Tag Archives: D&D

Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Eleventh Session

Posted on June 3, 2011 | 3 comments

Eleventh Session (13 page pdf) – “Teeth of Araska” – A Shackles pirate ship led by the infamous Captain Grudge decides the PCs look like tasty prey. Will they be victims or victors? Thrill to the nautical naughtiness in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate!

The ship-on-ship combat was pretty happening.  I used my Quickie Mass Combat Rules to streamline it; it was the PCs and their named NPCs and four units of Riddleport Thugs against Captain Grudge, his named NPCs, and six units of Araska Pirates.

We were also using my cannon rules. I love sweeping the decks of the PC’s ship with grapeshot. It gives me a sense of accomplishment.

In the end, they had a good fight of it but they really smacked around the pirate captain without him doing all too much.  But he was part bard, after all.  You can download Captain Grudge from the Reavers NPC Page!

One of the neatest parts was when Tommy chased the elven sniper/sorcerer Selis down into the depths of the ships alone… He stabbed what he thought was the hiding elf, but it was some mook, and he got locked into a cabin and a spider swarm summoned onto him!  He frantically tried to push through the poison and distraction to pick the lock and get out of there; he succeeded but it was a close thing. A huge mass of spiders coursing out onto the deck had quite the salutary effect on everyone up there.

Once the fighting was over, we had some roleplaying – “get to know the crew,” farewells to some of the NPCs, dealing with Clegg Zincher…  Sadly, Kevin, Tommy’s player, was out, so it didn’t come to blows with Zincher (he really wants him dead.) They took the Dark Pearl back to Riddleport with Sam, Eli, and Hatshepsut while the PCs decided they wanted to take their new ship, the Teeth of Araska, out to recruit crew and maybe find some treasure.

Most of the rest of the session was inspecting the ship, planning, refitting, and generally regrouping, since the last several sessions have been nonstop desperate combat to escape the Devil’s Elbow. And having their own ship is exciting! Are they in over their heads?  Probably!

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D&D Lair Assault: 4e Wallows In Its Own Filth

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 26 comments

The description of the new WotC Organized Play program made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I keep hoping 4e might come back from the brink.  Mike Mearls keeps posting “Ah yes, the good things we are starting to remember from older D&D editions” posts on his blog. Maybe D&D isn’t degenerating into a tactical minis game forever after all, I think.

And then they just up and announce it’s a tactical minis game. No really, go read the link.  The new OP is “tailored to groups of players who enjoy solving tactical puzzles, optimizing characters, and using rules to their advantage.” You come and minmax character builds and run them through a tactical simulation. If you die, it’s back to the save point and try again. Again, really, “Adventuring groups will often attempt a challenge several times before solving it.” The “D&D Fortune Cards are a required and integral part” isn’t even in the top 10 disturbing things about this.

Frankly, Organized Play is behind a lot of the bad stuff that started to corrupt 3e. It breeds a certain mindset and playstyle with very tightly constrained encounter difficulties, point buy min maxing, etc. that ends up corrupting the expectations of players. Now they are, as the kids today say, “Sticking it in and breaking it off” as far as that’s concerned.

I wonder how the people that always object to saying that 4e is becoming exactly like a computer game can even begin to continue to say that with a straight face now.

I mean, I don’t mind wargaming. I remember a lively game of Stargrunt II I played at a Gen Con.  But WotC needs to start a separate tactical game line and stop making everyone think that it is a roleplaying game. It just breeds more “It’s only about the kill” goons that inhabit local game tables, Internet forums, and eventually the ranks of adventure and supplement authors.

P.S.  If this is  your first visit here and you just don’t understand WHY…  I’m not gonna bother to link you to the past posts that explain how 4e is different from roleplaying games, etc.; if you can’t type “4e” into the search box above if you really want to find out, then you fall below the minimum INT required to care about whether you understand what’s going on…

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Games That Really Disappointed Me

Posted on May 21, 2011 | 19 comments

A thread on TheRPGSite about “Games You Really Wanted To Like But Couldn’t” struck a chord with me.  Here’s some of the games I really, really wanted to like but was sadly crushed by. Chime in with yours!

Rune. After Feng Shui, which I loved with an intense love, I was really looking forward to Robin Laws’ next game, and Vikings are cool, so it seemed like a shoo-in. Then when I got it, it was a weird budget-driven thing that I couldn’t even begin to attempt to run. You can’t put in a trap, you have to take the trap out of the budget for opposing elements…  Spreadsheet time! To create a Rune adventure you’d have to do days of prep and math, there is no “winging it.” A warning shot of what has mostly gone wrong with RPGs since in many ways. Recently I saw the 2e clone Myth & Magic trying to put in an “XP budget” thing in their scenario building and it gave me post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks to Rune, I said “Rip that out POST HASTE boys!”

Savage Worlds. With Savage Worlds there isn’t enough meat there unless the GM is willing to be off-the-cuffing stuff, and ours wasn’t. “I’m sorry, that seems like a valid Strength trick but the game only defines Smarts and Agility tricks.” “Oh well then this system is boring as all get out as written.” Also probably the GM’s style is to blame, he’d just suddenly take 15 minutes to build a big HeroClix battle mat and put the exact same generic goblin and dwarf minis down on it (we never fought dwarves or goblins, they were just stand-ins) and look at us and say “What do you want to do?” “To what? Where are we? What do those goblins represent? Are they attacking us or something?” But we gave it two campaigns. Once the final one ended with us getting killed by the traditional SW “guy you can’t hit ever except on super lucky dice explosions” we boycotted.

With FATE, I’ve tried Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files. Spirit of the Century was just too big.  411 pages for a “pick-up” RPG?  There was no way to bootstrap a group into playing it.  With Dresden Files, it wasn’t really the core mechanics that got us. Well, maybe it was. I just remember the wizard continually outshining other people in their specialty, and then us taking an egregiously long time to cast some detection spell. “Do we have enough juju to make it work? No? OK, we put in… Some grass, because he was on grass when he was abducted! Still not enough? We put in… A phone book with his name in it! How about now?” We stole Aspects and just added them to our Pathfinder characters in some campaigns, that works well enough. Might give FATE a try in another circumstance, but it’s operating at “two strikes.”

D&D 4e, because I actually liked D&D in Basic, 1e, 2e, and 3e; then 4e took a big steaming dump on everything the game stood for.

M&M 2e and Spycraft 2e. I loved 1e of both, and I was fine with upgrading and bought the books for both new editions sight unseen. And with both, they took a fine RPG and ladled on big levels of complexity and made it read like an encyclopedia full of definitions and not a game. They were completely un-charming and in both cases after reading some, even with my previous understanding from the earlier edition, I didn’t really want to power through reading the rest of the weighty tome. There’s a game design philosophy that sometimes comes into vogue that says “Make it read like a big ol’ dictionary, and they can just piece it together from all the individual definitions!”  And that’s about as easy as learning a foreign language from a dictionary. Game designers, stop being lazy. Write a game.

I think it’s at this point I decided giant complex games were not for me any more and started eyeballing lighter approaches (though sadly Savage Worlds was supposed to be the lead candidate there).

Those are the games that I really, really wanted to like, that many people told me I should like, but that in the end I like so little that if our group was like “Let’s play X” I, who generally go along with whatever game system without comment, would have to say “Uh… I don’t know if I’d really enjoy that.”

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Myth & Magic Playtest Underway

Posted on May 14, 2011 | 7 comments

Myth & Magic is a 2e retroclone under development and it’s looking good!

In retrospect, the much maligned 2e was probably, in my opinion, close to the best version of D&D. Shocking claim, I know.  But a lot of the stuff in 0e (race as class?) certainly deserved to die, and 1e was pretty Byzantine. 2e cleaned it up but was still light enough that people could house-rule and “ruling, not rules” reliably. I was really sold on 3e when it came out, and it definitely had some nice bits, but over the years it led to some mighty undesirable things (CharOp, Christmas Tree Syndrome, etc.).  A cleaned-up 2e might just do it for me!

You can download the Myth & Magic Player’s Starter Guide and GameMaster’s Starter Guide for free (forum registration required) now, they’re a playtest covering levels 1-10.

Player’s Starter Guide

It’s not just a slavish reprint of 2e, which is good. They’ve adopted the to-hit bonus and AC ascending from 10 from d20 instead of the less intuitive THAC0.  And they’ve added a seventh stat, Perception.  I think this is just wonderful; I ran with a Perception (and sometimes Luck) stat for most of 2e’s run. In general it’s 2e but cleaned up.

They also add “class talents” which are kinda like feats but scoped down a lot and limited to specific classes. You can spend proficiencies on them. I like some things about that approach, though I worry that powergamers will just take those and not actual NWPs.

There are still some wonky bits I’d like sanded off, like different XP tables per class – that’s just complexity that adds no value.  I don’t require classes be “balanced” but let’s avoid those different-for-the-sake-of-it bits that littered early D&D. If you want thieves to advance X% faster, give them the same XP table and just give them X% more thief skill points a level. Voila, same effect, less complexity.

On the other end, the only modernization I’d remove is the point buy character creation.  That is the gateway to optimized character builds, which in turn are the root of all evil. Yeah, it was an option back then, it was still bad.

GameMaster’s Starter Guide

The GMSG kicks off with the usual but keeps it short instead of meandering in for hundreds of pages, and even includes the first raft of monsters, which is good. It goes bad, however, when it incorporates the 3e approach to balanced encounters – ELs and XP budget.  “The XP budget tells you the maximum amount of XPs you can tally to an encounter.” That’s some 4e bullshit right there and needs to go.

On the monsters, they have a “CAM” (Combat Ability Modifier) which seems overly simplistic – it’s a single modifier for all skills and attacks and physical attribute checks in combat. It replaces all the stats but Int and Per. I’m about streamlining but that’s a little much, it makes monsters too homogeneous. Everything’s as strong as it is dextrous as it makes Will saves. And it’s always equal to the monster’s HD, which begs the question of why it needs to be an additional separate stat with an oblique acronym in every listing.

It does have random treasure determination tables; I get pissed off every time I run Pathfinder and want one, so props there.

Both

The art is sparse but good,the graphic design is simple but good, and it’s copyedited better than many pro products I’ve bought.

The game is definitely a good innovation on and return to 2e; with some more work I could see it being competitive with e.g. Pathfinder which I really like. And I like it better than the 0e clones, I never got that, 1e is the first real edition, and even in a cleaned up version like Castles & Crusades there’s still a little bit too much “Oh I’m a first level cleric and have… no spells.  I suck.”

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Tenth Session

Posted on May 9, 2011 | 1 comment

Tenth Session (7 page pdf) – “Sign of the Void” – A shadow demon tries to claim the PCs’ allegiance and takes rejection poorly. But their rune-markings unlock odd new weapons that prove most efficacious against the phantoms he unleashes from beyond the dark gate. Will they work as well against Clegg Zincher and cannon shot? They find out!

This session was basically two big battles; the first was a continuation of the major sea-cave setpiece from last session. Chmetugo the shadow demon showed up and laid a rap on them about how they are marked with the sign of the void and are fated to serve him and to transform the world into some weird monster realm. Naturally they turned him down. So he raised all the pirates as undead and sicced them on the party as basically unlimited numbers of tentacle-dogs came through the dark gate into our world.

I came up with a cool environmental thing; the shadow demon used his cold powers to make the surface of the water start freezing, moving outward another 10′ radius every round. This allowed the tentacle-dogs to attack (albeit precariously), provided danger for the PCs in the water, and generally made things interesting. They enjoyed breaking the ice, sliding around on the ice, and generally indulging in shenanigans. They finally decided that the only way to take care of the whole thing is to blow it up, which is fair enough.

Also, they investigated their weird runes they got from the activation of the Cyphergate. Glyphs from Tammerhawk’s glyph-plaque that exploded are embedded in their bodies and tattoolike runes appear over their location. They know that the glyphs burn when the tentacle-dogs are close, but now once they touched the gate they seem to be more active somehow. They resonate with the matching larger glyphs that once sealed this gate. During the fight they got a hold of the glyphs and they turn into weapons made of orichalcum that allow the PCs to hurt the shadow creatures. And when they saw Zincher with a similar weapon, they realized that he too was there in the Riddleport Light that day. They didn’t have a lot of spare time, but they started counting glyph plaques and trying to put two and two together. And the metaplot rolls on.

And more Clegg Zincher. That’s always fun. They kinda want to kill him and kinda not.  But he’s threatening Tommy’s girlfriend! But he’s a made man! But we don’t like him, he worked against us and Saul! But he does a lot of damage with that pickaxe! But he told the demon he refused to be its butt-boy! But… I see Zincher as an interesting Mafia type guy. He tells demons and Commies and other undesirables to go hose, and is out there personally helping people in the neighborhood when disasters come. But he’s a ruthless businessman who is not hesitant about having people killed.  But he operates under a certain code of honor. And he loves birds.

So pretty much, two three hour long fights! I don’t usually do that, I go in for more RP and stuff, but I wanted to really amp up this start of a new leg of the campaign. The first season was mostly urban and not so much pirate; this leg will be real pirate in spades!

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Fixing the Gunslinger

Posted on April 24, 2011 | 16 comments

We have been using primitive firearms in our Pathfinder campaign Reavers on the Seas of Fate, and watched with interest Paizo’s publishing of new gun rules and the Gunslinger class as part of a playtest for Ultimate Combat. In this last Reavers session, I put in a pirate captain with four levels of gunslinger to kick the class’ tires.

The gunslinger class is fine.  But the gun rules Paizo published are awful and suck utterly. Because their gun damage output is so low, and because they published them before the gunslinger class and they were therefore not up for playtest, to be viable the gunslinger ends up spending loads of abilities on getting more and more attacks, which is of course totally unrealistic with early firearms. It also drove them to include revolvers and other anachronistic weapons in a desperate attempt to fix their rules by sacrificing the game world, and even with all that they don’t favorably compare to the other classes in damage output. I actually had Wogan switch over to the Paizo gun rules for several sessions to give them a fair shake but we all decided they were just preposterously bad.

If your sword-and-sorcery fantasy world concept includes people reloading and shooting guns multiple times a round or blazing away with twin revolvers, then sure, use their rules. I think that’s a bit of a stretch however. A lot of people don’t like including firearms at all, and many of us who do want it to be more “Pirates of the Caribbean” than “Hard Boiled.” The “emerging guns” level as they describe it in the Paizo playtest doc.

Luckily, the fix is simple. I used my existing gun rules – in fact, after consideration and a year of playtest, I upped their damage to pistol: 2d6, musket: 3d6. I’ll note the gun rules in the Freeport Pathfinder Companion from Green Ronin have them doing even more damage that I just upped ours to, like 3d6/4d6! I didn’t want to go all that way yet, but after more time I can’t say we won’t. Then I told everyone “there is no combination of powers that lets you get off more than a shot per round per chamber.” Reload time is move action minimum.  No class powers to reload faster. And I don’t have revolvers and whatnot – I mean, maybe something like that could be found as part of a crashed spaceship in Numeria, but not in common use.

In fact, this pirate captain had as much as I’m willing to do in medieval/renaissance fantasy, which is a double pistol (two barrels). You can shoot both in a round at -4, or do one at a time. He had Rapid Reload so he could load and fire once a round. Or you can draw and shoot multiple pistols in a round (needing quick draw), but then you run out of loaded guns quick.

We did keep one part of the Paizo rules, kinda, in that they had firearms be a touch attack in the first range increment. We changed that to “versus flat-footed AC” (like everyone on the playtest boards told them they should do, but they ignored). This provides firearms a little extra boost. They still need it, because one shot at 2d6 damage is still worse than your average archer who can crank out 2 1d8+STR attacks with Rapid Shot (and a hundred other enhancement options besides). Especially since the guns have misfire chance.

Even with all that, the captain had a hard time hitting Sindawe – of course he wasn’t single class gunslinger (he was level 8 to the PC’s level 5, though) and Sindawe had a monk’s AC, where even flat-footed is high,and he was spending ki on keeping it at like 25.

The pirate captain got to use all his abilities. He used pistol-whip on a pirate the PCs charmed to attack him, he used quick clear because his gun jammed while Sindawe was swimming around the cave, he used snap shot on the PC’s first action, and used utility shot to set off the gunpowder keg bomb. And he combined his rogue sneak attack with it once when Sindawe was flat-footed.

So in the end, fixing the gunslinger to be a playable and balanced and non-anachronistic class is easy.

  1. Fix the guns. Use my gun rules and up the damage to pistol: 2d6, musket: 3d6
  2. Fix the gunslinger.  Change the “super fast actions” powers like Lightning Reload to something else. Maybe have Rapid Reload just take reload times down to one full round action and then Lightning Reload can take it to one move action.

I have to admit, I’m a little cheesed at Paizo. They keep running these playtests, but of the wrong things. It’s always “here, playtest this class,” seemingly more as a marketing promo than as an actual desire for input, but it’s the weapons that everyone can use that need more playtesting. Adventurer’s Armory was poorly tested and edited and was riddled with errors and bad ideas many of which haven’t been clarified to this day (like how brass knuckles etc. interact with monk attacks). They should have playtested these gun rules – most of their Gunslinger playtest was an exercise in “how do we make bad gun rules feasible” which is not an insipiring mission statement.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Ninth Session

Posted on April 23, 2011 | 2 comments

Ninth Session (10 page pdf) – “Architects of Ruin” – An assault on some hidden caves goes drastically wrong and half the party is captured by various miscreants. Pirates! Ghosts! Guns! Orca! Explosions! Gates to other worlds! Thrill to the hard-hitting action in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate.

Well, this session didn’t quite go how I thought it would. The PCs found the hidden caves of dungeoney fun, but as most of them looked at going in through a secret door, Sindawe dives in through a sea cave and finds a whole crew of pirates at work. And then he decides to take them all on  himself! I was a bit surprised at that. He made a good run at it really, even when surrounding him and getting sneak attacks it took natural 20’s for the mook pirates hto hit his super boosted monk AC. And even the pirate captain, Screev Ten-tooth, was having a bit of a hard time shooting him with his nifty double barreled pistol. But then the captain pulled out his alchemical flare shots, which blinded Sindawe, and that left him open to some intense whupass.  I tried to encourage him to dive back in and swim for it (being in the water gets you some intense cover bonuses, he benefited from them coming in) but he just fought it out till he went down, I’m not sure why. He killed half the pirate gang, which came in handy later though, that’s for sure.

You can download Screev Ten-tooth from the Reavers NPC page. He’s an expert2/gunslinger4/rogue2.

While this was going on, the PCs tried to come in the other way – it’s possible they could have rolled the whole dungeon up in the middle – but the siren ghost fended them off, taking prisoners (Hatshepsut and Akron Erix), routing Clegg Zincher’s goons, and charming Serpent and Tommy.  So off they go, to find the giant dread wraith lover boy of the siren ghost – they were lovers back in the day, but a hateful priest and some villagers killed the siren and then the dude hung himself. I figured they were going to have to kill him, but they actually managed to talk the wraith down and get him to follow them to the siren’s lair. I made that really hard to do, and halfway he started going after Wogan because he confused him with the priest that killed the siren, but each time they talked him down – high skills and assists getting those 30+ DCs required. Thus they overcame the whole siren ghost/dread wraith thing pretty handily! She gave them a parting blessing, even.

Then they found the Dark Gate, the one opened by the blast from the Cyphergate, bringing the real world and the shadow world (aka spirit world, demon dimension, monster realm) together with their world. They realized the bits of Tammerhawk’s glyph that exploded when they disrupted the ritual in the Riddleport Light (aka Shadow in the Sky/Madness in Freeport) embedded in them are attuned to the gate somehow.

They did a hurry-up attack on the pirates – they had to break through a barricade in the face of a swivel gun, luckily Wogan knows just when to pop an obscuring mist to provide cover. They hacked through the pirate crew. The captain used a flare shot to shoot a gunpowder bomb with a short length of quickfuse on it. That took us into slo-mo really quickly – Serpent went for the keg, and other people dove for cover. I said the fuse would take d6 segments (ticks in the initiative count) to burn down, so there was a lot of risk involved. Serpent managed to grab it and chunk it out into the sea cave before it went off with a massive shuddering crash. Then the pirate captain held his gun in Sindawe and ordered them to surrender their arms.

I am not a kind and forgiving GM. When someone has a person in that position, they get a free coup de grace whenever anyone tries anything – I am NOT a believer in “the bad guy has a knife to her throat!” “We take our full round of attacks, he’s dead, yay!” That’s BS.  But luckily, Wogan had a spare Infamy Point to spend. He whipped his pistol out and shot that gun right out of the captain’s hand! He out-gunned a gunslinger. Good one. Then the orca watching over Sindawe came out of the water and chomped him.

(This generated some argument from Chris, Sindawe’s player… He swam into the sea cave during the day, when the water is illuminated from the sunlight outside and was seen easily; the orca came in at night when it couldn’t be seen… This chafed him for some reason.)

The session ended up with all of them in the water again – this time to escape the tender ministrations of the tentacle-dogs that came out of the Dark Gate after them. And then a shadow demon came boiling out!

Earlier in the session, Paul (Serpent), who had run Second Darkness for another group, had said “thanks for taking out that shadow demon, that thing was a bitch!” I was like “Uh, sure, no problem <snicker>.”

Maybe we should just start every session with the PCs all in water. Make a theme out of it. Maybe in the HBO series that will inevitably be made. “Reavers, this fall from HBO!”

My favorite exchange from this session:

The pirate captain calls, “Arr! Surrender and ye can be part of my crew!”
“What are the terms of this deal?” Sindawe calls while continuing to swim for the tunnel.
“Arr. You can be me cabin boy and I promise to not be too rough on ya.”

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Eighth Session

Posted on April 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Eighth Session (8 page pdf) – “The Devil’s Elbow” – The PCs make some unlikely allies as they brave a remote island seemingly inhabited by beings from beyond time and space. All this and more, in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate.

The PCs shack up with Clegg Zincher in an unlikely alliance.  Tommy really, really wants to kill Zincher, to the point where his player’s emailing me lengthy assassination plots to ask what I think about them. But apparently he and his men are the only other people on this Godforsaken island.I had fun with the players’ interaction with  him.  He doesn’t hate them like they hate him, he’s on top and they work for some guy he has had to put in his place a couple times.  Just business from his point of view.  And whenever the players got too sassy I had him just let out a big wiseguy “Ayyyyyyyyyyyyy!”

Plus, Tommy was suffering from void death from the bite of the tentacle-dogs. He was remarkably submissive about being strapped to a cot in the infirmary tent with two other infected as a precautionary measure.  Sindawe kindly decided to go in there and sit up with him.

My chase rules come in handy in all kinds of circumstances – the PCs got attacked by tentacle dogs in the woods and hightailed it to the beach. They did well and got to the sand just as the dogs attacked.  I then made Arbitrary Surf Checks – the waves came in and out, moving the water line up and back 1d6 squares each round. That made it lively.

The rest was just island exploration. Slow paced, but I like mixing up big action pieces with lulls that build tension. Next time, a big finish!

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How 4e Loses Its Biggest Fans

Posted on March 31, 2011 | 10 comments

There’s a good post by Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games on ENWorld where he explains how he got converted from the “biggest non-WotC cheerleader of 4e” to saying “bah” and now planning to support Pathfinder.

WotC has perfected the art of screwing things up with this edition.  Hopefully all of Mearls’ Legends & Lore columns asking people about how they really like to play (hint: not the 4e way, is the general tenor of the responses) will culminate in a better D&D 5e sooner rather than later. And perhaps whoever is in WotC legal (and marketing, and product planning) will get tied to some railroad tracks.

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Save Third Party D&D Publishers!

Posted on March 11, 2011 | 14 comments

Aren’t third party D&D publishers doing fine?  No, we mean third party publishers for 4e.  So you can see the problem.

Chris Dias wrote this Open Letter to WotC: Save 3rd Party Dungeons and Dragons Publishers, asking WotC to do something, anything, to help out their third party business partners, please.

Of course, this reasonable request brought out the psychos of the Unpaid WotC Defense Brigade, who rebut Dias by telling him that he and his whole grey market sub-industry should consider themselves lucky to be suckling at Wizard’s teats. Bonus, one 3pp’s “lawyer” chimes in to give his opinion on how draconic business practices are the only way to go.

Surprisingly, I’m on WotC’s side on this one. Well, at least kinda. Let me explain.

Q: What do you tell a third party D&D 4e publisher with two black eyes?

A: Nothing, they obviously don’t listen.

Look, man.  Wizards has been making it clear for three years now that they would like every other company to die in a fire. They pulled all their licenses from third parties.  Then they abandoned the OGL, dragged their feet on putting out any kind of license, and then when they put out the GSL it had a “poison pill” clause saying you couldn’t use the new license if you were doing anything OGL. (They retracted that eventually in the face of a firestorm of criticism.) They don’t let 3pps into the DDI, they don’t promote them at all, they clearly see them as leeches upon their largess that they’re not even clear themselves why they tolerate.

So by continuing to try to publish for them, you’re really just getting into battered spouse syndrome.  “Hey maybe if you just beat me a little less I can really please you!” Why are these people still trying to do it?  “I know WotC still really loves us, even though they treat us so bad!”

Sorry, baby, they don’t love you. And they’re not gonna stop whupping on you. It’s time to go find yourself a new man/woman. Try Paizo and Pathfinder, they cheerfully promote their third party partners and those guys are creating large amounts of great content and selling it. Open Design, Rite Publishing, LPJ Designs, Adamant Entertainment, and many more.  Heck, I have personally bought Pathfinder stuff from those guys plus Green Ronin, Sagawork, and probably some others I’m forgetting. On RPGNow there’s 4x the number of third party products for Pathfinder than for 4e.

Morrus from ENWorld seems to be the only one happy about publishing for 4e, he says “it’s great being a big fish in a small pond.”  I would hope you could sell SOME copies when you slather ads for your product over every single ENWorld page all the time. And I’m glad you’re happy with “a big slice of a small pie instead of a small slice of a big pie” – but that’s not really what real companies usually try for, and it certainly doesn’t breed innovation or excellence. Try using software written for a niche industry sometime; you’ll discover where all those Nazi scientists fled to and what they’re doing with their time – Gmail it’s generally not.

You’re left with two choices – embrace the indifference, mediocrity, and occasional ass-beatings, or break up with that abuser and find a new sugar daddy, one that’ll treat you right. Come on, baby.  We’ll give you what you need.

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Salon on D&D

Posted on March 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

Check out this very lengthy Salon article, How “Dungeons & Dragons” Changed My Life.  Apparently it’s  hipstery for us old dudes to be playing D&D again.  Woot!  Keep doing something long enough and it’ll be cool again. Imagine my relief.

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Reavers on the Seas of Fate – Season Two, Seventh Session

Posted on March 6, 2011 | 4 comments

Seventh Session (14 page pdf) – “Children of the Void” – Rescued from an island in the Varisian Gulf by a friendly ship, the PCs make it to the Devil’s Elbow and find the place under siege. They try to rescue the Cyphermage contingent on the island and end up needing rescuing themselves. All this and more, in the latest installment of Reavers on the Seas of Fate.

This session was fun; it started with all the PCs clinging to rocks to avoid the embrace of a heaving sea, and it ends with the PCs clinging to a different set of rocks to avoid the embrace of a heaving sea.

The first part of the session was slow but fun.  The Reavers were marooned on an island after their swan boat got ripped apart by angry orca. Sindawe “made it up” to Mama Watanna, but that didn’t get them any closer to shore.  They made the most of their time being stranded, however – lots of inter-character role-playing. Tommy’s player Kevin was gone this session (with some complicated excuse involving the former guitar player for Dokken) and I subbed in for him, mainly in the vein of making off-color suggestions whenever the topic of Serpent’s mother came up. Serpent (Paul) was trying to send animal messengers to people he thought might help them, but Sindawe (Chris) hijacked some of them to send anonymous threatening letters to Bojask at the Gold Goblin, which set the tone for subsequent hilarity.

There was also more serious scenes, the most serious of which was Sindawe talking with Hatshepsut. It turns out she had full memory of what happened beneath the waves, when Mama Watanna possessed her body (“rode her,” in voodoo terms) and made love to Sindawe. I had a hard time with some of this – I had meant to ask a woman beforehand (one who would humor such a demented question) as to what a coherent reaction might be in this situation – this guy I just made love to for the first time apparently had some previous thing with a goddess who then possessed me and had sex with him with my body but as her… It’s more complicated than that even but this is a blog post. Anyway, Sindawe RPed it well and did awesome on a couple Sense Motive and Diplomacy checks, so things didn’t go real bad (with Hatshepsut, getting on her bad side often results in a trip to the ER). Talk about complexity. I had to resort to more explanation out of character than I like, but I had trouble forming that all in character. In the end, Hatshepsut was a little impressed by Sindawe’s courage (or foolhardiness) in defying a goddess to be with her. Though she’s not 100% sold on it.

Beforehand,  I had put together a solid timeline of what all was transpiring back in Riddleport and on Devil’s Elbow, so given their timeline of sending calls for help it took five days to get rescue (even though they were only a half day from Riddleport).  In this case, it was Captain Creesy, whose crew was in ill humor after having a fire set aboardship by saboteurs in port.

I use some random weather tables for the sea voyages, and my rolls indicated first a windstorm, which required all the PCs to really exert their sea legs (and Wogan to use a wind fan) and then the next roll upped the level to hurricane strength! Apparently the first winter storm from the northeast was a bitch and a half. Luckily they all have very high Profession: Sailor skills and came through without significant damage (and even stayed on course).

Then it was time for the island itself, with weird zombies that have a big ass tongue-tentacle. The PCs were very lucky in that Sindawe critted with his very first shot and realized that they had to attack the tongues – you could attack the zombie all you wanted and it would keep coming. So they got through that easy enough and went to help the Cyphermages in the Witchlight.

Then Serpent got an unfortunate surprise. Fenella Bromathan, who he’s been suspecting is his mother or sister or something, had been wounded by the monsters on the island and was on her way to turning into a zombie herself. This led to a great session of roleplaying. She is all educated and Cyphermagey, but now with death looming she fell back on the ways of her people, the Ulfen.

“I need your help. I know none of the mages will have the courage to do what needs to be done. They are too civilized; they won’t be able to accept our ways. I am a wizard, but first, I am Ulfen.”
Serpent nods. “I can arrange for a pyre, I think.”
She says, “It will be good to die under the open sky.”

Over the strenuous objections of the remaining Cyphermages, they took Fenella up to the roof, built a pyre, and saw her off Ulfen style. Beforehand, she passed on a locket to Serpent that might have a clue to his origins!

They interacted with the surviving Cyphermages. I got their names and descriptions from daemonslye’s SD Pathfinder Beta conversion PDFs – Fustinius the Balding, Eli the 12-year-old prodigy, Jean-Jacques, and Georges St. Maarten. They explained that the monsters were resistant to magic and killed half their number before they locked themselves in the Witchlight.

Then the monsters attacked. They look a lot like Sammael from the Hellboy movie. I have changed them a lot from their Second Darkness writeup to fit my campaign arc; their high DR was part of that and made them a mighty tough fight. In the midst of it, the tower the PCs are in topples and rolls down a cliff! In the Children of the Void adventure there’s a great mini-game where the PCs are in the tumbling tower, monsters are still attacking, and it gets really crazy. Everyone but two of the Cyphermages survived, though – Georges was killed by Saluthra when he panicked and tried to unbar the door, and Jean-Jacques died in the tower tumble. In the end, they were all clutching the rocky beach at the base of the cliff; luckily salt water affects the monsters like acid and they are momentarily safe from attack.

I really enjoyed this session, it ranged from hardcore roleplay to fun roleplay to action setpiece. Woot!

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