The problem: Multiclassing in D&D works fine for the martial characters and skill-based characters, the abilities of the various classes stack together well to make a stronger character. The rules are very punitive for primary spellcasters. None of the spellcasting classes build on each other and none of them stack well with the abilities of any other class. Various fixes have been attempted for this in the game (prestige classes like Mystic Theurge and Eldritch Knight etc., Practiced Spellcaster feat, variant class features, and so on), but they all seem kind of specific and kludgy to me. Why can’t I just make a fighter/sorcerer and have it be effective? These rules are intended to address that.

The rule: To take advantage of this rule, you must have at least one level in a primary spellcasting class (bard, cleric, druid, sorcerer, wizard). For every two class levels you possess that are not in that class, you advance your spells per day, effective caster level, and spells known as if you had advanced one level in the primary class. You do not gain any other benefits (like channel energy, wild shape, extra feats, class powers, etc). However, you may not take your total caster level higher than double what it would otherwise be.

You may use multiple caster classes to feed into each other (a Cleric5/Sorcerer4 would cast as a 7th level cleric and a 6th level sorcerer, but would only have channel energy and domain powers of a 5th level cleric, and bloodline arcana and bloodline powers of a 4th level sorcerer).

Any prestige class that adds caster levels to a primary spellcasting class (such as Arcane Archer or Dragon Disciple) only adds the caster levels specifically listed, you can’t count it (for the class it adds to) for the purposes of this rule.

This rule replaces hybrid classes like Mystic Theurge and feats like Practiced Spellcaster, so those are no longer available.

Examples:
A Fighter2/Cleric3 would cast spells as a 4th level cleric (but channel energy and have the domain powers of a 3rd level cleric).

A Ranger4/Wizard2 would cast spells as a 4th level wizard (but have school powers of a 2nd level wizard). Ranger is not a primary spellcasting class, so ranger spells would be unaffected.

A Fighter6/Druid1 would cast spells as a 2nd level druid (but have class features as a 1st level druid), because you can only double caster level at most.

A Paladin4/Sorcerer1/DragonDisciple2 (Dragon Disciple adds +1 caster level to Sorcerer) would cast as a 4th level sorcerer (1 for the sorcerer level + 1 for Dragon Disciple + 2 for the 4 paladin levels). Because Dragon Disciple adds to the bloodline abilities, the character would have bloodline powers as a 3rd level sorcerer. The paladin spells would still be cast as a 4th level paladin.

A Rogue3/Sorcerer1/Wizard2/ArcaneTrickster2 (Arcane Trickster adds +2 caster levels to sorcerer) casts as a Sorcerer5 (1 from sorcerer + 2 from Arcane Trickster +2 from the other 5 levels) and as a Wizard4 (2 from wizard + 3 from the other 6 levels, but maxes out at 4 because you can only double the caster level).

I was lucky in that my normal booster, which can have either one medium or two small minis contained two goblins, and the large booster, which has one large, contained an ogre. The goblins and ogre are very iconic monsters in Pathfinder and have a different and distinct look to them than in earlier D&D.

The figures came out well – in D&D Miniatures boosters figs were usually pretty bent up, and often they don’t stand straight (either the base being bent or the figure doing the “V8 lean” on the base). These figures have nice hard bases and the goblins’ little weapons were striaght and good-looking.  The ogre’s club was slightly bent (he came out of the plastic shell while still in the box) but one bend and it was true.

The sculpts are good and the paint jobs pretty detailed.  The one weakness is that the big primary color they use on each mini, usually for the skin, needs a little more something – a wash or whatnot, it looks very homogeneous.

Here’s some large scale pics for you to check out.

The ENWorld review complained a lot about the amount of wrapping they come in. I was ready to ding them on it too, but really it’s just a box with a plastic blister in it – not even the little annoying plastic baggies that D&D Miniatures used. I do wish that they had boosters with more minis in them – buying one or, in rarer cases, two to a pack is a little annoying – but here’s my “trash picture” to compare to the ENWorld one.

Basically I put the plastic blister back in the boxes and then put the small box inside the large one and closed it. Voila. Less packaging is always good but I think the guy was being a bit of a drama queen about it – of course if you’re buying cases worth you’re going to have box detritus. If you want them to just put a dozen minis in a ziploc and send them to you I suspect you’ll have a lot of complaints about other stuff in return. But I was happier with the packaging here than with D&D Minis because the unpack process is “open box top, pull out mini, done.”

In fact, I just went and bought a brick from RPG Locker because I enjoyed these guys so much! I’ve never bought minis “in bulk” before…

There’s super complicated open source BS like graphviz – not something I want to deal with as part of my hobby. “Do it in R,” suggested someone who clearly wanted a punch in the nose. Then I thought maybe I could use a virtual corkboard like corkboard.me or  Spaaze but those don’t even have basic “pins and yarn” kind of ways to represent relations. Then I looked at online graphing tools like yED and diagram.ly, which are fine but I already own Visio. That has a lot of fiddling around with layout for the desired use. I’m hoping for something a little more purpose built (like a HUMINT tool) that could be used with maximal ease by a GM.

Such things are also called sociograms, and are used in social media (all examples I could find sucked) and sometimes to map out character relationships in fiction, which is very much where I’m going with it.

I envision just entering names to create cards/whatnot and then create positive/negative relationships (color?) of various intensity (thickness?) connecting them, with some explanatory labels.  Perhaps being able to assign them to a location (like the village they live in) and assigning other affiliation (guild, organization, etc. where you could perhaps get the aggregate opinion of “those guildmembers to that PC” or “that person to the party in general” ) would be nice.  In a simple UI that is editable while also trying to run a darn game, and lets me quickly look up what this person thinks about the PCs (or if maybe they know someone that knows the PCs…).

I know this has to exist, it’s what intelligence folks do all day… I’m happy to pay a consumer amount of money for something if it hits my needs exactly. Anyone seen anything that would do the trick?

Seems like a simple enough “yarn and cards” solution would be a nice virtual replacement for all those wall-covering “find the serial killer” big boards in crime movies… And on the other hand, to construct lovely virtual stalker shrines to Justin Bieber or whoever… WHY DOES THIS NOT EXIST?!?!?!?

Here’s an example of what one small part of a relationship diagram for our Reavers campaign might look like… The Gendarmes in general are quite suspicious of the group, but they have a better relationship with the God Squad and Salvadora is specifically fond of Sindawe… I did it in yED, and had to spend 75% of the time fooling with layout.

Fifty-Seventh Session

The Lighthouse campaign started May 30, 2009 and is only coming to a close now, October 30, 2011! Just about two and a half years of science fiction goodness. 57 sessions of an entire every-other-Sunday afternoon, all documented for your reading pleasure. Thanks to Paul for his yeoman’s work in running it and to the rest of the crew for making it a fun ride!  And thanks to the Alternity designers, it really is a nice little sci-fi game – could stand a cleaned up version 2 but then again what couldn’t.

Here’s our Jade Regent page, I’ll post characters and session summaries and whatnot there.

The upshot is that we are novice adventurers in Sandpoint (the same town Rise of the Runelords started in) and, because of our relationships with some important NPCs, end up taking a caravan north, through Ulfen (Viking) lands and across the Crown of the World (North Pole) to end up in Tian Xia (Asia)! Sounds like fun.

More later, I’m off to the game!

We started with role-play.  Sindawe caught a case of the Lawful Goods during the first part of the session, confusing his comrades.  He gives money to the ex-slave family trying to make it in Riddleport, and then has management interventions with the crew over Slasher Jim killing too much and Tommy sexing too much. Eventually the other PCs were like “this is a pirate ship! Come on now!” I thought it was interesting because Sindawe is clearly wrestling with how to perceive himself as a “good guy” while being a pirate and also with the burden of leadership.

Then we got to sea and I started up the random encounters. Man, if anything my “Today at Sea” encounter list was shorter than last time. But it sure expanded out! This session summary is 27 pages long.

First there was an Ulfen longship and a Mordant Spire elf skimmer fighting. This could have been 5 minutes if the PCs bypassed it, but they first threw in with the Ulfen and fought the elves and then fought the Ulfen. And then took Ulfen prisoners, etc. This was a livelier naval combat than usual; it’s the first time they’ve had significant amounts of magic used against them in an engagement.

We find a great deal of hilarity in the fact that Serpent and Wogan always seem to roll 1′s (or at least very low) on Spellcraft and Knowledge: Religion checks.  They are good sports about coming  up with super ignorant incorrect things they believe as a result. In this case, Serpent saw the elven command crew gathering up as their ship was overrun and teleporting out, but with his 1 he interpreted it as some mass disintegration suicide ritual.

I’m not really sure they intended to fight the Ulfen initially, but basically they had their blood up and decided to kill till there was no opposition. Wogan luckily saved all the crew from dying – I need to come up with a better mechanic hooked to my mass combat system to figure out who snuffs it.  I’ve been letting him make a Heal check with his healing burst to see how many downed crewmen he can save and he’s rolled very, very high each time so they haven’t lost anyone in action yet. They end it all up with a new crewman, an Ulfen barbarian named Olgvik.

Then the PCs were confronted with the sad fact that sailors refuse to eat fish! They got some from the fishing ship last time and a bunch of pickled herring from the Ulfen ship, but as in RL Europe, all red blooded sailors eat fish as only a last resort, and feel themselves ill used if they must.

Then over the course of the week, the ship is attacked by an angry whale, then meets the same whale again but it’s undead. (This is from the random encounters; of course as the GM if one day says angry whale and then two days later there’s an undead whale, if they aren’t linked somehow you suck.) Then a homunculus came by. The PCs were horrified and intrigued when it simply gathered information from them about the whale like a modern telephone survey taker. “On a scale of one to five, how terrifying was the whale both before and after it was dead?” This is a good example of how linking some simple random encounters on the fly, you create what seems to be a hideous master plan going on in the world with absolutely no relation to the PCs. Makes the world seem real.

Finally, they take a prize – a small spice merchant. They take his cargo and money but leave him his ship, wife, and life. (The cook’s resultant experiment with “cinnamon eggs” was disgusting.) They enjoyed finding a book of tiefling pornography entitled “Fiend Folio.”

I’ve done a lot of reading up on historical pirates and it’s odd – same captain and crew, sometimes they’ll let someone go, sometimes they’ll sink a perfectly good ship, sometimes they’ll kill everyone with little provocation, sometimes they’ll do some of both! “Took three ships, sank two, killed some of the crew, let the rest get in the third ship and leave.” Not always explainable rhyme or reason to it (the drinking probably helps) but it’s interesting how our PC pirates are kinda turning out the same way.

Lots of great roleplaying fleshed this session out even more – good PC-to-PC interaction and also with various members of the crew.

That’s cool but surprising. The clarifications coming out of Seattle on the “multiple edition support” of D&D 5e have started to make it clear they won’t really support old versions per se, just let you craft your game to be kinda like them. Is it to judge interest in 1e/old school gaming? That’s hard – I mean, I still have my 1e books, and not to mention all the retroclones are mostly-free.

Now this reminds me of a more inspired idea Zak had which was to reprint all the 1e adventures in big coffee table books, which I would throw money at with no questions. (Adventure content is really more valuable than old rules content – something which WotC needs to wrap its head around; it’s why Paizo is beating them like red-headed stepchildren.)

Also, the money from this sale goes to the Gygax statue? I reckon that’s a good mix of being nice and sucking up to the community… It’s interesting that Hasbro signed off on that. It made me think this was fake until I could find the original on the Wizards site.

Well, let’s see what this means! I am I think understandably skeptical of any step from Wizards that seems beneficial and philanthropic, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

He doesn’t really say how they’re doing, but I guess it’s fine as they are forging forward with their licensed properties, doing Set 3 for Dragon Age and a bunch of stuff for A Song Of Ice And Fire, including a revised core rulebook to take advantage of the hype from Book 5 and the HBO series. Then besides two more DC Adventures books, they’ll put out some non-licensed Mutants & Masterminds things. That’s the long and short.

Here’s the real problem with all this…

With all of our licensed material, the thing to remember is that we don’t control the approvals process and this can affect our release dates. We do our best and so do our partners but sometimes patience is required.

My perceptions may be colored because I’m not interested in any of those licenses, but it just seems like being tied down 90% to licensed properties is risky – and somewhat less original, content-wise, than my fond remembrances of Green Ronin from the Freeport/M&M 1e days.

Well, good luck to GR anyway, they seem to be thriving.

I didn’t really expect this leg of the voyage to take a whole (long) session.  Behold the power of the random generator. I was using Zak from D&D With Porn Stars‘ Wavecrawl Kit, specifically as administered by the great “Today at Sea” random generator on Abulafia.

Here’s what turned into six hours of gaming, once roleplay and PC initiative was added in… Randomly generated plus a preening pass from me.

1. Annoying weather. Make a control roll. Failure results in… Amid the ship’s tossing and confusion on deck, someone slips over the rails. Man overboard! Determine who it is randomly.
2. Annoying weather. Make a control roll. Failure results in… Some miscellaneous marine leviathan has crashed into the hull in its sleep, starting planks all along one side before plunging down into the depths in its startlement. The ship is leaking badly, gaining on the pumps by 2d6 inches per hour, and will eventually founder unless something is done to alleviate the situation.
3. Giant seasnake
4. A small (if appropriate to type of vessel) passing ship is sighted. What is it?
   Fishing boat (probably lots of food on board).
5. Bad weather–Make 12 control or piloting rolls to avoid damage to the ship. Failure results in…
   Something caught in the rudder–someone needs to climb down there and get it.
6. Dead calm sea (lose a day of movement)
7. A medium-sized passing ship is sighted. What is it? A fishwife sailing the seas in a waterlogged cog, seeking a husband. She sends her harpies to go fetch a pretty one.
8. A quiet day at sea

They tried hard to get their money’s worth from each encounter – like they were determined to take that “small fishing boat” back to its home port and then work it over.  I rolled randomly and the place was just Godawful. I find visiting some places like that make PCs feel validated in their choice of being wandering adventurers, as they pity the poor local bastards in their squalor.

And I got to use pretty much all of our add-on rulesets this session.  First it was sailing in general, and having storms and other problems requiring various ship control rolls to overcome.  Then, when they were becalmed and bored, Captain Sindawe set up a melee between two halves of the crew, which used my quickie mass combat rules. And finally, when the fishwife tried to escape they used my naval combat rules (a mix of my chase rules and cannon rules). But it wasn’t all rules minigames, there were also more developments in the Serpent/Samaritha pregnancy drama.

They got to fight a fishwife – also courtesy Zak. This definitely got their juices going!

Once they got to Sandpoint they wanted to investigate Sandpoint, which was easy enough since I had both the old (Rise of the Runelords) and new (Jade Regent) versions in Paizo AP installments. In fact, it was a little entertaining because our brand new PCs were just leaving Sandpoint in our other Jade Regent campaign, so we put some easter eggs in both ways (the Teeth of Araska sold its old dragon figurehead to the Rusty Dragon, for example).

Easter egg – the orichalcum statue of Shelyn that Wogan buys is directly inspired by the Macguffin in the first season of the anime series Slayers. The fishwife had reminded me of Noonsa, the Flaming Fish-man, from that same series, so I riffed on it.

Also, I roll reactions routinely when meeting NPCs; Lavender Lil and Ameiko Kaijitsu rolled 1′s against each other and everyone enjoyed the not unfamiliar sight of two women deciding to hate each other at first sight for no reason anyone else can fathom.

And then unexpectedly they wanted to go to Magnimar to shop.  Realizing that at this rate such a side trek might take two more weeks, I told them we had to handle it in “montage” fashion. This allowed us to get through it in reasonably short order; they got their must-haves done and I think it went OK.  This group kinda tripped out at a similar narrativist insertion back in my Redeemers campaign but this one went fine.

Next time – more random encounters!!!

The thing is, there’s ways in which I think that’s possible and ways in which I think it’s not. On the one hand, if they return to publishing real content in setting books and adventures, that is somewhat “cross editions” – one of the main weaknesses of the 4e products was that they were useless for anyone not playing 4e, whereas editions 1-3 tend to freely exchange adventures, setting info books, etc.

It is also possible to have different levels of complexity of the same rules.  I actually played around with a game system with three levels of granularity called “The Third Degree” a while back, it was inspired actually by the action movie RPG Feng Shui.  There you had cascaded stats – like you might have Body 5, but below that Str, Con, Mov, and Tgh of varying amounts. For mooks their stat blocks would just say “Bod 5,” and you would use 5 for any sub-stats that came up.  I realized you could maybe please everyone if you had three degrees of complexity of each mechanic. Where it fell down is that you essentially needed technology to be able to print a custom RPG book for each player in the game so that they’d know what level of everything a given campaign was using!

I mean, earlier D&Ds had all kinds of optional rules and also rules not marked as optional but that were so fiddly everyone ignored them (weapon speeds, weapon types vs. armor, declaring actions, and other such lameness). So that sounds difficult but not impossible.

What is impossible is actually unifying 1e, 2e, 3e, PF, and 4e as they stand into a single rules framework.  It just won’t work. There’s too much crufty little crap that is not just “levels of complexity” but “different.” And I think they know this; in Monte’s article he uses circumlocutions like “your 3E-style game”. In fact, he says a 1e-loving player can play in your 3e-style game and ignore the options they don’t like – I think that’s probably overreaching; just having the level of granularity be the campaign is probably about as much that’s achievable. And the GM is going to have to have control.  “You are all starving!” “I ignore the starvation rules, they don’t come in till 3e!” But the real question is, will this really bring the players back in?  “Here, you can play at this level that’s 1e…ish?”

I also worry that their attempt to pander to all versions will make them not really innovate with this game. If all they do is try to glue all the old versions together in some demented Multiverser kind of way, in the end is that compelling? Shouldn’t such a game include a new “5e” as well which is an actual improvement on the game?

Here’s a secret.  We grognards don’t love Pathfinder, and 2e, and 1e (in my preferred order) because they are perfect. There’s a lot of BS and cruft in them. Except for the total nostalgia whores who demand everything be as Gygax originally spit it out because they are into that, the reason we like those old games is the level of hassle they give or don’t give us and the mode of gameplay they promote.

Here’s what I like and dislike about all the editions, let’s see if they can include all the good and remove all the bad.

• Basic D&D – low hassle, low rules, low character customization (side note – comparing this new toolkit plan to BECMI is largely incorrect;  in BECMI you got newer higher levels added on and a couple rules, but the ruleset didn’t transform or anything.) Lightly handled all styles of play really. I just lump 0e into here because I can’t understand how anyone actually does still like 0e. Very rules light and dungeon/exploration focused.
  I love this edition because it gives you the basics and then gets out of your way and lets you go adventuring.
  I hate this edition because once you’ve played it a while you tend to “want more” though.
• 1e AD&D – somewhat crufty and arcane, but usually not during combat itself. Low powered, you had to fight hard to stay alive, no level appropriate kid gloves. Exploration focus still. Not much character customization supported by the rules, mainly by personality plus whatever mutation White Plume Mountain inflicted on you. The golden age of the adventure module.
  I love this edition because it is very easy to write a diverse set of adventures for and to house rule.
  I hate this edition because there’s a charming level of wonkiness to the rules, but it’s underlaid by a not charming at all level of cruftiness you need to house rule away.
• 2e AD&D – not all that different, more of a streamlined 1e (I like it better than 1e), but the supplements and adventures that came out for it promoted more of a storytelling and roleplaying experience. Not as much focus on the dungeon, but kinda like Basic had nods to wilderness, dungeon, city, planar, etc. You were a fraction tougher than in 1e but still weren’t a superhero. Lots more character customization via kits etc. (Those who say kits were unbalanced haven’t played subsequent games – “Oh lordy he gets a +1 to something!” was a big deal back then, but nowadays they all seem like short bus prestige classes.) NWPs provide a very, very loose skill system. (I actually added Perception and Luck stats to my 2e games.) The golden age of the boxed set. TSR adventures were not that good and were often retreads.
  I love this edition because it hits a great midpoint of rules complexity – it has the more rules content of 1e but via THAC0 and other streamlining, makes it less work than 1e to play, but more satisfying over a long time than Basic.
  I hate this edition – well, mainly for historical reasons.  Death of TSR, Lorraine Williams, giant space hamsters, Castle Greyhawk, bad adventures.
• 3e AD&D – you start off a Billy Badass. 3.5e and Pathfinder cranked that up even more. Lots of character customization, arguably too much. Lots of helpful slash painful rules for everything.  3.0 core I actually really love, but am more ambivalent when you say 3.5 or PF with all the splatbooks. You stopped being able to house rule as much in this version because of how many rules they were and how much they interacted – you kinda had to just allow/disallow things and maybe if you spent a lot of time balancing it, introduce a new prestige class or whatever. Balance became a lot more of a concern in this edition, mainly because with the customization you could have wildly varying power levels at the same character level. More of a combat focus than 2e, especially with all the minis-requiring flanking/AoO/etc rules. The golden age of the adventure module come again, but from all those third party OGL folks. WotC adventures were not that good and often retreads.
  I love this edition because it lets you craft much more detailed and realistic characters, with the multiclassing and feats and all.
  I hate this edition because there are all these damn rules, and your players think it’s their place to grouse when you don’t use them or change them.
• 4e AD&D – purely tactical combat. Less character customization choice but highly balanced. “I just like moving minis around and playing a board game.” There are actual good changes to the core ruleset in there, but then they layer goofy stuff all over it so that combats are a four hour long exercise in marking tokens with other tokens.
  I hate this edition because it removes nearly everything I enjoy in roleplaying.
  I love this edition because its flat reception has caused Wizards to pull their heads out of their asses and reassess what it is people liked out of D&D in the first place.

It happens especially when they go to cities and between adventures. They go into a frenzy of trying to buy and sell and talk to everyone and do everything to the point where I have to start enforcing fatigue rules to get them to stop pounding on people’s doors at 3 AM demanding magic item sales.  Sometimes there is plot related time pressure but often there’s not.

In this campaign, I knew it was happening a lot. Heck, the last huge multisession fight they got into was initiated with Serpent going to visit the Cypher Lodge in the middle of the night and waking people up to demand magic item sales (with no idea that it had been taken over by the forces of evil… He found out quick though). So I tried to give them an out, a friendly (as such things go) local crime figure they’re aligned with (Saul Vancaskerkin from the Second Darkness Adventure Path) offered to take care of buying and selling and whatnot for them.  I reckoned that would get it off our play session plates and let us get to adventure. “Sure!” they said. And then they immediately went out to do it some more! They literally made that deal with Saul at 3 AM, went to bed, woke up, and then demanded of him immediately whether he’d gotten everything on their wishlists yet. When he hadn’t, it was out to kick down doors.

Serpent, and his player really, was getting frustrated. He keeps wanting to sell and or buy his stuff NOW.  Well, I run a fairly realistic game world.  If you want to sell something like that in a four hour span, then like in the real world you’re going to get pawn shop prices. And if you want some specific magic item, you’re not going to be able to find it in that span – especially if you have shitty Diplomacy/Knowledge: Local skills.  I also run fairly low magic so there’s not “magic shops”. I try to reward their persistence with some randomly generated magic stuff that some decent scavenging lets them find some gypsy selling or whatever, but this doesn’t sate their desire for to-spec items. It’s not just buying and selling, it’s anything they end up wanting to do in a city (Get information! Build a criminal empire!), but that’s a handy example I have that shows the syndrome. PC impatience vs. the realistic pace of the world.

Am I being hard-headed? I guess I feel like a lot of this, and I’ve said this out loud to the players, can be elided easily.  Say you are looking for X, let’s all say you loiter around in town for a week, and it’ll probably show up. It doesn’t have to take GAME time, it can be over with in one sentence. But for whatever reason, they don’t want to “let time pass” – every waking hour is spent in high activity mode. And in cases like this, it ends up making things take a lot more game time than a more relaxed approach would.

I understand that’s easy to do in a game – it’s why in many computer games we set our character to “run” by default, why would you want to go somewhere slowly? But it does stretch my (and NPCs’, in my world) patience when the group is a nonstop tornado – trouble in any 24 hour period is practically guaranteed.

It’s not just this group either.  I always laugh when I see con game adventures that are time-based – the PCs arrive at the inn at 5:00, then dinner is at 6:00, the body is discovered at 6:30, and then this big list of things that are supposed to happen after the next 24 hours.  Here’s what really happens: from 6:30 to 7:00 the PCs (insisting on being in combat round time the whole time so that they get the most out of their buff spells) beat, intimidate, interrogate, tie up and/or kill everyone in the whole inn. That’s if they’re good characters and a murder is needed to provoke them of course; otherwise that happens from 5:00 to 5:30 instead.

Of course maybe I’m worrying about it too much – if they didn’t want to waste game screen time on it, they wouldn’t; they’re adults and I’ve explained all the above to them explicitly. And heck, I can’t really claim it’s unrealistic – adventurers in town is just like sailors or cowboys or whatnot; they have a short time to play hard before they head back out on the sea/trail/etc. But it seems to frustrate the players (well, especially the one) because he seems to think it’s unreasonable that he can’t get what he wants quickly.

Comments or ideas? I also posted this as a question on RPG Stack Exchange to see if it garners any good answers.

If nothing else, despite its “dwindling market” it’s good news that the NYT considers this part of all the news that’s fit to print!

For those who consider this to be dubious news and part of the Great Media Conspiracy, Mike Mearls has responded on wizards.com to say it’s true and that they’re going to take a big hint from Paizo and do an open playtest of the new rules! You can sign up at that link.

This isn’t really surprising for those who have been watching. The Escapist recently published three articles on D&D’s past, present, & future that inform the landscape behind it very well.

Well, this is good news I think.  I’m one of the many who told WotC from the first steps of 4e that they were about to really mess up and fragment the hobby, and look, that’s exactly what happened. This is a big chance, and Mike Mearls and Monte Cook might be the right people, to un-screw up Wizards and D&D.  This is a hard task  given their corporate setup; here’s an interesting article on ENWorld from insider Ryan Dancey about how the Hasbro financial reporting structure and internal politics has really smacked D&D down hard and basically drove them to their ill-considered “let’s make it all depend on DDI and then not deliver” strategy.

Also, I like the open playtest idea.  Now, there are problems with open playtests – with Pathfinder, they got a lot of flack from some folks from not being willing to change too much despite fan feedback. D&D could fall into this trap too, and consider 4e (or 3e, depending how much they’re willing to admit their mistakes) too much of a must-have baseline. But if they take too much “fan input,” you get something designed by committee, which always sucks more than something designed by a small set of skilled artists. But the open playtest is no longer a rarity – Paizo has made sure of that; Goodman Games is using it for their Dungeon Crawl Classics, 6d6 does it routinely, and even those not doing truly open playtests seem to be doing more closed playtests (if the number of invites I get for such things is any guide).

ENWorld has three articles on the new edition: WotC Seeks Unity With a New Edition, The Day Wizards Showed Me 5th Edition, and Bet You Wish Your Workplace Looked Like Wizards of the Coast (this last is the most unlikely, unless you love being laid off). They are also keeping up a 5e Info Page with all reveals to date. Best quote so far is from former D&D Brand Manager Scott Rouse – “4e is broken as a game and business and it needs to go away.” The weirdest thing is all the news coverage it’s getting- from the Huffington Post to PerezHilton.com to HispanicBusiness.com.

Also, there’s an article on Forbes from a playtester – he got to play in an early draft of 5e and liked it.

The blogosphere results are in and there’s a lot of dubiousness.  GeekDad from Wired’s article on the new edition is probably a good representative response. I have to admit I’m dubious but hopeful.  If they could carry off Pathfinder compatibility, that would be a coup. WotC needs to realize they’re not the 900 lb gorilla any more, Paizo’s been eating their lunch in sales for a year now and is expanding into novels, comics, minis, MMOs… If they could come up with some plan to merge the two instead of leaving them divided, then BOOM goes the dynamite! If they don’t… 5e would have to be super amazingly good to sway me from Pathfinder, and I don’t just mean the rules – all the good content people have (usually after being laid off my Wizards) gone to Paizo, which is why the 4e adventures have reportedly been largely tripe. We’ll see if they can really swallow their pride and unify…

Many people are chiming in with what they want 5e to be like but frankly most strike me as confused and sucky. I really like Zak’s (before the announcement!) ideas on what 5e should be like though…

As background, this Viking barbarian/serpent shaman druid PC named “Serpent” has become involved with a half elf wizard woman named Samaritha (an NPC). Or at first he thought she was a half elf, turns out she’s a serpentfolk in disguise (they can alter their form). As he is all snake themed anyway, this turned out to not be a dealbreaker and so they’re an item.

Anyway, it started innocuously enough – Serpent was just BSing with the other PCs as they were buying supplies about how “Samaritha talks all the time.” Another PC suggested getting her pregnant, and the rest all jumped onto that discussion mainly just to make Serpent uncomfortable (though oddly, they all took the assumption that a pregnant woman would talk less at face value… I’m the only one of the group with a kid so I had to restrain myself from pointing out the flaw in this cunning plan…). They then talked about it again later at a bar, while at the same time asking around trying to gather information on a female pirate they are chasing, which led to the novel rumor that the fled pirate is pregnant with Serpent’s love child and he’s tracking her down to make an honest woman of her. So I thought it was a joke and they were all just busting his balls about it.

But the idea took root with frightening swiftness. Given that he’s a human and she’s a serpentfolk it would seem to be a somewhat intractable problem but the other PCs were seriously going to look into fertility potions/magic and the like to help their buddy out! (This is all before Samaritha is consulted on this plan of course).

And next session, Serpent totally sat Samaritha down and had a “let’s have a baby” conversation with her. She reveals that serpentfolk aren’t able to reproduce any more, that’s a big problem with their race. They had found a serpentfolk egg in stasis back in a previous adventure (taken from the Green Ronin Freeport trilogy by the way) – I had been downplaying that, and she’d stashed it, but now they discussed raising it as a backup plan – but I was surprised how invested everyone was with really making a pregnancy happen. And it got even a little more complicated because all serpentfolk born after a long, long time ago are degenerate barbarian types and they thought about doing some divination to figure out how the baby might turn out, that is if they could even conceive in the first place… The rest of the PCs had long left the joke part of this around and were quite engaged in this whole discussion and wondering how to make it happen.

I’ve never had having a kid come up in a campaign before so I guess I’m looking for advice… Though there’s a lot of different layers here. How could it happen with a serpentfolk and a human, just technically? How’s pregnancy at sea on a pirate ship going to work (and I guess it’s not like a full pregnancy, but semi and then she’ll lay an egg or something)? The odds are all against it but PCs have a way of making “things that haven’t happened in millenia” happen… I do keep a half decent edge to my game world where the difficulty and brutality of medieval life is present… Will I get on a government watch list for Googling “serpentfolk reproduction?” I don’t know, thoughts?

I am gratified, though, by the work I’ve put into the NPCs and the realistic feel of the campaign that this would even come up. For them to see Samaritha not just as a faceless NPC or “arm candy” is great, and to be immersed in the world enough to care about things other than “killing things and taking their stuff” – well that’s what roleplaying is supposed to strive for in my opinion.

First of all, sorry for getting behind.  Between the holidays and job hunting, I’ve been strapped.  I’ve got like four sessions of Reavers in the can as well as three of our new Jade Regent campaign.  Here’s getting to it!

Last time, everyone finally leveled to level 6.  I am all about the low level play and slow progression; they got 5th in February I believe. So they all showed up with kewl new powers to use. But as usual, we kicked right back in seconds after the last session ended.

They took the first part of the session recapping and trying to assimilate new knowledge into what the overall deal is with the Cyphergate and orichalcum and serpentmen and portals and phantom creatures. It’s inevitable that PCs get a little confused about what’s up even with reasonably simple plots because of the long time between games and the somewhat distractable nature of any given PC. So if you have orichalcum glyph pieces embedded in people and orichalcum plates taken from a portal seal, people get them confused. So I helped walk them through a solid statement of “what we know so far.”

Next, I had one of their NPCs mess with them. Last time, you will note how Pirro the pirate got the short end of the stick on healing. Well, they came away from the fight with four magical treasures, so he’s due one, right? He wakes up early, takes one of the items (a magical mithral axe), and goes down to the casino to put it on pledge to get some gamblin’ money. Naturally he loses badly (I rolled for it fair and square), and this causes the PCs a little consternation. I liked this scene because it let me reinforce that the PCs’ pirate crew are by no means mindless minions, and in fact the nature of being a pirate means they are unruly and like it that way.

Next, two things happen that deserve blog posts of their own.  The first is the unexpected and sudden “Hey, Serpent needs to get Samaritha pregnant!” plan that emerged to surprisingly unanimous support. See Pregnancy & Pirates for more. The second is the sheer impatience of Serpent wanting to get magic items sold and bought – he literally goes from place to place till 2 AM in the morning desperately trying to swing deals. More on that in Insomniac Monkeys on Crack.

What this demanded of me was a large amount of improv. Urban adventuring is challenging because it’s not like a dungeon or wilderness where there’s a limited amount of stuff that can be going on.  A big lawless city like Riddleport is guaranteed to liven up quick if you go through the wrong door at the wrong time. So they kept wandering around and I kept coming up with stuff that I hoped wouldn’t get me into real trouble.

I generally like to use the dice as a general determinant of “is this going to go real well or real badly.” For some reason the PCs were rolling really poorly this session. So when Sindawe goes to the House of the Silken Veil trying to find a Mwangi (African) hooker that might have fertility drugs or magic (I am not sure it ever occurs to the PCs to look anywhere but in bars or whorehouses for anything in this game), the roll comes up really low, so instead he gets a Garundi woman dressed up like some far northerner’s idea of a Mwangi witch doctor for the fetishist market. Heh. Also they’ve gotten on the bad side of Madame Pamodae; they are remarkably unconcerned about this given that she’s a priestess of a deity of revenge.

Then they recruit new shipmates! First it’s the traditional “set up a table in a bar” method, where they try to figure out what’s wrong with the people applying. As it’s a pirate ship, they find plenty wrong but decide”what the hell” with all of them but the last guy. This was a shout out to a previous player who was always an obstreperous muffinhead, and one day in a SF game came in with a new character that we were interviewing for a position on our tramp freighter.  Since he was a new PC we were just trying to get any kind of excuse to hire him but his response to every single question was vague “I do… things!” crap. We left him on the planet and in fact he got disinvited from the group (last straw syndrome). This explains Sindawe’s overly violent reaction. (Knowing how to push your players’ buttons and not just the characters’ is a good GM technique.) They also invite their girlfriends Samaritha and Hatshepsut and Lavender Lil along! And they shanghai the hated Bojask, a guy who works for Saul and they’ve never gotten along with.

Also, they make a couple runs at trying to extort a local new bar for protection money. They were hilariously shy about it really. I based the friendly but yelling owner/bartender off a male cheerleading coach in a horrible Comedy Central movie that was on while I was prepping that morning.

Part of this game is definitely the crew control.  I rolled for each crewmember’s shore leave. Basically 1 is something SUPER bad and 20 SUPER good; 2 means trouble the PCs can’t fix, 3 means trouble they can fix, and everything in between is general levels of doing well versus doing poorly. There were a lot of 4′s, including Pirro, which basically means “all money gone and got a good beating in the process.” The only bad result was a 3, where Goat got arrested for murder; some guys in a bar hassled him about being a tiefling and they turned up dead later. The PCs went and bailed him out in a remarkably civilized fashion; I liked their sudden realization about “Hey, wasn’t Slasher Jim washing blood off his knife back on the ship?” Turns out Slasher Jim also used to be on Morgan Baumann’s (their new quarry) crew. Big Mike got a 20 so I figured he parlayed into part ownership of the new bar – good for him, and a complication for the PCs’ protection racket!

The one place where the PCs rolled well was around the House of the Silken Veil – Pamodae has it out for them once she found out they killed her pirate ally, and they went back twice; both visits were sexy and hilarious in turn but they didn’t degenerate into murder, and let’s just say that was an unlikely result. It ended with Sindawe bluffing his way past a guard by playing the race card.

And FINALLY they get on their ship and underway!  Whew!  I thought it would never happen.  I think I run pretty fun urban scenes and (properly!) depict cities as full of people and stuff and places and whatnot, so PCs seem to get drawn into doing random things there even when they planned to go do something else.