Oh hey, thing!

So yeah, I'm on The Tome Show tonight, discussing Midgard Heroes as I oh-so-smoothly insinuated in my terribly conveniently timed latest roundup post. So if you're here from that, s'up?

Otherwise, I should mention that we had session #83 of Harbinger's game on Sunday, which was really excellent for me, as my Fighter, Lanth accomplished yet another major goal, and got to do some serious and convincing weight-slinging as far as convincing other people to do the needful and not be assholes (NPCs, not the party). Also, the party actually agreed on a plan for actually actives next steps against the main (so far) campaign level threat. This highlights something the game does that I really super love, which is Birthright style Magic-is-tied-to-the-land. Lemme 'splain.

There's these gigantic (typically) stone creatures called Domain Sentinels, who were created in ancient days to protect certain magically designated areas of land, or, well, domains. My character's race, the Veytikka, seem to have some kind of connection also to the domains, or at least to providing legitimacy somehow to people who want to rule it- but that's my impression from some things that've happened in game. Not least of which involves the first time we met a Domain Sentinel, on the first floor of a dungeon which is basically a nod to Od Nua from Pillars of Eternity. This one was a 10 foot tall stone quadruped which trapped each of us in this ray of blue light and asked us creepy, enigmatic questions. And the one Lanth got was, "Is there a threat to the domain?"

I said no at the time, but as shit got ever closer to the overhead rotary device, my opinion has shifted, and now we're basically collecting Sentinels to turn against the evil angel that is busily seeking to sow chaos and destruction in all the living world. So that's fun.

But really, I love this kind of mecha-monster ally deal, and it potentially lends itself to some fun, non-horrible, more allied Shadow of the Colossus type play, in the long run. Anyway, the session was much more heavy on the social side than the combat side this time, which is often pretty awesome when it's well seeded and has a strong foundation (this did, it was a number of pay-offs from really old previous encounters), and the combat, when it came, was done in such a way that we only barely survived it, only barely defeated the horrible curfew-enforcing armored air elemental thing that was beating the snot out of us, and then only barely avoided getting the tracking curse it'd placed on us cured before the local military police found us and made our lives that much more short. All in all, a good time.

And looking back over that, I should really get into more details about the pretty awesome and terrible situation we're in, but it's late, and I need to cut like, 50 words or so from my 200 word RPG that I will maybe actually remember to send in this year.

Over a year and roundup time.

...Wow, I suck so much. I promise you that the lack of posts in the past... years has been from lack of time, and in no-wise lack of topics. So let's walk through some Roundup stuff, shall we?

Running

I'm running Liel, my D&D game, and... that's about it. I'm enjoying the hell out of it though. I like running games... maybe more than playing them. I want to talk more about this soonest, especially because we just went through about 3 sessions of the players dying, being dead, and then making themselves not dead again, which meant it was a fairly good test case for ideas I put forth in that article I guest wrote for Tribality that one time. I think it went pretty well, and it was also a nice example of a theme that bears repeating: When the players pick up all the hints and figure out what's going on, they should probably just win.

...because, y'know, I need more blog topics. Right.

Playing

Aurikesh - Harbinger's D&D 5e game. Continues to be great. I'm mostly focusing on my Blademaster 2 weapon fighter, who is level 7 now and feels like an unstoppable badass. I need to get my Tomelock and my Royal Sorcerer caught up more. That said, my main is well in the middle of accomplishing one of her major character goals, so I've got that going for me. 

Granite Sledge - Standsinfire's 5e game. Planescape on a boat! A big, rocky boat. I am playing a Lamia Monk, which is really interesting... StandsInFire created cool rules for her; I'm blood of Abraxas. The game itself is gonzo in a good way... thing

Forgotten Realms - Harbinger is also running a 5e Realms game with me and a couple of friends. I am playing a gnomish Mystic Theurge who worships the god of runes... really, I just wanted to play a Theurge. So far, I like it pretty well... it sure is a wizard who gets to use cleric spells. Not super special, except thematically. 

Over The Edge 25a - Harbinger has run a couple sessions of this, and basically, I always want more. I've said this before, but MAN do I love the playtest dice rules so far- I feel like I could run almost anything with them, particularly if I want something very light, that is heavy on the RP.

Cuphead - does anyone really play this game, or does this game play them?

Love Nikki- Yeah, I said it. But seriously, it hits all my weak points- collection, completionism, aesthetics, and exploration. It's a time and money trap like no other. If you value your cash and sanity, AVOID (but seriously, my friend code is 106448785).

Flight Rising- Yup, still. Not a ton to say about the dressup dragons except it seems the community has mellowed some, and it's gone to always-open registration, so check it out if you are so inclined! For reals though, it's a really good introduction to the culture of subgaming and in-game IRL economics beyond gold sellers (just... search on 'adoptable' sometime), and how pet games are fascinating for the econ lessons.

Pokémon Go - What? Don't you judge me, you know you're playing it too. And no, I don't have Mew yet. I'm about halfway there, still stuck looking for friggin ghost pokémon.

Writing

I wrote a Campaign Starter Kit for Unknown Armies 3 which is out to the backers now! Likely it will drop on DriveThruRPG soonish, and when that happens, I should definitely post it here, and not, y'know... forget.

For myself, I'm working on a Very Deconstructed Game called (tenatively) At What Cost, and if I actually manage to not get swamped by Day Job, I will post design diaries here, or sommat. I am hoping to have a playtestable version of it by Metatopia, assuming we're able to actually go to Metatopia this year. We'll see.

Also, I should make sure I'm not under NDA before I talk about anything else I'm writing for anyone, but Harbinger and I will be at GenCon, so there's that.

Reading

Midgard Heroes - by Kobold Press. More on this later as well, but the short version, there's a lot here I want to pick apart and feed on to grant my games strength, much like the necrophage described in its pages. Find it here. 

In the Company of Unicorns - by Rite Publishing, specifically, converted for 5e by my own dearest Harbinger. So, in the dim and tawdry days of 4e, I was working on a set of equine racial options called Pwny Island, which apparently, I actually thought was funny at the time. I never finished it, like so many things, but look! B basically has- well, at least, the unicorns- and managed to make them interesting, serious but not over-earnest, and fairly compelling. I'm actually unironically interested in playing a unicorn character after reading this book. I really want to do some sessions with it and post roundup reviews, because Yeah I do! So really, go! OBTAIN IT.

From Kickstarter, we got our copies of Epyllion, Changeling 20th, and I'll be picking up Dawning Star at GenCon this year, and I'm further waiting on too long a list to mention, so I'll make the attempt to talk about those games as I receive them. 

And that's the news. Why am I actually posting things now? 

...well, why indeed. 

Because I missed you, probably.

Dungeons and Dungeons (potentially, part the first)

Since Shieldhaven brought it up in the comments on this post, I should talk a little about what I do when it comes to dungeon-running.

I grew up playing my dad's AD&D games, which were always dungeons. I think I've only run one game that was not a dungeon, and that one was a one shot for a single player. Contrariwise, except for my dad's game, I don't think I've played another D&D game that has been primarily dungeon based. So I guess it is still a little odd that for me, when I am running a game, dungeon exploration is pretty much everything. Which isn't to say that the world above doesn't matter-- it certainly does. Just that the players won't typically be interacting with it directly; at least, not for some time.

The part that can be chalked up to laziness is where I like the constraints that dungeons put on the party's immediate actions, at game start. There's this map, see? There's only so many directions they can go. I don't suddenly have to gen up a bunch of stuff I'm not prepared for (unless I haven't read my notes in a while, which has certainly happened), or come up with a more artificial way to use something I'd planned. What's there is there.

That said, no one really wants to go through another boring hall after boring hall, fighting incongruous monsters and improbable traps that don't seem to have any reason to be there. Also, there's the problem where you find a bunch of loot that is difficult to impossible to spend, because there's not a ton of good shopping in the underground. Usually. So here's a list of things I think about when I'm preparing a dungeoncrawl campaign.

In which there was Content.

As of Sunday, I will be actually running a game again! My first time running some 5e, so it ought to be interesting. I am a huge fan of the megadungeon, so we'll see how that goes down, especially since it will be my first time running D&D for Shieldhaven at all. Not the first time I've run a game he's played in; the first (and only) such being my Nobilis One Shot of great antiquity (that I never actually posted about ><). Anyway.

My setting, which is called Liel, is the oh so original idea of taking a Sigil like crossroads and making it a whole world, rather than just a city. So pretty much all races and gods are available here. To reduce burden on myself (for some values of reduce), I re-wrote most of the PHB races to get rid of subraces, and broke some of the subrace options into a cultural bonus for being an immigrant (more recently come to this work) or being a colonist/native (originally from the world, or having immigrated so long ago it makes no difference). I also changed some things because the default races are different (humans are common, but not even a little default), and yeah. The important thing here is that the natives/colonists all have an option to take a feat at first level, and I know you're surprised that pretty much all of the PCs are doing that. Go figure!

The main thing this does is make it so that I feel better about starting at first level, rather than going with my 3e inclination and starting everyone at 3rd.

When I last ran this setting for 4e, I had a pantheon of gods that granted a background feat to their worshipers. Feats being tiny and fiddly, this was a lot of good fun to come up with. I wanted to do something similar for 5e, and funnily, it actually fits better. Because there are so many gods available in the world, the most common form of worship is called Giedame, where the worshiper selects six gods of their choice and focuses their piety upon them. Technically, a PC could choose gods not listed below (historically, Dragonlance gods are popular in the world :P), and I'd try to come up with something for that, but I've only actually written things for the gods I made up myself. So... below the cut I have:

• 1 new feat
• a bunch of boons (about 1/3rd of a feat to mix & match)
• 3 new spells (2 1st level spells (one of which is a ritual), 1 cantrip)

And a bunch of gods for spicy flavor. Enjoy!

Where she been, Oooh she been gone! (Sporadic Roundup #3)

Over the past... several months, I completely forget what I've been doing. So let's talk briefly about what I've been up to lately:

• Dungeons and Dragons 5e -- I'm playing two games at the moment: Shieldhaven's Aurikesh game (as I was, and will be, amen), and also a game called Reborn- a mostly online game run by a friend that I will call Mr. AWESOME. In the former, I am continuing to play my Veytikka Fighter and Beruch Warlock, and have now added a Kagandi Parthé who is a Royal Sorcerer. My Warlock has been the subject of a lot of tinkering and fussing, but really, it was the addition of a couple of new cleric cantrips of Haven's that really helped me have fun in combat (I'm a tomelock, see). So it seems like a lot of the problem was that most of the cantrips at base just weren't interesting enough. Well, and the combination of a) needing to take Agonizing Blast (even though I didn't), and b)  invocations being a little too much like build traps (see item a). But I digress. Hopefully, I'll also get to play a bit of Lost Mines of Phandelver fairly soon, so that will be cool.  
• 13th Age -- we started a game of 13th age, run by another friend I will call Batgirl, and I'm hoping we'll get to play more of that. I am playing something completely ridiculous, but it's been long enough I can't recall a lot of specifics. 
• Life is Strange -- a Square Enix story game. I bought the season pass, and am on my second playthrough of episode 3, having completely fucked up the second episode in one playthrough. Or, well, allowed something bad enough to happen that I had to have a second one to see the other primary outcomes. There's 5 episodes total, and it's interesting to see how they handle the branching consequences. So I'm liking that. 

Also, I am working on a Twine game about books that change based on the order you read them in. I need to brush up on my JS skills so that I can possibly write some macros around more robust array functionality, because a lot depends on whether I can make conditional content around whether one item has a higher or lower array index than another. On the subject of a lot of fiddly, branching consequences. Anyway, when I have a playable demo, I will doubtless post it here-ish. 

I have not been working on either of the tabletop game ideas I have; the one about psions, temporarily called The Red Ones, and the one about cities, working title: A City of Dolls and Monsters. 

And that's the news in brief. 

Spells, Feats, and Advancement.

When I was a kid, I fell in love with my dad's collection of Dungeons and Dragon's handbooks, and most especially the lists of spells and things. Sure, they were presented kind of prosaically and weren't laid out in a way that was especially useful, but as little scraps of interest, they were incredibly cool to me, and hinted at the neatness of being a wizard... keeping a prop spellbook, and questing for arcane knowledge to grow in awesomeness and power.

When I was first able to roll up a character, then, I was extremely disappointed to learn that what I actually got was a tiny list of what was more-or-less available, with some obvious Best Choices, and of those, I could only cast a very few times a day, and had to decide how many times I thought I might cast a given thing. Which made the Best Choices at the beginning even more important.

What I thought I wanted, at the time, was a removal of the limits on how many spells I could know/keep in spellbook, and a different way of approaching how many spells I could cast in a given day. And to some extent, I am still in favor of some slotted spells, some at-will cantrips, and prepping the spells themselves, rather than individual castings of the spells. That said, having automatic access to everything in the spell-book at level still wasn't, and isn't, to my mind, especially interesting. The problem, at bottom, was that the way one typically gains the spells is hugely uninteresting: to wit, you level up, and then you (most of the time, some DMs vary) just get access to the spells for your level, within the bounds of your int.

Yawn.

I have two basic issues with these things: one which has to do with the way spells are handed out, and the other which has to do with the way one advances at all. We'll address the first to begin with, since it's actually applicable in D&D, and, some might argue, is the way the game ought to be run in the first place.

It boils down to, "treat spells as treasure." Fully, entrench the spells in the story, as items and artifacts that are a part of the world beyond their utility/combat effectiveness. Sure, it is important that a starting mage have spells they can use and have fun with, but couching that in story about how they learned said spells, and creating the expectation that yes, the players will and can uncover new spells over the course of play that can be added to said spell book (whether or not the user can cast them right at that moment) is kind of nifty. I'd like to remove the idea of gaining spells from the idea of "gaining a level," which also brings me to my second point.

The more I play games, the more I think I'm over the idea of levels as the primary form of advancement. Stands-In-Fire, at one point, suggested a system where you could learn one new skill/ability each session, and the more I think about it, the more I like that idea. I get, and I can pretty much be convinced that, for mages, it's important to limit capacity (ability to cast more powerful spells, and/or number of spells one can cast) in the early game and have that expand, just as I don't necessarily disagree with the argument that a fighter should get better at accuracy and damage as the game progresses. Doing something like that, however, would be antithetical enough to D&D that you might as well start building a new game system around that idea. Which is certainly fine by me. The main idea here, for mages in specific (though I really love the too-underutilized idea of training/specialties as treasure from 4e), is that what advances is now much and at what power you can cast, so the level that matters is the level of the spell. You get new spells through play/research, and pretty specifically through play/research, so it's not grubbing through the boring Player's Handbook pick lists. Importantly to me, though maybe not so interesting to other people, this also removes the desire to plan ahead with spells, because you don't actually know what you're going to find in the course of play, but must think of cool ways to use the spells you earn/learn/find as you go along. Personally, I am not a fan of playing the build game, and I would very much like advancement to be tied directly to what happens in the course of play, rather than planned out in advance based on what is in a rulebook.

But like I said, that could very well just be me.

Since I touched on training treasure above, I want to take a moment to talk about Feat Systems, and why I don't care for the ones I've seen from 3.x to the current iteration in Next (yes, this includes 4e). Largely, I think they encourage optimal combo combo building, which encourages deep system mastery at the expense of newcomers, less devoted to build-play players, and in some cases, the balance of the game itself. The habit of stacking customization in feats, and then handing those feats out at regular level intervals has the effect (once again, to me), of making non-feat levels basically boring stops on one's way to grind to get to the next set of feats.

I don't know what you like to play, but any tabletop game where it seems like a good and worthwhile use of time to grind high-xp monsters over and over to get closer to leveling has missed out on the thing I enjoy about playing a role-playing game: the figuring out of what one needs to go to achieve each individual goal. The goal in these situations is meta (more XP to get to the next level) and it's obvious what one needs to do (grind difficult monsters to get there). And yes, I'm not just talking about 4e-- this happened in 3.x games too. I prefer if the goal is less meta (one of the only times you'll see me say 'less meta' is desirable), more concrete, and more story oriented, for example, "we are seeking the monk who lives atop Forsaken Mountain that she might teach us the Awesome Ways of Awesome." Still, we're talking about advancement, but we're talking about something that's in the story.

And now, I admit that it isn't the feats themselves I mind, it's the way they're handed out, and how they're presented to the players as, essentially, a shopping list to handle at level. I would have no objection to treating them, once again, as treasure, earned through acts and adventuring on the part of the players... you could have tomes of Dwarven Lumberjacking (as a tropetastic example) which teach superior skill in axes, or a cool ability that allows one to do a nifty maneuver while wielding an axe. Or enchantments/blessings that one can temporarily add to weapons, or meditations that allow one to focus one's energy on repelling blows, and improve AC for a time. And these items could pretty easily map to feats as they're written in any of the aforementioned editions, tying their distribution to and through play, rather than to something so arbitrary as level.

To be completely fair, Arcana Evolved _did_ try to do this some with their spellcasting feats, by requiring ceremonies involving certain kinds of beings or creatures in order to obtain them, though the way they were presented was pretty much entirely though the rulebook, rather than being knowledge I think it would ever occur to anyone to organically acquire in play.

Anyway, I also get that, for the most part, this can be handled through the GM's style of game running, rather than needing to be ensconced in rules, unless one is modifying how advancement works, of course. And I imagine that there are already systems in place that do the things I'm talking about more naturally.

But huh, I'd also be open to running a gladiator/arena kind of game where the point was to build an optimal character from the beginning, and swap out pieces/choices between each session to tweak for effectiveness, as something of a crunchy 180 from my play-style, here. Hrm.

Keep it Classy, or the Paladin Problem.

My dear Harbinger has been doing the heavy listing on keeping track of D&D Next playtest reactions of late, and now the last public one is out. That said, Mearls and Co. are still making some extremely interesting Legends and Lore posts, and the most recent one has spurred me out of my complaisant atrophy to make some comments.

To begin with, I want to say that I am a huge fan of Four Core Classes, combine into neat-o concepts. This post addresses the former with the idea of Mage, Priest, Warrior, Trickster, but doesn't go into the latter at all, which is a bit disappointing. Trying to decide of the Monk is a Warrior or a Trickster (one or the other) is sort of silly IMHO; use the headers here as source types (which works for everyone except Trickster, really), and call a Monk a Trickster-Warrior (though I think of Monks as more Priesty-Warrior, like more-different flavored Paladins). Then you can have cool things like Magey-Priests, and Warrior-Mages, and so on.

The problem as I see it here is that they're kind of trying to re-create Defender, Striker, Leader, Controller without actually doing that, but they're using terms that don't exactly apply to the same things. It's kind of an un-developed idea in the post, but what will make or break it, I think, is how and whether they decide to handle overlap.

But then, I was a huge fan of Class/Background/Specialty, which sparked my imagination enough to create a Warlock with the priest background and a cool custom specialty of Harbinger's... which led to a neat story about an apostate priest who, not having been blessed with clerical powers, made a bargain with the Lords of the Fey, and belongs to an order who heals through bloodletting. I'm not saying that the current creation rules don't include things that will spark interesting story ideas (and a lot of the impetus for this idea came from the setting itself, to be fair), but in previous versions, I don't think it would have occurred to me to have a character who combined the divine and arcane, as there was really no good, supported way of expressing that idea mechanically. And the Priest Background kept it nicely limited. Personally (and while yes, I realise that there's a lot of mechanical variation and stuff they've done to legitimise it as a class), I'd have liked to see Paladins expressed solely as Fighters with the Priest background, or Clerics with the Warrior/Mercenary background (and related specialties), depending on their focus.

It should now not surprise you that I don't care for a whole lot of additional classes, on the whole. I think that the impetus to come up with a bunch of mechanics for said classes tends to result in those classes being Just Better than anything basic... as the Paladin is in the most current playtest packet. A traditional Paladin problem. Which then results in everyone's favorite game: Nerf the Pally. It's an unfortunate cycle.

Now, the chance of me running anything at all in the next... anytime soon is incredibly slim, but were I to do so, I would probably run out of some of those earlier packets, and keep the systems I like. Which is a definite advantage of the way the playtest has been run up to this point... we effectively have several partial, but playable games with a lot of different mechanics to pick, choose, and monkey around with. Which is awesome to me on a lot of levels, the most immediate of which is that I wouldn't ever run the current playtest as written-- I am sick to death of, "just start at 3rd level if you want to have fun" games, and that is very much where they've gone here.

I have some additional thoughts on the first part of the post-- spells, spell lists, and the like, but that is a topic for another post, if I can rouse myself enough to make one later.

Information Presentation: D&D Next and Fight Building.

Shieldhaven having sent me the latest Legends and Lore post, I was struck by the following portion:

Is a monster having immunity to non-magical weapons negating the concept of not strictly needing magic items?  Or is the intent to force players to get creative when facing such monsters?

We believe that not all monsters need to be able to be defeated in a straight, head-on fight. Some monsters should require players characters to either have the right tools for the job (in this case, magic items), or be creative in how they deal with them. We don’t want the answer to every monster problem to automatically be “stab it until it dies,” and that goes for spellcasting, too; there may well be monsters that end up in the game that cannot be harmed by spells. We think this is good for two reasons: one, it makes having the right tool for the job (and the tool itself) much more special and valuable, and makes the player feel good for having it; and two, it adds texture and problem-solving to adventures rather than encouraging players to simply barrel through every adventure using violence as the only solution.

All that having been said, any time we deal with something as impactful as immunity to spells or immunity to nonmagical weapons, we have to be sparing with how often we sprinkle it throughout the game. We don’t want to end up in a situation where those monsters that provide that texture become the standard, creating a reversal where players are frequently frustrated by having to constantly deal with monsters that cannot be harmed by traditional means. Like all things that present a non-traditional challenge to the players, we need to be judicious in their use so that they retain their value as an exceptional thing that provides texture, not a constant source of frustration.

All good points on the part of Rodney Thompson (thanks to Haven for the edit. :P), but what doesn't get addressed here is how to use them as a GM. "We" here doesn't seem to imply the GM, after all, but the overall design. And that's fair; they're clearly aware that giving even a significant portion of the monsters huge, sweeping immunities could easily lead to a lot of player frustration. What they don't get into, and what I'd really like to see in a DMG 1, are some basic uses for monsters with weapon/magic immunities, and how to make them fun.

For starters, don't have that be the only kind of monster in a given battle.

This could actually be a very general statement: where possible, include monsters of different types, with different strengths and weaknesses. The NPC roles of 4e were very useful for this, as having a controller, a couple soldiers, and a bunch of minions with complementary abilities often made for complex and engaging fights with a lot of layers. The magic or weapon immune monster could be likewise interesting, but the trick is providing enough stuff for the characters whose go-tos are obsolete something to do.

Thus, my next suggestion is, where possible, include manipulable elements in the combat location, and make sure that the excludes players can use them. In a battle where the big bad is immune to spells, don't have a lot of strength-check challenges, but structural items that spells can weaken and knock into the monster? Pretty awesome. In one where the monster is immune to non-magical weaponry, having a lot of mundane adds, or say... having something like a giant fire-pit where the fighters can temporarily gain a swing or two of enchant, but have to do something to keep it going? Very cool, and gives everyone something to think about while the combat is going on. If you can't tell, I was madly in love with terrain powers, zones, swarms, and special terrain in 4e, and I very much hope to see those come back in D&D next.

I think in general, a basic ideas guide in the main released DMG on how to stat fights for this edition, and how to set up the fights to be entertaining would go a long way in helping everyone at the table have fun with it. At this point, most people playing/testing Next have a lot of expectations and habits built up from previous editions. A little bit of guidance in how to make the most of this one, and how to realise what the designers had in mind for combat structure, would be a very good jumping off place for making it their own.

Sporadic Roundup!

So, my gaming has been... spotty, at best, but I figured that it was probably time to go and take stock of what I'm playing, for my own edification, if nothing else.

First off, quick shout-out to the indie+ gaming circle on G+, which has more or less got me back into a thinking about games, and writing about them. And, of course, Shieldhaven, who is running some D&D Next stuff for which I have a couple of alts. And, as I am a lazy git when it comes to filling out WOTC's feedback, I might as well talk about my impressions somewhere.

Tabletop

Arcana Evolved: Yeah, still playing that. Made it to level 14, are Runechildren now. Still not a fan of 3.5 style combat.
D&D Next: As I mentioned a little earlier, I have two characters in Shieldhaven's game: a Veytikka duelist-bounty hunter, and a Beruch FEy-Pact Warlock. So far, I really like the fighter's stuff in combat, though Shieldhaven changed up the dual-wielder specialty a little to make it less crappy. Warlocks, on the other hand, are very dull in combat, but, well, the class is basically sooooo two playtest packets ago. Will actually go into this more in-depth in a little bit.
Over the Edge: Have not played as much of this as I'd like, for realio.
Ptolus: played a session of this, and boy, I'd forgotten how much I prefer Pathfinder to core 3.x rules. Magus is completely broken, however, and... hm, there's probably a post brewing in how much I dislike +ECL classes (I was playing a Minotaur, but we hacked it to avoid ECL).
My Game: has been on hiatus about forever, largely due to a complete lack of time. And also because levelling without DDI, which I am not currently paying for, is pretty much lame. But I've probably talked enough previously about how badly I think WOTC bungled that one.
Mage: the Awakening:  Has now wrapped, after we murdered the face of the Red Word cult. I made it to Mind 5, Space 3 as a Mastigos, and I feel pretty good about that. There's some political goals that I will pretend happened as a result of us being awesome and sticking it to the Abyss, even though they did not occur on screen, primarily getting rid of the current head of the Consilium, and installing this Mysterium dude, Potestas.

LARP

Dust to Dust: Just passed it's 6th event, and boy are my arms tired! It remains both awesome and exhausting, and I'm delighted to be a part of it.
Eclipse: Is about to wrap up its first arc soon, and I am debating whether I am going to re-roll, or stay with my current character. Hm, ponderous questions!

Video Games

Skyrim: I continue to spend way too much time in the Skyrim Province for my own good. I have the Hearthfire and Dawnguard expansions, and am looking forward to Dragonborn. No, I have not completed the main storyline, at something like 250 hours. Good times.
Fallen London (And Failbetter Games as a whole): I still play this from time to time, though I have completed Cabinet Noir, The Silver Tree and the prototype of Below, their recent Kickstarter Project. I was less impressed with Cabinet Noir and Silver Tree, as they felt too... Fallen London, really, for the Format. Below, however, I am excited about, because I feel like the new format suits the dungeon crawl experience really super well. I should totes write a pimping post about that.

And now...

So that's where I am right now. I want to spend a little extra time talking about the 5e game, because it's what's interesting me most mechanically at the moment, and because the discrepancy between what the Fighter is good at and what the Warlock is good at is so huge.

First, the Fighter.

So, in the Aurikesh Setting, I am playing a Veytikka Fighter, which means I come equipped with claws that a) count as finesse weapons and b) do 1d6+atk. You know, just like the rapier I carry. So there's a certain amount of "eh, who needs this rapier?", at least, until magic weapons come into play. Also, I carry a shortbow, and am delighted by how switching weapons is a free action. The Duel Wielding specialty allows me to roll once for an attack with advantage, and if I hit, I roll the greater attack die plus 1d6 +bonus for damage. At the moment, this just means 2d6+bonus on hit, which isn't shabby, but doesn't have me putting things down with one hit at 1st level. Also, I am pretty sure that Haven boosted the HP on the monsters, which is just fine.

The Bounty Hunter background gives me contacts, access to a bounty board (basically, extra quests-- very cool if your DM wants to do anything with it, though I can imagine it being basically a dead spot in build), and 3 skills (spot, and... two other things I don't remember) , which is just fine, though the Veytikka advantage of keen smell gives me advantage on scent-based rolls (against wisdom), which don't stack with Spot. I'm told I can upgrade the skill to general perception later, which is certainly an interesting approach, and one I don't know how I feel about. But skills are tricky.

Combat as a fighter is not as purely awesome and cinematic as in 4e, but is likewise not as boring and staid as 3e. I have, from class, combat expertise dice I can spend to basically add damage or mitigate damage if I so choose: 2d6/encounter, which help me actually want to pay attention to combat outside of my turn, though I don't have a lot of reasons to care what my fellow party members are doing; nor do I have any mechanical way (thusfar) to keep the critters off of the casters and on me. Which I miss in an abstract sort of way, but didn't really notice when we were in game.

Also, I felt that my skills and things gave me some non-combat utility and interest, which was super nice. The character is kind of a silent, sullen type with a disturbingly honorable streak, and I don't really know where she'll go... oh, also, she's a member of the Iron Temple Warrior Society, so there's that.

Playing a Warlock is a massively different experience, and I can see why they were pulled from the packet. But I wanted to play one, because Haven is doing some awesome things with Fey in the setting that I super wanted to be a part of. Anyway.

In combat, a Warlock is basically All Eldritch Blast All The Time. I can see where Visage of the Summer Court (a wisdom-save AOE 30' charm spell, pick your own target) could have awesome combat application, but I didn't want to spend the boon for it just then. The lesser invocation that allows you to move around without incurring attacks of opportunity is sexy as hell, though as we were fighting arial opponents, it didn't come up. I'll be curious to see how it works in future encounters.  But yeah, as I didn't pick up the other Warlock Damage Spell, my combat applications are somewhat limited to blast, blast, blast.

That said, I pretty much used everything _but_ Eldritch Blast outside of combat- including Visage- and that was awesome and rocked my socks off. This is due in large part to Haven running a very fun and engaging setting with a lot of interesting NPC interactions, and that was definitely the strength of the session. I went from regretting not having bought more varied combat options to being really happy with Visage, due to its effect on Fey who, well... were just more likely to like me, recognising me as one who shared their same Patroness.

I'll be very interested to see what they do with the Warlock in future releases, if they keep it... it's a neat thematic concept, so I hope they do.

Also also, I took the Priest background and one of Haven's Custom Specialties, the Bloodletter, so that I could have a tiny bit of healing. So far, it has mostly meant that the party healers didn't have to spend healz on me, and could help other folks, so that's all right.

All told, I like it so far... I would very much like to see more 4e style terrain stuff in combat, and more of the push/pull/knockdown stuff also, as it made combat super engaging. I really like having to care about combat positioning, and I definitely miss it in this edition.



 

Grandiose Plans.

So, I learned somewhat recently that Atlas games has made the WaRP system available for use, which is the system Over The Edge is based on. And if you've read much of anything I've posted here, although that has not been a particularly frequent thing of late, you know how much I love love love Over The Edge.

So, I've had this King In Yellow/Dawning Star game I've wanted to run for several years now (ostensibly called, "The Truth in Yellow"), but, as I am not a fan of D20 Modern/Future, I'd been hard up for a system to run it.

And you see where this is going.

This will require spending some time with the Ineffable Tome of Ages and making shit work with what I want it to do, but WaRP is pretty durned flexible, and I'm excited to play around with it.

In the meantime, Shieldhaven has been gearing up for a D&D 5e game where I've got a couple of alts, one of whom (Lanth the Veytikka Fighter) you can see here, as rendered by the awesome Mr. Lich:

I am also playing a Beruch warlock, though I haven't a pic of her. Yet. :)

Redirect

So, Shieldhaven pretty much went and said exactly what I wanted to say in my last post, and in a much nicer, more coherent, and less hostile way than I managed.

So you should all go read it nao.

If I Were a CEO #2: 5th Edition D&D and the Two State Solution.

Or D&D Next, as some are calling it. Yes, it's what everyone is writing about these days. What will it do, what will it have rules-wise, why is Monty Cook working on it, OMFG. So I'm going to avoid that right now, and as I have done in the past, delve into the business side of things, at least, from my own limited perspective. Keep in mind, that as with all blogging, this is an Op-ed piece.

First of all, I was disappointed, if unsurprised, to learn that D&D was going to a 5th edition anyway, or at least, just doing a 5th edition. As I mentioned in the previous post, linked above, I don't think that adding another player to the edition wars is going to solve anything. The players who felt alienated when 3.x was abandoned for 4th pretty much either went to Pathfinder, or kept playing with the older material, and were lost as customers. They're not likely to come back in any lasting way for 5th. Also, the 4th ed base, who spent a lot of energy supporting that edition, splintered when Essentials came out, and will splinter further for this one, especially if it renegs on some of the best things about 4e (Economy of Actions, I am looking at you). While a Middle Way, which I think they're trying to do here, might be desirable, it is more likely that it will simply create more strife, because it means that 4e (which has been pretty much dumped for Essentials) and Essentials will no longer be supported at all.

A pause while those who are so inclined cheer over one or both of these things. Schadenfreude out of your system? Good. Let's continue.

As Shieldhaven will say at length, I am not a huge fan of 3.x, or Pathfinder (though I have just agreed to play a Pathfinder game. Another story for another post), because of various issues many of which I describe here (and which are actually worse than I describe, in fact). That said, every edition has both its problems, and its die-hard fans. The correct-- if perhaps difficult from a design manpower standpoint-- option?

The Two (or Three) State Solution: Support All Editions.

No, I mean it. WotC should take a clue from White Wolf, re-release all the material that they've got license to as e-texts, and offer Print on Demand. Potentially offer rules tweaks, new modules, and new content on a limited basis, primarily in an electronic format. And WotC can do this very, very easily. How?

The DDI character creator was the shit. I don't mean the online version, I mean the downloadable version that used to have all the updates. Making this a comprehensive and multi-edition database would be a product worth paying for. And how.

But I talked about all of this in the post that I linked above.

Now, while I know good and well that going back to supporting and providing content for 3.x won't, say, bring back those who defected to Pathfinder and are super happy with it. BUT it will be a more comfortable fit, and potentially get people back into generating sanctioned content for it, and allowing for more comfort with new additions, variations, and the like, as they can be secure that Their One True Edition will still be cared for. Continuing to support 4e and Essentials just means that they fail to lose people who invested in caring about those new rulesets, particularly those who are Less Than Enthused about the design stylings of Monty Cook, and what that means for future rulesets.

Also, the one New Book that I suggest for all editions is a DMG 2, much like was done in 4e. I cannot stress the importance of Show Me in how to run specific mechanics within a story.

Bring Back the Open Gaming License

Or at least, create a more wide-open licensing scheme by which people can offer home-brewed content, or small-press content at a nominal fee. This is more a point of Shieldhaven's than mine, but a huge problem with 4e, including DDI Char. Builder, is how hard it is to houserule, or for independent content reactors to actually generate compatible content. This is super good for the company in that it helps generate and spread interest; every interesting module someone makes potentially gets someone else to _also_ buy the core content.


Make it Clear

For my final point, it's less about the way the rules are (though that's important), but about how the information is presented. The biggest problem of all D&D editions up to this point is that the information in the rulebooks is explained so badly, and there's so much cruft, that finding anything is really very problematic. If the staff here spent some of their money on doing organization work on the books of the previous editions, this would go a _long_ way, I feel, to cleaning up some of the problems with them, by making things clear, and actually fixing legitimate errors and conflicts.

To sum up, I have a real problem with the idea that the best way to deal with the problems in the game(s) is to release a new ruleset every few years. I think that it's more a better way to just hemorrhage players, and drive everyone to either sticking with their old products, or going to games like Pathfinder, D20, or others. That's money left on the table, and it makes me super sad that WotC is not really looking into what these people actually want, and supporting that. I fear that they will wind up wasting a lot of time and money on an effective bust.