on D&D Next part 1 of ???

My group’s playtesting D&D Next which is looking to be the follow-up to 4th Edition D&D. If you’re interested, they’re doing an open playtest that you can sign up at the link above, get to see the rules they want to show you, play and give feedback, there you go.

Anyway, we’re playing it.

Right now, they’re trying to distill D&D down to an extremely pure form, which could be played as is, or with modules added. In this context, ‘module’ means ‘optional rules’, but since it’s D&D, we have to use the same word for 5 different things I guess. From the looks of this playtest document, I think they’ve done a pretty good job at that. I suppose the hope is to win back all of the customers that stuck with an old version.

It feels a lot like the old Red Box Basic Set (The D&D I got started with). There’s some new bits added to the game, but it seems it’s trying to get the feel of early 80′s D&D. I’m hopeful that it will be able to hit other flavors.

That said, I don’t envy those trying to reconcile all of the different playstyles that D&D has supported over it’s almost 30 year history, but as someone who has liked them all, I like the idea of my ruleset to be able to support them.

Ryvencon 2011

So, there’s this thing, RyvenCon going on this weekend. It’s an online tabletop RPG convention. There are a bunch of games going on and we’re looking for players. This is a great way to get some extra gaming, without having to commit to a long campaign. You get to meet new people, and maybe try a game you’ve never played (or never get a chance to play)

I’m running Freemarket, a post-singularity science fiction game that takes place in a space station near Saturn. This is not your rayguns & rockets sci-fi.

You don’t need a fancy, special computer, usually just Skype and a web browser, maybe the ability to run Java (The Freemarket game needs a free program running to make the cards work).

Games being run

So head over to http://ryvencon.omnivangelist.net/ – take a look at the schedule, sign up for a game and do something different this weekend!

The Spirit of Christmas

This year, on Thursday, December 23 at 9PM Eastern Standard Time, I will be running a holiday themed Spirit of the Century game over Skype. It will be one session, 4-5 hours long.

Spirit of the Century is a pickup pulp RPG made by Evil Hat Productions. It’s pretty awesome in my opinion, so there’s that.

It’ll take place in the 30′s. If you have a holiday themed character concept, that’s cool, if not, that’ll be fine too.

Anyone who wants to play is welcome (at least until we run into the limits of a skype call). If you’re interested, please drop me a note (LWaSH crew – I’m assuming you’re playing unless you’ve told me otherwise)

We will be generating characters on the fly, and you don’t need to have played Spirit of the Century before.

Happy Holidays!

on alignment & experience

As D&D has matured as a game, the role of experience points and the nature of alignment have changed. I’m not talking about the number of options, whether it’s the law neutral chaos spectrum in OD&D, the Cartesian plane that AD&D & D&D3 had, or the new (and old) fivefold model that is in 4th edition.

I’m talking about the erosion of the mechanical impact of alignment. In the old days, the if a player didn’t play to their alignment, if their actions drifted too far from their alignment, DM’s were encouraged to change it on them, and dock them XP till their character either atoned or got acclimated to their new alignment.

A lot of other things have changed in D&D since then. XP has morphed from a reward mechanic (points for finding gold for example) to more of a pacing mechanic, 10 average encounters or so, everyone levels.

For the record, I feel that both of those changes are for the good. Using alignment as a stick to beat players with never set well with me, and XP as a ‘score’ brings its own set of problems (penalties are often subjective, and the game begins to break when players get too far seperated in level)

What does one thing have to do with the other? I’m not sure, but here’s what I’m thinking.

In 4e, your level measures a couple of things. Competence of course, but also reputation. At the risk of adding a fun-killing amount of bookkeeping to the game, what if players were evaluated by what alignment their behavior warranted on a encounter per encounter basis?

Over time, this ‘score’ could do some things. With the notion of experience representing (among other things) how much of a reputation the character has, what if it also ganged what their reputation was. Someone who plays their alignment faithfully would be known as a man of his word, one who doesn’t, a hypocrite. There’s something about the notion of the character who believes in his heart that he’s doing good work, but from the point of view of ‘the people’ he’s become a monster.

I’m thinking about house-ruling this into my D&D game when it picks up again in the fall, but in the meantime, I’m curious what people’s thoughts are on the matter.

on D&D Adventure Design

Last night I began running the adventure that I suspect will end the school year for my gaming group. What makes this noteworthy is this represents the first D&D Adventure I’ve written since the early 90s. I’ve been adapting published adventures and expanding dungeon delves mostly, but it’s not the same. @gamefiend asked me what my process is, so I figure I’ll write it down. It’ll probably look ridiculous to me in a year (all the more reason to commit what I do today). I’ll be using this adventure I’ve written, but since it’s currenty ongoing, I’ll be vague at points, please forgive that.

[Edit: If you do something different, let me know. If you think I'm could do it better, let me know. I'm doing this to improve, so I want to hear what you do, and what you don't like about how I currently do it.]
Continue reading →

My PAX recap

I don’t want to write a long post about my trip to PAX East, but I want to touch on some points that really made the thing worthwhile.

  • ChattyDM pimping one of SarahDarkmagic’s encounters over brunch in the PRU food court
  • Not being able to play in the Dark Sun preview, so voulenteering to DM it on Sunday.
  • Dinner, Drinks and D&D at the Asguard Pub with the RPG Blogger crew, and the WotC crew that was working PAX. I didn’t even know that places let you play games in public, the waitress was awesome, and I had a blast.
  • Trying (and failing) to score a Saturday pass.
  • Talking games for the better part of Saturday with Quinn from At-Will, at whose house I was crashing for the weekend.
  • Running the Dark Sun Preview, which is one of the best written short adventures I’ve seen, kudos to Chris Tulach (Seriously, if you get a chance to play this, do it because it is awesome.)
  • Getting to bend Luke Crane’s ear a bit about Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, and Freemarket. He was extremely tolerant.

Which brings me to something. Everyone I met at PAX East was classy, friendly, and eager to make the weekend awesome. We gamers should do stuff together more.

On thing. I didn’t see any of the events. No keynote, no panels, no screenings, no concerts. I’m a little disappointed by this, but I wouldn’t trade what I did get to do for anything, so I guess it’s all good.

Either way, I’m looking forward to my next con (ConnectiCon), and trying to find more opportunities to play in public in the meantime.

Looking to play D&D on Wave?

Quinn, a friend of mine over at At-Will, is running a contest. Pitch a D&D 4e game, get a Google Wave invite. Read more about it here:

http://at-will.omnivangelist.net/2009/11/the-waves-the-thing-looking-for-gamemasters/

Submissions close this Wednesday, (the 11th), so if you’re interested, post your pitch on At-Will (100 words or less) and take a shot. (There are a bunch of waves pledged, so there are going to be multiple winners)

Fighty Update

I’ve made some pretty noticeable changes to Fighty, and I want to talk about them, so as few people have trouble as possible.

On Wave and mode.

You’re not really supposed to be able to edit a gadget in while viewing a blip, and with Fighty, I’ve learned why. If someone’s dragging the map around, and someone else is working with markers, they get really messed up. Also, the playback feature and the new items feature is practically useless, because every time someone pans the map, or zooms out, that’s a new change.

So, what I’ve done is made the map static most of the time. Here’s how it’s gonna work (for now)

Of you’re editing the blip containing the map (you can tell because you have text formatting buttons up top), everything works the way it always had. You can drag, add and delete markers, and they get updated everywhere. If you pan or zoom, they get updated for everyone in view mode.

If you’re in view (or any other) mode, you can watch. You’re able to pan around, you can zoom in or out, but someone in edit can recenter your map, or change the zoom level. You lose the add marker button. And you can look all you want, without triggering a wave update.

If this is horrible, let me know, this is the best way I can come up with addressing this issue, and it gets what to me seems to be a big usability problem taken care of, so I can focus on fun stuff (like getting icons to work), and maybe even some gaming.

Introducing… Fighty

I’m always looking for new ways to play games online better. Recently, I got a Google Wave invite and immediately started looking for ways to wave the game. There are a couple of dice roller robots out there (unfortunatley, robots are pretty slow at the moment), a neat card tool, which simulates a deck of playing cards, and a couple other things.

A friend of mine set up a D&D 4E game on Wave, based on Revenge of the Giants, which I was lucky to signup in time to play. This has already been discussed enough by the DM, gamefiend (see previous link) and one of the other players, Wyatt, so I’m not going to add anything there.

I’ve been spending a lot of time filling in one of the gaps that wave doesn’t do well yet, and given the nature D&D 4E, I feel is important. The battlemat.

So, Fighty is born. It’s a gadget for Google Wave, which uses a custom map from Maplib.Net. It’s a bit of a hack, as I’m not the greatest programmer in the world, but it’s just getting to the point where it is useful.

Let me know what you think.