Gaming

Running: one straight-up 4e game. We’re working through WotC’s module series. This is fun. Playing: one 4e game which I’ve played in no sessions of but I like the writeups. Should be fun. Will be running: online 4e game heavily influenced by The Shield and The Wire, or possibly the Scales of War adventure path instead, although I’d need a couple more people for the latter. Sort of leaning towards Scales of War for the sake of easier prep, but undecided. ...

Jere ran some more Gumshoe for us over the last couple of weeks; it was once more a bunch of fun. The scenario was more Cthulhoid this time around, not so much from a villain perspective but definitely so in terms of locale and threat. The PCs (a retired cop, a linguist, a spirit photographer, a stage manager, and an NSA analyst) were a motley crew attending a Shakespeare festival in New Hampshire. At a party a couple of days before Opening Night, the actress slated to play Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra killed her understudy under suspicious circumstances. By virtue of our collective failure to run away screaming, the local sheriff deputized us to solve the murder. ...

Unfortunately the local Living Forgotten Realm group’s plans to run bi-weekly Sunday games fell through, and I can’t make the regular weekday games. There’s a big weekend event coming up in a couple of weeks that’d get my puny level 1 cleric up a couple of levels, and thus perhaps enable him to play in the next tier of adventures – but I’d still have the same scheduling issue, so it’s not really worth it to burn a day on that. ...

The thing that really surprised me about running 4e was how amazingly simple it was in practice. Setup is perhaps a different story, which I can’t speak to yet, but assuming you have an adventure in hand and a bunch of players, it’s nearly frictionless to run. A well-presented adventure, as per WotC’s example, puts stat blocks for each monster with each encounter. These literally have 70% of what you need to run the encounter. You get each attack listed clearly, with the bonus to hit and the damage included, along with any other effects. Everything the monster might do is right there. ...

I tried Living Forgotten Realms today. It was pretty fun, actually. Short-form explanation: you write up a D&D character, and you sign up for an event – there are two public regular nights here in the Boston area (original), and each night so far has had at least two modules – and you go down and play with whoever else signed up and the DM, and at the end of the night you and the DM record your progression and then you can do it again the next week, or two weeks from now, or at a con. Whatever. ...

“And lo, a horror of great darkness fell upon him.” So that worked out pretty well. I wanted to run a grim, darkly complected game with veins of humor in the Warhammer 40K universe. Good match of setting and mood there. I got pretty much what I wanted. It took a bit of adjusting and shuffling and learning and talking to nail the mythos, but by the time we hit our stride it was awesome. ...

As an entry in this month’s RPG Carnival, I took a line of attack from Amagi Games; here’s a mini-system/technique for mechanically providing greater weight to the death of NPCs. This is sort of vaguely in the vicinity of being on-topic – the subject is character death, failing to specify player characters, after all. And undeath can be metaphorical. Or so I claim. Following the cut, a list of steps.

The Core Mechanic wants to get an RPG Carnival started, which is pretty cool. Carnival, in blog terms, is a once a month thing where a lot of different blogs write on a topic and the host does a big wrapup post linking to all of them. Generally the host changes each month. I thought about doing one at 20x20, but by the time I had the idea I’d run out of steam. ...

The new version is pretty usable. The author fixed the issue of slider feedback, so it’s possible to be precise about how many dice you’re rolling. There’s also a new feature allowing you to auto-tally rolls equal to or higher than a target number. Finally, you can double-tap dice to hold them and reroll the unheld dice, which is cute. At this point I’d say THAC0 is a good choice for die pool games, and D20 Dice remains optimal for other uses. I’d still like to see THAC0 have some sort of display of die type so you know if you’re rolling d10s or d6s or what, but in practice you’ll usually know.

One’s been out for a while, but just got upgraded; one just came out. I’ll do the latter first. Images follow.