Wil Wheaton, former Ensign Crusher and geek celeb extraordinaire, posts about his recent experiences DMing for his son and friends.
We’ll forgive him for running 4e. He has some good observations on DMing style, including improvisation and catering to your players and having fun. You know, all that stuff old schoolers hate.
I read about this new show, Deadliest Warrior, earlier today on Topless Robot and then watched it this evening. It’s on Spike TV, and it’s like Mythbusters meets the Military Channel. They take some historical warriors, do a bunch of tests on the weapons and moves they use, feed it into a computer, and run a simulation 1000 times to determine who would win.
This first episode was “Viking vs. Samurai.” They get both Viking combat experts and samurai guys to whack on sweet ballistics dummies (with skeletons and all, a step up from Mythbusters) with greataxes and katanas and all. Biggest revelation? The katana’s kind of a bitch weapon. I say this because it’s an RPG tradition to give katanas the biggest damage bonus because they’re so uber. But here, the longsword is the one that totally decapitated the dummy. They could cut through two pigs with the katana, but when pitted against a similar pig carcass in chainmail it did exactly jack crap.
There’s a lot of simulationist love to get out of their weapon trials [Obligatory 4e jab: unless you’re playing 4e, which has deliberately rejected all that historical trivia like real world weapons and armor (no really, they say that in Worlds & Monsters p.15)]. And just watching them cleanly shear off a thin segment of hair flesh, skull, and brain gave me a lot of new combat-description fodder.
It’s not perfect, they set up a kinda artificial round-by-round thing where the combatants exercise their long range weapons, then medium, then short. The Viking doesn’t employ his shield against the samurai’s yumi (bow), instead just sucking up a couple shots and leaving his shield for the “special weapons round,” but eh, it’s good fun.
The samurai won by a slight margin (522/1000 trials) but I think the Vikings got ripped off! They have a complete episode, “Apache vs. Gladiator,” up on their Web site. Check it out!
ENWorld scores a interview with WotC president Greg Leeds in which he says nothing we didn’t already know about their recent move to yank all WotC/TSR products from electronic publishing via PDF from all channels without warning. Except that PDFs are never coming back because of “them pirates.” Why even do an interview if you’re not going to say anything? Man, the marketdroids have really raped D&D’s corpse. Alas.
I don’t know if they realize that before PDFs, enterprising pirates just scanned and OCRed the docs anyway. This will change nothing in terms of piracy, and will only jack their customers. But, after all their other moves, it’s clear they don’t really care about that. They have the attitude that “all you little vermin need our product like it’s your drug, so we can be as exploitative as we want and you’ll still come crawling to us.” (And frankly from reading ENWorld, there is a good subset of people for whom this is true.)
Posted in talk
Tagged D&D, dungeons dragons, pdf, piracy, RPG, RPGs, suck, wizards, Wizards of the Coast
Wanted to buy a PDF of any Wizards of the Coast/TSR product ever? TOO LATE!!!
It started with an email I got from Paizo:
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 19:28:09 -0700 (PDT)
Dear XXXXXX,
Wizards of the Coast has notified us that we may no longer sell or distribute their PDF products. Accordingly, after April 6 at 11:59 PM Pacific time, Wizards of the Coast PDFs will no longer be available for purchase on paizo.com; after noon on April 7, you will no longer be able to download Wizards of the Coast PDFs that you have already purchased, so please make sure you have downloaded all purchased PDFs by that time.
We thank you for your patronage of paizo.com. Please check out our other downloads at paizo.com/store/downloads.
Sincerely yours,
The Paizo Customer Service Team
But it turns out it’s not just Wizards hating on Paizo, it’s everywhere. They pulled all their product from DriveThruRPG etc. as well. With LESS THAN ONE DAY OF NOTICE to download even things you’d already bought.
Read the threads on RPG.net and ENWorld for more.
Wizards chimed in on this with a:
“Hey all. I wanted to step in and shine a mote of light on the subject. First off, this cesation of PDF sales has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet Sales Policy. I know it’s the 6th of April and I can definitely see how the two would appear linked, but the truth is, this is a completely seperate matter.
Unfortunately, due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sales of online PDFs. We are exploring other options for digitial distribution of our content and as soon as we have any more information I’ll get it to you.”
He’s referring to the new Wizards Internet Sales Policy they announced today. Yes, these moves are unrelated. Surrrrrrrre they are.
So in other words, there are naughty pirates out there! Don’t sell PDFs! At the same time, WotC has announced they are suing eight individuals for infringement based on torrenting the PHB2. You don’t bother announcing stuff like that unless you are trying a “My penis is so big” offensive against the evil forces of teh Intarwebs.
Well you know what? Fuck you, Wizards. May I direct everyone who is interested to The Pirate Bay, where the D&D 4e PHB2 is available. (Not that I’d personally download any of that 4e crap.)
Are they really serious? What does removing all your PDFs from legitimate outlets do except encourage people to pirate it? And pulling this with such short notice undermines faith in the entire PDF market – re-downloadability is one of the selling points.
Paizo’s running a “PDF Love” sale on their stuff to try to make it up to their customers (use promo code “PDFLove” for 35% off!). Of course this sudden yank screws all the companies who were reselling their stuff. But since when did Wizards give one little damn about any of their supposed parters in the RPG industry?
Posted in talk
Tagged D&D, dungeons dragons, pdf, piracy, RPG, RPGs, suck, wizards, Wizards of the Coast
Now that this new noble guy is safely dead, we consolidate our position in:
Valix Drogue’s old manor is now officially Versane Manor, and we get the dead noble guy’s majordomo to make that nice and legal. Chuck the GM handed out minions for each of us to run! The assassin, the majordomo, the doctor, a squad of infantry, a squad of archers, and a double batch of household slaves. I got the assassin. We set the rest to guarding/improving the house. Everyone is quite good-natured about Versane delcaring himself clearly in charge of everything.
Chuck apparently expected us to do something else – rush off to the aid of the city, or something. Not us! We have a manor! We clear a graveyard, some hunter’s cabins, and a local village of undead. Now we just need some more peasants to staff it.
And they’re all jealous of my horns.
We’re moving quickly, and we finish up the fourth chapter of the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path this session.
In Part II of A History of Ashes (10 page .pdf), Annata, Malcolm, and Amiri successfully complete our Shoanti ritual as Thorndyke rejoins us. And then we have to face the biggest Red Mantis hit squad yet. Amiri and Krojin Eats-What-He-Kills benefit greatly from their barbarian unflankability. Sadly Malcolm does not, and the fight turns into a WoW-style format of Annata pouring healing as quickly as she can into Malcolm as he hacks at his opponents. Annata is pretty lucky with striking people blind, her blindness spell succeeds on Cinnabar the Mantis leader. It’s one of Sarenrae’s prime punishments for infidels so her good luck is dramatically perfect.
Annata respects the Shoanti people a lot more now. In the beginning she was fearful (as around Korvosa they’re generally considered to be the murder and rape brute squad) and looked down on their “savage” ways. But living with them, and seeing how they conduct themselves both in battle and in camp, she’s impressed. They’re certainly brave – Krojin didn’t even bother considering the whole “turn them over to the Red Mantis” spiel from Cinnabar – but they are also surprisingly joyful. Annata’s never been a big partyer (being largely confined to a temple for most of her post-street urchin life) and their celebrations, even after being attacked, seem much more honest and unabashed than Korvosan life, which appeals to some of her understanding of Sarenrae’s teaching (their worship of the sun also seems symbolic to her). She gets a bit of a Spring Break experience out of the celebrations and she needed that; being underground resistance in Korvosa had her wound pretty tight. By the time she has to leave, she is proud to be a Sun Clan Shoanti!
Amiri stays with the clan and Annata works to get her hooked up with Krojin. Brandie was just temping as a player, and Amiri’s backplot says she was trying to find acceptance with the barbarians so that wraps up neatly.
At the end of Part II, we actually started The Skeletons of Scarwall and did the initial briefing, Harrow readings, etc. And we get to see Laori again when we go find the Bortherhood of the Bones people! Shadow Count Sial and Asyra are lame, but Annata really likes Laori. Except for the evil-god thing they are two peas in a pod and happily chatter away with each other till Malcolm and Thorndyke are driven to distraction.
Posted in session summaries
Tagged 3.5e, adventure path, crimson throne, curse of the crimson throne, D&D, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs
Something Awful has a piece on the freakiest monsters from the AD&D 1e Monster Manual! My favorite is the Hippocampus, also my daughters’ favorite on merry-go-rounds everywhere. “They differ from a normal seahorse in that they have a long rear body similar to that of a great fish.” Think about that for a minute.
Part 2 is coming Friday!
This was a short session, as we went to see Watchmen beforehand. (And everyone liked it, despite all the naysayers out there).
This session starts with some noble and his retinue rolling up and claiming they own the manor house we just cleared of undead! Turns out the guy’s the husband of the lady we let loose from Valix Drogue’s dungeon. Apparently he had something to do with her being in there, as he is with a new mistress already. I was fine with that, and willing to take a job to go finish her off, but the guy had the balls to offer us 2000 silver for the job. Killing a noble’s worth 10k at least, 2k is an insult. So when the assassin showed up for him – we decided to help her out. No one insults Versane and lives to tell about it.
The session scribe had to leave early, so here’s the quick version of how it finished:
Versane and the assassin fought the Groarg captain and two tough mooks for like ten rounds with no one hurting anyone else. Finally their sorcerer opened the door and zapped Versane, who filled him full of arrow holes for his temerity.
Downstairs, Garret engaged guard after guard out in the yard, not hurting a one of them, while Ardreth and Seth zap-and-stun them off him. They were down to three opponents, two of them stunned, when Ardreth decided to come upstairs and help.
Sadly, all three of those guys downstairs then activated in ninja mode. Two of them ran up and slashed Seth into little pieces. Bennie spends and fleeing only bought him like a round. Garret engaged and finally killed the third one but too late for Seth.
Ardreth showed up and zapped the crap out of the Groarg captain. He still fought all three of us us off for like five rounds with three wounds on him. We finally killed all of them, as the two guards who killed Seth showed up. They saw we were badass and ran off.
And… that’s about it! The assassin killed the Baron and the paralyzed chickie. The majordomo and doctor surrendered (well, the majordomo just tried to stay between us and the Baron, but that was less “combat” and more “step around him”).
So yes, Tim died again. He loves making new characters anyway.
We continue into the fourth chapter of the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path from Paizo, using the Pathfinder RPG beta rules.
Part I of A History of Ashes is kinda Part II since we got a lot of the initial plot explication out in the previous session. We were really short on players, so Chris’ girlfriend decided to dive in as Amiri the barbarian, and she learned the joy of the UltraHack!
It was a short session, we screwed around a lot beforehand. We went to get devoured by the sandworm, but the noob is the only one who got swallowed! Then we go to perform some barbarian initiation ritual where we have to keep our poles erect for three days straight. Has anyone else noticed that this whole adventure path has been pretty homoerotic? In the art, even in the character descriptions, there’s “a lot for the ladies” in Curse of the Crimson Throne. Good thing I’m playing a female character.
Speaking of females, we pressure one of our groupies into playing this time, and she outshines her bf easily! Woot!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged 3.5e, adventure path, crimson throne, curse of the crimson throne, D&D, Pathfinder, RPG, RPGs
The RPG Superstar 2009 contest is in its final round! Open to all, the winner gets to write a Pathfinder module for Paizo. I just bought the one written by last year’s winner – S1: Clash of the Kingslayers by Christine Schneider!
Let’s check out the finalists.
Realm of the Fellnight Queen, by Neil Spicer
Hmm. I know my gaming group, and they will immediately start referring to the titular villain as the “fellatio queen.” It has to to with a bleached gnome following a fey queen’s commands to kill the local good fey in preparation for a Ravenloft-mists-type invasion from the fey realm.
I have to say, a couple things in here seem like a bit of a stretch. There’s a new monster that’s formed when “a nixie’s vengeful spirit reforms after being slain by a chaos beast.” That’s a bit… fringe. One of the encounters is the dreaded “the party should know to flee this instead of fight” kind of encounter. And there’s a lot of fey and gnomes. Which is fine, if you’re into that, but in general I wouldn’t tend to buy and run this kind of adventure. 4e’s beating both the fae and shadows to death anyway. The adventure structure is solid, but I just don’t find it compelling.
Dragonrest Isle, by Kevin Carter
A kind of Isle of Dread with the ethereal remains of a great dragon-on-dragon battle. It’s definitely more of a “sandbox adventure” than a plot-driven one, which leads to some concerns about “what if they do that out of order” and “how are they supposed to know X except by luck.” For a sandbox adventure it’s a little short on random fun sandbox stuff, but I reckon there’s no reason a pitch needs every random encounter mentioned in it.
It’s pretty generic and not real Golarion-ey, but I think that’s OK, I think some folks overdo it on that front sometimes. Just because I’m buying a Pathfinder adventure to set in Golarion doesn’t mean I necessarily need it to be so “deep into” the setting that I have trouble changing locales or plot points to suit my campaign. (And in fact the next two guys get taken to task for not fitting into the rich world backstory.)
The pitch isn’t brilliantly constructed, but the adventure it describes seems fun.
Last Ride of the Mammoth Lords, by Eric Bailey
Poison turns barbarians into crazed plants! Starts out with RPing with the barbarians and fun barbarian games. There’s a bit of a wrinkle in that the hook is basically “go save the barbarians even though the barbarians don’t really want to be saved.” Either you have some barbarian allies along (annoying for the GM) or you’re doing this despite them (annoying for the players). But then you get to fight Amazons! Everyone always wusses out and makes Amazons the good guys nowadays. And a Savage Land kind of setup. I like it. I don’t really like big puzzles like the ziggurat, though “Crystal Skull” is fresh enough in people’s minds that it shouldn’t be a stumper. Jacobs complains a lot about the deviations from canon, but says there is a ziggurat and dino infested savage land in the area – just underground. OK, seems like a minor change to me.
Thirteen scenes seems like a lot depending on how much each one is developed, but not out of scope. Doesn’t seem like more than the other submissions.
Denying the Boiling Beast, by Matthew Stinson
Some of the judges dis this title, but at least it’s more interesting than the normal “generic module name” trash out there. “X of the Y” my ass. Learn to live a little. Every module title doesn’t have to sound like Gygax crapped it out. It’s the one title that actually got my interest.
I like the adventure and its early progression. The writing here is full of little grammar errors and wonkiness, however, which worries me about the state of the full adventure.
The adventurers get involved with the usual/cliche “guy getting his ass kicked in the city” hook, get hired as guards, and are shortly braving hurricanes and underwater adventuring. Loads of good ideas; some questionable transitions. The Boiling Sisterhood etc. are very super cool, but the plot seems like a bit of a mess. What’s up with the killer owl? In the end, it’s just too messy, which is a shame because it has a lot of good stuff going for it.
In the midst of the latest barrage of D&D 4e GSL news, Paizo Publishing, creator of the Pathfinder roleplaying game, has released their license and fansite policy. Pathfinder is widely considered to be a “fork” of Dungeons & Dragons, made possible by the Open Gaming License that D&D 3rd and 3.5th editions used. Let’s take a look!
This license, the PCL, is really the “secondary” license, as the Pathfinder rules are open for use already under the Open Gaming License. It is similar in concept to the old d20 STL from D&D 3e – the point of it is to be able to put a special Pathfinder logo on your product to indicate compatibility.
The short form is that the PCL covers printed books, electronic publications, and free web sites. You aren’t supposed to use it for standalone games (although you can certainly use the OGL Pathfinder rules for such a game). The restrictions are pretty minimal, and are things like “don’t pretend you’re Paizo,” “don’t do anything illegal,” and “don’t totally copy our trade dress.” Fair enough. Also, you have to send them a copy of your product.
If Paizo says you’re in breach of the license, you have 30 days to remedy it, or else you have to stop and destroy inventory. This is reasonably generous. It doesn’t seem to explicitly cover the “what about when the license ends,” like the d20 STL was eventually totally cancelled by Wizards and everyone had till the end of 2008 to sell off their inventory. IMO they should add something about that.
And that’s about it. They don’t bother with the draconian (and unenforceable) crap the GSL had in it about “don’t ever sue us or contest us legally about anything or we say YOU LOSE” – they just say you have to use King County, WA as your venue.
And if you want to do something not allowed by the OGL or this license – use Golarion IP, have a paysite, etc – you can email licensing@paizo.com to see if they’ll let you.
But Do You Need It?
In fact, my only concern comes in with some of the things the FAQ says. This license is used to be able to put a “Pathfinder Compatible” logo on your book. the FAQ claims that “So while the OGL allows you to make compatible products, it forbids you from indicating compatibility using the terms “Pathfinder,” “Pathfinder Roleplaying Game,” or “Paizo,” since those are our trademarks.”
I’m not sure that’s true. Legal advice is welcome, but Hasbro lost that suit to RADGames over their Monopoly add-ons – the court found that RADGames could happily make Monopoly add-ons and say “for use with Monopoly.” Similarly, Mayfair only lost their old Role Aids “D&D Compatible” suit because they had signed a license that prohibited them, not because the law prohibited them.
Of course you could just use the OGL and say “3.75 Compatible!” or similar evasion, but my point is you may be legally able to indicate Pathfinder compatibility without this license. Of course you’d have to be way more careful about everything else. And since the license is very non-restrictive, it’s probably pretty safe to sign it.
In summary – very good! 200% less restrictive than the GSL, better than the d20 STL, etc. Kudos to them for delivering it before the actual game.
And they follow it up with…
In other words, the fansite policy. Like the one Wizards hasn’t gotten around to yet… They strike the right note and set out the problem perfectly at the beginning:
The Paizo Publishing community is an intelligent, creative, dedicated, and enthusiastic group of people, and we at Paizo appreciate and value the contributions of our community members. This Community Use Policy is designed to encourage you to spread your enthusiasm and creativity while respecting ownership of our copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual properties.
While copyright and trademark laws protect our property, they also prevent you from using our intellectual properties in most circumstances. That means that you are generally prohibited from using any of our logos, images, or other trademarks or copyrighted content without our consent. This policy grants you the consent to use some of our intellectual property under certain circumstances.
This policy is limited to non-commercial use, where commercial is defined as “charging for it.” This is more generous than the White Wolf Dark Pack fansite policy, which started screwing with anyone having ads on their site, etc.
You have to put a short disclaimer on your site somewhere. Again, you can’t pretend to be Paizo or an agent thereof, and not use their trade dress.
Then we get to the one problematic stanza.
• You agree to use your best efforts to preserve the high standard of our intellectual property. You agree to present Paizo, our products, and the Paizo Material in a generally positive light. You agree to not use this permission for material that the general public would classify as “adult content,” offensive, or inappropriate for minors, and you agree that such use would irreparably harm Paizo. You agree not do anything illegal in or with products or websites produced under this Policy.
Illegal, fair enough. But the “positive light” thing seems a little bit like “don’t criticize us” and the adult content/inappropriate for minors thing sucks like the WotC GSL morals clause. There are already some “adult” pictures, popular on the Paizo forums, of some of the Rise of the Runelords characters. Paizo claims the morals clause is one of the reasons they don’t want to sign the GSL, so this is a bit two-faced. I think this could easily be changed to say that people doing “adult” stuff should follow general laws/Internet best practices in labelling it adult content to keep the kiddies out.
Anyway, if you do this you can use some pics and stuff they have, but most importantly you can descriptively use trademarks from their products. So you can rattle on about Paizo IP like Golarion, Kharzoug the Runelord, etc.
So, all great except for the “adult content” clause. Let’s see if we can get that improved by when the game comes out!
1. Uses the OGL – check. Perfect. Oh, actually, not quite perfect – I see the answer now to my compatibility/RADGames/Mayfair question, which is that the OGL cockblocks it! The OGL is the one that says “You agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of such Trademark or Registered Trademark.” So you could probably do that if not for the OGL. DANCEY!!!!!
2. Pathfinder Compatibility License – needs a little better work on the termination clause, mainly the “when it all ends” part. Ideally it would say “sell it on into infinity” but a long selloff would be fair. About 90% perfect.
3. Paizo Community Use Policy – very good except for the morals and critique clauses. About 75% perfect.
Well, glad you asked. It would be nice if third parties could set stuff in Golarion. Unthinkable, you say? You must be too used to D&D and Wizards/TSR setting the tone of RPG licensing.
Check out the Traveller licenses that Mongoose Traveller is using. It’s OGL, they have a Fair Use Policy (fansite, like the PCUP), a Traveller Logo License (like the PCL)… And one last one. This, the “Foreven Free Sector” license, lets people publish in the Imperium setting! Basically it gives them a sandbox in one sector of space they can use and reference external PI, they just can’t change anything outside the sandbox.
Paizo could easily do this with some section of Golarion. And why not? In my opinion, similar to the benefit of the OGL, having people write stuff for their game world would only benefit them. But you keep them in a sandbox to mitigate problems from quality issues or whatnot.
Come on guys, whaddya say? Want to be TOTALLY perfect and open? You can do it!!!
With the release of Wizards of the Coast’s new Game System License for Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, they’ve made a bunch of improvements, there’s no doubt. So how are the third party publishers taking it?
The general summary is that even though the anti-OGL clause is gone and there’s some more favorable termination language, this experience has taught people with large, established businesses that they don’t want to be dependent on Wizards for their sustenance. The remaining parts of the license, which still allow Wizards to terminate you without the six month sell off at their discretion – especially the hazy “morals clause” – spell out too much risk. So people with a game of their own are going to go that way. Which I think is fair.
If people still had trust in WotC that they would “behave well” and probably wouldn’t be in the arbitrary termination business, it might be different. But everyone’s seen a lot of sadness go down over the last two years and there’s not a reasonable expectation of that.
In fact, reading between the lines, though it would be “safe” for Paizo or GR to just do a couple 4e products without taking a major line over to it – they generally just don’t want to. What we’ve heard of 4e sales doesn’t make the $$ too tempting and after spending so much time and effort and love and pain “chasing the dragon” for the last couple years, they’ve just had it. (My interpretation.)
So the big boys are going to stay away, but it seems like it’s a compelling play for folks who are just starting up and have less to lose.
Pipe up down below if you hear about other folks getting on board or staying away.
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