I mentioned last night that Oz was in the public domain, and that there was a thriving subculture of fans writing and publishing Oz books. I would not be me if I were unable to provide a link or two. Or three. I find this whole thing inexpressibly charming.
Population: One
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.
Possibly at some juncture the Framingham group that was discussed will get underway. Until then I’ll get my 4e kicks from running the modules. Since I was so jazzed about LFR to start with, I figured I’d toss out the update.
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.
Each encounter also has tactics and of course room descriptions, which is another 15% of what you need. Tactics aren’t absolutely necessary but it’s handy to have the script for monster actions available. The room description gives you special features, treasure, and all that. Note that traps and such are statted up as monsters, so you continue to have the stat blocks handy and the mechanics aren’t any different. Skill challenges also fall into this chunk of material.
All in all, an encounter is going to be two or three pages. I haven’t checked but I bet the vast majority of encounters are two pagers.
The other 10% is condition modifiers, attack modifiers such as cover, and so on. I think I’ll have these memorized pretty soon, but in the meantime there’s an excellent Dungeon Master’s Screen which is stable and laid out in landscape format. The latter means you can see players behind it. It has all the charts you want. Literally. It’s impressive.
I added in Paizo’s GameMastery Combat Pad, which is a magnetic whiteboard designed for initiative tracking. I didn’t need it; I could have tracked initiative on the battlemat. But being able to slide counters around when people hold or delay is handy.
So what I discovered was that I could run the whole game standing up, with the combat pad tucked in the adventure booklet, in my left hand. Right hand’s free for dice, moving minis, checking off hit points. This may sound really trivial, but I ran four combats in five hours and I didn’t have to look anything up more than once or twice — OK, having players doing some lookups for me was handy, but even so. 4e is ridiculously easy to run.
I’m thinking about more tweaks. I found some full-sized 1″ maps for the WotC modules that some people did in Dundjinni and Campaign Cartographer (note to players: spoilers, try not to peek too hard), and I think I can use those to good effect to cut down on the time it takes me to draw maps. Also they’re pretty.
I’m definitely gonna use these encounter worksheets next time. It’ll make it easier to track hit points. I’m considering backing one of ’em with magnetic paper so I could use the initiative magnets on that instead. We’ll see.
But it’s all gilding the lily. The core smoothness lies in the game. Kudos to WotC and the designers.
Spoilers.
This is a difficult movie. I laughed pretty hard through a lot of it, except where I was wincing. Sympathetic wincing, not angry wincing. The Coens are not in the business of making movies that are easy to figure out, and they don’t do open access. This is like that.
A lot of the criticism of this movie revolves around how unlikeable the characters are. Filmspotting talked about the Coen tendency to mock stupid characters. There’s no doubt that most of the protagonists are dumb and/or cold and/or malicious, but I don’t think I can write the movie off as an exercise in mockery.
Frances McDormand and, oddly, George Clooney saved it from that. Clooney’s performance is really way overmannered — for most of the movie. After sleeping on it for a couple of days, though, I’ve come around to thinking that was purposeful. Clooney isn’t a great actor, but he’s a smart actor, and he can do subtle. Watch what he does with the character after he kills Brad Pitt. I think what we’re seeing is someone who’s overacting because the character overacts. The scene where he calls his wife and begs her to come home? That’s someone stripped of his pretensions, and I think Clooney played it perfectly. Not to mention the symbolism of destroying his own phallic substitute sex toy; he’s destroying his own facade right there, poor guy.
His earlier lines about his quick reactions and his, ha ha, “I’ve never discharged a firearm” are the set up. On first glance, that’s part of the fakery. Those are his lines which he uses to get laid. But the Pitt death shows us a) that he does have really good reflexes and b) that he really hasn’t fired his gun in anger before. That’s the hook demonstrating that there’s a person underneath it all.
McDormand’s role is less complex. It wasn’t hard at all for me to sympathize with her. Yeah, she does horribly stupid things, but she’s intensely lonely. Richard Jenkins humanizes her in a wonderful performance by letting us see why someone would love her. To a degree, she’s a monster — but with someone as decent as Jenkins emotionally involved with her, you can’t write her off as nothing but monstrosity.
So I do wind up — not liking them, but at least wishing them redemption. The arc of the movie brings them together, then thrusts them apart. They’re definitely the centerpiece. And in the end, of course, they’re the protagonists who get out of it all alive. If not happy.
With that in mind, it’s another tragedy. It’s just that the Coens have no scruples about tragic movies overlaid with brutal humor.
(Not Fringeworthy, that’s different.)
Use Nemesis, which is fairly simple and free. A couple of nomenclature changes — Madness Meters are Stability Meters, and most difficulties are fairly low. Things are weird but not alien weird. The Unnatural track is the Fringe track. Trump dice are likewise Fringe dice.
There is no supernatural, but there is fringe science, obviously. Those versed in fringe science might go above 5d in a given stat. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nina turned out to have 6d in Body, and Dr. Bishop has 6d Mind. Perhaps more.
Regular combat still exists. Right now the show looks more procedural than actiony, which means firearms should be deadly, which I think they are in Nemesis. However, the interesting combat scenes are scientific. This works more or less like regular combat.
1. Declare your character’s action. The show’s set up with one main scientist, which works fine — everyone else does supporting actions, which feed back into the scientist’s work, giving him bonus dice.
2. Roll the appropriate dice pool. Narrate accordingly. Sometimes it’s going to be science skill vs. science skill (can we figure out how to undo this dimensional transposition before it explodes in downtown Boston?), and sometimes it’d be science skill vs. something else. I think the whole tank scene in the pilot was vs. tactics, for example.
3. Damage is to be contemplated. Could be physical. Could be time ebbing away. Possibly losing a fight results in Stability Meter checks. Mostly I think I like time passing; a lot of this stuff is going to be mad science on the clock, since it’s a procedural show. So it’s… when you run out of wound boxes, you’re out of time or the experiment failed.
You don’t have weapons. You have centrifuges, which get statted up the same way.
It is rather difficult to talk about Neal Stephenson’s newest without spoiling lots. In generic, cloudy, unsatisfying terms: it’s a Stephenson book, with lots of thought experiments and science and so forth. There are action scenes. The world changes dramatically during the course of the book, as a result of the actions of the protagonists. There is a romance of sorts, in which a practical female character falls for a slightly fuzzy-minded idealist.
The alien world setting is nice. I found myself very engaged by the society and the worldbuilding. Which is good, because there’s a lot of it before the plot proper starts.
OK, spoilers. Don’t get too excited, since it’s just gonna be a one-liner quip.
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, 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.
Pros: no pressure at all. You play when you wanna. Tired of the wizard? Swap to the fighter. Nice casual environment. Meet new people. All the modules are Wizards-approved.
Cons: Not super-heavy on the roleplay. Meet new people. All the modules are Wizards-approved.
I wouldn’t want it as my sole gaming outlet, maybe, but I had a good time and I expect I’ll do more. We had a great GM, who did an excellent job of keeping things moving and who knew the rules well. He handled skill challenges nicely; when we needed a push on appropriate skills, we used ’em, and he was fair about arbitrating other skills we could use.
I got stepped on once or twice when I busted out a bit of clerical roleplay and someone else wanted to make the roll due to a higher bonus, but c’est la vie. From an in character perspective, I think Alesk (oooh, a character sheet) did the talking on those occasions no matter who made the roll, so nyah.
The module was solid. I was wondering how these get built for random groups. Simple setup: “you all got notes requesting your presence at a meeting,” and we all went and met each other, and there was no angst about whether or not we were going to work together. I think the rogues got to show their sinister sides and my cleric got to be all holy and we acknowledged imperfect compatibility without letting it get in the way. Probably not the greatest start for an ongoing campaign, but for six people scheduled to work together for a few days? Worked fine.
The GM framed competently. He wasn’t shy about asking for skill rolls and providing hints, both out of combat and in combat. I think the modules encourage that as well, but the little touches like allowing us to roll Arcana to intuit that Sleep wasn’t going to work on the statue trap was good; saved people from feeling silly for using their big powers poorly. And nudging us gently towards the right places as we progressed towards the crypt was nice too. I didn’t feel railroaded into a specific way of handling a certain pack of guards, but I do feel like we were offered some possible smart ideas. None of which we took! And we still got past ’em.
I pretty much liked the table. I spent a few minutes pre-game chatting about the irksomeness of trying to get Zul’Aman bear mounts with the one couple, and one guy brought his kid along for some D&D exposure, and everyone was cool with that and super-helpful to the kid. Definitely varying degrees of game expertise, but I’m not gonna judge when I kept forgetting my bonuses to hit.
Also I got a +1 Holy Symbol of Life. And I suspect there’s a shortage of healers. So I gotta play again…
“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.
The goal was to do a tight series of self-contained missions. I knew this was going to be a short term game, but I didn’t want to run a whole story arc in three months, so I tried to treat it as a series of modules so that the end wouldn’t feel like we’d stopped in the middle. Also, I wanted to be able to pick it up again and run another one or two session bit sometime.
This sort of failed for two reasons. First, I couldn’t resist picking up some of the pieces of the first mission and turning them into an ongoing story. The spiders wanted to come back, and thus they did. The players should count themselves fortunate that I didn’t dump the Baron’s ghost on them, but frankly, he’s out there.
Layering in ongoing story elements also meant that I didn’t have to scrape to engage six players in the details of each mission. If the acolytes were heading to a feudal planet, say, I could drop in scenes growing out of the previous mission to give our tech priest some spotlight rather than carefully inserting a techie bit directly related to the matter at hand.
And the secret third reason is that I just couldn’t help it; it’s my best technique for giving a game texture. C’est la vie.
Six players is a lot, though. I should have run for five or four. On the other hand, if I ask myself who I’d leave out? Well, none of them. Er, none of you. Whichever. I enjoyed running for everyone and everyone liked playing. No good answers there.
Anyhow, the upshot is that I think I cut it to a fairly abrupt close. I thought about regearing for a story arc; I know where certain things are going. Perseus has a hopefully disturbing bit of news about the extent to which the five that is four has infested the Inquisitor’s Library and the denizens therein, for example. Also, to the best of my knowledge, the acolytes left Acreage without turning over some drugs to a certain person.
But I think it’d take another few months to play to a conclusion point. You don’t want to build the corruption too quickly. So cutting it now is the right move.
Also, I emphasize that the game was in my eyes a success. The system is a cranky old antique from the 80s that nonetheless works. Tweaking everyone’s weapon to be superior quality and reminding people of the aiming rules fixes combat ineptitude; treating failed rolls as successes with consequences takes care of the rest. And the combat is simple enough so that we could memorize how it works. I may have been getting a rule about Toughness wrong for the entire run, but if I did, I just made things more deadly.
The first mission hit an appropriate level of scariness. The second mission wasn’t meant to be scary, it was meant to be grueling. I think we got that nailed as well — the final combat sequence, when I just kept throwing waves of a few thugs at the PCs one at a time, with some PCs falling over into drugged hallucinations — that was meant to be grim and long and painful and I think it worked well without keeping our combat monsters from being scary. Hopefully it worked for the players as well.
All in all? Success. I am nothing but happy with the players, cause they gave me awesome stuff to work with. Discussion, feedback, and comments are welcome.
I’ve been enjoying the Filmspotting podcast; decent opinions, good chemistry between the hosts, a wide variety of topics. One of the regular features is a movie marathon. Over the course of a month or two, they watch one movie per week from a given genre and comment on it. The idea is that listeners can follow along.
They just finished a heist marathon, and will be moving onto a 60s British Angry Young Men marathon in September, which sounds cool. So I’m gonna hop on board. I will no doubt post reviews here, and if anyone local’s interested in joining me and my Netflix queue for viewings, feel free to speak up.
For reference, the list:
- Look Back In Anger — Richard Burton and class warfare. A review of the original play coined the term “angry young men.” The play was filmed for television in 1979, with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, so I’m gonna watch that version too.
- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — Albert Finney as an alienated factory worker.
- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner — a sports movie! Well, no, not really; it’s a movie about the oppressive nature of British society.
- The Sporting Life — Richard Harris, William Hartnell. More sports as the vehicle for social criticism.
- Billy Liar — early John Schlesinger, which is awesome by me.
- If… — classic allegory with Malcolm McDowell; directed by Lindsay Anderson, who also directed The Sporting Life, so it’ll be fun to compare. Really stoked for this.
The moral equivalent of running World’s Largest Dungeon for 4e, at present, would be to just run the module series. WotC is gonna put out three modules for each tier; H1 and H2 are the first two for the Heroic tier, and when H3 comes out that’ll get a campaign to level 11. There’ll then be P1, P2, and P3; followed by E1, E2, and E3. These are all announced.
Each module comes with play maps. I mean, come on.