Category: Writeups

Collin is my fighter. As with all my LFR characters, he is built with an eye towards effectiveness and an eye towards roleplay, which makes two eyes. That’s how you know I’m not a beholder. In practice, this means he’s a sword and shield fighter; I haven’t gone for the maximal damage cheese but I do like him to be pretty good at what he does. Which is minimize incoming damage and control the location of enemies on the battlefield. He can push and pull like nobody’s business.

If you care about his character sheet, make sure to check out the notes; he’s got a couple of powers and an item from a recent Dragon article which hasn’t gotten into the character builder yet.

He also has a backstory. Most of his life, he’s been a simple farmer in Chessenta. No family: he’s a bit too cranky and irascible to maintain a relationship, and he wasn’t really a very successful farmer. You grow some crops, you shout at kobolds to go away, and you do what you can. Chessenta is not exactly a farming nation.

About a year ago, a knight came riding onto Collin’s farm and dropped dead. Collin says “knight” when he tells this story, because it’s easier for the fluffheads of Cormyr to understand, and he’s been spending time there lately, but really he means a commander of the Akanax legions. Either way, the guy was wearing scale armor and carrying a nasty longsword, and he dropped dead on Collin’s doorstep. This represented two things.

The first thing was a huge problem. Legionnaires do not ride alone. It’s contrary to Chessenta military doctrine. Thus, Collin was soon going to have more legionnaires on his farm, and they would have questions which he could not answer in a satisfactory manner. These would eventually lead to questions which he could answer, but did not wish to answer, such as “How soon will Collin die once he’s stuck with a spear?”

The second thing was a great opportunity. Or at least a semi-interesting opportunity rendered deeply tempting by the previous thing. Collin could take the knight’s armor and the knight’s sword and the knight’s horse and ride off to find adventure somewhere other than Chessenta. That was a pretty good deal, considering the alternative. Using a sword couldn’t be too hard, right? 35 isn’t too old to learn a new trade. Sure.

The horse portion of the opportunity turned out to be not so good, since the knight’s horse was a warhorse and did not want some random farmer riding him. Collin still managed to make pretty good time on foot, and dodged his impending problem successfully. By dint of serious practice – he always was pretty athletic – he managed to pick up enough swordplay to get hired on as a merchant ship guard, and that went well enough for him to get paid, and so on.

Now he’s wandering around the eastern half of Faerun seeing the sights, hanging out with interesting people, and hitting things with an amazing new magic sword. Could be worse.

Saturday Tracker ran The Gibbous Moon, with cenakor, Xalcairn, Maelwys, logopolis, and I playing. It wound up being somewhat of a grindfest. We started an hour and a half late, and Tracker didn’t quite read some of the monster stat blocks carefully enough which extended the first combat by a bit. (The Deathlock Wight Resurrect power revives undead at half bloodied hit point value, not at bloodied hit point value. Ooops.) I dunno, one of those things, I guess.

I liked the plot of the module fairly well. I was bummed that we didn’t manage to save the father. Such are the vagaries of random number generators, I suppose.

Whoa, I forgot to record the weekend’s games! It’s cause I flew to Austin on Sunday night and I’m still catching up with myself.

On 4/9, Friday night, I ran Brothers In Arms as an exchange with Tracker. My other players were logopolis, codman, Xalcairn, and Nimrand. It’s not a combat heavy module, and I am not totally surprised that I didn’t wreak terrible havoc on anyone, although I did have some great moments when a dark creeper died and blinded half the party for four rounds. It’s a fun adventure and I still want to play it with Alesk sometime.

This is the second time I’ve played The Night I Called the Undead Out. I’ve liked it both times! Susan and I went down to Games & Stuff to play it, cause it’s nice to get down there every now and again. Mac was our GM, and he did a great job. Chris, Tom B., and Jonathan were our fellow players.

The usual complaint about TNICtUO is that it’s really long, which it is. I am inclined to think that cutting out the third fight would not be the worst thing in the world, and it’s how I’d abbreviate it if I were running it in the 3.5 hour slot that Games and Stuff allows. But that’s after playing it twice and thinking about it some more. And the thing is, it’s an awesome module no matter what.

For a relatively new GM, I’ve got to give Mac kudos for being really snappy and on the ball. Actually, strike that – he deserves unambiguous kudos regardless of experience level. He also dealt with Chris really well; I’m sure Chris is a nice guy but I’m gonna unabashedly say that if you don’t like 4e much and you can’t be bothered to learn your powers in four levels of play… yeah. Don’t play LFR just because it’s an RPG. Play what you love. So it’s not that Chris was a problem player, but he was pretty slow, and Mac did a good job of keeping up the pace regardless.

This was also Collin’s first adventure at level 5. I rebuilt him a bit to take advantage of the Dragon #385 article on fighters, which is all about shields. It worked well. He now has Dual Strike and a heavy shield that he can use as a weapon, which means he can double mark every turn. This is quite good.

Gangs of Wheloon is a classic I’ve never played, so when Matt J. was kind enough to offer to run it online for me I took him up on it. My fellow players were Darksydex, Eltherian, Knight4612, Tracker (aka Kevin from GASPCon), and Xalcairn. It’s a fun module with a few branching paths you can take, and I got a kick out of meeting one of the Valwaters, who I’d encountered as a DM in Head Above Water (CORM 1-3).

Collin took 8 points of damage across the entire module. 4 points of that was from a fellow PC – damned warlocks – and 4 points was from voluntarily entering a zone. I guess he’s properly defensive, huh? Now that the Fighter article from Dragon 385 is legal, I bought him a nice magic shield/weapon and redid his powers a bit. We’ll see how it plays out tonight.

April’s LFR began with Sense of Wonder, with Susan GMing. My fellow players were Mark, Tom, and Jason B. for a full set of the Bradleys; we also had Hudson and Jonathan. Legends was closed at the last minute so we jaunted on down to Games and Stuff, which is still an awesome space to play, I gotta admit. But 40 minutes away. C’est la vie.

The module is pretty decent. Not insanely challenging, but lots of roleplay and some fun NPCs, which Susan did a great job with. We had the double leader double defender configuration. That always makes combats feel a bit like pillow fights, especially since my Collin is rocking two daily healing powers himself. Nonetheless, I enjoyed myself mightily. I’m looking forward to Collin’s first 4-7 outing this Thursday.

Hm, which is BALD 1-2 with three defenders and two leaders. This’ll be a hoot.

In like a lamb, out like a lion. I managed twelve games once again, despite a very slow start to the month. My February ratio of 8 played to 4 run held true for this month too. Over half of the games (7) were at a con, and three of them were online. I can’t imagine I’ll play as many games in April, but we’ll see.

I had 7 different DMs again, with Tom A. the only repeat offender. I count 36 people on my tracking sheet; I DMed for 15 of them, and played with 24. Give or take a counting error. One of these days I’ll spruce up my spreadsheet. Yeah, that’s a touch obsessive of me.

Reed is my highest level character at 13. I also played Sirath this month, but he stayed at level 2. Collin stayed at level 4. Alesk and Veil got no play, and remained levels 5 and 2 respectively. Timothy gets a special mention for being my D&D Encounters character, which I am not otherwise counting. He’ll arrive in LFR at level 2, I think.

I am one game short of 40 for the year. Still not upping my goal, though.

Speaking of quick runs! Susan, Mark B., Dave Guerrieri and I cranked through Black Heart in two hours flat. Luke GMed. I’m kind of thinking maybe I want to schedule H1 games for con Sundays? It’s hard to give a paragon module the proper attention after two full days of gaming. 

The adventure would have been much better if we’d done the previous two in the series. I did like that our seriously clueless low-Insight characters got more or less conned by someone with way more temporal power than any of us. There was one bit where I felt distinctly railroaded, but without looking at the adventure I’m not sure if there was just something I missed or what.

I’ll definitely have to check out the whole series to see if it’s worth making a point of running it.

And that completed Regulator Con, after which Susan nobly drove back in the rain. Now I am very tired and I want to finish updating my character tracker, then sleep.

“Hey,” you say, “IMPI 1-6 isn’t out yet!” I nod wisely, and observe that Dave Guerrieri is one of the Cormyr regional admins and gets copies of modules early. Not BALD 2-1, which is what we were gonna play, but he had IMPI 1-6. Thus, me and Susan and Jason B. and David and Dan E. (who was at our BI table at DDXP) played that. Brian J. GMed. All good.

It was really quick, partially because we played on low tier despite a reasonably high level party and partially because Brian’s a pretty speedy GM. We’re not talking anything like the infamous one hour Black Knight of Arabel runs, here, but I think we were done in two and a half hours. I like a little more meat on my modules; on the other hand, Sunday morning after a full two days is Sunday morning after a full two days. So hey!

This was the only paragon module we played that didn’t have a paragony-feeling plot. Not a problem for me, since there are only so many political intrigues one can sort out. Sometimes it’s going to be a nice dungeon crawl. There’s also a big hint of Impiltur political problems to come. Good stuff.

I do not remember anything about The Paladins’ Plague except that I ran it for eight hours on Saturday.

OK, that is a lie. I have a stack of cards here that reminds me that Matt C., Barry, Susan, Mary Alyce, Meaghan, and Matt M. played. I just now realized how generous Matt C. was in his choice of character, since he gave up playing his striker in favor of playing a defender who’s unlikely to be seen in LFR ever again. Dude, awesome.

It was a pretty fun group; I’d have to admit that some of the mustering left me a tad annoyed for reasons that IMHO were validated during the game, but as the GM I’m there to make sure people have a good time and that’s where I’d best be getting my satisfaction. So I did, and I really had a good time GMing for them. 

They had a nicely balanced party. Every encounter was a total success, but most of the combat encounters ran right up to the time limit and I came very close to a TPK in both the final two encounters. The coordinator for the BI told us to skip the first fight of the second round, probably because Regulator Con uses four hour slots. On the one hand, I regret not having the chance to run it. On the other hand, I suspect it would have eaten enough resources to tip one of those two near-TPKs into the real thing, which would have been a shame. 

Running the BI was a last-minute thing for me – Susan and I had hoped to get two more paragon adventures in. Turns out there weren’t enough people interested in anything other than the BI on Saturday. I think it was the only thing running, with something like twelve tables. But you know, I can pick up those paragon mods any time, probably with the local crowd, and I’m not gonna get a lot of opportunity to GM the BI. I’m really glad I got the chance.

And that was Saturday.