everburning

I’m a gamer. My friends and I have spent a lot of time playing various table top RPG games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Mage. The amount we play has tapered off of the last few years as the group spread out, got married, had kids, became adults. We do still game, and some of those games have been running for years, other games have fallen by the wayside for various reasons.

Recently I’ve found myself thinking about gaming. I’ve never been good at the histrionics part of the game. I can find interesting ways to combine rules, feats and spells but describing the outcome is not a strong point. I’ve always felt awkward describing scenes and actions. I think this is the basis of my not running games. Much to the disappointment of my friends. In the last, 15 I think, years I’ve been gaming I’ve run twice. Once for a group and once as a solo. The group game was too long ago to remember how it went. I was told the solo was good, but it didn’t feel solid to me. Maybe I didn’t have a good enough grasp on where I wanted it to go, maybe it was something else.

The lack of description confidence is part of the reason I hang in the background in games. I’ll let the other players take the lead on quests, satisfy their personal agendas. I’ll tag along and do my bit, and sometimes come up with ideas that cause the GM to think, but don’t typically look to take the lead in games. This can, obviously, have a detrimental effect on character development. Especially after a character, played for 2-3 years, dies and you start anew. Developing the skeleton for the new character to hang off, while hanging in the shadows, is difficult.

Maybe this is an experience thing. Practice makes perfect and all that. I guess the question becomes, how to you get better at the descriptive aspects, the creative aspects, the design parts of the game?

How do you transition from a player in the background to a GM? Or, with smaller increments, a player that steps in the fore more often.

I know our main GM would love for more of the descriptive elements in the game. Hell, he’ll give XP rewards for descriptive write-ups of game content. Die modifiers if you give good descriptions of actions.

So, I ask you, gentle reader, how do you work on your descriptions, your histrionics, your character and world development? How do you make your game better?

We finally ran it. A few of us got together this weekend to play 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. We wanted to give the game a fair shake so we played strictly by the rules. (We’ve got so many house rules for DnD that this was almost a challenge, heh.) We also played the adventure in the back of the Dungeons Masters guide as that seemed like a good way to start.

I was Tolvan an Eladrin Rogue. We also had a Dragonborn Warlord, a Dwarven Figher and a Tiefling Warlock. One character short of a full party but we scaled the monsters down as needed. As I mentioned, this was a learning game, there were a lot of combat rules referenced.

So, how did it go? The campaign went well. We accomplished the required quests (although I was an hour late leaving to visit my parents.) I think we got a feel for the game played with a strict adherence to the rules and I think we all got a feel on what we thought of 4th edition.

Now, I know you’re all chomping at the bit to know what I think but, one more interlude. These comments are based on playing with the real rules. Like I said, we never play with the real rules as we’ve house-ruled everything. We’re going to give this another shake at some point to see how it feels with our custom changes attached.

That aside, I was a little disappointed in how the game played. It has been mentioned in several places that 4th gives DnD an feel similar to a massively multiplayer online game. I’d have to agree with this statement. They’ve done a lot of work to simplify things (which, in some cases, makes it more convoluted) and changed the game a lot to cater to new players. Some of this served more to distract me then to add to the game.

What did I like? Well, I like the new skill combinations. Makes everything a lot simpler and makes a lot of sense. The idea that you just have Perception instead of Search, Spot, Listen and who knows what else is a good abstraction. The fact that you’re either Trained or Un-Trained I’m not so hot on. As well, the fact that you can only learn new skills though a feat? What the duse? (Yes, I know, re-training, but we’ll get to that.) I think the concept of skill points and ranks wasn’t too bad. It let me put points into things that aren’t necessarily combat related (yes, one of my characters has ranks in profession sailing) and the removal of the craft related skills takes something away from the game.

Powers are an interesting one. I’m on the fence about these. I like the idea, I think they add flavor to the game. The fact that I have to make every attack use a power or I’m gimped drives me up the wall. Whatever happened to good old fashioned, I’m hitting that guy? Now it’s I’m using my Sly Flourish power to hit that guy. Damn it, sometimes I just want to hit things and I don’t want to get gimped for it. (I’m also a little bitter in that every time I used my Daily power I missed so it didn’t have any effect.) The other side of powers that I both like and dislike is how they work. Your power will tell you what to roll and what’s used for defense against the power. Say, Dexterity vs Reflex. This is good, this is kinda cool. This gives me a way to hit the fighter with an armor class of 21 but a Reflex save of 10. This also kinda sucks in that it’s a pain in the ass to remember what modifiers you’re adding and what the defense is for that role.

What’s the deal with feats? There aren’t very many and even when you dig into them so many are class specific that there is a very small pool to choose from.

I said I’d get to it, so here we go, re-training. Similar to powers I both like and dislike re-training. Why is it good? Well, there have been several occasions where I get high enough level, pick a prestige class (yes, yes, 3.5 reference but it’s my reference point) and realize I’m missing a simple skill pre-requisite. I then have to wait until I’ve got enough skill points I can use to raise that skill. This always kinda sucks. (I guess if I was really anal I would plan out my character from first to 30th before I start to play but I’m just too lazy. I like the more random approach.)

In this situation re-training would be helpful as I can move the training from a more minor skill into the needed skill.

This also doesn’t make any sense. What, I magically wake up one day and forget about Religion and learn everything there is to know about Nature? Same argument for feats. What, I suddenly forget how to stab someone in the back so my Sneak Attack damage has decreased?

Re-training does make sense for powers as I still think of them similar to spells.

Speaking of spells, personally, I think wizards got gimped. Sure, they get twice as many powers but they still have to pick the same number as everyone else at the start of the day, they just have a wider selection. You can’t memorize the same spell twice, so I can’t cast fly on two characters in the same day? Suck.

As Deacon said, I can’t play this game, there’s no 10 foot pole.

Concluding, I’m going to give 4e another shake. We’ll see what happens when we house rule a few things. I’m leaning towards preferring 3.5 but who knows.

I’ve fallen a bit behind in recent months with the blog. Surprise surprise. Anyway, I’ve been traveling back and forth to Seattle a few times in the intervening days and have had a chance to consume some media. Instead of individual posts I’m just going to lump it all together.

First up, I purchased a copy of RubyCocoa in beta book form. I read through what’s currently available in about a day. Well written, easy to follow and a really interesting topic. I’m waiting impatiently for the next beta release so I can get some more of that Ruby + Cocoa goodness. (Well, besides doing a bit of ruby cocoa programming when I get time.)

Next up, for those long flights, I discovered the magic of screencasts. I purchased three series of these by The Pragmatic Programmers. The list of all screen casts can be found in their Screencasts section.

I grabbed the current videos for: Creating a compelling interface with core animation, Everyday Active Record and The Ruby object model and meta-programming.

As I suspected, it’s best to watch from the start even if you know the stuff they’re talking about. Makes it easier to follow along with the examples in the later versions. All three of these series are well written, well produced and, overall, well done. I’m going to be keeping up with them as they go along.

Wizards released Dragon #364 and Dungeon #155 as PDF downloads. I’d read a few of the articles over the month but I must say, both of these downloads were really well done. Lots of interesting information, well laid out, well written. Both turned out to be really good reads.

In terms of movies, I managed to keep my plane movie time down. One full length and ten minutes of another. The full length was the new Bank Job movie. This one was actually pretty good, Stacy would probably hate it, but it’s good for a few hours on an airplane. The second was 10,000 BC. I started this on a lark and thankfully the plane was landing 10 minutes later so I didn’t have to watch any more. Sweet god, talk about wooden. The mammoths looked cool, but that’s about all I’ll give it.

Well, 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons has been released. I’ve been waiting for this for a while now and had the box set on order from Amazon since February.

There are a lot of changes in this edition. We’ll have to give a play to determine which are good and which are bad. Some will be missed out of nostalgia I think. I liked rolling my hit points even though I rolled a lot of 1s. It made the leveling that much more unique.

But then, some of the changes make sense. In fact, I specifically said fuck, that just makes sense at least once. Which greatly confused Stacy to which I had to explain that 3.x D&D has the knowledges as specific skills where D&D 4 bundles the knowledge with the other skills.

I’ve also got a copy of Keep on the Shadowfell which I’ve been reading through and am hoping to run once I can gather a few of our group together.

As usual, it’s been a busy few weeks. The condo is still a bit of a mess but it’s getting cleaner. We’re shuffling things around in the office so it looks like a tornado hit it. Lost the damn cord for the Rogers terminal. Going to have see if it appears out of the rubble.

In other news, took a quick trip up to Owen Sound on the weekend. Spent most of it gaming, although we did go over to a friends house for some drinks and cheese. Mmm, cheese. Tasty cookies too. Was a pretty good weekend. Hooked up with my parents for dinner, tried to call Mike for coffee, but no answer. The bus trip kinda sucked tho. Three hours on a bus where you sit with your knees pressed to the seat in front of you isn’t so fun. Did get through a good chunk of my book which is nice. Gaming was a lot of fun. Not something I get to do too often anymore which kinda sucks. I was pretty convinced my character was fucked for a while but managed to get it worked out.

After a good weekend of gaming I’ve been spending time contemplating running my own game. I know the other guys would love me to do it, but I just haven’t got there yet. After trolling the forums on Monte Cooks site for a while I ran across Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering which looked kind of interesting so I picked up the PDF version last night. Have I mentioned I love my laser printer? I’ll have to give it a read through and see what I come up with.

Thinking of running a game invariably leads me into thinking of writing a program to help run a game with. Something with the relevant stats/listings from the SRD documents along with a wiki style setup for creating notes and other stuff. The ability to generate maps would be nice. I tried to look for some good, free, mapping software for OSX last night but didn’t come across anything. We’ll see if I get started before my ADD kicks in or not.

In EWL news Nathan got the drag and drop code up to a basically complete state. There are some changes we could do, and some enhancements, but the plan is to let it sit for a while so people can poke at it and see where it bleeds. This was a pretty big chunk of work. We didn’t think so originally, but it ended up requiring a lot of changes all over the place. So, good work Nathan. Now, fix the mess I’ve made of tree2, heh.