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.



 

In which I am not alone.

Aaaand here's a small collection of links to other people's blogs, who have ideas I love, or have posited elsewhere in this blog. Seriously, keep it coming.

Dear Wizards of the Coast... -- from UAD&D. Talks about Multiple Editions and Print on Demand, a welcome echo of my post on the Two State Solution some time ago. And from a pro! A righteous read.

The Threefold Path of RPG reading. -- Robin D. Laws has some excellent insight on Information Presentation, a subject dear to my heart.

I Made a Board Game! -- Shieldhaven discusses Stones of the Wall, a game he invented for DtD. It's pretty cool. :)

Among the topics which I intend to discuss in future, there are some reviews (Toys for the Sandbox and D&DNext/5e/whatever), and also more on information presentation as regards the Dust to Dust Rulebook and Website, which are of perhaps more immediate concern to me than other topics.

Speaking of Dust to Dust, we just had our fourth three-day event! Which may lead to some ruminations.

I suppose we shall see.

Session Roundup #21

Sleepy Rabbit is sleepy. But I want to talk about the various games I've played over the past couple weeks before I run my game tomorrow. So, without further fuckery:

Dust to Dust-- yep, it's started; just out, and just wonderful. Some of the things I've complained about in other LARPs came home to roost, and that was enlightening-- specifically about time management. Which I should have known, having NPCd as much as I have, but that's all right. Got a lot of good mysteries out in play, and that's what matters. Looking forward to the next one.

I was also thinking of... so, there's games which are PVP, and games which are co-op. I am a big fan of games where the world is so Out to Murder You, that while you have as many personal and social conflicts as you like, you'd better get on with the people you live near when the shit goes down. The Arkaham Horror kind of game. And I sort of feel like that's where we are. I mean... we even have a Curiosity Shop! :D

Technoir-- I shall refer you to System Sans Setting's posts on the subject, but stop here to mention that I had a blast with this system. I got to play a completely riced out cyborg with an attack drone, who picked exactly the right stuff-- relative to a cyberware supplier, filled with odd and experemental cybernetics-- to be roped into one of the main and creepy plots, about my cousin's sister who was so borged out she was no longer even a little human. It felt deep, rich, and completely organic. Would play again. Can I play again now?

Mage: The Awakening-- Another classic session, mostly dealing with winding up the previous plotline, and getting us dealing with the consequences of having, um... disappeared off the effing map for a couple weeks. The main achievement of the session was getting the gems filled with Native American sprits into a museum's collection, thanks to the smoovness of Sequelah, and then talking to various mages about the Orders what exist, and which ones we should join. In addition to telling people more stuff about the horrible alternate reality of the Red Word. Volchik? Seriously leaning Mysterium. Mostly because while his natural inclination is Silver Ladder, everyone he's met of them, in his opinion, are obnoxious dickbags.

Nevermind what people think of him, of course.

Arcana Evolved-- There was an Arcana Evolved session run during D*Con, which has become pretty much a tradition at this point. It involved a battle against a Harrid (magic eating bastard) and his burrowing hounds and his bandit buddies, which meant that, once again, the most damage I did was giving Ghost Weapon to my friends. Though I did get off a particularly effective Gaze of Terror. But yeah... critters that _heal_ when I hit them with magic? Thumbs down. Not that shutting down the magister is a bad idea, really, and I've got enough spells that I've got a lot of indirect tricks (I mean, the Witch's best bet? Ice under the feet of the bad guys. Till the bad guy absorbs the magical ice and heals. ><) to use to be not entirely lame. This, by the way, is the fault of 3.x, which has straight up magical resistance as a thing. And I can't blame them-- energy type resist is way to easy to get around. But this is part of why I think no-fail damage, as spells are, mostly, is a not-so-great idea.

Also! Feeder Lady redeemed herself somewhat by letting us know that we could all take the ECL template: Runechild if we wanted. So I bought Child of Magic, which gave me, for free, a couple of spells that I'd totally be using all the time anyway, plus innate Magical Resistance, in addition to moar save bonuses. Suck it, monkeys!

Still gotta pick what my Rune actually says. Hm.

Legion-- system created by a couple of buddies that we playtested at D*Con. Good stuff, though the numbers run high. I was playing ehat amounted to a second level character, and felt like I couldn't fail near anything-- I just wasn't going to always critically succeed. That said, the penalties for some of the more stupid stuff I was doing-- using telekenisis to stop the spin of a plane with no engines-- were not crappy, and I could have conceivably killed myself. Also, fitting in all the characters and their stuff is not always simple. But Mr. M is a really good GM, and I had a blast. I mean, I'm a sucker for anything with a psionic skill.

Anyway, the game itself is good, old fashioned space marine sci-fi, set up for battle mechs (though we didn't get to play those), and psychic inquisitors, and awesome. Like I said, needs some numbers tweaking, but Recommended.

Gears of War, the Board Game-- yet another Fantasy Flight deal, this one takes the best things from Battlestar Galactica and makes them fit a shooter, namely the action cards. In GoW, these also represent health, and can be sacrificed based on card symbols to perform between turn actions, like following a moving teammate, guarding (attacking before the Locusts do), raising your defense by +2 dice, and something else that I never used because my character, Agustus Cole, could use every card to guard, and could guard on the same turn as other people. Which is the BEST THING EVER, and leads to awesome moments like, "OHSHIT this thing is going to eat my face!" BLAMMO! "Ah, nevermind, bitches."

The ammo mechanics are pretty cool, and chainsaws win. Would like to play a non-beginner game in future, but glad we did that board first. Anyway, I really love Fantasy Flight's full co-op board games. A solid win.

I'm probably forgetting stuff, but that's all on the top of my list right now. My DS is fixed (huzzah!), so I've been playing some oldies like Platinum Sudoku, Meteos, and Metroid Prime Pinball. Am I going to get the Phoenix Wright/Professor Layton crossover game when it comes out?

Oh yes, yes I am.

Not-Roundup #7 and

So, as you may have noticed, there was no Roundup Last week. This has to do with how Friday was start of the first ever Dust to Dust event, and now, I am all but a corpse.

I have quite a bit to talk about this week-- a bit about the event itself, and also a game of Technoir run by Systems Sans Setting-- and hopefully we'll get to it on Thursday, but it's possible that I will still be too corpsified for it. Mais alors, this has been your friendly neighborhood heads up.

Session Roundup #20

Brought to you by the incredible lateness of Dust to Dust Website Updates last night. You might look at the line, "Added Ancient Tales to the Codex of Dust." and think, "that doesn't sound like so much!" But if you are of that opinion, then I invite you to actually view the Ancient Tales Link and viddy what that actually involved-- namely, creating all those pages and adding the stuff. Oy. So. Sleepy.

Now, to bring you up to speed, last weekend was Arcana Evolved down in Georgia, following up the Last Session with a twelve hour marathon, in which we fought some super annoying mooks and a Rune Reaver. Full Disclosure: The mooks were annoying to me because they were also magisters, and dispelled my Clever Electrified Lair Trap. POUT. And I could have saved the 7th level slot for Spellmaster! GRAH!

Also, my rolls were crap. Fortunately, I made up the damage by giving Mirth and Ai-Wyn Ghost Weapon, which allowed them to bypass armor in their hits. So sweet.

This was especially useful, as the Rune Angel what I mentioned last time, who came to help us fight the Reaver?

Well, you might question the wisdom of enlisting the aid of a creature made of runes to fight a creature that eats runes with a touch. Well, we were too. Too late, unfortunately, to keep it from being a Rather familiar situation for those familiar with the classiest community on the internet. Still, we were triumphant, and classy enough to refrain from telling her to "OMG L2P!" to uninstall her skillset, or to cut off her hands rather than continue to heal our enemy every time she got hit, touched, or looked at funny. Instead we subjected her to over an hour of the Loresong Faen asking her world lore questions, which, I feel, was a fitting consequence.

Also! We got an item which increases the duration of Abjuration spells by 50%, which is super cool, as it could well be useful for me. Happy!

Shieldhaven has been playing Bastion lately, which has been a joy to watch, I've been playing Sudoku on my newly repaired DS, (W00t!), and we both have been playing a LOT of Echo Bazaar, which is a wonderful game with the world's shittiest server architecture. Ah well. Still worth it.

Next Friday is the First full Dust to Dust event EVAR. So if there is a not-roundup, or no roundup at all, please to be forgiving me, and I'll try to fill in the gaps with something that vaguely resembles content in the meantime.

Session Roundup #18

Hello kids. I am effing exhausted, so there'll be a really short Roundup tonight. Which is kind of a shame, because we played Mage this evening, and it was super bloody awesome. I mean, really cool. Cool enough that I want to spend more time parsing it before I dive into talking about it, but what the hell? Our cabal was in the midst of deciding whether we were gonna help bonus dudes escape from this misty spirit labyrinth, (see last session for sort-of how we got here-- basically, we freed some dudes with the Ghost Bees and Tigers, but there's some other guys we could free too, if we come up with a challenge...) when we, well... basically unlocked this whole nested sideplot about basically evil bits of our own souls, trapped in gems. Apparently, we are, or were, Total Recall style sleeper agents. For serious. So we got deep into trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do about that, which meant that Tommy spent a lot of the game talking to the spirits of gems with his super cool Spirit 3.

Also, I totally bought Space 3 with my xp from last session. Now we're thinking in portals!

Only, well... the paradox. :)

Anyway, we left on a cliffhanger-- we've just sort-of come up with a plan to convince the spirits in the woods to let everyone in the labyrinth go, by exorcising the gems with our evil selves in them, and offering the spirits a place in them.

I am not doing the plot, or the session justice here, for which I feel really bad. I'll try to do better later. Culture Packets for Dust to Dust are finally over, for the most, so I am relieved, but wiped. Plus, I have some other writing obligations.

Finally, I've been playing Echo Bazaar on Shieldhaven's recommendation, and I really love the feel here. It is super creepy and awesome. Personally, I love it when things are odd and deep and don't really make sense for a long time. It's deliciously overwhelming, and that says yes to me.

Now, sleep. No really. It's important.

As an FYI.

Shieldhaven posted today about LARP culture packets, what they are, ways to do them, and why we're doing them the way we are in Dust to Dust. If you're interested in LARP at all, it's definitely worth a read. Also, you'll get some small idea of what I've been doing with SO MUCH of my time lately, so that I've not been, you know... running things, or working on Dungeons, Pwnies, or anything else.

Session Roundup #14 :(

Okay, so I... I won't say lied, exactly, but was mistaken about my ability to catch up on Roundup posts in the intervening week. Anyway, here's what we've been up to, gamewise:

Magic The Gathering: New Phyrexia Expansion: So far, all right. Spendy in terms of mana costs, not so bad as Zendikar, and having the kinda neat thing where you can spend life instead of mana at a rate of 2:1 for some cards. Need to play a few more drafts to see what I really think, but there's some fantastically gross cards therein.

Mage: The Awakening: Last night's session was short, but really fun. First of all, went to Volchik's (my character) uncle's house to do research on an abyssal artifact received last session, and to research the Prince of a Hundred Thousand Leaves, who is apparently some sort of literary Lost Carcosa-- pieces of his book intrude on other works, and if they're all assembled, the abyssal reality which _is_ the Prince will replace our own. Horrible, sure.

But also wicked awesome.

Anyway, after that was a meeting with some banishers to convince them that they needed to help us with the abyssal, cannibal, cultists of the Prince, instead of, you know, killing us for being mages. We convinced the guys we were sitting with-- who could do absolutely nothing about the other banishers lying in ambush for us, and for whom they'd baited this trap. So Tommy (who I still think of as Tod Lowry, and is played by Stands-in-Fire), turned some of the decorative plants into a swarm of locusts, while Sequela (Four Color) controlled the shadows in the room to help us escape, and I went Incognito. Also, I decided to mind control a handful of the locusts, which was really useful when we got to the back door and there were dudes hanging out to jump us.

"Feast, My Hungry Children!" indeed.

I have to say, I like collaborative research in Mage-- first, all the assistants roll, and their successes are added to the final dice pool of the main researcher. This is some value more engaging than researching in a library in our AE game, which was pretty much, "you ask a librarian, who asks another librarian..." and so on. But I'll get to AE in a moment.

Best moment of the game? Our Obrimos, Suryia (System Sans Setting) agreeing to hand over a couple of Mages from the council to the Banishers in exchange for leaving us be. Since we had to cripple a couple of their dudes, don't know how well this will stand up, but we'll see. Because THERE'S NO WAY THIS WILL COME TO HAUNT US, RITE?

Also, Sequela and Volchik managed to find a couple of Rotes in Volchik's uncle's library. So that's awesome.

Arcana Evolved: On Sunday, while in Hotlanta, we managed to get in some AE, which was a pretty good time-- it was a shorter session for that game, which, in typical 3e fashion, meant all of one combat encounter. To be fair, this game is also frequently bogged down by IRL stuff and child wrangling, and was also the day after the 2nd World Event of Dust to Dust, so this Kainenchen was in a whole world of pain. That all said, my habitually whiny character had very little to complain about, as we mostly moseyed through the ruins of this city towards the bizarre interdimensional library by taking advantage of the extremely low going rates on native guides-- as in, 1 gold apiece. This was cool, as otherwise, it probably would have been three or four more sessions before we even made the library. As it was, we only wound up in a fight at the door, where some mooks called their Rune Reaver boss to come and bash us. Fortunately, we made it into the library first, where we met the (miraculously) still living last guy who seriously schooled it. At which point, we decided to cool our heels for a while, and do some research, while we made plans to give it a final beat down and restore some Imperial Order to the city. Banditry = Got to Go, and such.

Who can hate that? Not this Rabbit.

Dust to Dust World Event II: Return of the World Event: This world event was a thousand times smoother than the first one, which doesn't mean that it went perfectly by any means. Getting things that are basic setting information across to players is a huge challenge, and one we certainly don't have a good answer for yet. I suppose it's mostly a good thing that we're, you know, not a con/salon larp, and so not actually coming up with a bunch of pre-gens all the time. That said, everyone seemed to have a really wonderful time, so yay to that! We got to test a couple of different totems, and more higher level ritualism, which is _really_ dependent on the efficiency of the rituals in play. Not that any player could know that off the bat.

But, well, it is to find out!

Session Roundup #10

This week is notable for having been privy to the First Ever DtD World Event, and also session 2 of Mage: the Awakening

Saturday: Dust to Dust, Akathians vs. Ghuls-- So, this being the first event where I was, NoShitReally, a member of plot. The... circumstances of my arrival notwithstanding, it was really a lot of fun, and the players seemed to enjoy it quite a lot. We had some rough patches due to this being our first time working together, on the field, as a committee. However, it's really amazing to see something you've been working on for ages finally coming to life, and seeing what plays out as looked in your head, and what doesn't. I think Ritualism is the best example of, "OMG, that's just how it looked in my dream!" What is Ritualism, you ask?

Ritualism is how we do preparatory spellcasting in DtD. You have rituals that give you a number of charges of a given effect, which you can put in your focus. Each ritual has a rune, cost a certain amount of fatigue, and a backlash in case you fail the ritual. When you cast, you and up to 9 of your ritualist buddies pull dominoes (bones) from a bag, and attempt to make the sign of the ritual rune out of legal matches. As a wizard, you only have a certain number of bones you can pull from the bag when you begin the ritual. Fatigue reduces the number of bones that you can pull. So if you are working on a 5 bone ritual with a fatigue of 1, and you have 10 bones you can pull total, you've got 5 bones of leeway for matchmaking, and the next ritual you begin, you can only pull 9 bones total. Neat!

This encourages cooperative casting on one level, but also discourages it, based on how fatigue is divided amongst ritualists, and who actually gets the benefit of the effects. Plus, you have to have the ritual text prop to cast, so the text props are awesome treasure. Yay!

As for the parties themselves, Ghuls are nasty beasts-- horned human-looking dudes with very sharp teeth, who eat people and take their skills and memories. Bad times. a number of the Akathians did, in fact, get munched, including their leader, the Governor. Oops.

Our next event is on May 28th, at Indian Springs Pioneer camp in GA, and pretty much everyone should come, as it looks like it'll be a campover.Fun!

Thursday: Mage: The Awakening-- our Second Mage session, this was the one with the exposition. I think I want to think about this session more before I really post about it in detail, but I will say that picking up a second dot in Fate is def. on the table for things I want to do. Sometime after I go right for the fourth dot in Mind. I am not really familiar with World of Darkness advancement, so I don't know how hard it will be to get to Mind 5, but... omg, Mind 5. So awesome.

Also, I am looking forward to the next session of the game. Everyone's character feels very solid and real, which is unusual for a couple of sessions into a game. I don't think we've all figured out how we'll work with our abilities, and with each other, but that'll probably work itself out. Anyway. My gaming group is cool. And I'll talk more about mage... probably the Thursday after next, when we have our next session.

Session Roundup #9

No formal games this week, but Shieldhaven, Stands-in-Fire, and a couple of other friends and I went to MACE West: Cudgelcon last weekend, instead of going to the Eclipse campover. It was a lot of fun, as Haven describes here, and in addition to renewing my fondness for Magic: The Gathering, I picked up a few rulebooks.

Fiasco: looking forward to this one! The game is a rules light, GMless game played with D6es. It is intended to recreate the experience of a Cohen Brothers film. Check it out here, and I'll provide a more thorough update once we've had a chance to play it.

Savage Worlds, and Savage Worlds: Suzerain: Haven't had a chance to read these yet, but it does give me a chance to pimp the awesome Aaron Acevedo, whose art decorates the Suzerain book, and many other Savage Mojo games. Savage Worlds, incidentally, is apparently hot shit in Western NC! I was impressed.

We also played some Core 11/Besieged of Magic: The Gathering. I'm iffy on the Besieged set, mostly because I was very spoiled by the Alara block. I mean really-- thorough multi-color support, super fast deployment of creatures... omg, merfolk. It's just happy. That said, I made a pretty decent Infect deck, having played a bunch of Wither in Alara. In case you were curious Infect does the following:

Creatures with Infect deal damage to creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters, and to players in the form of poison counters.

So Poison Counters are also a new mechanic. If a player gets 10 of them, they lose the game. Awful, right? Yeah, play a white deck with Prot. from Black and Green creatures in it, and tell me that again.

We managed to not play any Battlestar Galactica or Mansions of Madness, though they're both games I hope to pick up soon.

In the meantime, been playing all the Shadow Hearts. I love that game-- so very hilarious, and far less railroady than I remember. But doing what sidequests you can before the second disc helps with that. Speaking of which, I am very nearly to the second disc-- at 40 hours of play. Fairly straightforward play too. Huh!

The very first World Event of Dust to Dust is this weekend! After work for me!

Yes, my work is in North Carolina, and the game is in Georgia. The game starts at noon, and my work, on Sat, ends at 10 am.

Whee!

Session Roundup #7

This week was dominated by video games and by me running my D&D game last Sunday. Yay punting!

Sunday: Tradya's Workshop-- After last session with the theatre and the rats and everything, it was about time for a low/no combat session. Which was great, because I hadn't the brain to prepare any stat-blocks for a special encounter or anything, and odd, coz I had no idea where the players would go next, but being that this is a fairly old-school dungeon crawl, the options were limited by the long pre-existing map. So they were pretty much going to go explore the northern part of the first level, which they'd looked at a bit before, or were going to go south and explore the few things that remained down there. This latter is what they wound up doing, which permitted them to get their hands on another one of their quest objects, and had them find the entrance to the hidden library maze. I won't go too deeply into the mechanics of the maze, as they haven't explored all of it yet, but it might sound a little familiar to people who really like, say, Sean Connery in monk robes.

Basically, they found themselves in a large, octagonal room with four doors, one in each wall, and stacks of books of various kinds in concentric circles. They rolled skills to see what sort of books were in the room, and if they found anything particularly useful, and also marked that above each door, there was a letter-- in order, T, R, A, & J. They knew, from the previous adventure, that the dude what owned the dungeon was called Jaylamer Tradya, so they decided to take the J path, and see if the subsequent rooms would have the rest of the letters of his name. And lo, they did! Each room was a trapezoid-shaped chamber filled with books on a common theme, with varying numbers of doors and a letter over each. This was consistent until the room with the final 'R' in Jaylamer, anyway, which contained 2 doors which had no letter. They found some palimpsests (not to be confused with the city of the same name... or were they?); the Avenger was able to create a rubbing to see the note that used to exist on the page. This gave them a couple of hints as to what they could find in each direction, and they decided to go through the one at the top of the trapezoid, which said it led to 'the center'. This took them back to the first, octagonal room, and of course, going back the same way did not work. Alas!

In the course of their searching, I remembered that this was the sort of party where I could give them magic treasure what didn't have any combat application, and so they found the following trinket:

Box of Delicious Creation

An ornate silver box with a lid of black wood, just large enough to hold a mug of something tasty.

Daily (standard): Creates a single item of food or drink, which is wonderfully delicious and comforting. Use of this daily item does not count against other daily magic item uses.

Random, I know, but the players seemed to really like it, and that made me happy.

Also, a couple of other plot advancement items were accomplished that I prefer not to discuss here, but which pleased me greatly.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant-- So, I forget which day it was-- possibly Monday?-- but the day sucked holy ass, and required that I go out to dinner with Shieldhaven immediately, and also buy a video game. Instead of doing so, however, I bought a PS2, and set about playing another run through of my favorite JRPG, Shadow Hearts: Covenant. It's frigging hilarious, and also a festive testament to the Japanese obsession with Jewish Mysticism. Fun!

I also have the first one, but the second added depth and scope in a way that I've only seen in games like Overlord and Overlord 2. Here you have the perfect setup what people ask for-- give me a sequel that's a game changer, keeps what we loved about the original, but does something new and better. The full customization of the judgement ring combat mechanic, having the turn based combat care where you stand for AOEs, and the addition of a combo system were all that is awesome, and I'm enjoying my second playthrough quite a bit.

Pretty much the rest of my whole world is eaten by culture packet writing for Dust to Dust, so yeah. That.

Session Roundup #5

This week's games were largely, intentionally or not, one-shots and video games. First, we've got the Over the Edge one shot that Shieldhaven ran for a couple of out of town friends, and the Dresden Files one shot that Samhaine ran for his overarching review of FATE rules. Further, Haven's finished his playthrough of Overlord, and I'm doing another playthrough of Bioshock 2. And if I wanted to get really granular, I could talk some about Tsuro, Entanglement and the concept of games within games. We'll see where I get before I decide to fuck off for the day.

Saturday: Over the Edge.

So, for this session, Stands-in-Fire and I were playing our previous OTE characters-- he's the last surviving descendant of Ramses II turned Crime Scene Investigator, and I'm a Telepathic Evo Shandor-styles architectural engineer reincarnated from an ancient, extraplanar city. We're both currently burned CIA Agents. We fight Crime!

Usually, we have The Monkey King and Wombat with us, but since they've absconded for some fuckin' insane place, no such luck. Fortunately, we had S. and J., hitherto referred to as the Hammer, and the Elf, playing an Impression Sensitive lady from a random Corporation in Tulsa, and a pit-fighting also CIA agent dude with a hat and one hell of a beard. So that was awesome.

I'll skip a lot of the set-up and story, though I am sad of that, because it's really awesome and paranoid and spooky. Have I mentioned that I really, really love OTE? It's super Rules Light, which sometimes I like and sometimes I don't, but in this case, the rules for say, combat create the right feel to me, and are a lot of fun. So I'll focus on combat and some highlights.

We got in the first fight of the session in visiting this wealthy dude on a yacht, who frequented an unorthodox casino called the Winds of Change-- some Satanists showed up to kidnap him while we were having a very pleasant chat, in which he agreed to let us come to the Casino with as his guests. Guns being illegal in Al-Amarja, the island setting of the game, he completely denied owning the 45s that he handed to myself and Frank, and we proceeded to charge up and deal with the Satanists. They were working over his bodyguard real good, so I grabbed their attention telepathically, which mostly meant that they decided to come and start beating me with their lead pipes, instead of the bodyguard.

This is called Tanking, kids. Don't try it at home. Thank goodness I had a couple of hit points.

Fortunately, it also worked like it was supposed to-- everyone else was able to wail on the assholes with impunity, including Frank blowing holes in one of 'em by shooting him in the face.

Word to the wise-- in OTE, Guns are Brutal. This will continue to be important throughout this session. We had been staying away from using guns for the legal implications, but the real reason to do so is that Guns are awesome-- as long as you have them, and the bad guys don't. If the bad guys have them, you wind up lying there bleeding to death in the bottom of a boat...

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The thugs with lead pipes having failed to knock the gun out of my hand, I shoot the nearest thug in the belly with my gun, dropping him, mostly. The last one decides to take off, and I take off after him, after he's been stunned by a heavy piece of machinery thrown by the Elf from the deck. He gets away from my attempts to bash his head unconscious on the dock, and eventual lying on the ground being kicked, and I manage to get the skinny on who sent him and where he's going from his mind. Turns out, his boss is a dame named Nikki, who we know is CIA from the team that was sent to Al-Amarja before ours. Huh. Leaving the detail of who Nikki is exactly out of it, I give the rich dude the info on who was attacking him, and we agree to meet later. I need a nap, and everyone needs snazzier clothes.

Figuring out how much to heal and when is a bit of a pain, and I'm still not sure if there's anything more I ought to have done in the few hours between the fight and us going out to the Winds of Change to heal more. As it was, I was at a little over half health, (14 of 21 points) when I donned my stereotypical spy-bodyguard chick togs and we headed out.

The Casino bit was really cool, and involved a Rumblestiltzkin, "what's-my-name?" puzzle about the Casino's enigmatic owner. Of course, she has a bauble that makes her immune to telepathy, but I wasn't going to even try to read her anyway. The setting and Haven's style of running games (here's a problem-- what do you do?) work together quite well to instill total paranoia on such matters, and I don't want my brains fried or et. Hammer wound up solving the puzzle with her psychometry, which was super cool, actually. We collected the session McGuffin, a large and red-glassy gem of a sort familiar to me and Frank at least, and headed back to the Island.

The second fight was a full-on speed-boat gun battle as we headed back from the casino, after having achieved the session objective, more or less. Gun battles SUCK for both sides, but in a kind of awesome way. Also, I need kevlar, because I got shot all to hell. Well, after blowing up someone's head with telepathy after trying to get them to drive their boat into another of the attackers' boats. But I digress.

Kevlar is as illegal as guns in Al-Amarja, as the Peace Force are the only ones who are supposed to have guns-- so if you've got kevlar, you obviously mean to fight the Peace Force, amirite?

Riiiite.

However, being ex-CIA, we don't really cotton to that sort of thing-- at least, the smart ones don't. Which is why I was lying bleeding on the bottom of a boat, and Frank was Just Fine. Anyway, why I like guns-will-fuck-you-up here:

What you're doing is pretty much an 'explain how you're attacking' combat system, and the d6 contests feel very fair. Guns multiply results like woah, and speed up combat a lot. So you and the other team have tools in the form of warm bodies to be targets for these guns. You've got to hurry up and take out the other guys before you get taken out yourself, which is nicely tense. We did manage to survive, and I was healed up at the end. Hammer's character went back home after a couple of days, giving us the plot mcGuffin, and the Elf's character signed on with a security company. Everyone wins!

Tuesday: Dresden Files

We're pretty much playing this so that Samhaine can do a more detailed review of the FATE system for his blog, but that's all right by me. Also, you can read Shieldhaven's write up of the session here, if you haven't already.

My character is pretty much a mashup of Dexter Morgan, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Batman, with a dash of Il Duce from Boondock Saints tossed in, in a 5'2" half-black, half-mexican body. She's a normal human, mostly because I know absolutely nothing about the Dresden Files setting, and that was... curiously the right choice. I mean, I never play just normal, no powers characters, so this was actually a major change for me.

Really curiously-- I liked it.

Now, my character is pretty much a sociopath-- she's got the Dexter-style compulsion, but the Buffy/Batman fixation on killing monsters and just monsters. The toggle switch here is whether any given creature in front of her looks to her like a monster. Now, she also has another potential off-switch here in the form of one of her aspects-- "Double or Nothing" This means that any given monster can potentially re-direct her wrath by giving her a better, more monstrous target. Also, if there's likely to be a lot of a thing around, she can be talked into letting something live to learn more about it, and kill it better later. Further, Shieldhaven's character took "Violence is My Last Resort" as an aspect, to potentially give him a lever to calm down myself and Wombat's character, as we're the loose cannons of the party. This worked to great effect to avoid any real combat this session. Stands-in-Fire played a Malvora White-Court Vampire-- basically, psychically feeds on fear. These guys are the primary cause of Gertrudis (my char's) Double or Nothing aspect-- she hates their guts, but they were willing to offer her a sweet deal, working for them and killing worse monsters. Stands-in-Fire's dude, Will, is pretty much the least offensive incarnation of a Malvora-- seriously, he's a horror novelist. So that wound up working really nicely.

We wound up skipping the City Creation bit to play in 2000's ATL, which was the cause for numerous jokes-- both the ATL part and the 2000 part. I mean... remember AOL and Altavista and Bluelight and Napster? I knew you did. :D Also, my character got to make a lot of jokes about riding MARTA to meet the rest of the team. Funtimes.

So, what I like about FATE are the skills and the aspects, much for the same reason I like skill challenges in 4e. It's pretty much this:

1) identify what you want to do

2) identify a skill that should help you do it

3) describe how you want to apply said skill

4) roll

5) succeed or fail in some specific way based on 1 & 3.

Numbers and role play, gets me every time. Incidentally, I like a lot of OTE for the same reason. It's very neat to focus on what your character is all about based on these aspects... it's a very good set of tools for figuring out how one should respond to pretty much any situation. In Gertrudis's case, the answer is probably, "smother it with ether and burn it alive."

So, the quick summation of our game is that a local Malvora had summoned some Goblins from the Nevernever to spread fear that he could feed upon. We were chasing the goblins, who spoke in completely awesome rhyme, and in the final confrontation with them, Shieldhaven's wizard convinced Wombat and me to back off from jumping the critters so we could solve this diplomatically. This was mostly okay for two reasons, one gameist and one simulationist:

Gameist: As a normal human who had not bought many stunts, I had 10 refresh. Seriously, I can buy off a compel here. Even if the GM had decided to compel all 3 possible aspects (Buffy the Serial Killer, Are You A Monster?, and The Marked Condition-- guess what all of those do!?), I could have afforded to just keep buying them off, as I hadn't needed them for anything else. Also, since Shieldhaven's character was a Wizard, he only had 3 refresh, and he might concievably need them for something before we were done.

Simulationist: Again, Double or Nothing. As soon as the goblins let us know that they'd been summoned by someone else, that person became my Preferred Prey, and I'd be happy just sending the Goblins elsewhere if it meant I'd get my pound of flesh-- or ash, whatever (another aspect is, "Are you better than Fire?")-- from this Malvora. And he's a rogue Malvora, my favorite enemy. I do love killing wise guys, I do.

In a storyboarded denouement (it was getting late as shit), Will beat this dude in a social challenge before the local Court, bringing him down in disgrace. I like to think that Gertrudis then went to his house, etherized him, then poured gasoline all over his place and set it on fire with him tied up inside. At least, that's what she would liked to do, though probably wasn't permitted.

To skim through the rest of the week's gaming, Bioshock 2 on Medium is a lot harder than I was prepared for, because frankly, I suck at Shooters. Oh well. I'm still having fun. I need to not play Entanglement so much, and I really like Tsuro-- the multiplayer board version-- we're going to be using an altered version of it in Dust to Dust. Speaking of which, patch notes tonight!

Whee!

Session Roundup #4

A day late due to patch day again, but nu, better late than never!

So this past week saw some Arcana Evolved, and also rolling up characters with Shieldhaven, Wombat, and (eventually) Stands-In-Fire for Samhaine's Dresden Files one shot. AE was first, while down in the ATL for a LARP BBQ (mmm... acronyms), where Kings' Gate Matters were wrapped up, and Dust to Dust char. creation stuff was discussed at length. That wasn't really a game, that was... well, I shouldn't really call it foreplay, but you know...

*ahem*, anyway.

So AE.

It was a pretty straightforward session... we fought more !*^@&!%^! Winter Wolves, captured one, quizzed him, and had our Faen Akashic do some object loresight on that wolf's collar. This got the attention of something called a Winterspawn, who apparently was the Liege Lord of an Ice Devil that we killed the hell out of some time ago, who scried on us for a while. Then he teleported a thing that looked like a dead corpse frozen in a battle-mech of ice armor at us, and was apparently annoyed that we fucking smashed it into a thousand pieces. I say we, but I really mean Shieldhaven's Warmain and his awesome hammer, enchanted with Ghost Touch. I didn't bother to use any other spell slots than that, because with Ghost Touch and his earlier attack, not to mention the damage the other tanks dealt, there wasn't any reason to do so. The math may or may not work out on whether I did more damage spending the 5th level spell slot on Ghost Touch than on some other blast you to hell spell, like Attack From Within, but eh. It was pretty cool either way.

The Winterspawn wasn't really down with us taking out his minion, and in response to me mouthing off at his scrying-bubble after failing to dispel it, he telepathically contacted me to explain why he and his buddies wanted to cover the world in winter, freezing everyone. We knew this, mostly (there's a Primordial Evil that they can trap forever this way-- btw, sorry about your planet)-- but dislike the methods (Hey! All my stuff's here! And what about meee!?), and so I argued, Honeythorn Gump style (What good is a world locked in a season of death?), and we agreed to disagree (I'm right and going to keep on doing what I'm doing and hope we don't meet again, nyah vs. I'm betting my friends are going to want to come and probably try to kill you and all your friends, nyah. Not that I said that), and I reported the chat to the party. We were all quite perturbed.

Dresden Files Char. creation was... interesting. So, you create concepts, like in say, Spirit of the Century, based on what you think you might want to do. My concept was initially Dexter Morgan as a small half black, half mexican girl, and it eventually sort of became half Dexter, half, well, That Other Serial Killer who targets monsters. This is a character that I would normally consider completely unplayable, but. I'm gonna go ahead and blame Wombat and Samhaine for this one. We play the game on next Tuesday; Samhaine will be writing a review of the system thereafter, and I shall link it whereupon.

In the meantime, the Monkey King and Four Color have been Continuing the Conversation on humans as default race et al in gaming, and on player investment. You should go give a little looksee. Basically, what it's all done is make me want to read Eclipse Phase and play Noumenon.

Fortunately, Shieldhaven is considering what game to start running next, and Noumenon is on the list, though Mage or Westmarches E6 are my top choices.

Over The Edge with some Guest Stars this weekend, and I'll do a new Games I'm Playing post when Shieldhaven chooses our next adventure. And hopefully I'll have gotten to play some more Fallout: New Vegas in the interim.

Btw... does it make me a bad person, wanting to play this so badly? I mean it looks like...

Never mind what it looks like. But I still want to play it.

Session Roundup #2

Although a day late, as yesterday was the first round of Majour Updates for That Heap Big Thing, and I had neither time nor brain to spend on else. Anyway, we didn't have any tabletop last week, but rather had an In-Play Party and One Day for Eclipse.

So, I play Pallas Harper Kell, a space-samurai thug for the Imperium of Man, whose cousin is a muckety-muck soldier trapped in a muckety-muck noble's body. She's a good time. She also is a naive, a-type personality, quite by accident.

Anyway, a little on In-Play parties and One days vs. regular LARP events. In-Play parties are interesting, and not technically canon, except that they are. Things that happen there don't, or aren't supposed to, have plot consequences, though they make have profound character consequences. At this one, my character spent most of the night curled in a ball, utterly embarrassed, and completely smashed.

One of the most important aspects of in-play parties-- the presence of alcohol.

So... this was my first Eclipse one-day, an MJQ event. It was cool, took place in a bar, and still had combat. It didn't have a field battle, which is one of the typical features of most larp events (a heap-big battle that involves some element of strategy or boss-level difficulty), but that wasn't really expected. Mostly, there were a ton of politics, and some really neat twisting of situations so that characters who are good friends are-- in a very subtle and sidelong way-- finding themselves at cross purposes. Thusly, they must needs scramble to fix that. I was not involved in any of that directly, but Shieldhaven was. It's a thing that Eclipse has begun to do really quite well, and that I hope to see more of in the future.

Also, Stands-in-Fire and another friend, Miss L, are well on their way to becoming psionic space-demon fighting ninjas. For realz.

***

On another note, writing patch notes for a LARP website was the best idea ever, and I feel very good about it.

Finally, mostly because I am fading, Shieldhaven wrote a post today about the very topic I have neglected to maunder upon for some time, and once I've slept, done some various chores, and run my game tomorrow, I shall speak more on't.

Raison D'etre

In case you were wondering what I've been up to recently that I have been so lax in yammering on with promised yammers, this is it.

That is to say, the Dust to Dust website and rulebook are finally live. I don't care who you are or where you live, but you should Go and See.

A full and formal post of joy is here, at Shieldhaven's blog.

It is awesome, all awesome, and you can be a part of the awesome too.

Not-Roundup, #1.

So against all probability, there were no games at all this week. Instead, there was a ton of work on the LARP that I am staffing with Shieldhaven, Stands-In-Fire, Basics, and others-- Dust to Dust. I am working on the website.

What-no-link, you ask?

No. None indeed. Not for another few days, anyway, as we go live on February first.

In the meantime, we will be gone for an In-Play Party and One Day event for Eclipse this weekend. Yes, LARP events count for the weekly roundup.

So... watch this space. There may be also some discussion of the necessity of the familiar in games. Which puts me in mind of one of my lj icons for my instinctive reaction, at least.

Blinded.

(almost done with the direct reposts from LJ. This one is from July, and linky here.)

So, had our first introduction to Paragon tier 4e D&D last night. As I had hoped, Standing In Fire did an excellent write up of it here, and I've some reflections about this aussi, as well as D20 in general, just at the moment.

So, there's no question-- 4e does low level gameplay right. I'm probably going to start my D&D game (which I ought to be picking up next month as a 2Xmonth game) at 1st level, because I /can/ and the power level seems right. 1st level in a 4e game /feels/ roughly equivalent to 3rd level in a 2e/3.x game, largely due to the fact that in previous editions, that's when wizards start to feel useful at all.

As for high-level gameplay... well, we'll see. It's completely changed the game, that's for sure, for both GM and players. For starters, there was already a ridiculous amount of stuff resolving at any given time-- this is especially true for my Revenant Assassin, which I would possibly have a better handle on if I had not started her at 10. Lemme 'Splain.

I adore this character. I cannot stress this enough. She is an awesome undead-dwarf of the badass with the stealth score from the Grim Prison, and probably the first character that I just gave up and min-maxed to all hell, with no hedging. Fortunately, she also seems to work okay in the world, but I digress.

Assassins are these terribly gross, terribly brutal strikers who have a pretty neat not-exactly-marking mechanic-- that is to say unlike marks, it doesn't care whether or not the target makes an attack that includes you or not. It's pretty much a damage-widget that gets a kick at 11th level. Also, they have a built in at-will teleport (you have to begin it and end it next to a creature) that goes up a square at 11th. Also, especially if they are revenants, they can do a whole shit-ton of necrotic damage, because they are the only class at the moment to use the Shadow power source. Combine this with Revenant-- no really, you want to combine this with Revenant. For starters, revenants have the correct stat bonuses-- dex & con-- and there are a bunch of feats specifically for Revenant Assassins, most of which have to do with the Revenant racial power, Dark Reaping. I have a ton of things that resolve when I use Dark Reaping-- first off, I can drop an extra shroud (yon mark-not-mark damage kicker) on my shroud target when I invoke the power (someone within 5 of me drops to 0 hp). Then, when I actually invoke the power (next hit I make before the end of my next turn), then dark reaping does 1d8+5 necrotic damage, and my shroud target takes the full damage of the shrouds on them-- 1 d6+3 (since I am 11th level) per shroud, up to 4 shrouds max. Those shrouds do not disappear, as they normally do when I invoke them. Ja, awesome. I neglected to have anything else happen when I use dark reaping for my feat, but believe me, it was possible. Instead, there's a metric shitton of stuff that happens when I use an action point, including crap that lets me phase through walls and go insubstantial and yeah... it's a mess to keep track of. And worse for the GM, who is doing his best to keep up with all of the monsters that are hitting us at the same time, and well...

Nonetheless. We got to a point where the huge and nasty Minotaur was about to charge a red swath through the whole lot of us-- and lo, but it triggered every nasty thing under the sun-- the hybrid barbarian/runepriest used an immediate interrupt to do some radiant damage and blind it, putting it at -5 to hit everyone, in an already pretty high defense party. This was on top of the 10 ongoing untyped it had from my Shared Suffering Armor, and some fire damage (less, because it was resistant to fire) that it took from an ability of our Mageblade's, that did damage when it moved.

All of this resolved at about the same time. And I don't hardly blame B for throwing up his hands in frustration and amazement. We hadn't expected to be quite as awesome as we suddenly were either. 4e apparently tells you, as a GM, that yes-- at Paragon you've got to increase your game in some pretty specific ways-- but here you run into a serious problem that has scared a lot of people I know off of 4e-- information presentation. The main of the books you'll find are all character stats-- huge lists of powers and feats and racial stats and OH GOD, for crying out loud just download DDI Character Builder already and not have to deal with this madness. Because you're going to miss something. Without question. Or else you're me, and you're going to want to play a class that is only found in Dragon Magazine anyway. I'm starting to feel like releasing PC class books ought to be seriously de-emphasized-- or at least set up for what it is-- and the emphasis switched to getting folks hooked up with DDI, and making it more houserulable (it isn't. At all. Dear Lord.) But the PHBs are pretty much all stat blocks, and that's kind of eye-crossingly frustrating to look at.

the DMGs, the Planes books, and some of the Setting Guides are better, but not explicitly so. Clearly, there's a fall-through when it comes to explaining the balancing math from Heroic to Paragon tier, so it still feels as though you have to fudge things around a lot-- the biggest issue I've seen in 4e is that most DMs will under-stat their monsters in Heroic, thinking that they're throwing stuff that is /way/ too powerful at the PCs... only to have the whole encounter mopped up out of hand. And then there's the one or two who run encounters straight, and nearly wipe the party out of hand. Which leads into my first point of advice for folks who have never run 4e before-- START AT 1ST LEVEL. Getting a feel for how your party plays, and getting them used to using their powers at lower levels is vital, and not something you can do easily if you jump into high level encounters. Modding an existing game without resetting it is a bad idea as well, methinks.... this is not going to feel like the games you've played before. For me anyway, that was /awesome/. I have hated 2e/3.x combat for ages while sort-of enduring it, without being able to put my finger on why I hated it. The answer has to do with economy of action. In earlier editions, you don't have it. Everything is a standard action. Heaven forbid you heal anyone and hit anyone in the same turn! You've got to make a choice between working on killing a d00d, and maybe keeping your other middling damage dealing friend from getting killed-- depending on if you're a cleric, or a wizard with heals (like an Arcana Evolved Magister, which conceptually I do really like), or what. And this frustrates me hugely, even more than the whole running out of spells idea (and don't get me started on spell prep. I am one of those who never got used to trying to gauge how many of what spell I was going to use in a day. When they came out with Sorcerer, I never went back). So...

If I were running this game in 3.x again, I would probably houserule a lot of healing to be minor actions, as long as that is all that they do. I have a much more complicated short-run Dawning Star game (d20 modern) that I seriously need to work on, and the biggest obstacle I have run into is considering how I want to deal with combat, as I really suck at running it (thusfar), and I really hate most d20 combat mechanics. A lot will depend on the nature of the creatures that the players will be fighting, but... hrm. I know, this has gotten fairly far afield of high level 4e maundering, but meh.

The games people play now.

So Hi. Das ist ein Kainenchen. I may have an opinion or two on things as relate to Games of various sorts. Video, board, LARP, tabletop and yeah, I really, really like 4e D&D, though I started with my dad running me and my brother through The Caverns of Quasqueton when I was 8.

Now I am running an all-girl 4e game, playing in a bunch of other 4e games and one Arcana Evolved game. Also Campaign Committee for an as-yet unreleased LARP called Dust to Dust. Also aiming to play more Arkham Horror and Battlestar Galactica Board Games, finishing up my Fallout 3 DLC and dying a lot in Bioshock 2 Multiplayer.

So that's me.

Edition wars maunderings to come.

Peace out.