"Look, no one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said 'Let's get rid of all of our fans and replace them.' That was never the intent," Mearls said.

Man. I know no reasonable person believes that. Even so, I feel pretty bad for the Wizards folks. No matter what they do, some subset of the RPG fans will hate it.

Call it the narcissism of small differences, if you like, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. The Internet offers gigabytes of evidence which suggests we’re all susceptible to those dynamics. They don’t call them Edition Wars without reason, whether the conflict in question is D&D 3e vs. 4e, or old World of Darkness vs. new World of Darkness. If there’s a bright side, it’s that people care enough about the pastime to express strong opinions about it.

To hear the author tell it, even this article provoked some amount of controversy! The Escapist posted the whole transcript in an effort to clear the air. It’s funny that people (apparently?) accused the author, Alexander Macris, of having some kind of intrinsic bias in various directions.

D&D and the “death spiral,” for instance: does anyone doubt that although 4e might’ve sold “well,” the industry continues to shrink? I’m not saying anyone has to like it. I’m just pointing out that it’s a no-brainer: there are many more choices, media-wise, than there were in the days of 1e, 2e, and to some extent, 3e. Or about the alleged axe Macris has to grind: do people not give any weight at all to the criticism of 4e? Reasonable people can disagree on issues like whether there are simply too many concurrent effects for many people to track.

Towards the end, they get into an interesting discussion about how the current environment for games differs from the environment D&D came out of. The short of it is that RPGs— or any board game, really— are competing for time with video games. Video games have many strong incentives to get you up and running very quickly, whereas learning an RPG or any sort of board game typically takes time. It’s a boostrapping problem: how do you start playing immediately if you have no idea how to play? I imagine that first hour, if that long, is extremely fragile.

It’s a tough problem, and I’ll confess I don’t know enough about, well, anything to predict whether or not the Red Box approach is likely to work. The time investment is still an issue: people are willing to spend comparable time on MMOs for raids and such, but by that point they have some idea of what they’re in for and they’re reasonably sure they’ll enjoy it.

And if it’s a hurdle for players, it’s often worse for the DM. There are ways around this, like making the mechanics of encounter-building very easy. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way in any case; I might very well be projecting.

I think they’re right in some sense that the more you play an RPG, the more you’re likely to get out of it. But that’s a tough sell, isn’t it? For an MMO, the game is fun immediately, without ramp-up time and without having to find like-minded people. Frontloading the experience is one way to deal with it, but we’re back to the bootstrapping problem again.

At this point, I’ve begun to regret not having picked up Essentials. Oh, sure, I knew what I was getting into with the Red Box, and I still want to play it. And I’m a goddamn collector! No, the problem is that now I’m curious. I want something to read through and digest.

I foresee a trip to my FLGS in the next week or so.

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.

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.

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.

Still, I think Changeling would be a good challenge for me; I’ve learned a few things, and Changeling is one of those games that’s kind of amazingly open-ended. I mean, there’s a lot you can focus on in any given game. Off the top of my head, there’s changeling politics; changelings’ relationship with mortals, family (incl. fetches) or otherwise; various changeling-specific supernatural stuff; and of course conflicts between privateers, True Fae, and changelings. It’s intimidating, which I’m guessing is why good GMing advice tells you to consider seriously what your players want.

Divine Power comes out soon, as well, if it’s not out already. I’ll have it by next week, I think. Previously, I voiced interest in running a divine-themed game and I’ll confess my interest in D&D in general has waned somewhat. 4th Edition’s system is less invasive in many ways, but I’m concerned about unintentionally performing a bait-and-switch. That is, I feel I might be cheating people if I ran a D&D game with a little combat as I typically include.

A little bit of my hestitation with regard to running new games is this tension between wanting to run a long-ish game and the improbability of actually pulling it off. This is a pretty common complaint among adult gamers, as far as I can tell; it comes with the territory of being an adult. I saw how my first long-ish D&D game nearly died until I forcibly rescusitated for one last session. I’m glad I did it but it sucks that I had to.

Anyway, all that aside, I’m also really excited about Geist. Here’s a brief roundup of interesting things I’ve read about it.

First off, you can see some examples of character creation from some of the White Wolf freelancers, incl. Stew Wilson and Matt McFarland. Also, I’ve been remiss in not keeping up with Matt’s actual play thread, as many entries have become unlocked since I last checked.

Finally, if you have any substantial interest in the game, you owe it to yourself to read Martin Ralya of Gnome Stew’s preview of Geist. He got his hands on a review copy of Geist, and takes a nice, long look at the game.

That’s all for now!

Needless to say, I cracked open Geist first. I’m on a few pages in but it’s really cool so far. For those of you familiar with the old World of Darkness, imagine something like Risen except designed to be sustainable. That’s my initial impression so far, at any rate.

I’ve got a friend in town, and perhaps enough people around that I could actually run again of it tonight. We’ll see, won’t we? It’d be a challenge for me, but if there’s enough diggity demand, I’d do it.

Oh also I got my hands on a copy of Spirit of the Century. My friend Alex talked it up, and since my local store had 10% off, the price was right.

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.