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.