Category: Gaming

So what now?

Not as much LFR. I feel less cranky about the campaign than I did when Susan and I talked it over before Christmas, which is when we made the initial decision to cut back. On the other hand, I’d bet that part of my good cheer is that decision itself, so revisiting it doesn’t seem either wise or necessary. I’m glad to be stepping back in a good mood rather than a pissy one.

2010 was a very poor year for the campaign. I enjoyed it a lot personally, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the rate of new content dropped alarmingly. Even worse, there were almost no new mods for private play. Private play was a very important part of the success of the campaign, and cutting off legal private play hurt badly. As a nasty side effect, this encouraged people to blow off the restrictions on private play and start breaking the rules. With no real enforcement available (or perhaps even desirable), this meant all the rules started to seem less important.

This combined poorly with a serious communication issue. I appreciate everything the globals do; I also think they, as a whole, are not skilled community managers. Which hey – I’m not either. But it is absolutely awful when one of your global admins is bitching about how poorly the players treat him. Here, read the MMO take on it. All of that is relevant except the volunteer note, since some of our admins are pure volunteers – but let us not grow confused about what it means that WotC isn’t spending money on the campaign.

One of the other more cheery things in the last month is, however, improved communication, which is nice. While not all deadlines are getting met, they’re getting better about communicating the issues at hand. Probably not coincidentally, the campaign has control over new module distribution. My uneducated hypothesis is that the admins had, for most of 2010, very little control over the mechanical process of releasing content and that this generated a lot of frustration. If this is accurate, the new livingforgottenrealms.com is helping a lot.

Organization has also been better. DDXP came off very well this year, although eyeballed attendance was down. Nonetheless, the BI was done before the show, people got modules in time to prepare, and the story was interesting and most forum reports were good. I was mentally prepared for a disappointing, semi-chaotic DDXP, and it wound up being quite the opposite.

This leaves me looking at 2011 and thinking that I can take my LFR when I feel like it and leave it alone otherwise. Our primary characters, Reed and Faral, hit level 19 at DDXP. We still don’t plan on playing the epic any time soon (more on this later), which means they have four or so adventures left before they leave paragon play behind. We’d like to make three of those the upcoming Waterdeep adventures, and one is probably the end of the Tyranny arc. That is pretty much OK. I have a level 16 character who could do P2 and P3 content, but Susan doesn’t, which means paragon play won’t be a big feature of our gaming time.

We do have plenty of heroic level play in us. Whether or not we do a lot of it in practice – well, we’ll have to see if we ever get down to the Monday night Columbia game.

I also intend to run semi-regularly, because I like it. I am still looking for the sweet spot between creating a challenge and overpowering players. 

There are some experience point spoilers in what follows; pray be careful, if this might offend.

Reed and Faral would like to play the three upcoming Year 3 Waterdeep modules and SPEC 2-2 P3 before hitting epic. Reed is slightly ahead of Faral on experience; he has 137,495 experience and it takes 175,000 to hit level 21. This gives him 37,505 experience points to play with.

SPEC 2-2 P3 will chew up 11,200 of those, leaving him and Faral with 26,305 experience points to epic. High tier experience for P3 modules is 8,840. Three of those would be 26,520 experience, which would just push them over. But Faral’s a bit lower. Note made: try to play at least one of the Waterdeep modules or SPEC 2-2 on a lower tier, to open up room for another adventure in there somewhere. Sadly it can’t be a double-length one unless it’s the last one they play.

Bah, math fun is not. This is not why I play, and it’s bugging me that I have to care about all this crap just so Reed can get some play in the locale I really want to play in.

LFR Mods

I played everything new for LFR at DDXP except the epic. Brief, non-spoilery thoughts:

The BI had a slightly less interesting story, but I thought it was better structurally. They had one special mission per encounter slot, which only one table could take; when more than one table wanted a given mission, they let the rest of the BI decide who should get it based on a brief speech. The special missions were level-band limited. Also, at the end of the the BI, the Coronal of Myth Drannor awarded unique items to randomly selected players. One of my friends got a special banner, and one got a pumped up version of the Bowstring of Accuracy that allows him to use any bow as a divine or arcane implement. You can give these items away to other players, but you can’t ever get them back.

The BI was fairly tough but not ridiculous. I think they amped it up a bit for the second day, combining two encounters into one. As per expectations, charging into battle was not always the right move. Both days failed one particular encounter, heh.

There were only two specials. While they took place in Myth Drannor and were tightly linked to each other, I didn’t feel like they were super-closely linked to the BI. The paragon one has a ton of replay value and if you do it at APL 18 or 20, you can face off with a pretty big name villain. I played the heroic once and the paragon twice and had a ton of fun both times.

The Elturgard modules were both fun. I was pleased to see that they used the  flowchart I sent in after playtesting ELTU 3-1, so if that ever turns out to be useful for you, you’re welcome. I’m getting pretty optimistic about the new story region system.

In general, quite a few adventures had story awards that allow you to buy specific uncommon consumables and so forth; they also seemed to have a lot of bundles of the style “Any uncommon neck slot item of level + X.” So that’s some of how they’re handling the new rarity system.

Oh, and everyone seemed pleased with the epic.

Rumors

New BI at Origins? Maybe!

Heroes of Shadow

I played the HoS preview game, Kalarel’s Revenge; my character was a blackguard, which is a striker paladin build. No mark, lots of ways to burn your own life for extra damage, plus an encounter power that inflicts damage even on a miss and adds ongoing on a hit. Essentials-style character, no attack dailies. Str/Cha. Fun flavor, I liked him. The other characters were some sort of dark cleric, a necromancer with both necromantic and nethermantic powers, an assassin, and something I’m forgetting maybe. I’m sure someone will post the character sheets somewhere.

Also I loved seeing some of the post-Keep on the Shadowfell activity in Nentir Vale. From a roleplay perspective this was great; this module should be made available for download somewhere.

Seminars

I didn’t go to any because I was gaming and someone always liveblogs.

Fortune Cards

I played with some at the Heroes of Shadow game. They were not super-unbalancing with a random selection. However, the rare ones seem to generally give you a floating reroll card when a specific condition is met – stacking a deck with ten of those could be ridiculous and unbalancing. I’m still waiting to see the full card list before I make up my mind either way.