Out of the Box Roleplaying

Trying to figure out what to do at Gen Con on the last day of the 'con? If you're like us, all you really do is wake up and scavenge for last-minute deals on the sales floor. Well, now we have solved our problem.

Stupidranger.com is pleased to announce our first (and hopefully annual) Gen Con event!

-= Out of the Box Roleplaying =-

See your favorite D&D bloggers fight for survival (and your amusement) in a very special game! Rules-light and fun-heavy, the unsuspecting, hapless, brave adventurers will face a threat unlike any the world has ever seen: a DM driven to madness by E.L Fudge Cookies.

If you've ever been to Hickman's Killer Breakfast, you'll appreciate just how hard we tried to completely rip off their format (which is 100% proven to be an incredibly entertaining event!). However, we won't have anywhere near enough people or space to kill dozens of people at the DM's whim, and we don't have the kind of star power Tracy Hickman does. And I won't be singing. I can't promise Dante won't. Especially not a song about the undead to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On". Once he reads this, you may also be treated to Vanir being killed on stage before your very eyes!

Featured guests include:

• Dave The Game from Critical Hits


• Phil the Chatty DM from Musings of the Chatty DM


• Yax from Dungeonmastering


• Other Mystery Guests! (The ones Vanir forgot to Email before Now!)
  

And now, the moment you have all been waiting for: REGISTRATION INFORMATION!

** PLEASE NOTE THE NEW AND IMPROVED TWO HOUR TIME SLOT! **
** THE EVENT NOW STARTS ONE HOUR EARLIER, AT 9AM!!! **

SEM00075
Out of the Box Roleplaying with StupidRanger.com
Sunday, August 17
9:00AM - 11:00AM
Embassy Suites Consulate

There is no cost for this event, and there are Lots of seats available. Come out, meet lots of cool people, and have some fun with us!

STAY TUNED: Exciting announcement taking place this afternoon...

Gentle Readers --

Please stay tuned to the site this afternoon (after 5 pm Central Time) for an exciting announcement. Vanir will be along to provide further details at that time.

Don't worry! Everything is fine, we promise this will be a *fun* announcement!!

Someone else's Proper Villany...

I was doing my normal morning RSS reading and saw that Yax over at DungeonMastering posted a fantastic (and incredibly concise) DM's Guide to Uber-Villians. There's a LOT of good material in a very small space in this article, and has given me a bunch of seeds to use in my future campaigns.

It strikes me that I often don't use minons enough, or effectively. That will probably be one of the first areas that I flesh out for my next Big Bad.

For those of you looking for our own take on being bad, feel free to have a look at Vanir's Proper Villany series. I've got some random notes on how I tend to handle evil characters, I will gather those up soon and perhaps add my two cents worth on the topic.

If Andrew Lloyd Webber Was a DM

Over the weekend, to assuage my need for a movie late at night, I popped in the Phantom of the Opera DVD. As has happened in the past, I began to identify the story elements as roleplaying elements. And I realized that Phantom of the Opera movie is obviously a 3.5 D&D campaign with Andrew Lloyd Webber as DM.

Here's the Story, D&D Style

The Phantom is a bard. He uses some mad Disguise skills to hide his horrible scars, and he obviously took the Skill Focus: Cape Flourish feat. He uses his Bardic Music to Fascinate and Suggest to Christine, that he is a angel and she should love him. She fails her Will Save and totally believes him.

Then, Raoul comes along. He's a rival bard, who uses his Bardic Music to Fascinate and Suggest to Christine that the "angel" is not to be trusted and she should love him instead. She fails her Will Save and totally believes him instead.

There's some crazy "who's better than whom" battling, with music and rapiers and such. After leveling up, the Phantom rolls very, very well on his Craft: Opera roll, and Christine is cast as the lead. On opening night, the Phantom pulls out his Disguise Kit and joins her on stage after he kills the other guy, then kidnaps her via the conveniently placed trap door and whisks her away to his lair. Raoul tries to follow, but he fails his Reflex save when he triggers a trap door. He falls into a pit of water, but he makes his Swim check and manages to escape. He eventually finds the Phantom's lair.

There's more singing, and each of the bards tries to cancel out the other's Bardic Music. Christine finally makes a few Will Saves and realizes that the Phantom really isn't the catch he wanted her to believe he was. Raoul and Christine escape to live happily ever after, while the Phantom disappears into oblivion.

Then, Andrew Lloyd Webber takes down his DM screen and says, "Well, that's that. Good job, everyone! Next time, we're playing 4E, which means you can't be bards, so email me your new character concepts."

The Fine Art of Bartering, 2008 Edition

Last week, all of us here at SR were pleased to find an incredibly sweet deal on the 4th edition boxed set of books. $57, and that included shipping. I have no idea how the Internets brought us this price, but whatever deal Buy.com had with WotC saved me a whole ton of money. I just got my books on Saturday, and they are Fantastic. Reviews will be coming as soon as we have read enough to have any idea what we are talking about! Unfortunately, that's not really what I wanted to talk about right now -- it is simply the root from which a very stupid tree grew.

Dante went into one of our local gaming shops over the weekend, and during the course of a conversation with one of the employees about 4e, he mentioned that he got his 4e books already. And. in a nutshell, the conversation went something like this:

Dante: "I see you've got 4e books in. I love the new edition. Got my books just this week."
Employee: "Well I bet you paid more somewhere else!"
Dante: "Actually, I got them online for $57 shipped."
Employee: "Why the hell did you do that? Where are you going to play games if you don't support your local gaming shop?" <begin several more minutes of vitriol and guilt>

This begs two questions. One, why the hell would we buy it online as opposed to this guy's gaming shop? I think the answer possibly lies with the fact that we could get it for $57 instead of $102. I can understand buying local under most circumstances, to support the community and local commerce and all that. But please forgive me if I do not have enough civic pride or have enough loyalty to your store to take advantage of a price that is over half off what you're asking. I get that Internet sales are killing brick and mortar stores. I understand why he didn't go under the MSRP. But I also happen to have both a newborn and a thirst for Xbox games, and he's crazy if he thinks I'm not going to take a $45 discount on the same product.

The other question, as to where we're going to play games if we don't support our local gaming store, made me a little angrier. Making customers feel guilty about not shopping at your store makes me want to shop at your store considerably less. You know what's going to happen if you piss everybody off and nobody buys stuff at your shop anymore? We're still going to buy our stuff elsewhere and we're still going to play games wherever we want. And for the record, I have never played a game inside a game store before. I have this thing called a "kitchen table" around which we all gather. Some of my friends have a similar device.

When Dante told me his tale, I got my +3 panties in a twist, and I had written most of this article before I realized that I might not know the whole story here. I've never run a shop before, much less a gaming shop, and I don't know how everything works exactly. Fortunately, my friend Tony did run one up until recently. So I asked him his thoughts. And basically, I was pleased to hear that I wasn't completely off the tracks in my thinking (at least in his opinion). The guy's price really wasn't his fault, and he did think the guy was kind of a toolbox for guilting his customers. A lot of the guy's problem, Tony thought, was that the owner of our local store hadn't figured out it was 2008 yet and he was playing by an old set of rules. Tony knew right from the start that his store wasn't going to be able to compete with the prices of the Internets, and thusly, he offered a lot of things that the Internet couldn't give his customers. He hosted events, like tournaments. He held promotions. He gave people reasons to want to physically come into the store. And he supplemented that income with Internet sales.

All of us here at Stupid Ranger are firm believers that a strong gaming community benefits everyone. But I also believe that a good gaming community is founded when a lot of people discover a common interest and all work together to make it great. Not because they feel guilty about it. If you want your store to be the center around which the local gaming revolves, make your store kick ass. Give us reasonable prices, host fun events, put up leaderboards, and let people get in contact. The community doesn't even have to be IN the store -- put up a website. Offer stuff for sale online. Put up forums and spread the word to your customers. Get us involved and make it relaxing and enjoyable for us. It's gaming, we're supposed to have fun. Don't make us feel like we're going to sink the whole community and make your family starve if we don't jump on your wagon. I have my own wagon. It is nice.

I imagine this article is probably going to piss a couple people off, but this is part of the world all of us gamers live in. I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts and experiences, especially any of you who own a game store. And please note that I didn't name any names. I probably won't be shopping at this particular place again, but I certainly don't want them to lose business. I want to see our local gaming shops succeed just as much as the next guy.

Random 4e Musing: Movement...

This morning I find myself in the office at an unusually ungodly hour. I fully expect to achieve miraculous feats of productivity that include sitting quietly and breathing in-and-out to the tune of our white noise machine.

Because of this horrible situation, I blearily found myself wandering downstairs this morning and I tripped on the dog. This forced me to wheel out of the way of the end table and love seat, resulting in a vaguely marionettish finish in the middle of my living room. I was satisfied to have avoided all major obstacles, but it got me thinking about something related to the newly released fourth edition of D&D: movement.

I have only made it through what little I could glean from the new PHB, but it seems that many of the battle-oriented skills (the at will/encounter/daily ones) have to do with manipulating squares on the battle grid. I have seen that standard movement is done as a function of squares now as well.

This doesn't implicitly bother me that much (those skills are COOL, by and large), using a standard measure is bound to make things less complicated in the long run. What I don't like about this situation is that it does push a little more planning time onto the DM, or at least a little more "board prep" time during the game. I fully suspect that I would be able to squeeze out an impromptu drawing on the battle grid to relay the scene to my gaming group, however the cleanup and drawing process does take a little time when you use a vinyl battle mat like we do.

This might force me into doing the whole "plexi-glass overlay" thing that I have been thinking about for quite some time, but that involves more work than I'm willing to undertake in my currently sleep deprived state.

I'm sure this development is going to increase the sales of battle grid accouterments and what-not, so that might be interesting to behold. In the past, my reasons for not buying in to the many tools designed to make battle grids more interesting, easy to generate, or the like is that it seems to be a fairly large amount of outlay for only a few minutes of enjoyment during most of our gaming sessions. To fully leverage some of the really cool stuff you are forced to plan in advance or else face the annoyed groans of your campaign-members as you pull out set pieces, landscape tiles, and the like... and I'm not very good at knowing when to plan for that type of thing yet.

I'm sure in time, my skills in such matters will improve but for now I'm going to keep enjoying the fun descriptions on skills and not sweat the details so much.