Out Of The Box Roleplaying: NEW TIME! MORE GUESTS!

Well, true believers, we're putting the finishing touches on our upcoming Out Of the Box Roleplaying event for Gen Con this year, and the further along we get, the more excited I am about this. For those who missed my last post about this event, please allow me to summarize:

• Half D&D, half improv comedy, all fun. Watch your favorite bloggers battle their way through a very rules-light, high-hilarity adventure run by Dante!
  
  
• Special guests/victims include Yax from Dungeon Mastering, Phil from Musings of the Chatty DM, and Dave The Game and Bartoneus from Critical Hits.
  
  Joining our fearless guests at the gaming table will be our very own Stupid Ranger!
  
  
• See Vanir roleplay and draw scenes from the game as they happen in a sugar-fueled frenzy! Watch as his heart and brain compete for the right to explode first!
  
  
• FREE STUFF including E.L. Fudge cookies for everyone and totally sweet prizes for audience participation!

Here's the event information!

**PLEASE NOTE**
The event time has switched from 10AM to 9AM and the event will run two full hours until 11am. If you already signed up, you should be receiving an email from Gen Con notifying you of the change.

This is a totally free event, and we're not going to turn anyone away, ticket or no ticket, until the fire marshal intervenes. And he may have a fight on his hands.

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

Come join in the fun!

There's always a counterpoint: Spells and Rituals...

My good buddy Vanir did a great job outlining his thoughts on fourth edition character generation, spells, and rituals. The group of us had some excellent discourse on the changes that we immediately encountered, however during the discussion on spells and rituals I really had a "oh good, they fixed that" moment.

My biggest complaint about a lot of the utility spells were the amount of suspending disbelief that was required in order to buy the fact that with a handwave a portal could be opened, or someone raised from the dead. My gut reaction when I saw that most of these focused magical events had been moved into the rituals category was "people aren't going to like this" followed by "but as a DM I really do."

The Rationale Behind My Opinion

One of the biggest pain points as my 3.5 campaign moved up into the epic levels was the relative ease that the player characters were able to exercise complicated, game changing magic. This made for several "Dante aneurysm" moments toward the end of the campaign, one of which left both me and Kanati, my co-DM, scrambling.

The players resurrected the dead gold dragon that we had placed in their path as they fled an oncoming army.

This completely derailed the rest of the plans for the session, and we had simply placed this dead dragon as a "holy crap, strong things are afoot" piece of set dressing. In 3.5, the players were high enough level to have the material components on-hand so I let them exercise their powers and do what they wanted to do. I could've said "hey, the dragon's soul doesn't want to return" but that is very clearly DM code for "NO" and I had no good justification for why the dragon wouldn't want to come back and have at those that killed him.

In 4e, the preparation and casting time would've simply excluded this as an option. The oncoming army simply would've overtaken them.

This is the root of what I like about the new ritual system. The things that should take awhile (making a portal, raising the dead, and so on) takes enough time to give the DM some modicum of control over the situation. This allows the integrity of the written storyline to be retained within the game mechanics if needed, or at very least it provides a bit of time for the DM to get his head around the changed situation while the characters perform the ritual.

Does this mean that I think the players should be limited when they use the rituals? By no means. Do I think that people should roundly convert the rituals back to their 3.5 edition counterparts and treat them as per day abilities? Absolutely not. I can clearly see the value added by the distinction between spells and rituals, and I also see opportunity for growth.

I will be very interested to see what additional rituals get added and how their execution time gets tweaked in accordance with how much they disrupt gameplay or how much relative peril should be undertaken when casting. Aside from the battle simplification, I think that this aspect alone is among the best in the new edition.

It's Like Moving Into A New House, Complete With Hernia

After a hiatus of a month or so, we finally got to play D&D again last weekend. Well, technically. We decided to take the plunge and get into 4e so we aren't completely incompetent when we show up at Gen Con this year. It was time to roll up characters, and with the exception of Sirgeekelot, nobody had played 4e before. God, it hurts to change editions. I'm sure many of you can sympathize here. In 3.5e, I'd been playing and using that book long enough that I could find whatever I needed pretty fast. (And if I couldn't, Stupid Ranger usually knew the answer.) Now we're all screwed!

That being said, it did seem somewhat more straightforward to roll up one's character in 4e than in previous versions. I decided to try out the Wizard class, the lone "Controller" role in the book, to see how it stacked up against the 3.5e wizards I was used to seeing. Here's a few thoughts on the experience:

• After some mild arm-twisting, Dante talked us all into trying out the various methods of rolling up stats. Sirgeekelot did the point-buy system, I did the standard array method, and Stupid Ranger did the traditional rolling method. I've always hated methods other than rolling, I think it lends to mediocre stats and I usually use a crappy stat as a personality quirk for my character. Even so, I did wind up with a Wizard with a 16 INT and no stats so low that he would not to be able to open a door or wet himself in public or something. I think the standard array would be a good way to roll stats up if you wanted everybody to be exactly equal stats-wise or you were in a huge hurry. But I think I'll be rolling next time.


• The designers of 4e have been dutifully streamlining everything to make play go faster, more balanced and more smooth. This means they've combined and abstracted some features out from 3.5e - like Spot and Listen checks, which are now Perception. The list of skills is about one third of its former length, and choosing and training in these skills no longer requires a degree in calculus and a magical sherpa guide of leprechaun descent to guide you through the process -- changes which I welcome.
  
  Saving throws now use 2 ability scores, the higher of which determines one's bonus. This means that for the first time in recorded history, you can roll up a wizard with a good Reflex save. (Incidentally, our good buddy Sirgeekelot has designed a new t-shirt based on this discovery, which is now on sale in our shop.) I'm not entirely sure why INT would make one's Reflex save higher, as I've seen some very smart people walk into some very hard punches in my day, but I'm going to chalk this one up to "it makes the game more balanced".


• It seems like everybody has spells now. It's just that melee types tend to cast their spells with swords and maces and call them "exploits". Every class features a lot of picking of specifically named powers, which was always the part that took me forever when playing a spellcaster in 3.5e. Despite this, it did not take long for me to pick powers (probably because there weren't many to choose from at 1st level). This was nice too.


• I initially looked at the wizard and cleric powers and got upset because all I saw was combat spells. How the hell was I supposed to magically lock a door or grease up a staircase/elk/orc princess? I'm a roleplayer, dammit!
  
  It took me several minutes of kvetching and about 8hp damage from Dante's Clue Bat before I realized that rituals and spells were not, in fact, the same thing. A lot of the non-combat spells can be found in the Rituals section in the back, but not even close to all of them even the 3.5e PHB had. As previously stated, they have done some work to combine/generalize the usage of many game elements, so it may well be that I just haven't read over the list enough. One thing I didn't like, though, is that most of the rituals take a great deal of time longer than their 3.5e spell counterparts. Need to magically lock (or unlock, for that matter) a door before the bad guys catch up to you? I hope you have a 10 minute head start. I'm not sure why the designers felt the need to do this or what rationale is behind it, but this certainly puts a cramp in my "use spells for unusual roleplaying purposes" style.
  
  The other weird thing about rituals -- why in the hell are they at the very end of the book? They're literally the very last thing (besides a page of playtester credits) before the index. Did the people laying out the book forget that part until after the presses got started and just cram it in there at the end? Not that I really mind. It makes them much easier to find. My initial impulse was to say it would have been a little better to find it somewhere closer to the character classes, but I suppose the previous editions had the spells broken out into their own section as well. The fact that class-specific powers and everybody-gets-em rituals are separate was a little confusing to me, but it's something I can get past pretty easily.
  


• There were some conventions frequently used in the book that I found, for lack of a better term, obtuse. It was like they expected you to know what it was, but hid the definition somewhere really obscure. Dante and I both searched for quite awhile before we figured out that [W] was shorthand for one's weapon damage. A lot of the powers in the book say things like "and an ally makes a saving throw". A saving throw against what? Does that mean he gets to succeed the next time he has to roll one, or is this some beneficial effect you're giving him (and if so, why is he saving against it)?
  
  However, I have a feeling these are clearly defined somewhere I didn't read yet, and that their usage will flow freely like water for all of us at the table once we get to play for a few sessions. I'm sure I'm going to feel completely stupid once I find out what this new saving throw business means.


• I got a definite impression that they're approaching 4e as a work in progress, with errata being issued and the PHB2 slated for release next year. It sort of reminds me of how software patches work, except unfortunately adding and changing things to tabletop gaming means you either have to juggle 5 books to play with everything or you have to buy new books that have all the new stuff in it. My wallet, my back, and my all-consuming lust for convenience hate that part.

I think most of the pain of rolling up our first 4e characters had a lot more to do with the fact that we are playing with a whole new set of rules than any real problems with the rules themselves. That and we really didn't get to use these characters at all yet (that's next session).

I will have to reserve judgment until we actually get to play for a few sessions, but I'm hopeful about this new edition at long last. Overall, I still have some minor concerns with 4e but it's not the "OMG ITS NOW WORLD OF WARCRAFT TABLETOP RPG" that I had feared. I was confused by a lot of things, but I have a hunch that it will likely turn out that I, rather than the game, am obtuse. Only time will tell!

Learning 4e: First Impressions through character generation...

As previously mentioned, Sunday was our intrepid group's first experience with the fourth edition of D&D. We decided to do character generation as its own session, namely because we were sure there was going to be a lot of questions.

There were.

Learning is a two way street!

I asked that we get a buffet style look at the character generation options that existed within the new edition. Each of our three players took the three rolling methods described by the PHB: point buy, random rolling, and the standard array.

I believe that all three ended up with satisfactory stats, however there was a great deal of nostalgia for actually rolling the dice. Yeah, you were pretty much guaranteed a better average to high set of stats for the point buy system, but unsurprisingly.... people want to roll dice!

There was a considerable learning curve involved with negotiating the books themselves... some aspects of the Player's Handbook seemed confusingly laid out and it took some considerable effort to fully understand where all the rules fell together.

Our group got into some interesting philosophical discussions about the class changes that went into place with 4e. It seems that many of the changes make logical sense, and they are intended to make the game more digestible for new gamers. The trouble is that many of us are not new gamers, and we see opportunities for extension, expansion, and growth in the system that excites us. Having such a stripped down core system has left me wanting more to work with.

Do not misunderstand... I think the gameplay of 4e will be fast, fun, and very classic D&D. I'm just afraid that we'll be subjected to scads and scads of expansion books just to get us back to "normal" and essentially the sound of my wallet emptying is the only motivator in the end.

Time will tell and so will gameplay. Hopefully Vanir and SR will come along in the next few days and provide their insights!

It's The Circle Of Protection 10' Radius, And It Moves Us All

I recently met a fellow at work who was just getting into tabletop D&D and was asking me for some advice. This guy is one of our interns, I think he's about 18, and he'd played lots of videogame RPGs but apparently never tried the tabletop version before. After some discussion as to whether he should play 3.5e or 4e and talking a lot about the usefulness of various skills, he started telling me about a friend of his that was modifying a lot of the 3.5e rules to make the game "better and more streamlined".

At this point, a red flag raised in my mind because I've seen some really odd things come out of people remaking D&D to their liking. This particular guy's modifications were a lot like I'd seen some friends do back in college: he felt D&D just wasn't hardcore enough. So all his rules revolved around things like harsher penalties for spell failure, and lowering the number of hitpoints given per level to make things more realistic.

I don't know if it's all gamers or just the ones I grew up with, but it seems to me there's several stages of life gamers go through. Perhaps not all of these, or in this order, but it's a trend I've seen throughout the groups I've played with over the years:

• Introduction
  The player is learning the rules and is overwhelmed at first, but eventually gets the hang of things


• Monty Haul
  The DM of the group decides the lower character levels are boring and decides to make everybody roll up 20th level characters. Also, every PC gets a pick from the unique artifacts in the DMG, and no weapons under +18 are allowed.


• Hardcore
  Eventually growing sick of the over the top everything of the Monty Haul stage, the DM of the group decides gritty realism is what this group needs to reinvigorate it. Rules are changed to hamper the player and monster stats are buffed to make every encounter incredibly challenging to make the PCs feel a real sense of accomplishment when (if) they are victorious. Players leave practically every night with dead PC's and a new four-letter word to describe the DM.


• Realistic
  Hardcore's younger, scrawnier brother. Some gamers skip Hardcore completely and go right here, while others still want realism but not so much the soul-crushing frustration. Here you'll find the sticklers about marching order and endless discussions about who takes what watch when to maximize the amount of spells you get each day (thank you 4e, for ending this nightmare). Here you'll also find people who think Resurrection spells make it impossible for PCs to really fear anything in the game and diminish from the excitement of a true victory (see, Hardcore isn't totally gone!).


• Oh Yeah, It's A Game
  Most people finally get here, maybe only in part, but here nonetheless. The gamer finally realizes it's not about the rules, the power, the loot, or the realism, and finally clues into the fact that they get together with their friends every week to share exciting adventures and fun.

When I was writing this, I was thinking that a lot of teenage players decide they can do it better and write their own strange rules, but upon further thought I know just as many 40 year olds who do it too. I think it's a product of how a lot of gamers are -- very sharp analytical minds and enough perfectionism to want to fix things we perceive as flawed. Unfortunately, I think we're a lot better at finding things we want to fix than fixing them in a lot of cases. Although I'd be willing to bet a lot of game designers out there enter Hardcore or Realistic and manage to get it right somehow. (You know, factoring crazy stuff like "playability", "balance", and "fun" in there.)

All that said, I can't honestly say I haven't had a lot of fun with some seriously broken do-it-yourself rules over the years. And as long as we had fun, who cares? It's just a game, right?