First up, there are those from the D&D Encounters series. The folks over at Dungeon’s Master have posted a PDF containing all six characters.

You can also download the characters from [Bloodsand Arena][bsa].

There is, however, a hitch. Anyone who doesn’t use WinZip to extract the files will see error messages along the lines of “unsupported compression method.” Apparently the archive was created with WinZip, which now defaults to a proprietary compression algorithm. I don’t really blame Wizards for this, to be honest— they’re not the ones who’re apparently trying to destroy interoperability with other Windows apps, let alone cross-platform apps. Thanks for nothing, WinZip!

For my part, I held my nose, installed it, extracted the files, and promptly uninstalled it. It’s a nasty piece of software. If it weren’t for this, I wouldn’t have touched it with a 10′ pole. [7zip][7z] is more than sufficient.

For those of you that don’t have a Windows machine handy, well, you’ll need a workaround. While I can’t vouch for this link from a security standpoint, it does look like someone else has compiled another ZIP file containing the PDFs. Hit this RapidShare link if you’re desperate. I opened it on a Mac and didn’t have any trouble.

What with Dark Sun heating up (GET IT?), I feel I’ve got a few more posts in me for the near future. A few thoughts about White Wolf are tumbling around in the brain-box, too, although to be frank it’s more to do with what’s not happening than what is. I might be repeating myself, though.

In any case, to everyone out there, thanks for reading!

Magic items

This was one obvious question that came up when I thought about Dark Sun and 4th Edition. Given that 4th Edition, much like 3rd Edition, makes pretty heavy use of magic items, how would the designers reconcile this with the fact that magic items in Athas are rare?

The answer is that rewards will take a different form. Embarrassingly, it seems that because I didn’t look through the whole DMG2, I missed the part where they talk about alternative rewards. The Bloodsand Arena intro explicitly refers you to the DMG2, and it seems that the Dark Sun Campaign Setting will address this directly.

For those of you that don’t have the DMG2 handy, the notion of alternative rewards might not be that much of a revelation even so. That chapter discusses a few things, like training (e.g. special abilities granted from training with someone), boons (e.g. perform a service for a diety or otherworldly being, gain some enchantment or boon), and the brute force method of simply granting inherent enhancement bonuses to the PCs themselves.

At any rate, this answers the question of how to reconcile weapon breakage with the centrality of magic items. Magic items? Ain’t none! But maybe you can exempt them from the breakage rules in the event that you decide to give them out.

Defiling

It seems that defiling, at least mechanically, is something more active than I recall it having been in 2e. (Sadly I do not have my Dark Sun stuff in front of me right now.) The templar character can choose to re-roll a single damage or attack roll, and in exchange, her allies take damage equal to have their healing surge value (e.g. 1/8th of their hp). This is pretty great.

Unrelated to defiling per se, I love love love the sorcerer-king pact warlock. This is one case where something from 4e suits Dark Sun as much as something from the original. Are you a cleric of a god-king, or did you go all-in and forge a mystical pact? Absolutely fantastic.

Open question: clerics

If you cast your mind back to Dark Sun, there were no divine clerics as such. This made sense because there were no gods as such. Instead, there were either the Templar— servants, secret police, and otherwise ruthless enforcers of the sorcerer-kings— or elemental priests, with the traditional fire, water, earth, or air aspect.

How are they going to handle this in 4th Edition Dark Sun? In 2e, it was a change in spell list for the most part. Retooling the entire cleric class seems less viable. I have a couple of ideas, one of them a suggestion from a friend.

One is that they won’t do anything special. Clerics might be the best at healing, but I think by this point there’s enough available from other classes that clerics themselves aren’t strictly required. Classes that don’t quite fit with Dark Sun could be tweaked just as easily as the races have been.

As a friend of mine pointed out, PHB3 also includes a new divine leader, the Runepriest. I don’t see it as particularly evocative of Dark Sun, but I’m sure there are ways around it.

Another alternative is that there’s a new class in the Dark Sun book. This seems unlikely. PHB3 provided all of the psionic classes to date, and while they’re usable elsewhere— they do a great job of rationalizing psionics in the default setting as a product of the Far Realm, alien and other— Dark Sun is where they take center stage. More likely is some kind of cleric build, perhaps a Sun cleric. Divine Power is slipping my mind, too— are there any cleric builds in there that might suit Dark Sun?

I think the most likely option is some combination of the first (play a shaman, warlord, bard, ardent, or runepriest instead) and the last (rebrand the cleric as a Sun cleric and/or offer an additional build).

Wrap-up

Surely there are other questions, like how they plan to translate various races into a Dark Sun friendly flavor. These were some of the biggest ones, though, and the answers are pretty satisfying.

Anyone out there still have burning questions about the 4e adaptation of Dark Sun? Anything that’s been answered? Anything yet unanswered?

I picked up the L5R offering. I played 1st Edition back in college and a friend of mine mentioned that they’d have a 4th Ed item out for Free RPG Day. It’s quadruple redundant to say that I also picked up Wizards’ Dark Sun offering, Bloodsand Arena. You know what else I did? I ran it. Last night.

I’ll try to keep it light on spoilers, but I can’t promise anything.

It’s been a while since I ran anything. Actually, I can’t remember what the last thing I ran was. I’m guessing it was something out of Dungeon Delve. Running a pre-gen adventure was pretty similar, and everyone was pretty excited about it overall.

I’d say it was pretty successful. Some people got frustrated with the raider encounter. I don’t think the raiders were particularly strong— rather, I think that people were missing a lot and I was rolling particularly well. In retrospect, I realize that since we weren’t playing with all six characters, removing a couple of minions and perhaps one of the regular monsters might’ve been more fair. Despite that, I was once again reminded of how badass 4th Edition characters are. I was afraid it was difficult as one or two people were bloodied pretty quickly. As it turns out, leaders can heal quite well and Second Wind is another last resort. I didn’t pull any punches and the party came out fine.

As a side note, I notice once again how reluctant people are to use their Daily powers. Like, amazingly reluctant despite the fact that they’re on a multi-day journey. I understand why. As a player, I seldom use my Daily powers, either. When I look back on it, though, I realize that seldom in my experience have we had more than two or three encounters in a row without an extended rest, both as DM and a PC. Maybe not everyone should go and use their daily, but I’ve begun to think that it’s better to use a Daily to expedite an encounter than it is to wait until the party is very nearly screwed.

As for the skill challenges, I’m not sure how I felt about them. Difficulty-wise, they were most assuredly not too hard, and I appreciated that. There were some failures here and there but for the most part, people got to roll their skills and do well. What I’m still not sure about is how to run them.

For instance, the PCs are traveling at some point, and there are various skills listed as appropriate. They have specific applications for those skills, too. Whether it came down to how I was running it or now the players were approaching it, it didn’t seem like they were approaching it from the perspective of “What skills can I use?” Rather, they’d start with “I want to do X.” I nudged them closer to what the adventure suggested, which was all right. I didn’t feel great about it overall.

I was worried about the encounter in the town, but it went quite swimmingly. We didn’t end up spending too much time on it.

As for the last encounter, well, that one was interesting. It was what you might call a mini-game. This was one of those situations where I had to balance the role of providing a challenge by not letting the PCs go completely off the rails while also letting the PCs do things that were awesome. It’s a balance, right? Overcoming an obstacle will feel more rewarding if the player feels they earned it.

In this case, it was pretty difficult to provide a challenge for the PCs, given how things turned out. About halfway through I figured out how I could square this with the plot in a way that would be satisfying to the PCs as well as myself. Based on comments from the players afterward, the last part of the game and the aftermath were probably the most enjoyable part of the game for everyone.

I should also add that people seemed to enjoy their characters pretty well, and people expressed some interest in possibly playing again. I told them I’d be happy to run the next part, and that it would be pretty cool to run off and on until the game came out. Given that I’ve still got some 2nd Ed Dark Sun material laying around, it should be possible to cobble another couple of runs together.

In the meantime, I’m not sure I’ll be able to wait until August. Well, all right, maybe I can manage.

Granted, this blog went dark for a while for a good reason: I haven’t had many cycles left for D&D. For one thing, I bought a house and moved. That’s cool except it’s hugely disruptive. Even a few months later, I don’t feel that the house is really in a state for running a game or playing it.

For another, I got into a beta for some game nobody’s ever even heard of. And by that I mean a game I played a whole bunch in college and got pretty heavily into again when they announced Starcraft II in 2007. In addition to taking up a bunch of my time, I got into watching professional matches. What can I say? I used to think it was really cheesy until I realized that this is basically a “sport” that I actually care about.

At any rate, I was blissfully unaware of such as the The Plane Above book and PHB3 until I swung by my FLGS the week before. I’ll be frank and say that of the two, I am far more excited about The Plane Above. I know, I know. Those of you that are familiar with my preferences are shocked, I’m sure. Once I’m finished reading it, I should probably write up a post about it.

The second part was the latest D&D/Penny Arcade podcast. I’ve listened to the previous ones, and they’re devilishly fun. Nothing quite kills the boredom of a long ride on the bus than these. Hopefully my fellow passengers take my intermittent giggling as harmless.

In any case, I’ve got just a bit of a bug. We’ll see if it manifests into anything substantial. The Starcraft II beta is closed for now, I’ve got nothing lined up, and I think some sort of exploration/sandbox-y game set in the Astral Sea could be quite a bit of fun.

I’ve had some thoughts about this of and on, especially as far as the iPad is concerned. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had much the same thoughts: what potential such a device has for tabletop RPGs! Even if you assume only the DM has one, there are many possibilities.

I’m thinking mostly of what this could do for the DM, to be honest— I don’t imagine that enough people own such devices that you assume everyone in the group has a smartphone. There’s more you could do in that realm but I think we’re some ways away before something like that is feasible. In any case, that would have to be a web app, I think; the web is the only development platform smartphones have in common these days.

For D&D, the obvious advantage is data tracking augmented by automation. With a larger screen, an app to track various states and automate certain mechanics becomes much easier. You could have an application that allowed you to run combat much more easily by tracking status effects, marks, and so on. The possibilities are so obvious that it’s weird that Wizards is still absent from this space.

A new project?

In any case, I was excited enough about these possibilities to finally start learning Cocoa Touch. I’ve no idea if this will result in an actual product. For the time being, it’s a way to kill some time, to learn something new and write some code.

Seeing those apps I linked above cemented my desire to write something unrelated to D&D. The audience for D&D is broad enough that other people have tackled this, so my inclination is to focus more on narrative-driven games instead. While I’ll admit I haven’t sought it out much, it does seem to me that this area is somewhat under-represented in terms of their online presence. There’re some obvious reasons why that might be. Either way, it seems like an opportunity to me.

For instance, I’m often carrying a laptop to the table or a pile of index cards. I have notes for scenes, stats for NPCs, and so on. Tracking status effects, encounter powers, loot, and the like is far less of a concern and requires less math for games like the new World of Darkness. In concrete terms, there’s less of a need for automation and more need for an efficient system for data storage and retrieval.

Is this a worthwhile idea? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s enough that I think I would use such an app. The sticking point is that my games require a fair amount of improvisation. An app could be too heavyweight for that— why not just open a web browser to a website like Obsidian Portal, Wikia, or simply use a notepad app like Simplenote?

Another question is how much effort the development itself will be. I wouldn’t require someone to enter their game notes on their iDevice, which implies some manner of web-based data entry app. Does that mean I need to get cracking on something like AppEngine?

I also don’t know how difficult it is to get something up and running on the iP* (as my friends and I often refer to the iPhone OS devices). So, in the coming weeks I’ll continue playing around with Cocoa Touch, sketch out some ideas, and we’ll see what I come up with. If it turns out to be a stupid idea, I’ll still have learned something and broadened my coding horizons.

It goes like this: not only is the World of Darkness MMO based on the old World of Darkness, but it will also be accompanied by a re-launch of the old World of Darkness.

Yikes.

Now, it’d be difficult to write up any sort of impassioned response to this. It’s just a goddamn rumor! I hate it when people on the Internet get seriously bent out of shape based on conjecture and hearsay.

Still, you know where this is going— obviously I’m saying something about it. You’re reading it right now! That’s because I can’t resist tossing out an opinion. Hell, if a blog’s not for this kind of speculation and bloviating, what’s it for? We might as well shut down the entire Internet, too.

So, yes, here it is: if that rumor’s true, I’ll be deeply, sorely disappointed.

It’s not partisanship that motivates my preference for the nWoD over the oWoD. While there are are pluses and minuses to each, I genuinely prefer the new World of Darkness for a plethora of reasons, and it’s tempting to rehash all of the reasons why. That way lies madness— it’ll be 2004 – 2006 all over again. I’ve had enough of those arguments to last me for a lifetime. So, without delving into too many specifics, I’ll speak to the oWoD game that was far and away my most favorite game for many years: Mage: the Ascension.

I most assuredly wasn’t the most avid fan of oMage. For one thing, I liked Revised better than 2nd Edition. Maybe that alone disqualifies me. But as my friends at the time can tell you, I was pretty deeply into the game for kind of a long time.

Now, though, years later, M:tAsc holds little appeal for me. The problem with staking out edgy political territory is that, when that era passes you by, it hardly seems relevant anymore. Maybe someday Ascension will feel retro. The ’90s sort of feel that way, although it’s hard for me to really nail it down.

My feelings have changed on other parts of it, too. I used to be ambivalent about many of the Traditions. The ones that I find interesting now are the exception. The wacky setting elements never thrilled me before, and now they actively bother me. The notion of paradigm feels more self-congratulatory than transcendental. The Technocracy might’ve been more relevant in the ’90s, but now that whole conflict feels like a straw-man. I’m not sure whether to attribute this to my tastes evolving, changing times, or simply growing up. Perhaps all three are inextricable.

This is to say nothing of the other of the Big Three. In their modern incarnation, I enjoy them. Their previous incarnations hold even less interest for me than the old Mage.

I feel obligated to give whatever they come up with a fair shake. I don’t want to be ridiculous Internet bombastic. So whatever it is, I’m willing to hear them out— if nothing else, they’re smart, creative people whose material I enjoy more reliably than any other’s in the business. That’s perhaps one reason why this rumor sticks in my craw, that it seems like a huge step back.

In any case, we’ll see. It’s all rumor and speculation and hearsay and all that kind of bullshit. Until we hear more, I will maintain a cautiously optimistic outlook, and wish the folks over at White Wolf the best of luck in shipping their upcoming work.

My girlfriend likes comics and I like RPGs. As usual I’d hoped for a new World of Darkness book. I wasn’t disappointed. Still, when we left, I couldn’t help but observe that, when it comes to White Wolf’s World of Darkness, I feel we’ve approached the end of an era.

At a guess, the last time the proprietor had new WoD material in was February. Today, once again, there was only one book, Night Horrors: the Unbidden. I’m pleased there was something, but this is a far cry even from a year or so ago. Rather than two books a month, it’s more like a book every two months. It’s hard not to look at the slow, haphazard release schedule and conclude that the end must be near.

White Wolf has said up front that part of the reason why they don’t announce release dates anymore is because of flaky publishing and distribution. Fair enough. It’s also no secret that the tabletop roleplaying industry is struggling to some extent or another. Now, I never got the impression that White Wolf was doing very poorly, but it’s not like I know anything and data is quite sparse. Furthermore, I can’t imagine that the recession has helped them any, or that the ridiculous cost of oil a couple of years back didn’t make things more difficult.

The most convincing speculation I’ve heard is this: the folks who would’ve been writing or developing have are devoting most of their time to the World of Darkness MMO. If that’s the case, it would be an eminently reasonable business and creative decision. Who better to write for the game than the folks who do this sort of thing for a living? As they near launch, it should be obvious that they’d need to spend more and more time on polish and bug fixing.

Still, I wouldn’t bet on a return to the typical monthly-ish publishing model. Modern MMOs need to stay fresh. That means, among other things, content updates. Content updates require writers and designers, the same folks who’re devoting their time to shipping the initial release.

Of course it’s not all-or-nothing, and it’s possible things will continue on as they have for the last however many months. It’s also possible or even probable that they’ve got something up their sleeve— they’ve got smart folks there, and it’s tough for me to imagine tabletop folks abandoning the medium altogether.

If I had to write up some kind of guess about what’s in store, it’d be some manner of tie-in between physical products and the MMO. I don’t know what form that would take, or whether that’s even feasible. White Wolf’s people have had a lot of time to think about this. It’s more than likely they’ve moved on several iterations past whatever half-assed ideas I can come up with now.

The best I can imagine is some kind of tie-in between events or mechanics introduced in the MMO and a physical product. That could mean a return to a metaplot-like state of affairs, where each book allows your group to play through the events introduced in the MMO, or introduces new mechanics that mirror mechanics from the MMO. Perhaps there might be a subscription-based model, an add-on the game subscription that provides you with material for offline games. It may be that they decide to go all-in with digital content.

Regardless, if they are poised to enter a new era, that does imply an exit from the previous era. I suppose many eras are ending these days, in any case. Many forms of old media find their business models in danger— newspapers, movies, television, and book publishing. Unlike the movie or music industry, however, the RPG industry cannot afford lobbyists who can provide legislation in lieu of innovation. (Zing?)

There’s another rumor I’ve heard somewhat recently. I started writing up a reaction to that one, too. It ran long, so I’ve got another piece coming up momentarily. Stay tuned.

Themes and classes

If you page through, you’ll see that there aren’t a whole slew of new classes to account for Dark Sun’s take on various archetypes, like elemental priest, gladiator, or templar. (If you’re ignorant of Dark Sun, you can educate yourself here at The Burnt World of Athas.) Rather, those concepts are listed as “themes.”

I don’t have any insight as to what those mean except that they clearly have a connection to the setting. It does appear to signal that, for example, gladiator won’t be an entirely new class. The sorcerer-king pact warlock (theme: templar) is interesting— in the old setting, templar were a priest class (in 2e, cleric was a another priest class, as was druid). This seems just as good if not better description of the relationship between templar and sorcerer-king, to be honest.

Beyond that, I’m curious as to whether theme has any implications beyond setting.

Weapon materials

Weapon materials are back, apparently! To refresh your memory, metal in Dark Sun is relatively rare. People tend to make weapons out of more readily available materials, like stone, obsidian, or bone. These materials were inferior to steel and would confer penalties to accuracy and damage.

From what I’m reading, they want to keep the feel of steel being kind of a special deal, but without adding a weapon penalty figure. The gist of it is that you can opt to re-roll an attack on a 1. If you’re using a non-metal weapon, your second roll has to get above a number (presumably based on the strength of the material) or else it breaks after the attack is resolved. If it’s metal, then it only breaks on a re-roll of 1 to 5.

I can’t remember whether magic items were explicitly rare on Athas, but my recollection is that this was the case. This would be consistent with what I recall of the setting. You perceive that this raises a question: will magic weapons get some kind of exemption? Magic items are somewhat less critical than in 3e but they’re still very important.

I suppose they could be treated as metal, or if the expectation is that you don’t re-roll with a magic item. Leaving them as-is means that you’ll seldom if ever want to re-roll with a magic item, which makes me wonder why you’d bother putting the mechanic in since, for the majority of the game, nobody is going to use it.

Gettin’ excited again

Regardless of how it turns out, I’m excited about Dark Sun. I’m still conflicted about the extent to which I can run a roleplaying-heavy D&D game. It’s certainly doable if the group is up for it. I would still wonder about how to handle leveling or gear if there’s only one or even no combat encounters for multiple sessions. Possibly that’s fodder for another post.

In the meantime, I’ll be checking in with Critical Hits in the coming months to see what kind of information we’ll get about Dark Sun and, I suppose, PHB3.