I’m not sure how I missed the Ken Hite-scribed setting coming from Atomic Overmind Press, in which the Nazis summoned Jormungandr, only to see it nuked by the United States, which led to disastrous physical and occult effects including monsters, not to mention Soviet giants and a generally battered world. But I did. So there it is in case you did too.
Category: Gaming
My current secret MMO crush is Funcom’s The Secret World, which will be a modern dark fantasy conspiratorial MMO. I don’t expect much from it, which is why it’s a crush — the ideas are hot but as much as I want to like each and every Funcom MMO, there’s always been a bit of a gap between concept and execution. Hope springs eternal nonetheless.
Now there is a trailer, which will probably not bear that much resemblance to game play. There is also a sort of informative interview. Starting locations will be London, New York, and Seoul. I so much want this game to be good.
The Character Builder has been updated, so I started fiddling around with Players Handbook 2 ideas. The first thing I statted up was a human shaman named Bivvy, who claims to be of a noble family fallen on hard times. His spirit companion is a butler. “Whichever type of spirit companion you choose, it can have any appearance you like.” I’m just sayin’.
He’s taking Wrath of Winter as one of his at-wills, on the premise that the butler ought to be able to appear at someone’s side noiselessly. Also, I think, Blessing of the Seven Winds. Bit of a tornado, what?
I need to find a small figurine depicting Stephen Fry to make this really work.
This would be the newest thing to do.
Even after downloading and playing this I’m still substantially surprised that Richard Thompson found his way onto Rock Band. But it’s awesome!
The fan reaction has also been pretty gratifying. There’s a lot of “it started badly but then I got to the solo, whoa.” It’s weird realizing that this track has the potential to be the top selling Thompson song ever.
My favorite comment on the video: “Is all of that solo really played on a guitar though? Man, I wish mine sounded like that. ;P”
Danger, Will Robinson! D&D post! (I know. But I can’t bring myself to clog up the community with boring crap about a character nobody actually plays with. Er, clog it up more than once, anyhow.)
Just in case anyone was missing it — most of my D&D commentary will wind up over here, since I wanted my compatriots to be able to post as well.
I recently got a new text processing program called Scrivener. It’s oriented towards the writing process; you don’t use it to format text and produce final output. You use it to outline, shuffle, and put down words. I think it’s awesome for pen and paper gaming work, and I wanted to document my current workflow with an extended example.
I tried using a stack of index cards instead of an initiative tracker last session, and it worked out pretty well. I put most of the monster stats on each card, plus checkboxes for hit points. I think it was smoother than using the tracker.
I may need to put more of the stats on each card; I kept having to go back to the book. Maybe only for more or less simple monsters, and Big Bads can still require book reference?
I really like the ease of having defenses and hit points all in hand, though. The checkboxes in particular fit how my mind works.
I’m still trying to fuse the brilliant combat engine from D&D 4e with the brilliant narrative engine from Gumshoe. You may not have known I was trying to do this. But I am.
Let’s skip over the skills question for now and pretend that we have a Gumshoe adventure all mapped out, with the multiple paths and the clues and the major and minor scenes. It’s a flowchart, basically. None of these scenes are directly combat-related, although it may require combat to reach a given scene. Here, have a PDF example. Contains spoilers for the Esoterrorists sample adventure, though!
Now: for each scene, we may (not must) attach either a prerequisite combat, a resulting combat, or both. A prerequisite combat is a fight you need to engage in, or possibly win, in order to get to the clue scene. The clue scene might be really brief; e.g., maybe the fight happens and one of the combatants has the clue on him. Or, say, you have to fight through the kobolds to get to the secret lair in which more information is available.
A resulting combat is when they come after you for finding a clue. Actions have consequences. I think it’s important to make the linkage super-clear for the best narrative effect.
The idea is that by strongly pairing investigative scenes and combat scenes, you reduce any chance that the players will feel like they’re playing two different concurrent games with the same set of characters. This is just a theory right now. I should probably test it sometime.
Another tangential note: you could maybe keep skill challenges as long as you went with the current WotC approach, which is that failed skill challenges result in problems rather than failures. This is attractive in that skill challenges seem to be cool, but I think it’s too much of a departure from the Gumshoe skill model. Or you could ditch the Gumshoe model altogether and make clue acquisition into skill challenges? I don’t know how to run skill challenges well enough to do this, however.