Mostly what beginning players need to know in D&D is, “What do I roll and how do I do it?” The D&D character sheet is pretty much a failure in providing this information, with attacks and weapon damage buried in … Continue reading D&D Combat Sheet
Turns out I didn’t go further with RuneQuest than thumbing the rules, but I did get a game of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition up and running. I wound up with 5e because: The new edition attracted by interest as a gamer and designer D&D is ubiquitous, well-supported, easy to find in stores to browse and buy The game seemed to have the right balance of crunch and ease-of-play, particularly for new players I haven’t paid attention to D&D since my deep dive into 4th edition, when I tried to play it as a sort of wargame — an “Advanced … Continue reading Dungeons & Dragons 5e
Fresh out of the box from Amazon: Andrew, I will bring my copy of Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms to you for our Sunday “Dawn Patrol” — you can borrow it if you’re serious about rolling up a Ranger. Continue reading It Comes In The Mail
As part of the fight at the Bridge of Four I threw a wave of thirty-two goblins at four heroes. Thirty-two goblins. That number is pretty staggering for a number of reasons. Those goblins were matched against first level characters, who weren’t greatly challenged by the attack, which says a lot about the power level of starting characters (and the importance of taking advantage of defensive terrain!). But more interesting, to me, is how easy it was to run that mob of monsters. A weakness of many RPGs is a failure to scale. Monster details that make individual creatures interesting … Continue reading Monsters & Minions
So how is this newfangled Essentials Rules Compendium holding up to actual play? Mechanically, the rules are doing just fine. Everything seems to be fitting together without contradiction or error, which is what you’d expect of this revised-but-don’t-call-it-Version-4.5 rules set. The rules are clear when you read them in advance of play and you go into your session with high confidence that you know what you’re doing. That’s where it gets tricky, and it has little to do with the clarity of the Rules Compendium. It has everything to do with how information is organized an how different people learn. … Continue reading The Core Of The Matter
A few random thoughts about the rules and last night’s game, and also an excuse to post silly stuff, like … Bill Gates character sheet … and … Both of these images were heavily in my mind last night as we three father geeks gathered in my garage to put on the elf boots and roll dice like in the bad old days. After a few minutes of “What The Hell Am I Doing?” awkwardness (which I feel whenever first unfurling my gaming geek flag), I fell back into the rhythm and it was just friends rolling dice and pretending … Continue reading DM Debrief
(Editor’s note — Andrew wrote this in email, but it really deserves an airing here on the blog, so I’ve reproduced it under his name, to his eternal shame and embarrassment. Thoughts and insights are his, editing mistakes and snarky pictures and captions are mine. –PRO) I’ve been holding off commenting until I completely read through both books, and created my character. Well last night I finished up the books and started creating my character. Here are some poorly organized thoughts on 4E: -THEY TOTALLY NERFED DUAL WIELDING (Looks like Cleitus suddenly switches to a BattleAxe? What gives?????) -NO MULTIPLE … Continue reading Nerd Rage!
I got about ninety pages into the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Rules Compendium last night. I like what I’ve read so far. The rules are approachable and readable. Very little actual rules content so far but with powers and combat rules still to come it is clear they back-loaded the crunch in this book. So far it’s all been philosophy, terminology, character-creation advice, a world overview, and other high level stuff. About the only meaningful rule that surprised me so far is: Don’t combine bonuses of the same type that apply to the same roll or score, use the higher … Continue reading First Impressions: Rules Compendium
My Amazon box o’ D&D was waiting for me when I got home this evening. I haven’t had time to do much more than glance at the books but first impressions are favorable. Big type, lots of white space in the layout, nicely illustrated (where illustrated at all — the books look pretty crunchy, without a lot of fluff). Much will depend on how well-indexed the books prove to be. I spotted a glossary in one book, which is a good sign. The Essentials books are digest-sized, and soft-backed. They may fall apart with repeated use, but that would mean … Continue reading The Essentials Have Landed
The D&D Essentials line wasn’t really on my radar before this week. I had heard about them in passing on Twitter but as I wasn’t in the market for D&D (and as the explanation of what they were about was murky) I promptly forgot about them. The whole point of this venture is to tackle “the ASL of RPGs,” so that meant I had missile lock on the three 4e D&D hardbacks. But Andrew (who along with Dave is joining me in this campaign) did a little sniffing around and said we should go with the D&D Essentials instead of … Continue reading Why Essentials?
Goblin Soup 