As a D&D blogger, this is my obligatory "ZOMGZ 5E" post.
I am tentatively very excited about the fifth edition.
Or, more accurately, I want to be tentatively excited.
I belong to what I believe is the smallest faction of D&D players, those that jumped aboard in the late 90's with the last reprint of the 2E books. At the time, the older versions of the game were understood to be fundamentally broken and when the third edition arrived, it was seen as out of touch, dumbed down, and generally terrible in all respects.
Apparently, I and my group at the time were the only people on the planet who felt that way.
There are hordes of players who are tremendous fans of both OD&D and the D20 system. While no one in my current group (myself included) have ever played OD&D, we don't have a negative opinion of it, and many of the players in my current group see D20 as their preferred system.
I remain, a loyal devotee to the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition rules. I am a simulation gamer. I have the most fun when the rules of the game I am playing are an interpretation of a reality that is other than my own. The way I play AD&D, the rules line up with that philosophy of play very well. To me, this style of play is what makes table top RPG's worth my time.
If I wanted a style of play where my chief concern is making the best "build" and maximizing my character's strengths and minimizing my character's weaknesses, I'd go play WoW.
I think WotC expressed the opposite opinion when making 3E, and very certainly in 4E.
I hope that they won't do the same with 5E, though I expect they will. I've found almost no like-minded players who haven't already abandoned D&D for some other system that was made with simulation gamers in mind, and the adherents of 2nd Edition are too few, methinks, to have much of a voice in the upcoming playtests. I don't know what kind of game 5E will be, probably some bastardized version of OD&D and D20, those two groups of players being the most numerous and most vocal.
I expect that long after the 5E release, I'll still be pawing through used book stores and Amazon.com searching for long forgotten 2E books while the rest of the gaming world is enjoying D&D20.
Still, I must applaud WotC for their approach on the new edition. They have set the lofty goal of uniting all D&D players from all editions under one banner. I wish them luck.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Not dead!
I'm still here, oh ephemeral audience.
I'd like to make the excuse that the holidays have kept me super-busy, or something, but the fact is I'm just lazy. It's a new year, so maybe I'll try to blog a little harder.
My regular Sunday night game seems a little bogged down. The party has no clear direction and neither do I. I've been grasping at straws for inspiration and coming up empty handed. I'm going to go home tonight and dig through old notes and see if I can't find some kind of inspiration.
In an attempt to stave off boredom and get my RPG fix, I've started playing solo. (Insert mandatory masturbation joke here) I rolled up a dwarf fighter named Bognar the Mighty. He's an ex-tailor who found himself better suited to military life. After guard duty got too boring, he struck out on his own. So far, he has wandered into the tiny town of Hamlet, which is having problems with a group of goblin raiders operating out of the nearby forest. When a group of five of said goblins came to town looking to loot and plunder, Bognar stepped out into the street and challenged them. After a pitched battle, Bognar emerged bloody and beaten, but victorious. The elderly town alchemist gave Bognar six healing potions and urged him to move on before more goblins arrived, but Bognar (who has no love for goblins or bandits and especially goblin bandits) resolved to hunt down the remaining goblins in the forest, lest they come seeking revenge. Bognar charged off into the forest and was promptly trounced by another pack of goblins.
I'm thinking of rolling up a hobbit thief to help him out.
I'd like to make the excuse that the holidays have kept me super-busy, or something, but the fact is I'm just lazy. It's a new year, so maybe I'll try to blog a little harder.
My regular Sunday night game seems a little bogged down. The party has no clear direction and neither do I. I've been grasping at straws for inspiration and coming up empty handed. I'm going to go home tonight and dig through old notes and see if I can't find some kind of inspiration.
In an attempt to stave off boredom and get my RPG fix, I've started playing solo. (Insert mandatory masturbation joke here) I rolled up a dwarf fighter named Bognar the Mighty. He's an ex-tailor who found himself better suited to military life. After guard duty got too boring, he struck out on his own. So far, he has wandered into the tiny town of Hamlet, which is having problems with a group of goblin raiders operating out of the nearby forest. When a group of five of said goblins came to town looking to loot and plunder, Bognar stepped out into the street and challenged them. After a pitched battle, Bognar emerged bloody and beaten, but victorious. The elderly town alchemist gave Bognar six healing potions and urged him to move on before more goblins arrived, but Bognar (who has no love for goblins or bandits and especially goblin bandits) resolved to hunt down the remaining goblins in the forest, lest they come seeking revenge. Bognar charged off into the forest and was promptly trounced by another pack of goblins.
I'm thinking of rolling up a hobbit thief to help him out.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The begining is a very delicate time...
So, my novel is a bust, for now. That's all I'm going to say about it, besides that trying to write a book in 30 days is an insane venture.
Anyway, I was thinking today about how I got into the hobby of roleplaying games in the first place. As a young lad, I played countless hours of Wizardry 7, a computer RPG in which you control a group of adventurers and had always been enamored with romantic notions about the middle ages and armored knights on horseback. My family had taken a trip to Las Vegas once and we had attended a medieval dinner show which only fueled my obsession.
By the time I hit middle school, I was introduced to Tolkien by my history teacher and was thoroughly indoctrinated in the lore of the The Lord of the Rings. I also began playing Magic: The Gathering and MUD's, the great grandaddy of today's MMO's.
Probably sometime in the seventh or eighth grade, my then patrol leader in Boy Scouts asked me if I would like to play Dungeons and Dragons. Being a good southern baptist boy, I knew that D&D equaled SATAN and was reluctant to play. My patrol leader, who became my first DM, explained to me that D&D was basically the computer games I had already been playing, just without the computer. One night, during a scout meeting, I rolled my first character.
I can still remember the instance when I knew that D&D was something special. It was possible for my character to know how to speak Elven, and I elected to learn the language.
"Why?" my DM asked. "Well, the rules say I can," was my reply. "No," said my DM, "Why does your character know how to speak Elven?" I was floored. Full-on deer-in-the-headlights mind blown stupor.
D&D was the first and perhaps only game I have ever played where the rules and mechanics of the game are secondary to the game itself. It was not important that I was allowed to start the game speaking Elven, what was important was that my character had at some point taken the time to learn to speak a foreign language. This was infinitely more significant that the fact that he could, indeed, speak it.
I've come to understand that my experience with D&D is not typical. More often than not, it appears, the RP in RPG is an afterthought.
My early RPG days were fraught with misadventure and misinterpretation. For one thing, our group didn't grasp the rules on how to roll hit points, so that by level 5 my thief had 125 HP.
I also took Tolkien's books as canon, never mind the fact that we were not in middle earth. But to some extent, so did our DM and pretty soon I had a sword that glowed whenever the Uruk Hai were about. Those were glorious days, before I really knew how THAC0 worked and I just seemed to get magically better at stabbing things.
If anybody reads this, leave a comment and tell me how you got started. I'm genuinely interested.
Anyway, I was thinking today about how I got into the hobby of roleplaying games in the first place. As a young lad, I played countless hours of Wizardry 7, a computer RPG in which you control a group of adventurers and had always been enamored with romantic notions about the middle ages and armored knights on horseback. My family had taken a trip to Las Vegas once and we had attended a medieval dinner show which only fueled my obsession.
By the time I hit middle school, I was introduced to Tolkien by my history teacher and was thoroughly indoctrinated in the lore of the The Lord of the Rings. I also began playing Magic: The Gathering and MUD's, the great grandaddy of today's MMO's.
Probably sometime in the seventh or eighth grade, my then patrol leader in Boy Scouts asked me if I would like to play Dungeons and Dragons. Being a good southern baptist boy, I knew that D&D equaled SATAN and was reluctant to play. My patrol leader, who became my first DM, explained to me that D&D was basically the computer games I had already been playing, just without the computer. One night, during a scout meeting, I rolled my first character.
I can still remember the instance when I knew that D&D was something special. It was possible for my character to know how to speak Elven, and I elected to learn the language.
"Why?" my DM asked. "Well, the rules say I can," was my reply. "No," said my DM, "Why does your character know how to speak Elven?" I was floored. Full-on deer-in-the-headlights mind blown stupor.
D&D was the first and perhaps only game I have ever played where the rules and mechanics of the game are secondary to the game itself. It was not important that I was allowed to start the game speaking Elven, what was important was that my character had at some point taken the time to learn to speak a foreign language. This was infinitely more significant that the fact that he could, indeed, speak it.
I've come to understand that my experience with D&D is not typical. More often than not, it appears, the RP in RPG is an afterthought.
My early RPG days were fraught with misadventure and misinterpretation. For one thing, our group didn't grasp the rules on how to roll hit points, so that by level 5 my thief had 125 HP.
I also took Tolkien's books as canon, never mind the fact that we were not in middle earth. But to some extent, so did our DM and pretty soon I had a sword that glowed whenever the Uruk Hai were about. Those were glorious days, before I really knew how THAC0 worked and I just seemed to get magically better at stabbing things.
If anybody reads this, leave a comment and tell me how you got started. I'm genuinely interested.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
NaNoWriMo
I'm trying to write a novel this month. I don't expect to finish, but I'm going to give it the old college try.
Consequently, don't expect many posts. (Not that you get many to begin with)
Blah! Anyway, Sunday was game night and I hosted.
The players made contact with a special NPC and were sent on a Scooby Doo style adventure to a supposedly haunted tower.
The layout and traps and enemies in the tower came completely off the top of my head, which I think worked pretty good for both me, and the players.
I'm a little lost on what direction I want the adventure to take, I'd like it to culminate in earth-shattering events, but at the moment, I'm at a loss on how to get there. I need to go on a hunt for a muse.
Consequently, don't expect many posts. (Not that you get many to begin with)
Blah! Anyway, Sunday was game night and I hosted.
The players made contact with a special NPC and were sent on a Scooby Doo style adventure to a supposedly haunted tower.
The layout and traps and enemies in the tower came completely off the top of my head, which I think worked pretty good for both me, and the players.
I'm a little lost on what direction I want the adventure to take, I'd like it to culminate in earth-shattering events, but at the moment, I'm at a loss on how to get there. I need to go on a hunt for a muse.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The DM's treadmill
It's been weeks since my last post because, frankly, life has been kicking me square in the testicles. Repeatedly, and without mercy.
But that's not what this blog is about! It's about escaping from your life of testicle injury! And throughout my trials and tribulations, I've still been rolling the bones and forgetting myself for a few hours a week.
In the game in which I am a player, which I am now calling the New Gods campaign, our characters are becoming (what else?) new gods. In the real world, this is to test a new mechanic of the DM's homebrew system, but it's made interesting by the fact that within the game, our characters belonged to an atheistic society.
In the game I'm running, the players are off on some half-cocked vague adventure. We've had two sessions so far, and for the first one, I was barely awake and not at all prepared.
In the second session, I had actually prepared a small dungeon, and even populated it with new monsters from my own imagination. The dungeon also contained a +2 knife, which in my game world, is an extremely rare and powerful magical item. The kind of knife a king would wear. The party made a more or less bee-line for the intended target of the adventure, and after locating it, buggered off, leaving about 90% of the dungeon unspoiled. What was intended as a three hour dungeon was done with in about fifteen minutes, and I proceeded to wing it.
Winging it is a time honored tradition among DM's, and in my experience, can sometimes lead to the best adventures. Certainly some of my proudest moments have come from running games off the top of my head.
Unfortunately, in the current campaign, I had yet to "take off the training wheels".
When I run a game, for the first couple of levels, I like to give the party a pretty firm hand. I overtly and obviously hand them the first adventure to help introduce them to the setting and allow them to introduce their players to me. By the end of it, everyone should have a pretty firm grasp of the flavor of the adventure and their companions. After that introductory bit, I tend to let the character decide where they want to go from there.
The big problem of this approach is when the characters do something that takes the story off the rails early and you're forced to deal with things you aren't even vaguely prepared for.
My PC's escaped the sewer dungeon, plowed through a mountain of my bullshit, and are now on their way to something more interesting, that may or may not have a bearing on the fate of the world. As per usual.
But that's not what this blog is about! It's about escaping from your life of testicle injury! And throughout my trials and tribulations, I've still been rolling the bones and forgetting myself for a few hours a week.
In the game in which I am a player, which I am now calling the New Gods campaign, our characters are becoming (what else?) new gods. In the real world, this is to test a new mechanic of the DM's homebrew system, but it's made interesting by the fact that within the game, our characters belonged to an atheistic society.
In the game I'm running, the players are off on some half-cocked vague adventure. We've had two sessions so far, and for the first one, I was barely awake and not at all prepared.
In the second session, I had actually prepared a small dungeon, and even populated it with new monsters from my own imagination. The dungeon also contained a +2 knife, which in my game world, is an extremely rare and powerful magical item. The kind of knife a king would wear. The party made a more or less bee-line for the intended target of the adventure, and after locating it, buggered off, leaving about 90% of the dungeon unspoiled. What was intended as a three hour dungeon was done with in about fifteen minutes, and I proceeded to wing it.
Winging it is a time honored tradition among DM's, and in my experience, can sometimes lead to the best adventures. Certainly some of my proudest moments have come from running games off the top of my head.
Unfortunately, in the current campaign, I had yet to "take off the training wheels".
When I run a game, for the first couple of levels, I like to give the party a pretty firm hand. I overtly and obviously hand them the first adventure to help introduce them to the setting and allow them to introduce their players to me. By the end of it, everyone should have a pretty firm grasp of the flavor of the adventure and their companions. After that introductory bit, I tend to let the character decide where they want to go from there.
The big problem of this approach is when the characters do something that takes the story off the rails early and you're forced to deal with things you aren't even vaguely prepared for.
My PC's escaped the sewer dungeon, plowed through a mountain of my bullshit, and are now on their way to something more interesting, that may or may not have a bearing on the fate of the world. As per usual.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Anxious for the weekend
It's only Wednesday, but I'm chomping at the bit for the weekend to begin.
Saturday, I'll be playing in a homebrew quest and Sunday will be the first session of our new AD&D game, for which, I have written nothing.
The group is composed of mostly fighters, with a thief and a mage, though one character is considering creating a fighter/mage/thief.
At least two of the characters are attached to large organizations, so, I can always give them a mandate from a higher-up to gather some droogs and go explore location X, for it is spooky.
Eventually, I'm going to have this current group return to the castle of the previous group, which has been overrun by baddies.
As I get older, I find that I have less and less time for gaming. Or rather, between the group, we can only find a two to three hour block once a week to game. This may be adequate for some, but when I started playing, we would set aside at least six hours for a session. Some of our marathon sessions went well into the double digits.
Very rarely, I can get with a group of guys on a weekend and literally play all night. It's a great feeling to start a session when the sun is going down, and end the session by eating breakfast together before you go home and pass out.
And as a player, when you're in character for that long, you really can get into your part and into the story. One of the most memorable sessions my early group had ran almost 16 hours. In the end, almost everyone was dead, and I hate psionists forever.
Saturday, I'll be playing in a homebrew quest and Sunday will be the first session of our new AD&D game, for which, I have written nothing.
The group is composed of mostly fighters, with a thief and a mage, though one character is considering creating a fighter/mage/thief.
At least two of the characters are attached to large organizations, so, I can always give them a mandate from a higher-up to gather some droogs and go explore location X, for it is spooky.
Eventually, I'm going to have this current group return to the castle of the previous group, which has been overrun by baddies.
As I get older, I find that I have less and less time for gaming. Or rather, between the group, we can only find a two to three hour block once a week to game. This may be adequate for some, but when I started playing, we would set aside at least six hours for a session. Some of our marathon sessions went well into the double digits.
Very rarely, I can get with a group of guys on a weekend and literally play all night. It's a great feeling to start a session when the sun is going down, and end the session by eating breakfast together before you go home and pass out.
And as a player, when you're in character for that long, you really can get into your part and into the story. One of the most memorable sessions my early group had ran almost 16 hours. In the end, almost everyone was dead, and I hate psionists forever.
Monday, October 10, 2011
The Wheel has turned
Last night was game night and between stretches of Portal 2, some decisions were made in our group.
One of our players is out of the game for the foreseeable future and, not all the players were really interested in continuing our Traveller game. The players decided to scrap both the existing DnD game and the Traveller adventure and roll-up new characters to start fresh.
I had some great ideas for where I wanted to take Traveller, and vague grand plans about the DnD campaign. But the DM juices are already flowing in anticipation of the new adventure, and I must admit that I'm getting somewhat excited.
One of our players is out of the game for the foreseeable future and, not all the players were really interested in continuing our Traveller game. The players decided to scrap both the existing DnD game and the Traveller adventure and roll-up new characters to start fresh.
I had some great ideas for where I wanted to take Traveller, and vague grand plans about the DnD campaign. But the DM juices are already flowing in anticipation of the new adventure, and I must admit that I'm getting somewhat excited.
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