Undiscovered Loot Info

I often bounce between quite a few different computers when I'm working on things and oftentimes am not especially well organized.  I've decided instead of keeping it all packed away behind private Google documents that I'll toss some of my in-progress blogging and worldbuilding into a link here on the blog.  The content there will likely be even more loose and disorganized than normal posts with little in the way of formatting.  The good thing about this is that it will allow me to post things without needing to spam any RSSers (beyond this initial post.  Sorry).  

If you are interested in the undiscovered loot check it out here or follow me on twitter where I will be posting when there are updates.  Thanks for reading and good gaming out there!

The Relative Evil Scale

This guy didn't multiclass paladin.

During my undergraduate years I wrote for a detective radio drama that aired once a week with a brand new mystery.  When it started out things were pretty simple; bad guy shows up, detective figures him out, bad guy goes to jail.  As this started to slowly begin to feel stale the other writers and I played around with adding longer lasting characters and plot lines without a whole lot of concern for tone.  Then we realized that we had made a terrible mistake.  As the episodes went by our villains kept getting meaner and meaner as our main character started getting more and more humanitarian.  We can't have a sparkly clean hero!  This is a 1930's noir for crying out loud!

We sat down one day to discuss this weird change in tone and to try to figure out how to fix it.  What we came up with then is something I now do every time I am running a campaign.  It does an excellent job preventing alignment creep and can even be used to avoid stereotyping a specific class of character as being always good or always bad.  I have come to call it the Relative Evil Scale.  

Dawn of Worlds: Dear Game Makers, Make This

Our Rough-Draft In-Game Map.

I mentioned in my previous post on 4e that I also got a chance this week to play the free world-building game  Dawn of Worlds from the apparently long defunct Legends Games.  I mentioned as well a decided contrast between the two games that I think goes beyond the different group composition or the method in which we played.  While I enjoyed both of them immensely, I think that where we got lucky with Dawn of Worlds is that we played it with a nearly perfect setup: playing through Google Hangouts using Tabletop Forge with a group that hadn't discussed too many world specifics ahead of time.  I'm going to likely be making more posts soon regarding what we actually created, but for now I want to look more at the process and why you should already be getting a group of people together to make your very own world.

D&D 4e Play Report: Lots of Fun, Not Lots of RP

This past week (while I was fastidiously failing to post anything here) I had the opportunity for the first time ever to break out my gaming stuff twice in one week. Well, to break out my gaming stuff twice in one week with other people. I'm going to be giving each of these an article separately (as I can't manage a short post to save my life) but I think that it bears mentioning the second game simply because it will contrast so much with the first. I played a mostly core-fantasy D&D 4e game in person with my hometown group and then a couple days later played made a steampunk kind of world using Dawn of Worlds through G-hangout with some members of the new group.

Character Generation and Setup

My first gaming experience was with the 3.5 rules of Dungeons and Dragons and from the beginning I found most of that pretty intuitive.  Sure, there can be some weird things with grappling and character building can be something of an enjoyable challenge, but it more or less makes sense the majority of the time.  If there's a build that doesn't work out well I feel like I can look at the sheet and quickly know where the problem is.  When 4e came out I assumed that my previous experience would carry over in a meaningful way.  Unfortunately, it really hasn't. 

Half Cooked Race: The Cragborn

Next week I'm going to be running a world building game (likely Dawn of Worlds) that I've been tweeting, G+ing, chatting, and basically doing everything but blogging about.  The original stated goal had been to sit down and create a whole new fantasy world right then when we get together.  Unfortunately, just knowing that this was coming up got some creative juices flowing and (gamers being gamers) I've had a couple of discussions with people in the game and (worst of all) I've already come up with a race that I intend to put into the game.  Hopefully history and other players will leave their mark on the beasts as well, but this should serve as a kind of proto-race going in.

In an effort to bring about a world that has bits of fun and whimsy in it, I've created the cragborn.  The name is pending on that because I kind of hate it, but haven't come up with anything better yet.  This race will likely be the tribal-not-fully-understood hairy things off away from civilization that everybody is somewhat concerned will take over the world.  However, instead of the world having something to hold them back, their own ineptitude is enough to prevent a hostile takeover.  You see, these monstrous furry beasts make all of their buildings, armor, and weapons out of ice.

New Gaming Group, Old Content

January 2013: New Beginnings

I'm very excited to be posting in my first RPG Blog Carnival which is generously being hosted by Kobold Enterprise.  Thank you for reading!

Apart from a very short stint playing a couple of one shots in college, I've played pretty much exclusively with one group for the past twelve or so years.  We all pretty much got into gaming at the same time from a mutual love of fantasy books and our explorations into tabletop gaming more or less happened simultaneously.  There were occasional times when someone would bring a game over from another group, but I at least didn't really experience that.  We played on and off through the years in a variety of systems and settings, but the core group of about five guys was pretty much unchanged.

I've now moved to a new city and although I absolutely intend to keep playing with the old group (Hi guys!) I'm also getting very involved with a new group of players (Hi guys!).  This new group has only been playing for about a year and is HUGE (sixteen players mixed about evenly by gender).  The first game I played with them was a 4e game with eight players not including the DM.  I don't think I've ever played a game with so many people in it simultaneously and this is apparently the normal amount of people to show up at a game.  The culture of the group is also very different as they accept that the players from one session to another could be pretty much entirely different.  I've just started to try to get involved DMing with that and it leaves open one important question.  How freaking cool is this?!

Faerie Elves: Elven Subraces Simplified

When I first played D&D 3.5, it was very exciting to me that not only could I be a charming, fleet-footed elf, but that I had dozens of choices for what kind of elf I could be.  After quite a bit of waffling between the dozens of possibilities, I ended up backing down and going with a half-elf despite the low-crunch benefits of it.  I just couldn't get enough meaningful background on any one elven race that separated it from every other one.  Wood elves make sense, but what separates them thematically from wild elves?  Aquatic elves sound awesome, but I will likely be on land most of the time anyway.  What on earth is a grey elf?  At least as a half-elf the confusion about the finer points of elven life could be in character.

This original battle with elven culture grew into a distinct dislike of the knife-earred archer-mages that until very recently has endured.  I've now decided that in my games I will do away with the multitude of elven subraces and cut things down to three types of elves with a single stat block.  If a player wishes to change the stat block I tend to be fairly flexible, but these are the three core variants that I allow.  The elves are no longer just vaguely connected to the faerie, but thematically partially fae creatures.  In a sense, the elven races are the continued lines of half-faerie.