You hear a loud, rumbling sound. A boulder might be involved.

First, there was the article about traps called Trapped!. More of this, please!

The dos and don’ts were a great start, giving me some points to look over when I consider what I’m gonna do with traps. It also had a good mix of traps that I can either use or rip off, which also act as data points on how 4e handles them.

Maybe this is the best kind of endorsement you can get: reading this made me want to put traps in my game. I was already thinking about it, as I much prefer 4e’s traps-as-interactive-terrain or traps-as-combatants approach. This little article gave me a little more confidence and sealed the deal.

Stars and the people who make Pacts with them

I just skimmed through the warlock bits, just to get an idea of the premise behind it. It’s actually pretty straightforward: there’re some roleplaying tips (what’re your character’s thoughts about this whole pact-with-the-evil-thing-beyond-the-stars thing?), seeds for ideas about what sorts of entities they worship, some feats for every tier, and a bunch of new Star pact powers.

The one hitch with this kind of thing is that I’m leery of new shit being more powerful than what’s in the core, and also of somebody finding something off the Internet that is broken. 4e’s math is much more transparent than previous editions, and we’ve already got some data points for each class.

I’m not saying I saw anything messed up in there; I skimmed the first few levels, and to my untrained eye stuff seemed on the up-and-up. And honestly there’s a bit of jealousy, here; I’d probably be much more excited about it if I knew more about the warlock class and how it played, or if it were a treatment for another class nearer to my heart.

Arcane Barber

Ritually Speaking is mostly a list of rituals. I’ll admit that rituals are underutilized in my game, though in my defense this is really the first “serious” D&D game I’ve ever run, let alone 4th Edition. So with that excuse in mind, I don’t see much in here that really grabs me. I suppose it’s one of those bits that’s useful to have around, especially if they can be the lynchpin of a particular plot. When it comes time to do my next campaign, I’ll be sure to take another gander at rituals as well as this article.

Pay or no pay?

WotC is saying that these magazines will move to a subscription model by the end of this month or so, and I’m still undecided. If they have more class-specific articles or articles in a similar format to Trapped, I’d consider paying.

That said, there’s a lot of stuff in there that I don’t use, so it’s more than likely that I’ll wait until the demo for the character creator comes out before I decide.

When the game works, there’s also not much “game” there, so to speak. For instance, you only make a few decisions: which class you play, which items to equip, which adventure to choose, and which potions to bring with you. It’s not like D&D in the sense that you don’t pick which attack powers you have, or even in a more granular sense, you don’t choose whether to go down the left or right corridor.

This makes it sound bad, right? Like you wouldn’t want to play? Well, I can’t stop playing. I’m on vacation this week, and since I can basically play this game while doing something else, I’ve been doing just that.

Matthew needed a 20 to resist… and rolled a 2.

I’ve been trying to puzzle out just why it’s fun, as it’s a bit mystifying. I’ve settled on a few reasons.

One, there’s loot and XP, which are tried and true mechanics. Updating the page to see what items he gets is addictive, and keeps you coming back, as you can equip stuff you find in the middle of the adventure. And I don’t need to explain why leveling is great, do I?

The potion mechanic is another clever trick to keep you glued to the app. If you’re getting your ass kicked, you can salvage the adventure by pounding down a potion. Of course, if you’re downtown with your friends, you cannot do this, which is why the “Update Result” button is a tool of the devil.

I’ve long felt that any game with any meaningful cooperative element instantly makes the game more fun, which is where the social component comes in: you can buff and heal your friends! This is reason three to keep clicking the Friends page: you are HELPING.

Finally, on an adventure, you always win something. If you fail an adventure, you don’t get extra special rewards for completing the adventure, but you still get items, XP, and gold. Dying just means you need to either get your friends to heal you or spend some time waiting.

Final words

This game isn’t really about strategic depth, which is a strength and a flaw. It’s a strength because it doesn’t really require much attention to play; you get the same thrill from this game as you might from refreshing your e-mail or RSS feeds.

It’s a flaw because I don’t really feel like I have much input as to what happens. It doesn’t seem worth it to figure out how to win various adventures when you can just plod along. Put another way, I feel like being good at it requires you to be a bit more obsessive than a casual game like this warrants.

In all fairness, there does appear to be some way to even the odds. According to the FAQ, different environments have certain associated stats, meaning you can optimize for an adventure if you know what’s in it. Story encounters are also always the same. So there’s a bit of gameplay in deciding what potions you’ll use to shore up weaknesses as well as what items can help you do this.

I’d give this a shot, but, er, Castle Crashers just came out. Then again, the Fire Lord just handed my ass to me, but I got a new item on the way, so maybe this time I’ll bring along a Dex potion and see how this works out. This is what laptops are for, right?

Essentially, a pair of ladies, who were also identical twins, moved to a suburb of LA in 2002. At some point, they started feeding wild rats they found living near their house. Rats, as you might know, breed quite rapidly. Hilarity ensues as some neighbors who just move in notice a truly absurd number of rats in the area.

You can read the original LA Weekly article here. Here’s an excerpt:

The number of wild rats the Barthels bred in one year— if they began with a single male and a single female — is, by the association’s calculations, 2,258. That number of rats would be capable of devouring 10,931 pounds of food and excreting 56,400 rat droppings. But the sisters fed the rats for much longer than a year. They did so from the time they returned from Santa Ynez in 2002 until late 2007 — not to mention possible rat-feeding during the decades that Margaret continued teaching in Redondo to support their refuge in Santa Ynez. Theoretically, during a second year, 2,258 rats in the Palisades could grow “a thousand-fold,” to more than two million rats, says Greg Baumann of the association. That’s only a mathematical figure, because the food needed to sustain two million rats would be impossibly huge, and cats were in the area. But, estimating conservatively, the two sisters added tens of thousands of rats to L.A.’s tony Westside. And perhaps far, far more.

Can we talk about this? Let’s look at some big “creepy” markers:

• Identical twins
• Thousands and thousands of rats

Of course, my first thought was about how I’d use this in a World of Darkness game. Beyond the obvious beshilu-type connections, this offers all sorts of interesting possibilities.

A hive mind composed of rats, who perhaps share a mind with these ladies? Women who’re made of rats? Rat-spirits gathering in advance of some event? Post-apocalyptic food supply for some messed up people? Eventual carriers of an as-yet unknown plague? An animal-based spy ring for some bizarre or sinister purpose?

Shit, this is one of those plot hooks that just writes itself.

I’ll say some words: play D&D. In a Facebook application.

I can’t play it right now because it’s down. Here’s what Bruce Baugh has to say about it, which has enough in the way of screenshots and an explanation such that I want.

Damn you, Facebook.

And triple damn you, Wizards! If this is as good as it sounds, you’re basically going to waste an enormous chunk of my time.

Edited to make the link to the app an actual link.

Lemme show you one that’s been bouncing around in my head: a spear-wielding, Hide-wearing eladrin fighter.

Teleportation! Spears!

I think spears are neat, and I like eladrins’ ability to teleport. I imagine this guy as being slightly out of place in eladrin society, despite the fact that he can’t really shake his contemplative or scholastic side. This might ordinarily be a warlord, but let’s say you want a guy who gets into the thick of things. Eladrin fighter: GO!

An aside: highly optimized vs. not

You probably won’t want to try this in a group that has a bunch of highly optimized characters. More than likely you will miss a lot more than everyone else, and missing a lot is one of the fastest ways for combat to start dragging for you.

In other words, I would avoid doing this unless you’re sure the DM will either work with you to make it viable (e.g. put you a little ahead of the curve on magic items), if you’re really good, or if you see other players with characters like this. Or, uh, if you’re OK with missing and/or dying a lot.

Concept and stats

A light fighter isn’t the worst idea for this kind of guy— we can give him Dex enough to compensate for Hide, and enjoy charging with a speed of 6. There are also plenty of spear-and-Dexterity based exploits.

Because his bonuses aren’t a great match for the class, we have fewer options for what we do with the rest of our stats; in other words, we can’t use the 16/16/12 or 16/14/14 spread unless we want to take a hit on Strength (and we don’t). Let’s go for Str 18 / Dex 16.

I’m gonna go ahead and put a point into Intelligence so that he could conceivably get Jack of All Trades or Linguist. I like the idea of a guy who, despite playing against type, still tries to keep his hand in a variety of disciplines.

Here’s our stat block, from the D&D Ability Generator:

Eugh. He’s strong, quick, and he’s slightly above average when it comes to smarts, but socially, he’s not great. When he’s not fighting, he just looks uncomfortable in his skin, and it’s somewhat off-putting.

What’s he good for?

With Hide armor, his defenses are AC 16, Fortitude 15, Reflex 13, Will 10. He has 25 hit points. Not great!

Since this whole exercise ain’t worth it without one, he gets the Eladrin Soldier feat. Which spear should he use? After glancing through the PHB, I saw one fighter exploit that excludes a spear or polearm at the expense of the other, and no magic items that do this. So it’s a 2h vs. 1h comparison.

If you go 2h, you’ll probably want Toughness soon and Power Attack to max out your damage. If you go 1h, you get access to shield-based powers and feats, and a more reasonable AC.

It should go without saying that you should pick fighter exploits that leverage Dexterity and/or spears, as there are a fair number of them, and some of the ones in the heroic tier are quite nasty.

Heroic tier feats should be mostly obvious. After Eladrin Soldier, pick up shield feats, Dex-based feats, or anything else that catches your fancy. I see a potentially interesting Defensive Mobility + Powerful Charge + speed 6 combo, for example.

When you hit Paragon Tier, things get a little more interesting, feat-wise. Spear Push is a gimme, as is Feywild Protection. With your high Dexterity, you can get Defensive Advantage and Seize the Moment. You can also trade up to much, much better armor in the long term with Armor Specialization (Scale). Fleet-footed means you can pretend you’re an elf.

I see this guy as being pretty mobile, and doing some neat stuff with the appropriate fighter exploits. He can teleport to where he’s needed if he can’t get there on foot. Plus, spears are cool.

Disclaimer

I’m not actually a fan of min-maxing, and I don’t think I’m particularly good at it. I have no idea if this character is viable in the short-term or the long-term. Heck, why don’t you give it a try and get back to me?

I will say I’m a little surprised by how not-shitty this turned out, at least on paper. I expected this mostly to turn out as a vanity sort of guy, and as I think more about him, I see some interesting possibilities, both mechanically and in terms of roleplaying.

I could see doing more of these unconventional types of characters just for fun. For instance, a tiefling cleric could be an interesting combination!

You know what that means: first impressions!

A little bit of crunch

For me, the question that first sprang to mind about hunters is: what exactly can you do with hunters to make them interesting enough to produce a core book but without making them function just like any other supernatural to receive a splat-book?

It turns out that hunters get a constellation of mostly mundane benefits rather than a handful of supernatural attributes. I think this is an interesting approach, and I like it— if vampires, werewolves, and mages are all the social, physical, and mental types, then you might call hunters the Skills & Merits guys.

First, they get this stuff called Practical Experience. Practical Experience is extra XP they get from confronting and/or defeating monsters, reflecting the fact that hunters rely quite heavily on their skills and Merits and that the ones that survive are the ones that learn a lot.

Another interesting mechanical bit that they get is the ability to risk willpower. They can opt to spend a point of willpower and choose a benefit, like the usual +3 dice or 9-again on the roll. If they succeed, they get some extra willpower back. If they fail, it’s a dramatic failure.

Hunters also get Professions, which reflects professional training in a field and confers a modest benefit to skills in that field, and Tactics, which I’ve mentioned before.

Incidentally, one of my favorite Tactics is called Dentistry. Why is it called Dentistry? I’m glad you asked! See, it goes like this: you get your buddies to tackle a dude and hold him down. Then you hit him in the face.

Hunter doesn’t have the equivalent of Clan; instead, there are twelve opt-in splats (your Covenant, Tribe, or Order equivalent), divided into compacts and conspiracies. Compacts are one step up from a cell: they’re a bunch of organized guys, and investing points in one means you get stuff like more Allies.

Conspiracies are a step up from that, so they get some of the most overt stuff, like tactical gear, alchemical elixirs, magical relics, or divine blessings. These are called Endowments, which are souped-up Merits you get access to when you sign up with a conspiracy and put points into its Status.

Impressions

I like what I see so far. Except for the conspiracy-level guys, hunters don’t have much whiz-bang shit they can pull. Instead, they’ve gotta be careful, work together, and rely mostly on their skills.

Inevitable

I don’t want to slag Hunter: the Reckoning, but as with each of the re-implementations, comparisons are inevitable, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about this a little bit.

Reading Vigil, I realized why I didn’t much care for Reckoning. There was a lot of missed opportunity, I felt, in terms of exploiting various hunter archetypes; the well-defined and somewhat limited nature of the supernatural stuff overshadowed a lot of other ideas that I found more interesting.

The new game tries to cover all of the bases, and they do this somewhat exhaustively. Aside from your unaffiliated street-level guys, you have your government conspiracy types, your mega-corp doing weird bio-medical research, your paranormal pseudo-scientists, your religious fanatics, your occult conspirators, and more.

One criticism is that this is kind of a shotgun approach. You wouldn’t think that’d be a bad thing for a hunter-themed game, but hear me out! I’m somewhat sympathetic: there’s a lot there, which makes me wonder how difficult it is to really focus on a given theme in any game.

Another thing that comes to mind is that this game seems better suited towards a low number of compacts in a cell, or an even lower number of conspiracies in a cell.

Too bad I can’t play

Yeah all right I could “play” if I wanted to run a game. :P But right now my stupid gaming dance card is full.

First, I’ve gotta finish up Er-Eret, which probably won’t happen until late September, or perhaps mid-October. I was also interested in running a paragon tier game. Someone else wants to run that, though, so perhaps I could set that aside. And then of course at some point I wanted to run Changeling: the Lost.

Since I am not sure we’ll be able to play Er-Eret next week and the weekend after that is PAX, perhaps the best compromise is to run the Hunter quick-start next weekend.

We’ll see, won’t we, blog?

In terms of the tools themselves, there’s the Ability Generator and the Encounter Builder. To begin with, it looks like they’re using Adobe Flex (which makes me wonder how difficult it would be for me to do something similar myself). They’re Flash instead of a client app. As such, they’re both pretty lightweight, although the Encounter Builder is fairly extensive in some ways.

So let’s talk about ‘em.

Ability Generator

If you’ve played a D&D computer game since Neverwinter Nights, this tool should be obvious. It’s a point buy calculator. Pick your race, which ability score you want at 8 (if any), and you can spend points to twiddle your ability scores to your heart’s content. You can also click Random to have the point distribution randomized. I thought that was a nice touch.

When you’re done, you can get them in a copy-paste-able text format.

Will I use it?

I actually liked the example stat arrays in the book, and in some ways prefer them to point buy. Tweaking my stats point-by-point is nice and all, but I prefer having the broad strokes established; I don’t like deciding what to do with my last point or two.

That said, not everyone likes that, and there’ve been times where I thought a stat array could use a little tweaking. I could also see myself clicking Random as a starting point and going from there.

Since I’ve been thinking about writing a tool like this for myself, this saves me the trouble. I will almost certainly use it.

Encounter Builder

The encounter builder is pretty straightforward in concept; you can find these in various places on the Internet. You pick party level, the number of PCs, and you’re taken to a list of monsters, pre-filtered by tier. You can then browse through all of the monsters released so far, filtering by level, type, origin, category (e.g. Archon), keyword, et cetera.

As you select monsters, it totals up how much XP you’ve spent, and offers an assessment of difficulty.

When you’re done, you can click “Display & Print.” I suppose what you’d do here is copy-paste the output, which provides a write-up of the encounter. This write-up doesn’t include monster stats, so you’ll have to transcribe those yourself, unfortunately.

Would I use it?

I’ve been eyeballing encounters based on the rule of thumb of “one monster of equivalent level per party member,” and even then I strayed from that for the first one, with only two level 3 monsters and the rest level 1s and 2s against a level 3 party.

While I do have a spreadsheet that adds up and figures out monster totals, it has one or two bugs. This is because I am lazy, and I’m lazy because Excell’s macros are a sin against creation. Having this capability in a browser window does actually make this easier, and it’s really for convenience that I will most likely use this once I’m past the idea phase on an encounter and I have to commit to some monsters.

This tool does save me some trouble, and as such I will probably give it a whirl.

My biggest problem with this tool is the font they used for monster names. It’s more difficult to read than it needs to be, given how small it is, and given that the rest of the interface doesn’t have this problem.

Coming soon

I have more thoughts about Er-Eret related to some bigger problems, like pacing in a journey-style game as well as making people’s skills relevant in a non-urban environment.

I saw on EnWorld the other day that, among other things, the Player’s Handbook II is in the latest catalog from Wizards. It’s due in March 2009.

I’m glad we’re hearing about it but March? Dammit! That is basically Forever. I’ve really been spoiled by White Wolf’s release schedule, where there’s a 128-pager every couple of weeks. There’s always more material to read, and it’s almost always really good, even though I’ve really only run one game of Mage: the Awakening. (I intend to remedy this once 4e slackens its grip on my cold, shriveled heart.)

Some of the classes that appear to be as good as confirmed are the bard, barbarian, druid, swordmage, and sorcerer. After paging through the Swordmage preview (click the “Download the preview material” link), I am sort of interested in that class.

But let’s be honest: it’s the old classes redone that I am most interested in. I like seeing how they express the core concept of the class. I think the fighter’s never been cooler than in 4th Edition, and I can’t wait to see what they do with the old classes.

…except for the bard.

Yeah, all right, fine! I can’t lie. I’m curious about the bard, too! Despite my inherent skepticism, I know they’re going to do something interesting with it. I just have no idea what.

I guess there’s a Monster Manual II coming out in May, also. That’s like Forever plus Infinity.

Fortunately, Hunter: the Vigil is due out in a week or so. Or so they tell me.

OK, I’m going to level with you, blog: I find this hard to believe. Deep down, I suspect shenanigans; there’s no way it’s August already. Right? The Pacific Northwest barely got a summer as it is, and now the summer is over? Look, you might be able to fool everyone else, but I’m not falling for this one.

Still, I decided to play along. I told my FLGS that I’ll be buying Hunter when it comes out, even though I’m signed up for D&D for at least a few more weeks, and I’m thinking about running a paragon tier game after this one.

It aggregates a bunch of RPG blogs, which is neat, as everybody in the network gets a bit of traffic.

Feel free to stop by there, and also welcome if this is your first time here.

The PCs left Er-Eret, traveling through the surrounding countryside. Alac carried the banner of Er-Eret, and as they passed people along the way, some greeted and saluted them, while others merely glanced at them, and resumed what they were doing.

By the afternoon, they were on the outskirts of what could be considered Er-Eret, and in the distance they saw a burnt-out farmstead. Ratha spotted them first, and saw that they were in fact goblins.

The party snuck up on the goblins. Rubican re-ignited the burnt out barn, and the rest of the PCs quickly went to work on the unprepared goblins. The fight was settled in short order, as the goblins were unprepared and our PCs had learned a thing or two about fighting since they set out for Er-Eret.

After defeating the goblins, the PCs found an ash pit that contained a number of human and dwarf remains. Alac ordered that they take the goblins who were apparently in charge and put their heads on a pike. They lit the rest of the goblins’ bodies on fire, but not before burying the remains of the slain humans and dwarves.

This camp appeared to be some kind of staging area, so they ransacked it for weapons and destroyed them.

After making camp for the night somewhere else along the line, the PCs traveled into the Blackwood, so named at least in part for the darkness incurred by the tall, thick branches of the trees.

The trail was fairly easy to follow, though as dusk arrived, it became more difficult to see. They followed the path to a point near a hilly area, with what might have been an old path. Sighni advised that they simply continue to track the goblins, despite the spiderwebs indicating that this was the territory of spiders.

As the party proceeded, they heard noises in the brush, and caught glimpses of spiders moving through. They tried various distractions, which delayed but ultimately did not prevent the spiders from hounding them to a clearing.

It was perhaps the most challenging battle of the game so far, with the ettercaps and spiders poisoning and webbing the PCs. Ratha lost consciousness towards the end of the battle, but otherwise the PCs were victorious.

After the last ettercap died, the PCs stopped to take stock and rest. They noticed that there were spider-webs strewn about here and there; this was some sort of lair, and the bundles indicated that there were many victims here. The party found a variety of useful items that were no longer needed by the unfortunates who’d found themselves at the mercy of these spider-folk.

THE END

That’s where we stopped. There’s more up and coming, but this was a logical stopping point, as some people had to get up early this morning.

I might have more on the post-mortem now that I’ve gotten this summary out of my system— I won’t lie to you, blog: I postponed writing this because of how unhappy I was. Maybe I’ll have a second postmortem on some specifics once I get over my frustration.