for the girl and another 600 for his wife.  After hearing the raid was carried out by a force of 30 men our hero’s decide to invite Chay along to help.  He was as well equipped as if he were an arms dealer.

They ride for days till they come upon the spot in the foot hills where the nobles men were ambushed and all killed.  The trail led on from there more skillfully concealed toward the mountains.  Finally they arrive at a narrow canyon, scouting up it Brok and Chay discovered there was a passage at the end and it was guarded.

The next night they slowly made their way toward the enemy.  Chay and Brok tried and failed to keep the others stealthy.  Chay used his power of seeming invisibility to get right up to the hidden entrance through the cliff face.  Brok followed using stealth but was spotted, the enemy archers prepared to arch.  When the rest of the group got half way from any cover they enemy cut loose.  About the same time the heard Guentar scream back down the valley where she had been left in supposed safety.

Arual bravely turned back to save the near helpless healer alone.  Luther carried Abida to the cover of the cliff entrance shielding her from arrows with his own body.  A screaming squad of swordsmen charged down the passage at Brok and Chay.  The ambush was sprung, the swordsmen had hidden far down the passage behind a closed door.  The archers were hidden safely above in cleverly carved firing galleries.  That made 20 against six, long odds without a wheelbarrow or holocaust cloak.

Chay killed the first two swordsmen as they charged then turned his attention to the archers above. Brok and Luther cut down the enemy warriors as they swarmed at them.  Finally Ferd the great oaf from the monster hunt had made it to the front.  Steel sword in hand he cut at Brok, wounding his arm.  A wizard disguised as a swordsman stopped and shot Chay who had been decimating the archers.  Little Abida had been helping as she could now unleashed everything she had on the mage.  Luther and Brok cut Ferd down with ease.  The battle in the passage done, Brok charged from cover to rescue Guentar.  One of the last archers caught him in the head with an arrow.  They finished off the last archer and saved Brok from the grave wound.

After questioning a few captives they only discovered that the enemy was more afraid of their master than the enemy.  Our brave band though wounded traveled on to save Arual and Guentar.  Traveling from the mountain passage into the valley they passed into dense forest.  They encountered a half dozen warbeasts like the one they fought before.  Surely the group would have died there but the beasts smelled traces of Arual’s armor.  Their own scent, confused they allowed them to pass.

Arual and Guentar awoke wearing finely made chainmail bikinis. [Princess Leia’s outfit] They were just in time to see the noble’s daughter be possessed.  The tower had collapsed onto the bed of the wizards who had ruled here.  The dead man a shifter who had made the warbeasts.  The dead woman was a mind control wizard who possessed he victims. She had survived by using her power to jump from body to body till they were used to death.   A pile of forty corpses attested to her failure to find a permanent host.  But the girl she now possessed had a power of her own, regeneration, this allowed her to survive the possession where they others where left dried husks.

Arual seeing the girl’s aura being replaced by one from the corpse attacked.  Guentar followed and was struck down by a mind blast from the Shadow Queen.  Arual was quicker and landed a flurry of punches on the possessed girl.  Just then the rest of the group arrived.  The Eisen blade was thrown to Arual who chopped off the girls head.  She saw the evil aura leave thru the floor.  It possessed one of the slingers who had followed the others.

The battle raged and the slingers died.  The mind control wizard left with no more options and weakened to her last jump possessed Guentar.  The group was forced to knock out their healer and eventually kill her. With this great sacrifice the Shadow Queen was dead.

Arual noticed the beheaded girl’s power left her only mostly dead.  With a plopping sound the head reattached and regenerated saving the child.  We left the hero’s as they began to take inventory of their losses and loot.

Continue reading »]]> After a lot of consideration I picked up a Nook Color this weekend.  I had it rooted roughly 30 minutes after actually using it for the first time, and 20 of that was to check out the stock OS on the device.

A stock Nook Color is funcitonal if you want it to read books and browse the web (except for Flash).  It’s oddly disjointed in usage.  For example Pinch Zoom, the much beloved functionality doesn’t work for Books or the Browser but it does work for pictures.  WTH?  It’s like the Book, Browser, Pictures, Magazines app writers weren’t quite on board with what should be available or what the other guys were doing.   As another example, to read a book in ereader format you touch the sides of the screen to page forward and back.  With a .pdf you drag upwards and downwards.  WTH? again.

For the money a stock Nook Color is worthwhile, if you have the money without impacting important things in life.  It serves okay as a book reader (the e-ink of the Nook and Kindle are better for this in general, things like reading outside, battery life, eye strain).  The inclusion of very functional (except for Flash of course) web browsing, a magazine reader make it ‘just’ worth the price of admission.

It’s only when you Root or take control of the device and put a fully functional copy of Android on it that it really really starts to shine.

Using AutoNooter to root the device is painfully simple.  Your risk of ‘bricking’ the device is very low and you can restore it to default stock by the simple process of powering it off during the boot process 8 times in a row, this makes the nook think it’s broken and it’ll restore itself to factory fresh leaving no sign it was ever rooted.

There’s also a way to run Android Froyo off a SD memory card and thus you can go stock by simply taking the card out or go ‘pro’ by putting the card in.  This makes it almost impossible to break the Nook by rooting it.  You’d literally have to drop it on the floor and physically crack it wide open while putting in the SD card for this to go wrong.

So anyway, I got it rooted, this took roughly 60 seconds start to finish, I first tried Froyo on the SD card but it was a laggy, I was on a slow speed SD and I didn’t know about having to power of the screen after a reboot to make it not laggy.  I’ve got a quality Class 10 SD ordered and will revisit that process then.

After rooting using AutoNooter which puts on the Google apps including the oh so important Marketplace I went and installed a better browser Dolphin HD, Angry Birds (why I’m not sure myself), pdf readers, .lit readers, cbr readers, .epub readers, .rtf readers,  I have 1000′s of books in various formats and the Nook directly only reads a few of those.  Now I can read all the Walking Dead comics I have in .cbr format without having to manually convert them to pdf’s.

I added ‘cool’ launchers with themes and graphic skins, widgets to forecast the weather for me, winamp to play my music, video players, video streaming players, file server access apps, gmail, google chat, exchange mail, the list goes on.  All freely available, legally, through the Android Marketplace.

I’ve got it stuffed with game manuals and books so I can refer to them anywhere without having physical copies handy, apps and utilities to make my life easier and in general make it what I really wish my iphone was.  With a 7″ screen.  There are ‘atmospheric’ apps I could use for a little background noise or just use Winamp or Pandora or something else to have a little setting music going on.

Essentially using free, legal software I’ve turned this little e-reader into a fully functional tablet computer that makes it crazy attractive for the cost.

So I give it 5 thumbs up, assuming I had 5 arms, if you go the extra step and root it.  3 thumbs up stock standard.

Continue reading »]]> The work on the numbers continues.   I’ve actually started also collecting skills for a skill list and currently have it at 20 skills, a couple of which are catch all skills from another game system I wrote a few years back.

The idea is to allow a player to buy any number of Knowledge skills for a character which are, oddly enough, a way for a character to ‘know’ something.  Fairly standard really but then I also have a Practical skill that a player can use to give a character the ability to ‘do’ something.   These might be called Professional skills or Crafting skills in some systems.

Really almost ALL skills in any given system are either Knowledge or Practical skills.  Lockpicking?  Practical skill.  Arcana?  Knowledge skill.  The system I used these for previously pretty much had these two skills solely and the player simply added as many to cover what their character knew or was able to do.

But that leaves a lot open to interpretation and for some players leaves them going “uh uh, what?”  So with this new dabbling into a system there’s a ready made list of the basics, currently 18 skills not counting the two generics, right now that give a pretty good starting point.

Anyway that’s beside the point for this post.  Back to the math, what I’m finding is again is a potential issue with scaling.   To beat a 5 (not equal), the current base difficulty number, a person with 1d10 succeeds roughly 50% of the time.  2 dice and it jumps to 74%, 3 dice and it’s 87%, four dice and 93% and 5 dice a 97% success rate with a total variance of  47%.

To give you a comparison for the closest direct mechanic, Savage Worlds heroes with a range of d4 to d12 + wild d6 nets a 62%, 75%, 81%, 84%, 87%  chance of success to equal or beat a 4 for a total variance of 25% from the top to the bottom of the normal range.

So using a 5 dice pool is setting me a broader range in ability, almost double in fact between the low end schlub and the uber grandmaster.

I’m not sure yet if that’s a bad thing or a good thing.   Changing the size of the dice doesn’t have any effect, it’s the size of the pool that has the effect.  This is the same scaling math that really breaks the One Roll Engine but I’m not sure the breakage is as extreme here and I’m trying to come up with ways to alleviate some of the issue.

For the curious the screenshot is of the sim I’m using, it’s a work in progress, as I expand the things I need to test I code them in.  I have some concerns that I may be breaking the math by miscoding but I’m trying to check and double check that as I go along.  I’d hate for a programming screw up to point me down the wrong math path or have me waste time trying to resolve an issue that doesn’t really exist.

Continue reading »]]> What with work and a birthday party for the boys we again side tripped into another Castle Ravenloft adventure.  We only had time for one as I was busy triaging an issue in London but it was quite entertaining.

The adventure is The Howling Hag where some old lady is cooking up a nefarious ritual in the crypts beneath castle ravenloft.   Each adventurer starts separated in a corner of the possible 5×5 playing tile map.  They have to explore their way to each other and to the center of the map.  Due to the randomness of the tiles you’re never sure if you’re going to hit a dead end or a way out.   Each explored tile draws in at random 0 to 2 monsters or triggers the Hag to show up on the new tile explored.

The Hag has all kinds of gnarly teleport powers and as a result adventurer’s were popping all over the place.  Our cleric found a workable path to the center ritual room but was then teleported to another location in the crypts.

Unfortuantely that was the ONLY working path we came up with in the end.  We were poised to make a 3 hero rush on a possible path, our fourth hero was trapped in a dead end section when the Hag slowly but surely started teleporting us away.

I’d managed to use my Great Leap ability to launch myself past all the monsters and the hag to the edge of the last unexplored tile that would connect to the ritual room that we had access to and when the tile was revealed it caused a dead end.  It really did come down to not only the last tile but the direction it was revealed from.  If we of explored from the other possible avenue we’d of had a straight shot to the ritual room and a chance of defeating the hag.

With four heroes alive but all down to 1 or 2 health, and only one working path that we couldn’t get to it started to look bleak.  Then the hag started loading up the dead end passage sending the Cleric and Wizard to join the Ranger while I, the Rogue was left to try and defeat 5 monsters and survive long enough that the Hag might randomly teleport me into the working path.

Alas it was not to be, our 1 in perhaps a 1000 chance was soundly defeated as I lay dying on the floor, out of any means of rescue or healing thus sealing our fate.  The other three escaped through a side door to spread word of my demise as the Hag completed her foul ritual causing all the women in the land to grow beards.  I’m glad I didn’t survive to see that day, better to be dead.

This was a really fun adventure for us all things considered.  The exploration to get together and the having to play solo and sometimes getting no monsters and sometimes up to 2 monsters per tile made for a fairly exciting game.   As each tile as flipped there was a sense of anticipation “Would it dead end?  Would we have a path?  Would we be able to group up and grow stronger?”.

Some people might find it annoying that pure luck can cause an otherwise well played and successful session to fail in that it’s possible to not have a clear path to the ritual room where you win.   But I quite enjoyed it myself.

So far there hasn’t been a ‘bad’ adventure in the book, I think we’re up to 8 or 9 but still The Howling Hag and and the Klak – Kobold Sorcerer adventure are by far my personal favorites.

The next map is The Gauntlet where the group has to face down waves of monsters to get to some goal.  Should be interesting.   This will also be the adventure where we bring in new Hero options from the community, a Warlock, Barbarian, Druid, Assassin, Avenger will be joining the mix at the very least.  It’ll be interesting to see if the community has come up with better or worse heroes in the areas of playability, power and interesting to play.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been thinking about dice mechanics and what I like and dislike about them.  By dice mechanics I don’t mean the guys in little overalls who fix your craps dice but rather the ways various roleplaying games introduce randomness into their systems.

The number of systems that I know about and this doesn’t include all of them by any means, is pretty large and run the gamut.  You have the ORE system where one dice role (One Roll Engine) determines everything about whatever it is you just tried from success to damage to location etc.  The problem I have with the ORE system is it’s mathmatcically sketchy, the odds of success go down way fast as the number of successes go up.  But I digress.

You have a system like Warhammer FRPG where you have a flat percentage chance using percentage dice which also determines your hit location.   A system like Dungeons and Dragons where you have a flat percentage chance at a success but a myriad ways of determining the level of that success.  There are systems with bell curves like Hero Systems where you roll 3 dice and take the total.  You have exploding dice and wild dice in Savage Worlds which means a dice can roll a number bigger than it’s max value and you pick between two different rolls as to which one you want.  Systems where you have a single die type and systems where you have 6 or more die types.  Systems where you roll one die and systems where you roll double handfuls.

It’s a lot.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out what I personally prefer and if it’s feasible.  I’d like a bell curve where the average value just falls on the success side of the success/fail line and the average ‘hero”s chances for typical tasks falls in the 75% success range.  I want it possible to have really cool rolls ala Exploding or Acing die where a player might normally get a 10 as average but every once in awhile gets a 20 or 30 or 40.   And I want a system that randomly supports Cool like the Dragon Die from Dragon Age: Origins.  In case you’re not familiar with DA:O the dragon die is a different colored die in the pool that a character rolls and the result on that die grants them points they can spend to add Cool to their results like extra damage or knocking someone down or whatever.

A problem is, the more die you have in the pool, the greater the chance of exploding die that really crank up the totals.  You want explosions to not be the ‘default’ or at least I don’t, I want them to be memorable or exciting when they happen, not a disapointment when they don’t since the don’t is the expected result.

But to have something like a Dragon Die you need multiple dice, or do you?  That’s a topic for further discussion but in general since I’m looking for a bell curve system, multiple dice are available anyway.

Then there’s the level of success.  The majority systems have an inital roll that is  binary or at best trinary levels of success.  Your initial roll determines that you either succeeded or you failed.  YOu have to then make another roll to determine the level of your success.  Some extend this so that you either failed, or succeeded or succeeded really really well with no other gradations.  The old Miss, Hit, Critical Hit trinumerate with a variant that a critical hit just gives you a chance at a greater level of success.

The biggest thing holding back a real scaling die roll in terms of results is that all systems except the most simplistic ones always differentiate the range on a per character basis.  One character might have a possible range of success of 1-6 while another might be 1-12 and this can change on a per attempt basis.  That makes it impossible for practical purposes to have the initial roll determine the success level as it would involve some crazy math on each and every roll.

A CRPG though could handle this very well.  Say a roll of 10 is a minimal success and a roll of 20 is a maximum success.  The computer can very easily compute the percentages of the ranges without any problems.  But a human figuring out what 8% of 12 is on the fly is not nearly as easy.

Obviously dice mechanics are a big thing and a major way that systems differentiate themselves, well the dice mechanic and the combat engine that falls out of it as a result, and there are many many ways of doing them.

Is there a best one?  No, not in my opinion, there are some that are a best fit for the rest of the chosen mechanics but I think if there was a best one, we’d of seen it by now.  This many designers spending this many decades at it, if there was a Theory of Relativity level dice mechanic it should have popped up by now.

Or perhaps we just haven’t had our Einstein yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy gaming!

Continue reading »]]> I wanted to make a comparison about MMOG’s and Pen and Paper gaming and the conclusions that I draw from that.

Back in the day, I played Ultima Online.  If you’re not familiar with it, it was one of the first MMOG’s in the U.S. and is still around today.  UO was very much a sandbox, there were no classes, no levels, no game directed direction to your play.  And in the first year or two of the game there wasn’t a whole lot of content.  Back then content was pretty easy to categorize.  It was random spawn that you go and kill.  No quests, no story lines, no ‘phat lewt’.   But back then programmers and servers alike weren’t all that good and the amount of spawn that was available was way under what was needed to keep players entertained because the apps and hardware couldn’t support it.   We even coined a phrase “Connecticut Online” because the countryside was completely empty of things that might prove dangerous to you.

The combats were pretty simple too, you either hit something with a hard object, shot something with a ranged weapon or hit them with the same spell over and over again *Corp por corp por corp por*.

As a result of being a combat light game, light in that there weren’t a lot of options to choose from and pretty static and infrequent things to use those few options on, players become role players.  Sitting around taverns and talking, hanging out in their crafting shops selling things to their customers, and having pretend wars with groups of ‘orcs’ or ‘elves’ and generally playing a persona rather than playing the game.

Then came EQ which had levels and lots of things to kill.  And introduced to the masses the concepts of tanking, crowd control, healing, buffers and debuffers, getting behind someone for the back stab.  Combat went from going into combat mode and trying to stay next to your target so you could ‘swing’ the sword when your timer ran out in UO to having a toolbar filled with icons of various things you could do and combinations and interactions with other players in EQ.

And roleplaying disappeared completely.  Combat was interesting and going after that next carrot on the treadmill became the most important thing.   Killing 10 of this for a NPC who had one line when you clicked it “Bring me 10 of this” was the extent of game play.  And it was good, or at least enough for 99% of the gamers.

Which brings me to an observation and the basis for this post.  Many people decry 4th Edition as the death of roleplaying because the books don’t have any rules for it, that the books are all about combat.  And in that I think they’re right but for the wrong reasons that they claim and not that it kills roleplaying but that it impacts it.  In an aside, “Seriously people?  You need rules to roleplay?”

I believe a direct correlation can be made, at least by me, as to why this might indeed be the case taking the MMOG’s impact on gaming and applying it to our tables.

It’s because combat in 4th Edition or Hero Systems or Mutants & Masterminds  is interesting, much like combat in EQ was.  It’s entertaining and really isn’t that why we’re playing these games?  To be entertained?

In these types of systems players have a huge ‘toolbar’ filled with various things they can try during combat, powers that let them buff and de-buff, crowd control, heal and hurt, single target and masses of targets.    The sheer number of cool things that a character can do is enough to make one giddy.  The GM has way cool monsters and bad guys to run and pit against the players.   Very little is cookie cutter which his bad guys, he has access to sugar cookies, oreos, gingersnaps, all kinds of tasty variety for the players to consume and enjoy.

Then there are systems like Savage Worlds or Fudge or Spirit of the Century or to kick it old school Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  These are combat mechanic light much like UO was.  Your toolbar of tricks is very limited, you either turn on auto combat and try and stay near your target so you can ‘swing’ your sword at them when the timer (your turn) goes off or you shoot them with your ranged weapon or you cast the same basic spell over and over again to kill the target.   The GM has the same issue, all his bad guys do tend to be cookie cutter with minor mechanical differences, all sugar cookies but some with white sprinkles instead of blue ones instead of powdered sugar.

As a result the amount of roleplay in my experience both online in a MMOG or offline at the table with your friends can be affected in direct inverse ratio to how interesting and involved the combat system is with the added bonus/penalty of how many new toys (carrots) you gain along the way.   Players act differently when there is a new toy to pick up, a new power to be gained, all just dangling out of their reach waiting for the next block of experience than there is when the prize is simply the doing.   Some game systems promote the journey’s end, while others promote the journey itself.

And I’m not saying you can’t roleplay with any system or that you can’t have fun and entertaining combats in any system.  Obviously you can.  We’ve had periods where roleplaying that lasted for a couple of hours straight without any combat in 4th Edition and had vastly entertaining fights in Savage Worlds.

What I am trying to say is that the system you choose to play can have a direct impact on the results at your table and these impacts can be obvious and sometimes subtle.

So what’s the end game of all this?  Not much to be honest other than perhaps if you want a game that’s heavier in roleplay then perhaps choosing a lighter system might promote that while a group that might be more interested in combat might choose a heavier system.

Continue reading »]]> In running Savage Worlds which is a very stats light game in comparison to GMing 4th Edition Dungeons or Dragons (or worse 3rd Edition DnD or Hero System/Champions) it’s become interesting to see the differences as they play out.

Savage Worlds lets you as the GM come up with on the fly encounters that are as interesting as any pre-planned encounter simply because it is so stats light.   This isn’t necessarily a rousing endorsement as the variety of attacks, barring magic, psi or super powered settings is pretty limited.  With the ability to shoot, hit or throw something at someone it’s not hard to make a creature on the fly.   This is definitely a pro and a con both.  It’s a pro because it makes it extremely easy for a DM to sandbox a session and to accommodate the players when they bypass his carefully crafted plotlines.   It’s a con in that the bad guys can tend to blur together mechanically.  This puts more creative pressure on the GM to make the bad guys distinct based on something other than their game mechanics.  Which is a pro and con both depending on your players needs and your own creative abilities.

With systems like 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons or Hero Systems, on the fly encounters requires more pre-prepping, you have to have already created some generic stand-ins to haul out when the players go off the track as in both cases making reasonable balanced creatures on the fly is a hit or miss procedure and requires a fairly deep familiarity with the systems.

In Savage Worlds even after only a couple of sessions it’s pretty easy to just go with ad hoc encounters.

Another thing I’m finding is that much like the original Dungeons and Dragons maps aren’t necessary for a lot of encounters and when they are, they’re much alike, simple line drawings on an erasable map that take seconds to knock out.  4th Edition battles, because of the strength of impact of movement powers/effects and the like really need ‘good’ maps to take full advantage of the system.   Places of difficult terrain, obstacles, pits, shadows, braziers full of flaming oil, patches of ice etc. that the players and NPC’s can use to make use of their abilities.   I have a huge roll of maps that I pre-drew out every Saturday morning for the upcoming battles during my 4th Edition campaign.   Which typically meant the players would encounter those battles and led to a more focused non-sandbox campaign.

Encounters being necessary to play out is another factor.  With 4th Edition the system by RAW requires a lot of battles that are really pretty pointless because they’re designed as resource drains.  To burn off the player’s daily allotment of resources.  It’s a practical guarantee that the players are going to win and the chances of someone dying in the first few battles is pretty nil given a typical setup.   I deviated from this with mine in that I just didn’t have the pointless battles, each battle was typically rated as Hard and required the players to burn a lot of resources to win it.   And then there would typically be enough downtime to recover.  Occasionally I would have the chained battle sequence where the intent was to wear them down but for the most part it was boss battles.

With Savage Worlds when you though add in the wild card factor of any attack by any creature has the chance to kill any other creature with one attack it means that every creature is a force that can’t be ignored and even what would be a pointless battle in 4th Edition becomes something that could have major impact.

As an example in our last Zombie Run session, three of the party escorted a engineer into a nuclear reactor so he could fix a problem.  They ran in to four undead.  In 4th Edition this would be a hand wave at best, there’s just no way 4 minions could possibly cause a problem for even a single dnd character assuming the minions were of appropriate level.   To make the disparity worse in this instance in the first round three of the undead were killed leaving a single undead for the three of them to fight.   And yet this single undead almost killed one of the players and perhaps has due to possible infection.

In our last session which lasted our typical 5 hours roughly, the group had an encounter with Zombear (boss battle), a band of raiders (boss plus horde), an ambush by snipers, another band of raiders (horde) and a group of undead that were played out tactically.  That’s 5 tactical encounters in 5 hours something we never managed with 4th edition and the actual tactical dice rolling portions of the session took perhaps 2 hours of the session total.

In many systems like 4th Edition or Champions or whatever, such encounters would have been unnecessary to tactically play out simply because they wouldn’t, couldn’t  have any impact barring astronomically screwed die rolling.  The player characters would simply have been in no danger from any of it and personally I’d of hand waved it with dialogue, “About 10 minutes outside the base you take fire from ambush positions on the road and…” made up something about what might have happened.  Rather than playing it out as we did.

There’s also a subtle issue with 4th Edition in that since the participants in combat are so diverse that combat becomes a joy in and of itself and with the players and GM’s knowing or unknown influence the combat can overshadow the story simply because there are so many cool things everyone can do in combat.

With Champions, like many of universal systems (GURPs, Mutants and Masterminds) the games can end up where building unique and cool characters and then having them fight other unique and cool characters can end up being the primary source of entertainment simply because it is fun and entertaining to take a pile of build points and see what you can come up, taking a character concept, “I ran over Death in my truck and now I have to take his place.” and then building powers around that.  In our heyday we played a lot of champions and a lot of it was character building and set piece fighting with just enough storyline to let us make more cool characters to use.   This isn’t a bad thing, just another area where the game mechanics influence the game play in a significant fashion.

Anyway as I continue to bounce between the game systems it’s interesting to see the effects the mechanics has on the game play.   If you could somehow manage it, it would be extremely intriguing to me to see how the same group would play through the same storyline but with different systems. But that would require me to break out my time machine and after the last time I’m not doing that again barring dire emergency.

Continue reading »]]> Savage Worlds is an old system, perhaps not as old as most but it’s been around for 7 years now and gone through a modest number of editions and no groundbreaking changes.  The core rules appear to have remained mostly intact throughout its current lifespan.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going over the rules and running ‘test drive’ encounters where I run both sides of the combat and add in additional rules as I uncover them.   I plan on doing something with the system in the next month or so, something that starts off as Pulp Noir and descends into Supernatural Horror set in the roaring 20′s where there was no gun control, crime and corruption were rampant and the mafia was just hitting it’s stride along with union bosses.

The version I’m working off of is the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition, Third Printing available for $9.95 from Amazon or some ridiculously low price like that.  I picked up a deck of cards and some Cthulhu tokens by Fantasy Flight Games for their Arkham Horror game to use as Bennies at the same time so I could get free shipping.  And as I have Arkham Horror I can use them for their intended things like Doom tracking for that game.   The book is the size of a large format paperback, not sure what the technical term is but about halfway between paperback and manuscript and is in full color and quite well done. A terrific value for the price and I’d recommend picking up a couple if you actually plan on running Savage Worlds.

I would like to reiterate, I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it, that I do NOT like cutesy page backgrounds in game manuals.  Ripped edges, stains, textured vellum, whatever the design, I just want plain black text on plain white paper.  If you absolutely must have nifty graphics then keep it on the periphery and not under the text.

After going through the rules and reading them in a casual kind of way, at this point I’d like to say that it could use some editing and proofing by people unfamiliar with the system.  I spotted a typo or two without going into copy edit mode which is more than acceptable for a blogger but in a printed product it comes off as a little sloppy.  But then any update is bound to include its own typos even when all the existing ones are fixed and I’m fully aware of that, I mention them here only in passing and wouldn’t downgrade them for it.

As far as the understandability of the rules as currently written, I’ve had to resort to searching the forums to get clarifications and all modesty aside, I have a fairly decent general knowledge skill on gaming systems.  Certain things simply aren’t clear in the wording of the edition I have or appear to be something that’s so basic to the system that the writer(s) didn’t even think it might not be known.

With that said I must say their forum and moderators are insanely good.  Every point of minutiae that I didn’t pick up from the core book I was able to find easily and quickly through their forum search.   Which leads me back to my comment about the book not being clear.  Every question I had, had already been asked time and time again on the forums.   Taking all those frequently asked questions and adding in the extremely clear and concise explanations by the moderator Clint would resolve every complaint I have about the rules as written.

I don’t want to give a bad impression of the system or the printing I have, for the most part it’s clear enough, there are just a few places where a simple example or an expanded example or another sentence or two would alleviate the few confusions or omissions.

The system itself purports to be Fast, Furious and Fun which is their slogan.  As a newcomer to the system I can see where this could be quite true.   Combats are both completely open and fairly simplistic.   The rules are few, elegant for the most part and at the same time keep a skies the limit option open.

Combat comes down to the Player deciding what their character is going to do and then breaking that down into separate actions with the caveat that each additional action over the first one adds a penalty to ALL the actions taken and that a character can only perform one action per ‘type’ per round with the exception that they can make two attacks if they have two weapons which includes bare knuckles.

For example: Biff Strange could on his turn say “I’m going to throw this chair at the thug fighting Nancy to give her a better chance to hit him as he ducks it, punch this guy in the throat,  reload my .45, double tap the third thug and scream insults at that guy to try and taunt him to come after me instead of ganging up on Nancy with the first guy while I run around the room like a Loon.”

This breaks down in game mechanics as an Agility Trick, Reload, Fighting, Shooting, Taunt, and a Run action.  That’s six actions though and that adds up to a -12 on EACH of them to succeed and an additional -2 on the off hand assuming the character doesn’t have some edges that allow them to attack with both hands without penalties.  With the exception of the Run, that action doesn’t require a roll, barring some unusual circumstance.

It’s open ended in that it encourages players to have their characters do things outside the box through the inclusion of Tricks and Will Tests, Ganging Up on someone, making a Wild Attack or taking Aim while giving them realistic gamist limits to prevent them from getting goofy like the above sequence of events would be.  Sure a player could try that but they’re going to fail 95% of the time to perform any of them much less all of them.

This also though limits the player, especially those coming from say 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons with all the specific powers those characters have.  Those powers in 4th are a bit of a straight jacket in their own right of course.   In Savage Worlds a player in combat, which is the biggest part of any mechanics because honestly mechanics to define roleplaying should be simple and behind the scenes for the most part, anyway in combat in a Savage World, a character can essentially Shoot someone, Fight (melee) them or Blast (spells/psychic/supernatural etc) them.   The system doesn’t have a lot of conditions, in fact it has only a couple, a character can be Normal, Shaken, Incapacitated.

Normal is obviously that, they can act normally.  Shaken means they can only walk slowly no other real actions allowed.  Incapacitated means just that, they’re unconscious.   There is no Dazed, Immobilized, Stunned, Restrained, Bloodied, Blind, Deaf, Ongoing Damage, etc and so on.

Wounded I suppose might be another condition but it only has one effect, the more wounds you have (up to a max of 3) the more penalties you take on all your rolls and movement.   Again a simple, elegant system.

Combat and especially the wounding/incapacitation rules overall, while a bit slippery to get your head around at the first read through is pretty Fast.  The Furious and the Fun part are too GM/Player dependent to say it’s always going to be that way but Fast definitely fits the bill.

Much like old school 1st and 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons was Fast.

oDnD: “I roll to hit with my sword.  I hit?  I roll damage.”

SW: “I roll to shoot with my gun. I hit?  I roll damage.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, nor is it necessarily a good thing at all, it just is what it is.

After playing some trial combats I can see though where the combats can lend themselves to more narrative/story style easier than something like 4th Edition.  But the proof of that will indeed be in the pudding and obviously is fairly group dependent.  But I believe that it might lead those that tend to go, “I use Righteous Brand on him.” to be a little more descriptive in their actions because by their very nature the actions in SW are very generic.

The magic system which can be used for everything from fireball casting wizards to mind blasting psychics to ego blasting super heroes is much like everything else with the system, simple and broad in scope.   It uses Power Points that the player spends to use each power with subsequent effects.  The basic core rules in the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition are fairly… well basic.  They include things like the Armour and Blast and Telekinesis and is a pretty similar list to other universal systems.

Savage Worlds has an Extra’s and Wild Cards system, much like 4th Edition has Minions and Elites to make it as close an approximation.  Extra’s/Minions go down once they take damage regardless of the amount.  Whether you call them Extra’s, Minions, Mooks or Redshirts, they’re there for cinematic effect to make the players feel powerful as they mow down the thugs to get to the boss.

But where there’s a difference is that in Savage Worlds, dice can ‘ace’ or ‘explode’.  If you roll the highest number on a die, you get to keep that number and roll again and add it to the first.  You can in theory continue to do this for infinity but odds are you won’t do it more than a once or twice most times, odds being what they are.   This means that unlike 4th Edition, in Savage Worlds its quite possible for an Extra to take down a healthy Wild card (Minion kill a PC) in one attack.    Which is inherently impossible in 4th edition.  Now it has a low percentage chance to happen.  But the risk is there and something to be considered.

As an offset to making bad dice rolls or one shotted by an Extra players and GM’s both have Bennies that they can use to reroll or buy a roll to avoid that one shot.  Similar to Luck points,  Fate chips, Destiny perks and the like they allow the player and GM to dial the difficulty of an encounter one way or another.  If the GM has misjudged the relative toughness of an encounter he can spend Bennies to save his bad guys or give them a Mulligan on that big attack roll.  If he’s kicking the group’s ass then he can hand out some extra Bennies for good roleplay, playing in character, making a joke or whatever and ease the players troubles.

Savage Worlds has a ton of campaign settings although I’ve not looked at them all that much.  I’d have to be really interested before I bought one.  But you can get all kinds of things that a lot of people really seem to like a lot.   Zombies, Apocalyptic, Supers, Victorian Age, World Wars, Westerns,  Steam Punk, InterDimensional, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Modern Day, all kinds of source books are out there and because they all use the same core rules you can mix and match them as you want for the most part.

Savage worlds uses a unique, at least to my knowledge, system for dice.  Typically a game system seems to use one basic die for skill checks or combat tasks  with the variable dice pool being used to denote different degrees of damage probability.   A Savage Worlds character might have a d4 in Strength and a d10 for Smarts and a d8 for Fighting.  And those are the dice you roll to see if you succeed or fail at something.

In a way I don’t like this system as it’s a slow way to roll and determine things.  Player/GM has to check what die they need to roll, pick it out of the pile, roll it and read it, determine if they succeed or not and then roll any axillary dice as needed.   One of the simple things that really helped out with 4th Edition for us in terms of combat speed was the player only needs one die, a d20.  They do average damage on regular hits and max damage on critical hits.  No digging out and rolling 3d8 or 2d12+1d6+2d8  for damage.   It seems like a little thing but it really adds up over the length of a combat.   Especially for the GM who might be rolling 5, 10, 20 attacks and for each successful attack another 2 to 4 dice rolls to roll, count up and add bonuses to on their turn depending on how many bad guys there are.

But everyone who plays it and proselytizes says it’s Fast Furious Fun so we’ll see. Once I present it to a group of players and have them doing things with it I’ll report back.  Actually you’ll be able to listen to it first hand as I’ll most likely be podcasting it just like the 4th Edition sessions.

Like other universal systems Savage Worlds can handle any genre but unlike most it does it with simplicity and sleekness of rules rather than needing a Hero Builder or coming up with an archaic formula in a spreadsheet cell to compute things.  It’s simple enough and cheap enough and in my opinion elegant enough that any GM should at least give it a look.  If you don’t want to spend the $10 on the printed copy you can pick up the Test Drive rules, a subset that allows for decent experience of the system for free.  Hard to argue with that kind of pricing.

I will offer though that you really do need to read the system before you scoff and toss it aside.  I know at first glance, and second for that matter, I didn’t give it a real chance to catch my attention, the wacky dice set up, the simplicity of it, the overall broad scope didn’t catch my interest.  Indeed it is only with my 4E campaign going on hiatus for the summer that I picked it up again to give it a serious read through as I was looking for a new system that I’ve not used before.

Time will tell if it’s right for me and my group and I’ll post an update once we get to the dice rolling.

Until next time, as they’re so fond of saying, Stay Savage….

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> I whipped this up after running a couple of trial chase scenes using the Savage Worlds rule system.  Essentially in a chase you put the ‘chasee’ at one end of the chart and the ‘chasers’ scattered as needed behind them.  Each turn everyone makes a skill check, if they succeed they can move closer or farther away.  If someone gets more than 10 range increments away from the target they fall out of the chase.

Now you could of course just use a piece of paper or draw it on your battle mat but since I have Hirst Arts molds and the adventures I’m going to be doing are set in the 20′s and primarily urban, making a section of street and sidewalks seemed a lot cooler than a simple piece of paper or some dry erase marker on a battlemat.  Or at least I think so.

As a result, after a couple of hours work gluing and painting I have my own custom chase chart. (Molding time not counted here.)  The paint job is rough of course, this is an ‘actual play’ piece and not a display piece and spending hours of work detailing it would be wasted for the most part as it’s handled and scuffed and all that.  This way I won’t mind if the paint gets chipped or damaged.  Well I won’t mind as much.

Continue reading »]]> As my 4th edition DnD campaign is drawing to a season finale for the summer I’ve been looking around at other systems.  One that I’ve had a vague interest in trying is Savage Worlds.  This system, if by some odd chance you’re not familiar with it,  is a sandbox system, much like Champions/Hero System, GURPS and Mutants and Masterminds (to some extent) to name a few.

These systems are set up to handle a lot of genre although superheroes is the prevalent one along with most eras with various degrees of success and typically include an assload of additional settings books that add specifics that are related to an genre/era to round them out that in general cover a pretty wide gamut.  Cyberpunk, Fantasy, Wild West, Swashbucklers and Post Apocalyptic etc. are typically published over the years after the initial release of the base system.

One thing and off topic, after dealing with the simplicity that is DnD 4th Edition from a Player and GM point of view (especially since the only dice we use is a d20), other systems feel anitquated. I forsee new gaming systems taking some of the 4th features and expanding them into other genres including a sandbox mode.

Anyway, so I’ve been looking at Savage Worlds, it’s one of the few I’ve not looked at very heavily or used which has a draw in and of itself for that reason.  It’s not as complicated as the other sandboxes, at first glance, which is a plus as I’m too old for complicated for the sake of being simulationist.  As part of my ‘looking’ I looked around for gameplay podcasts using Savage Worlds and found one over at rpgmp3.com on their rss feed called Savage Worlds – Rippers.  The Rippers part references the setting the group is using which is Victorian England from the sound of it circa late 1800′s with a bit of supernatural and of course featuring the most infamous Jack.  Other than Burton of course.

As they’re going through their character design (see I do get to the point eventually) it strikes me how much a sandbox system can force players to make characters where-as a class based system allows players to make characters.  And by make a character I mean give it a personality rather than a list of powers and numbers.

So I toss my mind back over the decades of GM’ing I’ve done and it’s easy to see this repeated.  Game systems that hand a player a character ‘off the shelf’ as in “here, you’re a fighter, you get to do this” make it…. easy(?) for the player to simply accept that and for the… lazy? detached? gamist? player, that’s enough.   Off the shelf characters focus on the What, and the Who is at the players discretion without any natural pressure to define that. And in may cases the What is all that’s of any concern.

Let me interject here that I’m not saying one or the other is bad or better or right or wrong, I’m merely pointing out observed human behavior and some thoughts on underlying causality.

Game systems where the player has to literally build their character from a essentially unlimited collection of parts seems to force them to have a character rather than a collection of numbers.   The Who is forced to be considered even as the What is created.  “Well Miss Angela is a doctor so she should have this medicine knowledge thing and be smart.  And she studied fencing in college so I guess she should have some skill in fighting.”

As opposed to, “I guess I’ll play the cleric.”

To make a construction analogy, when someone builds a house, they’re involved with it from the ground up, they make changes to the floorplan, add arches and decorative bits to the strcuture, put in that big bay window where they can sit and read while enjoying the sun and the view.

When they buy a house, they may put on a new coat of paint or they may not.

Both people could and in many cases eventually do end up with the same ‘house’.  But it’s more likely that the person who bought the house is going to settle for things the way they are when they bought it.

To bring this analogy back to the ‘real world’, as a GM you can help with their paint choices.  There are “10 minute questionnaires” out there that you can pass on to your players, regardless of game system with questions like “How has your character earned a living up to this point?”  “Are there any people, groups or societies that the character is a part of or involved with now or in the past?”  “Where did you grow up?”.   These kinds of things can help the player get a handle on the character before they get to the numbers whether their choice is as simple as which class to play or as diverse as does their weapon have the armour piercing advantage and deal extra knockback…

So as you bring out your class based games and get your players going with new alternate lives, remember to encourage them with word, question and setting to make those characters theirs and not fighter_0001 or blaster_003.  Your game play will be the better for it.

Image Credits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading »]]> I upgraded to WordPress 2.9.2 this morning or tried to, so if you see any issues with things not working please drop me a note.

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.

Continue reading »]]> Just a quick note to say I’m voting with my wallet on this one and refusing to buy Bioshock 2.  Three different DRM systems are installed to get this thing to work properly.  I’m appalled. Until I get the stupidity to set up a game machine that’s JUST a game machine that I can reghost after every game to start over clean I’m not installing something that loads down my WORKING machine with this much crap.

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>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Continue reading »]]> I’ll be upfront and honest, I’m a harsh Gm. Not vindictive or competitive but I do tend to draw out the most from the players.  I’ve very rarely ever killed a character though and the ones I did kill deserved it.  After 30 years of doing this I can still not run out of fingers counting characters I’ve killed permenently.

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’. Â  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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Continue reading »]]> I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and thought I’d ramble on about players from the DM’s point of view, mostly in a bad way of course…

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.

Continue reading »]]> I have four dice towers for sale. One is not up to my standards it ended up with a bit of lean. It’s one of nondark ones. That one is $20. The other three are $30.  That will include shipping as I want to try a new design and I want to move these out the door.  You can assume anywhere from $5 to $10 of that price is going to shipping.

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.

Continue reading »]]> I’m going to be making some dice towers in the next week or so and will probably have a couple of spares.  If there’s interest I could make these available for purchase.

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. Â  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.

Continue reading »]]> Made this over the weekend.  It’s a dice tower (I know, duh right?).  I prefer this style I think over the other one I made as you can watch the dice tumble down it.  And they really do tumble like no body’s business, hitting at least one peg per layer and really spinning like mad.

[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. Â  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. 

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

Next I cut out a ramp using a thicker piece of wood again using the circular saw to cut one of the 45′s and a jig saw the other 45 degree angle.  Circular saw only has one 45 angle.  The jig saw as you might imagine was a little wiggly but a quick hit with a random orbital sander fixed it right up.  I then glued these pieces together and waited.  Ending up with this.  Note the unclamped piece is there just to help insure straightness.

Sadly the next day after unclamping it I managed to knock it to the ground and one of the sides came free.  Gluing it back up I was in a bit of a hurry and as a result it’s a tiny degree non-straight.  This had the end result that my plexiglass pieces don’t fit flush.  I could sand those down but decided not to.

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.

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 -

And the dice look so pretty falling through it.

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.

Continue reading »]]> This might seem like a pretty minor thing or have you going, “Uh duh?” but believe it or not after thinking up all kinds of magnetic flags, chips, and other indicators it hit me, “Dumbass why don’t you just put a number on each miniature and avoid more clutter on the gaming field?”

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.

Continue reading »]]> I’m looking for a couple of players to start a mini-campaign that would last perhaps 3-4 months of weekly sessions. Women and older (30+) players given preference, not for any perverse reasons on the woman part, my wife is one of my players and I’m in love with her but because in general I’ve found women and older players to be less likely to be square pegs and less competitive and a lot less inclined to say something like “This is boring when do I get roll dice.”  They’re also less likely to come up with Dick Tuna* jokes where my kids can hear it.

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.

Continue reading »]]> I went to Home Depot at lunch (really prefer Lowes but there’s no Lowes near me at work) and scoped out the plumbing department and found some pretty nice things.

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’. Â  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.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> I blatantly stole the name from PVPOnline’s July 30th cartoon but I was noodling with something a little more phat lewt’ish in terms of dice towers.  Rather than a series of ramps it has pachinko influenced rods that bounce the dice around inside.  A square one would be doable of course but the round tower is kind of cool don’t you think?

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. 

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

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

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

Continue reading »]]> I’d like to post some hands on reviews of some items, Magna Map by Dark Platypus and Magnetic Markers by Alea Tools.

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. Â  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. Â  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. Â  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.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> Mass Combat Rules

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example:

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

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

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

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

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

The orcs make an counter attack:

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

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

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

Round two –

Guard – A:5 D:5
Orcs – A:3 D:-3

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

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

The guards counterattack –

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

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

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

Guard – A:3 D:3
Orcs – A:-1 D:-6

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

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

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

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

Bears consideration I suppose.

Image Credits

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

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

You can grab it here – [Download not found]

Image Credits

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

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

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

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

Continue reading »]]> I believe that any PnP game session has an inherent and implied social contract between those people present.  Without exception, or none that I know of, all PnP games require a “DM” and at least one “Player”. Â  They’re two sides of the same coin and without both sides you have a big fat nothing in the middle.  Both sides should be working together to create an experience that people can remember when they’re old.  I’ve been very lucky in that I have had good players and good GM’s (I’m pretty much the only one that ever DM’d so they were GM’s for me.) for literally decades and as a result I have a lot of really great memories to recall and enjoy in the remembering.

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. Â  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. Â  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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading »]]> Well my two level table is finished.  It’s far from furniture quality or even up to my normal standards but like my wife reminded me when I was picking out good wood, “who are you trying to impress?” and I had to agree.  So this is a very rough construction for me.  No inner bracing, just glue and wood biscuits with a few screws screws to hold it all together while the glue dries. Â  After manhandling in and out of the house to do the fitting and finishing it’ll hold up to any normal or even abnormal play.

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.

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. Â  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.

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

Aura Compass –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the player side there are options -

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

On the DM side -

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

General -

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous -

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

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

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Continue reading »]]> Just some screen shots of the double decker gaming table topper (DDGTT?).  This is after painting although the top needs another coat or two but unfortunately I ran out of green paint.  I only had one can and that was a fluke that I’d bought for another project several months back. Â  Otherwise it would be solid white.  But since I’m going to be puting a big sheet of plexiglass on top of it I thought I’d use the green since it could be slimy dungeon floor or a grassy meadow or something else that’s green in color.

That’s one of my sons, one of the twins actually, in the background on his bike.  Ignore the mess, my garage is always in a state of semi organization.  I can usually find what I’m looking for so it’s not as haphazard as it looks.  The black car doors my son is in front of belong to my mustang, 1967 coupe, that I took off an embarrassingly long time ago to rework the innards of and haven’t put back on as of yet as I’m going to strip the interior to replace the dash and wiring etc. Some day.

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.

Continue reading »]]> Just a quick pic (poor quality due to using my blackberry as a camera) of the double deck addition to the gaming table. That’s my wife holding the light in place for the picture purposes as it all needs to be actually assembled and finished before I can screw that down.

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. Â  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. Â  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.

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

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

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

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

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

Later.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> And voila the dice tower she is finished.  This is a basic one made of 1/4 red oak primarily with a decorative ‘railing’ for the catch basin made out of (at a guess) birch or pine, a soft wood anyway that as usual took the stain not so great but I was out of prestain and didn’t feel like going and getting more.

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?

Continue reading »]]> Perhaps the ultimate in Pencil and Paper geekism is the Dice Tower.  This is stage two of mine.  Stage one was simply cutting and gluing three sides of the tower together.  Not really picture worthy.  Next was cutting out the ramps which you can see in these pictures.  No the work isn’t all that good (free hand jig saw and random orbit sander only tools used) and I’m sloppy with the gluing but I’m going to line the inside with thin cork so the glue won’t be visible.  And when dealing with 4 pieces that have to slide into a tight U shape and yet want to fall out while trying to clamp it, well let’s see you not get wood glue everywhere.  The outside I believe I’m going to use black walnut stain on to match the inlays on my gaming table.

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. Â  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.

]]> http://www.keyourcars.com/2009/06/05/dice-tower/feed/ 0 http://www.keyourcars.com/2009/06/04/2476/ http://www.keyourcars.com/2009/06/04/2476/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:56:48 +0000 Dennis http://www.keyourcars.com/?p=2476

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

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

Red = New Hires -

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

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

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

15 Bugbear Gang Leader
05 Bugbear Headreaver
03 Bugbear Strangler

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

07 Halfling Slingers
01 Halfing Sneak

10 Gnoll Marauders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Continue reading »]]> Okay after experimentation with some scrap and taking some measures and the like I’ve simplified the map topper for the table.  This is the second iteration.

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. Â  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.

Continue reading »]]> In the interests of not throwing out the work I did on my current gaming table I’m thinking of making an addition to it, see the image in this post.  It’ll be an insert that fits into the existing playing surface that adds a map deck about 10″ or so above and then is inset a bit in the bracing so that there is more room for the players to put their character sheets, power cards, etc.

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. Â  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.

Continue reading »]]> I found something in a campaign blog that I read that I thought bore mention.  Let met state in no uncertain terms I am not condemning the idea, the poster or the philosphy.  I try to do the golden rule, “You play your way, I’ll play mine and you’re welcome to join me if you can at least temporarily play mine.” in terms of ideas. So with that said this is simply my response, not a debate or a discussion really, just my kneejerk response.

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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.

Continue reading »]]> I’m a little surprised to find Enworld down because Gleemax is down. Months ago ,sure but the amount of of forum traffic these days is less than it was and I think everyone upgraded their hardware back then so it’s just a little surprising.

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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Continue reading »]]> I have the first of the Dice Tower prototypes set up.  In PT’ing it out of foam core I fixed a few things with my paper design.  Things like:  to account for the larger vegas craps sized d6′s I use I need to add an inch or so to the height to remove any chance of them getting stuck, the catch tray really doesn’t need to be as long as the tower is tall.  Even 10 big d6′s fit fine when I put a divider in halfway down.  The sides can be very short, the dice really don’t launch all that far. Â  I suppose if you were playing Exalted or high end Champions or any other game where you roll big handfuls of dice this might need a big tray.

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.

Continue reading »]]> Well I’m not sure how I’ve lived this long without ever seeing or hearing about Dice Towers but someone brought it to my attention so of course I’m having to build one. Â  It’s a rather pointless little thing but it’s a) a craft project which I enjoy and b) cool in a pointless chez geek way and that’s good enough for me.

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. Â  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.

Continue reading »]]> Now Alea Tools has some nice things, honestly if money is no object then I’d drop a $100 and pick up a their GM pack. But money is an object for me, a hard to come by one so while those are great, they’re not something I’m going to be picking up any time soon. But the idea of the bases is pretty cool. Just not at that price.

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

Continue reading »]]> In lieu of anything really cool this weekend I picked up a copy of Cuthroat Caverns which is a boardgame that sounded pretty interesting. Â  You can get the rules from the publisher’s website if you’re interested.

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. Â  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. Â  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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Continue reading »]]> I’ve written a bit of a client/server app to allow remote users to roll dice and their results will pop up on in big beautiful letters on a display on my side.  Fairly basic right now, you can type in the number of dice in one box, any bonuses in another box and then click the dice to roll. Â  I need to add-in some set it and forget it boxes though so the users can set buttons to specific die rolls like 1d10+1d6+2 in addition to the more generic ones.

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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Continue reading »]]> These are just some thoughts for me to further consider as additional house rules for my table, posted here so I have them in all the places I have access to a computer. Please don’t feel any need to read, comment, criticize or praise.   These are based on my own personal observations and experiences at the table with my current group of players and their characters.   These changes are designed to boost things where I feel they are lacking or to improve the flow of the game where I feel it has some sticking points or to make the party more likely to survive my typical encounter danger which is on the higher rather than lower side.

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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Continue reading »]]> I went through this morning and reboxed all my miniatures.  Humanoid tribes stuffed into one compartmented box, undead in another box, beasts in another etc.  Character PC’s I divided up by base type, fighter’ish, caster’ish, sneak’s, archers, misc. Â  Then each PC type was divided by sex.

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. Â  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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Continue reading »]]> I went looking and found one of the DDM maps for download, Two Towers I think it’s called, pretty basic map design I must say after years of making FPS maps , but anyway I printed it out and pasted it to some foam board I had laying around.

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. Â  The ranged characters have a range of 10. Â  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. Â  Other than that we use the standard terrain rules, walls, difficult terrain, victory points etc. Â  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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Continue reading »]]> Just came across a new, to me, virtual gaming table called Kloogewerks.  At first glance it looks fairly well suited for doing a 4th edition remote session.

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. Â  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.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> Well I’ve got nothing to offer you other than random musings and ramblings. Â  The forums have dried up on me, there’s very little activity on Enworld and very few posts worth reading on Gleemax (official forums) much less actually recording for posterity here.

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. Â  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. Â  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. Â  Of course a 220 would also be needed for a decent mig welder.  So it’s always one thing after another.

Continue reading »]]> Played a 5 players co-op game of Touch of Evil over the weekend.  It’s a fun game, pretty easy to pick up after a couple of rounds assuming a literate semi-intelligent ape reading the rules.

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.

Continue reading »]]> Over the weekend a friend of mine (Temple if you’ve read previous posts) came over with Battletech Classic.  This is the remake from WhizKids after FASA or whatever got sued by the original makers that Battletech was stolen from or whatever that was.

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

Continue reading »]]> These marker/token things look moderately useful although not my first choice of colors for certain conditions but the square shape does work better with the typical model base as it allows you to better see it I would think.

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.

Continue reading »]]> Not all that much terribly newsworthy or of import to me anyway (this site is all about me you realize ). But I did find this tidbit that I’m going to have mull over in greater detail later and which I post here for my enjoyment (and yours if you’re so inclined).

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