Save vs. Geek

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about D&D 4e, specifically about the
skill system, and the lack of non-adventuring skills. I’ve decided
that I like this.

Here’s why.

Your typical gaming group has a mix of players, from your tactician,
who can’t help making an optimized character, to the actor, with an
involved history, and abilities that make sense for that background.
By eliminating paid backgroud skills, the actor doesn’t have to
sacrifice as much character ability to match the character’s history.

Which brings me to action points. I’m not seeing any reason for
players to save action points, so in my game, I’m going to allow
players to spend an action point, to fill in a bit of convienent
backstory. Flashback scenes are nothig new, but I like the idea of
spending a point, allowing the player to take an author stance, and
declare a thing that happened in the past, that could give a
situational bonus (I keep thinking about all the flashbacks in the
Highlander series).

What are other people using action points for?

dan DnD, gaming

Last Friday I ran my first D&D 4th Edition session. Overall, it went well, with a few bumps that I hope will work out in future sessions.

Here’s how it went.

The group was myself, and five high school students. None of us had played D&D 4, three had never played any version of D&D, two hadn’t seen dice with more or less than 6 sides, so it was a mostly inexperienced group. We planned to run for two hours, and we went over by about thirty minutes.

We’re running through Keep on the Shadowfell, which starts with a combat encounter. We used the Character Builder to print character sheets, this went really well, as it prints power cards, which proved invaluable with all the new players. It let them see what their tactical options were easily. For the next session, I’m going to make up a cheat sheet for the more traditional options (charges, grabs and the like). The fight was the five players against 8 kobolds. Withthe
new group, it took two hours to run, I think it would go much faster once everyone gets a handle on the system.

My DMing style needs a lot of work. I found it difficult for me to frame the encounter in a way that has any atmosphere. I hope that I’ll improve with practice.

We didn’t have much time for the in town interaction, which was probably for the best, it’ll give me time to get to ‘know’ the people in the town.

My biggest concern is that since the session was entirely combat, I’m concerned that there will be an expection that that’s the game. This only builds the pressure on me to balance the next session.

One of the complaints that I’ve heard about 4th edition is that it’s too reliant on miniatures, usually followed by a rant about how they sell them in a sealed box, which I admit is frustrating. We used pogs from the PDF that Firey Dragon released for the Shadowfell adventure, mounted on one inch washers, which I think went well. They worked out to about $0.12 per token.

Overall, I’m liking the game. I think it’s the most accessible version of D&D to date. I like that nobody seemed too overwhelmed by the game (I did make lots of assumptions to keep the game moving, such as not making players worry about minor actions unless they’re doing too
much, and I think that I messed up flanking).

The biggest piece of advice for someone running this version, is that the system doesn’t try to help with the more ’story focused’ aspects of the game. In third edition, there were skills that weren’t particularly useful for adventuring (craft comes to mind), which would give the DM hints for what’s important to the character, and what sort of story the player wants to have (Bangs to you Story Games hippies). This makes character background pretty important if you want a RPG that isn’t heavy on the game and light on the roleplaying. I’m not sure if I like that, but I think that it’s okay once it’s known. I’m wanting something like the old 1e specialty table. The thing I’m really excited about is the apparent focus on making it easy to play, by lowering the learning curve, and making D&D less of a lifestyle choice, I hope that this translates in more time spent playing, which is why we all game.

dan DnD, gaming

So tonight, I went out with some people (new friends) to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. Having heard mixed reviews, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be any good. I have my opinion, but you’ll have to wait for that.

First, what it has, that someone who watches Bond would expect.

Insane chases, improbable, and exciting
Beautiful women
Villans just unrealistic enough to feel no empathy for
Improbable plots to hold it all together

Things that are missing:
Cheesy double entendres
Crazy gadgets
Q
Cheesy henchmen

So, now that you have a cheat sheet, and can probably make up your mind yourself, here’s what I thought.

I enjoyed it. It could have been called Casino Royale II, and if you haven’t seen that, don’t see Quantum until you’ve seen Casino. Like it’s predecessor, this movie throws out all of the previous incarnations of Bond. It’s gritty, it’s ugly at times. Daniel Craig does cold pretty well. To me, this incarnation is closest to the original Fleming, where Roger Moore is a parody of 007. While Bond in this film leaves a trail of dead bodies, living up to the ‘License to Kill’ MI-6 is certainly uncomfortable with Bond’s use of said license, which is a nice touch, and makes the series more believable.

In all, this isn’t the greatest movie ever, and isn’t as strong as Casino Royale. In short, if you loved Casino, you’ll enjoy this. If you didn’t like the direction that Casino took, yoi’l get more of the same. It’d be best as a double feature in my opinion. This concludes Dan’s movie review.

That is all.

Posted with LifeCast

dan movies

Years ago, before the internets, I was still a computer geek. I’d spend my time using my 1200 baud modem to connect to local Bulliten Board Systems. BBS’s had email, forums sometimes (rarely) chat, file downloads, and what were called ‘door’ games. Now, the internet is much better than the old BBS’s in a lot of ways, being able to email anyone, anywhere, it being easy enough that everyone seems to have some sort of presence, and the advances delivered by bandwidth (video would be unheard of, it took 20 minutes to download an image)

But there’s one thing that was lost.

The local community. Since a BBS was typically run by a person who’s close enough to be a local telephone call, the users naturally all lived in the same area. This enabled a lot of cool things. Just about everyone lived near everyone, there were meetups in the real world, discussions about local events came naturally.

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Craigslist have begun to pick up on some of these uses, but not ideally, because the categories are by town/school. Brightkite does things a bit better, but has it’s own problems, such as a tiny user base.

I live in New Milford, CT, just south of the middle of nowhere. According to Facebook, my ‘network’ is either New Haven, Bridgeport, or Poughkeepsie. Craig says I should be in northwest CT, new haven or fairfield county (one town over)

The thing is, my ‘network’ should really be something like, 50 miles from where I am.

I can’t blame facebook, the model was build around campuses.

Local news outlets don’t understand how to build communities, and maybe it’s wrong to expect them to.

With the onset of location aware cellphones, and software, these models need to change. We need the tools to find people near us, not just for dating, not just for events or resturaunt reviews, but for anything. One network, or a thousand federated networks.

More to follow

dan local, nostalga, social