Tag Archives: D&D

Geek Related – The Site

Posted on June 17, 2012 | 4 comments

I got a question in a post comment recently asking if the stuff on this Geek Related site was also me – it is, it’s my old Mindspring site from before I started the blog.  There’s some stuff you may find of interest there:

The Official Death To Jar Jar Binks Website – ah, youth.  Not really RPG related but the day after Phantom Menace came out I slapped the site together. It got featured on Salon and ZDTV among other media outlets. For the last like ten years I still get emails from people demanding “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?!?” like I’ve even touched the site in a decade.

The Way, The Truth, and the Dice – I was publisher for the e-zine of the Christian Gamers Guild for a couple years. There’s some good stuff in these mags (especially the realistic combat and friction rules); sadly it all fell apart due to infighting (they eventually put out a fourth issue some 5 years later with content we’d gathered, but nothing since then).

Scooby Doo Cthulhu – Almost as popular as the Jar Jar page, this is the Scooby crew statted for traditional (BRP) Call of Cthulhu.  Used in about a billion con games. “Julianus” did them, I just hosted them. I especially liked using them with the various “Blood Brothers” CoC adventures.

The Monk – I redid the monk class for AD&D 2e based on a more supernatural, free-wheeling style as I was watching a lot of HK movies and playing Feng Shui.  They totally stole my approach for Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords and then D&D 4e. I made up custom monastic orders for Greyhawk too, partially based on on some of Erik Mona’s Oerth Journal work (“Baklunish Delights”).

Horror in Roleplaying – probably one of the most lasting of my game essays, I did a lot of horror gaming back in the day and wrote extensively on how to do it. Nothing from the entire storygame movement has caused me to think any of it should be changed.

Classless Skills and Powers – I really enjoyed AD&D Second Edition and when the Skills & Powers supplements came out I wanted to like them – they let you do more of a custom character generation – but they were deeply, profoundly flawed.  I figured I’d fully GURPS them up and turn D&D classless.  This worked great, we ran several campaigns with these rules (sometimes mixing in non-S&P characters for those who didn’t want to go to the trouble). 3e ended up solving a lot of this in a simpler way so I left this behind when I upgraded, but for 2e OSR fans it could be useful!

Children of the Seed – Feng Shui is one of the best RPGs ever.  And it was powered high enough I thought it would make an even better anime game than a HK action game.  I was a fan of the anime series Blue Seed and so I wrote characters and a con-ready adventure to that end!

The Yeomanry page is down forever, sadly, and Bruce’s session summary page died with Onramp and he’s being a slack about getting it going again.

The great thing about all of these is that I had a lot of spare time back in the day and took all this real seriously – so this has all been playtested in campaigns and/or many con games, there’s bunches of sample characters and whatnot… About as complete as you could hope house rules and whatnot to be.

So poke around and let me know what you find interesting!

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 5

Posted on May 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

Fifth Session (10 page pdf) – We kill Thorborg the oni and make a bunch of new friends in preparation for our journey north. Plus we have to fight BLINDHEIMS!

Well, both Tim and Matt showed up late, but luckily walked in by the time we opened the door to the boss’ lair and went inside. Things started out well – I used Suishen’s wind walk and see invisible to get up in the air and see the oni and I shot her with an outsider bane arrow.  And then she shot a spear-sized arrow right into me with a crit and down I went in one shot. I’m not really made of hit points, it’s why I want to become an archer eventually.

V’lk then saved the day with an obscuring mist – cancels ninja backstabs and also made the oni have to move out of the mist and then attack.  Gobo pumped a couple cure light wounds into me by then the rest of the party was still screwing around down with the ninjas in the mist so I had to charge her again. But in a spate of good luck, V’lk poisoned her and I hit her, she missed me, and I hit her again taking her down – I maxed out all my stuff to do it. She fell to the ground and got scorching rayed in the face as a coup de grace.

Afterwards when we’re opening cells, we get flash-blinded by froglike critters – I recognized them immediately from my old Fiend Folio days.

Yep, it was blindheims. A blast from the past. We killed ’em.  After handing Ravenscraeg over to Longthews (if only he would be a useful ally in the future, but thrall-raping seems to be the extent of his mens’ skills) and headed north in our caravan.

Soon we got attacked by a frost giant raider who put a whupping on me till everyone woke up and got their act together.  Jacob is part frost giant or something so now we’re keeping him as a guide to “teach him their ways.” Apparently that’s horse thieving, but I guess he’s dressing it up a little more mystical than that.

That’s all we did; between travel and treasure distribution and a bad case of “everyone not paying a lot of attention” we chewed through the session hours pretty rapidly.

Oh, and we leveled to sixth.  Woot!  Didn’t get much, but more hit points is always welcome.  New character sheets as I get them are uploaded to the main campaign page.

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How We Track Treasure Nowadays

Posted on May 27, 2012 | 2 comments

Tracking treasure and its distribution has always been a bit of a pain. How much loot has been lost because it got tossed in a bag “for distribution later” and then forgotten?

For our Jade Regent campaign, I got tired of it (and of how much time we spent on doing distributions) so I came up with this Excel spreadsheet format. Warning: It has all our treasure in it, so there’s spoilers for the first two chapters of the Jade Regent Adventure Path.

We keep the spreadsheet on a common Dropbox so all of us can get to it at the game and at home. Whenever we get stuff it immediately goes onto the Party Treasure tab. We note where it’s from so that when we ask our DM two sessions later about identifying or pricing “that toad statue” we can help him figure out where the heck it came from.

Once we pause and do a distribution, all distributed items go to the Distributed Treasure tab. Some of our players aren’t real sharp about writing things down, which is fine if it’s just them sucking due to not keeping their stuff straight but some items are plot related. Also sometimes we have to do distributions when someone’s not there, so this way they know what stuff we gave them last session.

Then there’s a separate Coinage tab for raw cash with a running total of “party funds” and once it gets high enough we dole out shares.

Since this is Jade Regent our caravan has a separate economy of its own, and we track that on the Caravan tab.

We’ve found it very helpful. I don’t like clotting up the session summaries with loot lists (though I’m having trouble breaking Bruce of doing so) and too often it’s one guy who writes it all down in pencil and then loses the list between sessions.  Welcome to TECHNOLOGY!  Feel free and download it and use it yourself, just tell them Geek Related sent you!

 

 

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All You Hit Points Belong To Us?

Posted on May 26, 2012 | 14 comments

One of the most contentious topics out of the day-old D&D Next playtest is the rule that resting overnight gets you all your hit points back without fail.  There are multiple Wizards and ENWorld threads arguing about it already.

I think it’s a terrible idea.

The common arguments for it and their obvious refutations are:

1. Well, hit points are just luck and near misses and stuff! Why shouldn’t they all come back?

Because there’s no other mechanic for actually getting wounded.  If this were a game with “wound points and vitality points” or some other way of having a way to reflect persistent wounds while still regaining your “near miss points” that would be fine.  But there’s not.  And being wounded, persistently wounded, is not just realistic, it’s a major part of all fantasy fiction from Lancelot to Harry Dresden. Leaving that out is shitty from a storytelling point of view.

Besides, hit points have always been described that way and have always come back slowly, so saying it’s a necessary consequence is ignoring the mechanic’s history.

2. But it sucks to be injured when you’re headed out to adventure!

“I want my videogame character to be at max!”  I mean, I understand that from a certain gamist perspective. But this is the kind of player entitlement that leads to the kind of childproofed gaming that 4e got to with its rust monster. If you just want a big “I Win” button or have a 5 minute attention span, there’s other games to play.  RPGs allow you to be concerned about resource usage over the long haul, not just the 30 minutes.

3. In 3.x, isn’t it lame that everyone has to spend on wands of cure light wounds that just do this anyway?

No one has actually said this that I’ve seen but me, but this is the one valid argument that does occur to me.  Yes, it is lame to just pay thousands of gold to get disposables to do the same thing. But there’s probably a different fix to that problem than “here you go, heal up whenever you want!”.

 

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D&D Next Playtest Readthrough: Eh, It’s OK

Posted on May 25, 2012 | 7 comments

I’ve read through the D&D Next (aka 5e) playtest doc and my general opinion is… It’s OK.

Background: I have played D&D Basic (BECMI), AD&D 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e, and Pathfinder, but hated 4e at first play.  I like Pathfinder but it’s wearing on me due to the sheer mass of rules; I hanker for a more Basic/2e approach with less… junk.  I don’t really like the retro-clones because I don’t like retro for the sake of retro, I’d like modern and streamlined but just lighter. Anyone who can say with a straight face “Want to play a game with us? OK, read this 576 page book first” deserves a punch in the mouth.

The playtest rules say I can’t quote rules directly, but I can discuss them generally, so here goes.

The core rules are pretty D&D-like.  Interesting main points are:

  • Ability checks vs DCs replace skills and are used for saves. Good.
  • New thing: “Advantage” lets you roll 2d20 take best, “Disadvantage” is take lowest, this replaces the host of annoying little modifiers.  Good.
  • Individual initiative 3e style. Fine.
  • You can take an action and optionally move – so far the rules are gratifyingly free of the host of Magic: The Gathering-esque action types that invaded 3e+. Good.
  • Rests and semi-healing surges like 4e… You take a long rest and regain *all* of your hit points?  WTF? Bad.
  • Conditions like in 3e, which is on the line between helpfully streamlined and annoyingly legalistic. Fine.
  • Armor is simpler, AC, all/half/none of your DEX mod, and speed mod.  Good.
  • Weapons are about the same with lots of categories and bludgeoning/piercing/etc… Well, a little simpler I guess.  A weapon might be a “heavy” weapon doing 1d10 bludgeoning and having a couple “special” attributes like Reach; at least no weapon speeds and crit mods and all that.  Good.
  • There’s not the annoying “types” of bonus, but dangerously, the stacking rule is that only the same exact spell doesn’t stack, so we can look forward to super min-maxed stuff that 3e at least tried to mitigate somewhat with the “different e.g. enhancement bonuses don’t stack” thing. Good for sentence 1, bad for sentence 2.
  • Spells require either a hit roll or a save; more than 3.x require hit rolls using your spellcasting stat bonus. Some people hate this, I don’t know why, I used to do this in 2e as a house rule so that magic wasn’t 100% reliable. Heck, they should do it more (like for placing fireballs I used the usual grenade weapon rules and splash diagram). Good.
  • Spells do not appear to scale at all with level – not durations, not cure light hp healed, etc. Magic missile seems to be an odd exception. Maybe as a “sacred cow?”
  • The base rules as they put them out seem fine, but then again that’s what I thought about the basic mechanic of 4e in my 4e PHB readthrough. So I’m nervous.
  • The core rules as they printed them here seem to focus more on exploration than 4e, which was purely tactical combat, but that’s hard to tell from a 31 page draft.
  • The DM guidelines are fine if not innovative. It does put the DM back in the driver’s seat.
  • Since there’s no skills, DCs don’t scale as much, with a DC of 20 being “Extreme.” That’s very good. The swinginess of 3.5e “DC 40” checks was lame. It also seems to stress flexibility and roleplay in how to go about making a check.  Good.

So that’s all pretty good, the only “Danger Will Robinson” moment is the thing where you heal up completely overnight automatically. Avoids the “CureLight Wounds wand” syndrome but isn’t very realistic, I’d like to see some persistent wounds on top of that maybe.

The Characters

Then I read the character sheets, which scared me a little more. A first level halfling rogue seems to have a lot of crap. Race and class and background and theme turn into like 11 specials to remember. I start seeing what are basically skills, just hardcoded, and feats. It seems like too much.  Although in the examples, background seems to only give skill bumps and themes give a feat. Maybe background *or* theme… Especially on the wizard the difference between the two is pretty thin and confusing. Themes are like 2e kits, kinda. But so are the backgrounds.

On the plus side, all the powers so far seem to make sense- the fighter’s powers aren’t weird pseudo arcane stuff like in 4e.

The Monsters

The monsters in the bestiary are OK, except for being a little too complex and legalistic full 3e stat block style – and with fixed hit points, but that might be just for the playtest.

I am concerned with the treatment of NPCs as monsters and not real characters 4e style, so for example there’s an evil cultist entry with three “types” as if they’re Left4Dead zombies as opposed to being real people – “What, there’s no such thing as a second level evil cleric?” I see more of this in the adventure, with arbitrary “specials” on the orcs and goblins.  And several of these powers (gnoll packlord, I’m looking at you ) go over the line to breaking simulation (no in game world justification, just “a power”). Meh.

The Adventure

Caves of Chaos.  A good choice as it is very nonlinear. I like the format for rooms that leads off with sensory input, very short boxed text, then gets to it.  Not just three 4 hour long setpiece battles like 4e does, but a proper module, looks like it’ll play like any other D&D at first glance.

The Summary

It’s like a simplified 3e, corrupted with only small 4e-isms.  The ongoing meme is that it’s somehow more like OSR stuff but I don’t see that – there’s a little simplification but not even down to 2e levels, let alone earlier levels. Removal of the obsessive focus on the tactical map is what’s making people say that, I guess. “It’s not pure 4e, so it must be OSR?” The simplification is welcome to my eyes.  I’m not sure if this quite reaches the level of being compelling, though. I worry especially from the character sheets that there’s a bunch more junk they just haven’t shown us yet that’ll take it to 3.5e levels of law degree gaming.

One of the big things that’ll sway me is if they go open.  I suspect they won’t just because even the playtest is laden with legalese junk. If they do, it might make it.  If they don’t, they won’t pull anyone from their current games of choice, is my prediction (and all my 4e/5e predictions are coming true with regularity now…).

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Trouble Downloading Your D&D Next Playtest?

Posted on May 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

I did initially too, but a cursory look around revealed this customer service post with a link to a direct download.

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Random D&D News

Posted on May 24, 2012 | 2 comments

There’s a Design Your Own D&D T-Shirt contest going on courtesy of Topless Robot on WeLoveFine.com. Go check out the designs and submit your own!

Also, I just got the email about the D&D Next (aka D&D 5e) playtest being open, and I should be getting an email with the stuff in it soon.  Though I’m a Pathfinder fan, if they can make something simpler – like 2e with cleaned up mechanics, or Rules Cyclopedia Basic – I may be in!

However, I’ve been listening to some actual play podcasts lately – mainly the Major Spoilers podcast is relevant here – and have been realizing how Goddamn boring D&D 4e combat is.  “I shift two squares and hit it.” I want that crap to go away fast. The podcast is engaging till combat hits and then it’s excruciatingly boring (for like an hour!). Hint, that’s how the game has gotten too!

Note the ENWorld discussion forum for D&D Next as well as the WotC D&D Next page.

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 4

Posted on May 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

Fourth Session (13 page pdf) – Trolls, ninjas, necromancers, statues – they all fall before our righteous wrath. We kill, and loot!  And kill and kill and loot!  Kill kill kill, loot loot loot…

Most of the Paizo APs, I’ll be honest, give you crap treasure.  This one is different!  Besides my new intelligent katana Suishen, we’ve found a lot of unique and cool magic items.

The most enjoyable fight was with the three monks then the lady ninja.  It was a big “you can’t see them” fest – I took care of the shadows and all with a daylight from Suishen and then I figured the See Invisible would take me the rest of the way – but that ninja chick, even when sniping and taking a -20 to her Stealth check, was totally staying hidden and owning us with sneak attacks.  Three shuriken are a joke unless they’re each coming with a many-d6 sneak attack attached.

The toughest fight was with those stupid statues.  Super high DR, immune to all magic, break  your weapons when you hit them – and they were like CR4 or something, what a hose job. We had to stop after to recover to hit Thorborg.

This weekend, we’ll fight the oni posing as Thorborg Silverscore!  I best log off now because there’s a hell of a thunderstorm brewing here in central Texas, but more soon!

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 3

Posted on May 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

Third Session (14 page pdf) – We assault Ravenscraeg, Thorborg’s hideout. It is full of ravens, and ninjas, and raven-ninjas.  And we totally find the intelligent ancestral sword of the Amatatsu family in a hole!

Our plan to sneak around like ninjas is largely busted by a raven swarm attack. Our disguises do let us get the drop on a room of ninjas, though, so we fight them then a squad of Vikings pretty well.

Our Viking prisoner gives up some intel. Being Combat as War fans, we set up an ambush for their werebear leader and took him down with extreme prejudice.

Some DVD extras – Bjorn snatched all the money from the Murder God’s offering bowl, I hope it’ll come back to haunt him.  And the inside joke of “Eye Ape, Ear Ape, Ear Ape” is because I figure the blind Gobo, mute V’lk, and just-doesn’t listen Harwynian are like the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil monkeys. And in some anime, Paul had seen that subtitled as “Eye Ape, Ear Ape, Ear Ape,” which amused all of us.

We also liked going into the kitchen. The Vikings were like “You pesky ninjas, get out of the food!” Then we killed them.  Except for the baker, we commanded him to continue baking the tasty bread.

It turns out the most vicious sub-boss in the place was a raven! We had quite a time fighting it. And of course Bjorn’s anti-animal abilities don’t work on it.  “It’s a magical animal!”

In the end, we found the intelligent katana, and learned Thorborg is really an oni!  We had been half considering leaving and letting Asvig Longthews and his Vikings clear the place, but that convinced us we need to sweep and clear – next time!

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 2

Posted on April 28, 2012 | 2 comments

Second Session (11 page pdf) – We head out to Asvig Longthews’ house to kill us some Vikings. We end up saving some Vikings but killing some ninjas!  Once we hear a chick named “Thorborg” is behind this unholy genre mash-up, we head right out to kill her.

We snuck up on a Viking wake. After V’lk annoyed me by setting off the obvious lion-summoning trap, we got control of the place without a lot of trouble. Asvig Longthews as our prisoner was being intractable, but we knew that a lot of these guys have some kind of head-exploding curse on them for if they talk.  In what seemed to be quite against GM expectations, we managed to dispel the curse and get the Ulfen on our side!

Alas, the ninja ambush that was probably going to be waiting for us at the funeral boats just came to the longhouse instead. And they took me out fast.  With my character, sometimes I end up leading the battle to victory, sometimes I get dropped in two rounds. Not too much in between. Finally, we kill them and head off to find the person behind this, a woman named Thorborg (this made us giggle).

So we argue about plans – draw her to town, ambush her on the road… No, we’ll just go right up to the front door of her keep. Our attempt to bluff our way past the door guards goes badly and we get to fight more ninjas.  They are really annoying, because they can go invisible and then sneak attack you.  For a PC it’s less cool because you can only do it a couple times a day, but of course monsters only have to go one combat and get to use all their daily uses on you.

The humorous silver lining, however, is that the kenku ninjas were equipped liberally with blowguns.  Kenku are bird-people with beaks, not lips. This caused a minor riot to break out when we found it out.  They didn’t use them on us, luckily.  We speculated that there’s some ninja union and they make everyone carry blowguns whether or not they are equipped biologically to use them. “Now that’s Lawful!”

The illustrations in the books add a lot to the play experience.  We always show the monster pics to the players (sometimes having to obscure 3/4 of the page in the book to safely do so) and in this one, the spider eater picture really put us off our feed; we had considered killing it just to clear the way and after we saw it we decided “screw that!”

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Monte Cook Leaves Wizards/D&D 5e Design Team

Posted on April 26, 2012 | 6 comments

In surprising news on his Livejournal, Monte Cook has announced he’s leaving the D&D Next design team. He says it’s not a disagreement with his fellow designers, but with the company.

This is bad news, very bad news, for D&D Next.  Monte was providing external credibility, as someone who had worked on Pathfinder and has been outside the WotC/Hasbro echo chamber, to the process. Mike Mearls has been talking all old school but he’s been in charge of 4e for a long time and many of its missteps belong directly at his feet. I was willing to believe the combined team, I’m not so sure I’m willing to believe “Now it’ll be even better!’ backpedaling/spin from the same old characters.

I wonder what ‘corporate disagreement’ is in this case. Did they not want to pay him enough?  Or did he see the business plan and think “this is crap on toast?” The Examiner has some speculation. Mearls’ post does have a little bit of a lightly disguised slap-back in it so I’m not sure the “company not the designers” thing is entirely forthcoming.

I guess we’ll see; Wizards took the opportunity to announce that the 5e playtest will start on May 24. Maybe we’ll see something good… But the person with the most experience working with actual players and getting playtest information on products just left. And I’m worried that they’ll just show off some core mechanic that will seem fine…  When I did my initial 4e PHB readthrough, the core mechanic itself seemed fine, it was what they did on top of it that (IMNSHO) ruined the game.

Well, good luck to Monte, and good luck to the 5e team.  (The latter needs it!)

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Jade Regent – Night of Frozen Shadows, Session 1

Posted on April 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

First Session (16 page pdf) – We journey with our caravan all the way from Roderic’s Cove in Varisia to Kalsgard in the Land of the Linnorm Kings. A fair number of Viking raiders toss themselves onto our swords.

We kicked into the second chapter of the Jade Regent AP today. Our characters are shaping up well if oddly.  V’lk is mute and Gobo is blind, Harwynian is somewhat… flighty. Bjorn and Jacob are alternately charging into combat and absent. But we’re getting into the groove with each other. See our main Jade Regent page for the character sheets level by level.

The road up to the Linnorm Kings went through many lovely locales including mining towns and a village of gnomish mini-Vikings. I stomped around it pretending to be Gojira.

Along the way, I decided Hiro would take up playwriting; he adapted the crazy tengu’s play into a work called “The Cuckolded Cuckoo” that the caravan performed along the way. We also continued to experiment with caravan fighting rules. We fought off trolls and bandits without much trouble.

We got ambushed at night though, and I about died – those Ulfen greataxes put a whupping on you fast, and all our ACs are pretty low.  I managed to escape the press and led the chasing Ulfen into a narrow place between the wagons where Harwynian could Web them. Then it was a lot easier… We even took a bunch of prisoners to sell back for their weregeld.

In the end, we got to Kalsgard, our destination, and start in on the long chain of “Ah yes, I had that sword, but now…”

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