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.

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.

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.

The penultimate fight was way shorter than I planned. I’d forgotten how badass the PCs were, so I had a bunch of level 3 guys which went down really, really quickly. I always underestimate the players. That said, it worked out really well in the end— the PCs took those guys down fast and hard, which left more time for the final fight and the epilogue.

The last fight went well. I had Evan take over a custom-designed monster, whom I was afraid would steamroll the PCs. Probably he could’ve been more interesting— he had a few fairly powerful encounter powers, most of which were Standard actions, meaning that he could only use them kind of slowly. One of them was a recharge power, but it probably should’ve been another one instead of his ability to reconsitute goblins into pesky zombie minions. I probably should’ve weeded out one or more attacks in order to replace them with something that could be a move or a minor. Maybe a Flaming Sphere-like ability, for example.

In terms of having a player control an NPC, I’d say it went well. I trusted Evan to do the right thing after telling him to not, say, just fly over the PCs and plink them. This group worked well enough that I don’t think Evan had a problem with being killed in the end.

In fact, let me state for the record that this was Evan’s idea originally— I didn’t just take over his PC without his consent! The jumping off point was when he said he could see himself turning into an antagonist, someone that the party would have to fight. It was such a great idea that I couldn’t resist.

Pacing went well. The pacing went relatively well. I didn’t feel too bad about not giving them in-game “stuff” for some things like the supply room, as it offered clues (read: it had been undisturbed for a long time).

Expository stuff for Rubican could’ve used work. This was fun for Evan and I and more boring for others, I suspect. I like doing one on one stuff, and that’s fine in itself. The problem was that nobody else had any idea what was happening, which was kind of a shame after all that build-up. Perhaps the party could’ve seen/heard the last set of visions. Admittedly, some of this was due to the fact that I wanted to end it, which meant I didn’t have time for more interesting expository stuff. In the future, I plan to involve multiple players in “side” plots.

Improv went well. I’m not sure how much I should reveal what was made up and what wasn’t. I don’t want to ruin the impression for any of my players that everything wasn’t prepared, but let’s be honest: I didn’t prepare everything. So if you’re a player from my game and you don’t want to know, skip this!

I made up the weapons at the end on the spot. I had a dungeon tile for the corner there, forgot to do anything with it, and decided it had to be something good when people decided to explore it. Likewise, I gave them some books that I hadn’t planned originally— one of them for creating portals, and a couple of zolem manuals. I didn’t plan my descriptions for the staging area. Aaaand I didn’t plan anything past the PCs teleporting back to Er-Eret.

In the end, I’m happy with how all that went.

I finished a goddamn game. And now I can say that my game finished! It took god only knows how long. At least six months. …nine months, judging by when I put up session #1! Awesome. As I may’ve mentioned, most of my games end in neglect, either due to scheduling conflicts or my interest wanes.

What’s next?

Good question. Most likely it’s an Arcane Power game, since that book is out and Divine Power isn’t. The player roster will probably see some changes, and it will more than likely be a different format of play. I’ve also got a couple of things I might want to try and execute on in my next game (e.g., “rituals are important”).

You’re in a room

The PCs were in a room that ostensibly acted as a barracks. After examining the room, they noticed that there were runes of warding that protected the room. Since Ratha and Rubican had reasonable familiarity with the language of Bael-Turath, they were able to complete the spell and rest.

They deciphered the missives, of which there were two. One concerned a portal, and contained orders to shut down the portal in order to retreat to the Usurper’s strongpoint. There were also orders to execute any prisoners. The other missive was from an inferior officer who begged the addressee to keep the portal open.

The PCs discussed the implications of there being a portal here— questions as to whether the goblins were using this arose, whether the goblins were actually being exploited by something else— and before long they decided to rest.

Rubican had a dream, where the Usurper made him kneel. Rubican resisted and although it chagrined the Usurper, he congratulated Rubican on his persistence and strength of will. Then he disappeared. Rubican didn’t wake up; rather, he saw across the clearing a woman who radiated heat. He approached her, and offered a hand despite the scorching air around her. She cut the shard out of his hand, and showed him a vision of plains of endless fire.

The next day they explored the rest of the complex. They found a storage room, which contained little of value beyond what could be considered historical artifacts. They found the holding cells, wherein the executed prisoners had risen back to life, still locked in cells, and more or less harmless.

Finally, they found the portal room. There was a bright sphere of light and a runic circle. On the floor were ashes, which had been undisturbed. The presence of ash was conclusive proof that this place had been undisturbed.

They entered the portal and explored a bit after realizing that the portal had closed behind them and that they were stuck. The notion was that the room they arrived in was a staging area for troops. This became clearer as, once they explored, they discovered that there were other, now dormant, portal circles. They also heard voices, and chose to investigate.

The last confrontation

When they found the source of the voices, they saw a bunch of goblins, one of whom was attempting to build a new Zombie/Zolem/Zombie fat-man. The rest were gambling.

The chieftain nearly lost his wits when he saw Ratha and Rubican together, as he had some sense that Rubican was affiliated with the Usurper, and after having moved a bunch, it was evident that Ratha was of the Star Pact. The PCs tried to extract more information, and found mostly that he was struggling to rebuilt the goblin army. Evenutally the PCs convinced him that he’d been betrayed, at which point he lost all reason and ordered his goblins to attack.

It was a short fight. Once the goblins all died, though, the jeweled finery that the chief goblin had been wearing began to crack and explode. A mist formed, which took on a humanoid shape, and rushed at Rubican.

At this point, Rubican had another vision. The Usurper demanded Rubican’s full cooperation. The Mother of Embers, as she identified herself, appeared behind the Usurper. When the Usurper noticed, he flew into a rage, and offered Rubican power and wealth at his side. Rubican chose the Mother of Embers. In response, the Usurper assumed control of Rubican and the battle began.

It was a longer fight than before, but odds were against the Usurper, even though he was able to reconstitute the goblins and raise the Zolem. Once the final blow was struck, the Usurper combusted and dissipated, leaving behind a fine white ash, almost like sand.

The PCs searched the room and found a number of books preserved. This was the Usurper’s lab, perhaps one of many. One of these books had a scroll of teleportation in it, which necessitated that someone involved have an intimate connection with the teleport destination.

Another thing they found were some old Bael-Turathi weapons, obviously magical but clearly outside the bounds of what magic was available in modern times.

They cast the teleportation ritual, and appeared in Er-Eret.

Epilogue

Eventually, Sighni, Ansa, Ratha, Lexa, and Alec got together and discussed the implications of what happened, and resolved to do some more research. Ansa advised against keeping the Bael-Turathi weaponry, as it might awaken or attract evil. They were also acutely aware that this was probably not the end of the Usurper.

Lexa hung on to a couple of the daggers. They whispered to her, and with each passing day, she grew closer to understanding. We decided that, in all probability, she would go insane, especially since her beloved crime lord was in such a dangerous line of work.

Long-term, Alac’s plan was to raise money for Er-Eret from the antiquities they found in the outpost.

That night, when they were celebrating, they saw a familiar face reflected in the bonfire: Rubican, who lived on in some parallel realm of pure and scorching fire.

Done!

I’ll have more in the postmortem, but it was nice to have a not-entirely-shitty resolution to this campaign. Everyone seemed pleased enough, and I was glad I could put it to rest.

I also got my hands on Arcane Power, which of course looks pretty sweet so far.

That’s all for now, though, blog. I must has my sleeps, you see.

To review, I’ve entered the following books into my little database: PHB, FR PHB, Martial Power, and PHB2. I haven’t added any builds or content from Dungeon or Dragon, including the Artificer. I haven’t added the Dark Pact warlock, but I probably should.

Well, now! The long-tooth shifter seems to have cornered the market on the highest number of viable classes and builds. That’s in part because Strength remains king; the half-orc, goliath, and long-tooth are all within the top five most viable races, in no small part because PHB2 adds more Strength-based classes. What’s interesting is that now Wisdom narrowly beats Charisma as the second most valuable attribute.

Wisdom’s increased prominence means the dwarf has picked up three top tier classes and a bucketful of new builds due to Constitution appearing in a few classes. I still find it more than a little amusing that a dwarf is a viable bard, of all things. (It’s not that I can’t see the thematic possibilities— it’s that prior to 4e, it would’ve been a ridiculous, awful choice for a bunch of reasons.) What I find more amusing is the prospect of a goliath bard, a 7’5″ bard made of rocks. Think on that!

Speaking of the bard, half-elves now have a bard build as a top-tier choice! Eladrin still only have one, though, and dragonborn picked up two more top-tier builds, bringing them up to six (with the caveat that three of those are warlord builds).

Another thing I notice is that new classes are, at worst, on par with many of the races from PHB1 in terms of the sheer number of options. On average, PHB2 races have ~3.3 top tier builds, whereas PHB1 classes have more like ~2.8.  They have ~35 viable builds on average, compared to ~28 for PHB1 classes. I’m not going to read a whole lot into this, but it is vaguely interesting.

Again with the context

As I said in my previous post, this is based on a fairly simplistic analysis of what’s viable and what’s not. Some classes have racial abilities that complement classes nicely, whereas others are a poor choice for other reasons.

To wit, a dwarf avenger with an Execution Axe and Dwarven Weapon Training is quite terrifying. With 18 Wisdom, he’s rolling at least 9 damage on every attack! He’s also less mobile. And, since avengers start with Cloth only, it’ll cost feats to take advantage of dwarves’ “Speed 5 with heavy armor” schtick. It’s a tradeoff, in other words.

The other thing is that suboptimal builds have some recourse as of PHB2— now you can shore up your slightly lower to-hit with feats like Weapon or Implement Mastery. Of course optimal builds can take those, too, but that’s potentially at the cost of a feat that’s more interesting or relevant.

You’re a what now?

In the end, I like doing this analysis not in order to find the most optimal builds, but rather to find those that are unexpectedly viable and thus offer interesting ways to depart from the norm. The half-elf barbarian, goliath bard, half-orc cleric, and tiefling shaman are each combinations that are (by the above standard) viable as well as delightfully off the beaten path. I might have missed them if I hadn’t written this tool. Depending on whether or not I find time to polish my little app, I might be able to make it available, with this purpose chiefly in mind.

Thanks for reading!

It’s also special in part because no Er-Eret tonight. It’s going to be a weeknight next week! It has to be. I’m determined. And I’m more than a little tempted to bring this to a close post-haste.

Anyway, I’ve only had a chance to skim PHB2 as of this writing. Even though my assessment is half-baked, I do have one or two impressions which are even more half-assed and ill-thought-out than usual!

Classes

Compared to previous editions, the barbarian is seems more meaty than dodgy: Strength is primary, and from there it’s Charisma or Constitution, leaving little room for improving AC via Intelligence or Dexterity. Picking up heavier armor is an interesting tradeoff— you’re spending a feat to forfeit +1 Reflex and 1 Speed in exchange for +2 AC.

Can we talk about dwarves? As I mentioned in a previous post, dwarves have a lot to gain from PHB2. There are tons of races that have Constitution, Wisdom, or both. In the top tier, we have druid, invoker, and shaman. All but a couple of classes have one or the other: avenger, barbarian, bard (!!!), and warden. For those of you counting, that’s seven out of eight of the classes in PHB2. 

If you were looking for more evidence of how much of a departure 4e is from 3.x, you have only to look at the half-orc: two physical traits up, Strength and Dex. 

I guess I have no excuse not to play a gnome bard. This time around, though, it’ll be far more interesting. No more goddamn talking to goddamn burrowing animals. And the bard? I could honestly see myself playing it, at least from a mechanical perspective. It’s viable as all get out and I want in on that shit. 

Shamans get a lot of at-wills to choose from. Six! This is on top of a couple of other at-wills. This is one class that took some flak over at Critical Hits. After browsing the level 1 abilities, it’s hard for me to see what the fuss is about. They seem as solid as any warlord, and if I’m in the mood to play a leader, they’d most certainly be in the running.

Someone pointed out that PHB2 classes a lot going on, and that seems pretty accurate. Barbarians have rage; sorcerers have their quirks; wardens shapeshift after a fashion, and druids more so. I’d say they’re definitely more mechanically ambitious than PHB1 classes at first glance. This is something worth discussing more in a separate post, so I’ll stop there.

Races

I have to say that demi-humans are the hardest part of D&D for me to get excited about. At the risk of repeating myself, my “ideal” fantasy game would be all human, but with similar mechanical benefits due to background. That said, there’re one or two bits that are interesting.

Deva make a great control wizard. In particular, imagine one at level 5— Cloud of Daggers or Thunderwave operating at 5 squares? -5 to enemy saves? Intriguing.

The rest Goliaths are sick barbarians, half-orcs are asshole brutal rogues, and gnomes can make for some pretty nasty fae-pact warlocks (COINCIDENCE? YOU DECIDE). It’s fairly standard, though one interesting bit is that a great number of these races are quite viable when it comes to PHB1.

Maybe the only complaint I’d voice about races is the proliferation of top tier race/class combinations. The math is transparent enough that you can adjust difficulty quite easily, whether or not the game assumes these highly optimized classes. Still, it makes me sad that, for example, the eladrin are still a ways behind the other races in terms of top tier class options. 

I’ll have more data on races later, once I’ve updated my data to include these new races and classes.

kthxbai

Aaaand on that note I’m going to adjourn. Expect more commentary in a later post.

The PCs are in a spot I’m none too happy about. My inspiration is failing and I feel a bit trapped; that’s as good an explanation I can offer for the weeks of silence on this blog, honestly. So, rather than dragging this out further and try to salvage it, we’re going to end it in the next session or two. Quite simply, there comes a time when I’ve gotta lance the boil and cut straight to rapid exposition and a couple of battles.

I’m pretty sure at least one of my players reads this, so I’m not going to go into details. But I did leave myself this out; this was my original plan, and everything else was a wrinkle or variation on this.

If I may be premature about this game, particularly in the context of my performance, I’d say it was a mixed bag. The first couple of sessions were reasonably good, I’d say. Maybe the second one is one of the best sessions I’ve run. From there, it got harder, chiefly because I didn’t know how to structure a D&D game in order to make it interesting. Some of that was self-inflicted doubt; rather than focus on what I thought would be good, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I should be doing, if that distinction makes any sense. I had ideas but I didn’t execute most of them because I didn’t know how to introduce them.

I think perhaps one of my biggest mistakes with Er-Eret was to send the PCs on their way too soon. The timeline could’ve been slowed down, such that a second or third attack was necessary to bring the place to its knees. Alternatively, forcing the PCs to attack more than once, allowing more evidence to mount or giving them a better idea of where they’re headed, might’ve been a smarter move and provided more engaging play. As it stands now, it was “go from point A to point B and have some fights on the way.” That’s OK as far as it goes, but I wanted more.

As far as my level of confidence with D&D is concerned, I’m still not there. The next game that I run will probably be scaled back somewhat in terms of ambition— I’ll start with what I’m most familiar with, which is character interaction (as opposed to dungeon design, traveling, exploration, and the like), translate that into D&D, and take it from there.  I’ll have a more solid plan for getting PCs together, a tighter arc, and then we can decide after one or two sessions if we want to keep playing these characters or what

Because yes, even though the corpse of my old game isn’t even cold, I’m already thinking about my next game. I’m leaning heavily towards a game consisting of PCs with a divine power source only. I may have to stretch that a bit, since I believe there are only four (i.e., cleric, paladin, invoker, avenger). The characters would, in theory, be affiliated with the same or similar religious organizations, and could act in some professional capacity. An inquisition-style dynamic would let them perform investigations, fight, and politick to their hearts’ content. It might also give them opportunities to do some dungeon crawling.

That’s all for now, blog. You see, while I’ve designed the last couple of bits, I haven’t committed much fluff to paper. I’ve also got to nail down the details for the last encounter, since this session could actually end up being fairly quick.