Deadlines? Oh, yeah; deadlines...

Some of you may even remember this post. But I'm guessing most of you will not.

(Hey, I could be wrong; I have no idea if anyone actually reads this unless I get comments. It would probably help if I updated more often, like on any sort of an actual schedule. But I feel that leads to long parenthetical navel-gazing entries on the state of my life, which changes very little, and ... oh, wait ... damn.)

Anyway, I finally got off my butt this weekend and produced the third installment of my comic strip for Fight On! magazine. It's called The Education of a Magic-User, and so far I haven't named the main character. Or his sidekicks. (I really ought to do something about that.) Maybe put up one of those "Characters" pages that the webcomics do.

But anyway, the point is, if you get the fourth issue of Fight On! (when it comes out), I'll have another comic strip in it.

This means that I have work in all four issues to date. I'm kind of proud of that.

I play

Sunday, January 18, at The Source Comics and Games.

Here are photos; in the first one, I'm the guy at the end of the table, directly between the camera and the pop machines.

The DM (with the little laptop) is Kesher, from the Original D&D Discussion Forum. We're playing the original D&D rules, from 1974, and the adventure is James Maliszewski's Ruined Monastery, from Fight On! number 1.

A good time was had by all.

Re-reading D&D

If you're at all interested in the Original D&D game, you've probably been reading Sham's Grog and Blog and his D&D Cover to Cover project.

If not, make haste over there! The man makes some good points and some shrewd observations.

Fight On!

Fight On! Issue three is available now. Get your copy now!

At 148 pages, it's the biggest issue yet (and quite possibly will be the biggest issue ever.)

As a point of comparison, the original AD&D Player's Handbook was only 128 pages. This gives you 20 pages more!

Observations on the 4e Starter Set

I've seen a few starter sets (or basic sets, as they called them in my day). The old ones, Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer -- these were the classics.

Later on, TSR started putting the bare bones of the rules in such sets. They started the pregenerated character thing (it wasn't WOTC; I still have such a set). (Of course, WOTC/Hasbro is still doing it...)

It's as if somebody said "Give 'em less!"

Now, the function of a starter set is to get people interested in a game. You give them the basics and let them try it. I can kind of see not including character generation.

Let's compare this one with the 3.5 starter set:

3.5 had a dungeon. Lay out these tiles is this order. These are the encounters; don't skip any or the characters won't make second level. It didn't say what to do if the Harpy (!) wiped out all the pc's the first time they encountered her! That's what happened the first time I ran it.

So, we've got a railroad with monsters too powerful for the fragile characters. There's no exploration, you just move on to the next encounter (with it's next dungeon tile). This is a good thing? I admit, I liked the props. And if you're going to insist on using a square grid, then saying how many squares a character can move works.

Okay, so how is 4e different?

First of all, there are five characters, instead of four. (Oddly, the text flat out states that five characters is best. But they don't give you any criteria for such a statement.) There are tokens, instead of figures, but this way you can have more.

Instead of a few dungeon tiles, there are punch-out cards containing really thick, plastic coated dungeon segments, including rooms, corridors, doors, a pit, a bearskin rug, a bedroom, etc. The kind of thing you can lay out and the players immediately see where they're at. I approve.

The dice in both versions are exactly the same (so now I have a pair of each...)

The DM book for 4e is where the game really shines. There's a scenario, of course, and this one has more of a background than "You're exploring this dungeon..." like 3.5 had. (If I recall correctly.)

There is discussion of how to design your own adventures, which is nice. There are plenty of monsters, which is nice. The characters are still pre-gens, but at least you can advance them to third level, which is kind of nice. There are still skills, but a vastly reduced list, so it doesn't overwhelm play like in 3.5.

But what really got me was on page three of the DM's book. I'll reproduce it here for your consideration:

DM RULES TO GAME BY

The DM is the final authority when it comes to rules questions or disputes. Here are some guidelines to help you arbitrate issues as they come up.

* When it doubt, make it up! It's better to keep the game moving than to get bogged down in a rules issue.

* Have fun! D&D is a game, after all.

* Use ability checks. When players try something not covered by the rules, ability checks should be used to determine success.

* It's not a competition. The DM isn't competing against the player characters. You're there to run the monsters, referee the rules, and keep the story moving.

* It's not your story. It's the group's story, so let theplayers contribute to the outcome through the actions of their characters.

* Be consistent. If you decide that a rule works a certain way in one session, make sure it works that way the next time it comes into play.

* Don't play favorites. Make sure that every character has a fair chance to shine.

* Be fair. Above all else, use your powers as Dungeon Master only for good. Treat the rules and the players in a fair and impartial manner, and everyone will have fun.


There's some really good stuff there. I could quibble about the ability checks thing, but on the whole, that's just some damn good advice, no matter which edition of which game you're running.


Bottom line, America: I don't hate the 4e Starter Set. I could run a game using this for a good long time (I could improvise some character creation rules, and I'm planning on collaborating with a guy to do just that...).


But it still doesn't beat the original three little books. They're still my favorites.

I don't know what I want.

So I have this terribly groovy new game, StarSIEGE: Event Horizon from Troll Lord Games. As I said in my last post, it's a toolkit, and therefore I can do anything I want with it.

But I don't know what I want.

It's not that I don't have ideas. I have three different settings/ideas (in varying stages of development) that I was working on for Big Eyes, Small Mouth back when I had players for that. (They, like so many others, decided they'd rather go back to D&D 3e. Oh, well.)

In addition, there are a couple of other ideas I've had, ranging from Flash Gordon style pulp/comics adventures to Space Opera to hard SF, to Shadowrun (which is totally doable in SSEH, btw...)

(If I really put my mind to it, I'm sure I could even do a fair representation of a typical medieval fantasy type of game...)

I just don't know which one to start with.

Any suggestions?

Anyone?

Bueller?

New and Old

There seems to be a bit of a slowdown on the old school board these days.

Oddly enough, this mirrors my own life; I'm experiencing a bit of a disconnect from old school D&D gaming. Although, I am (in a way) getting back together with old school gaming which was derived from D&D.

I'm talking about StarSiege: Event Horizon, from Troll Lord Games. It's brand new, but has a bunch of old school goodness.

First of all, it's dedicated to the memory of E. Gary Gygax, so how cool is that?

Second of all, it says right on the box that it's a toolkit. You know going in that you'll need to do some of the design work yourself. And that's about as old school as it comes.

Third of all, the game comes with everything your group needs to play. There's a sample setting, a GM's guide, and four (count 'em! Four!) copies of the players book. I've often wondered why some enterprising company didn't just go ahead and do that.

For those of you who missed the excellent review Doc Rotwang gave it, here's a link: StarSiege Event Horizon.

I have little to add, except that what the good Doc found as a gripe (it's a toolkit) is what I find perhaps the most appealing. I'm a proto-gearhead anyway; I was quite the Traveller gearhead, except that I stuck with Book 2 and never really got into High Guard.

The game is not without its flaws, of course. As is virtually inevitable for a Troll Lord Games release, it looks as though they really need to hire a copy editor. In the example of character creation, the starting character picks gear. A list is introduced, with a full colon even, but what follows is an entirely new paragraph. No starting gear list. Oops!

Also, there are other quibbles I have, but they all add up to just that: Quibbles. Sure, a table of contents or an index would have been nice, but this is still a pretty spiffy game.


One thing that also strikes me as ingenious is the way they handle ability scores: There aren't any. Instead, you just have the bonus or penalty you'd have from those scores.

These are rolled on 1d20, but for those who like a gritty game, you can instead use 3d6. This gives us the same table we remember from Tom Moldvay's D&D Basic rulebook: 3 gives -3, 4-5 gives -2, and so on up to 18 gives +3.

Except in StarSiege, you just have the +3. I like that.

Obviously, the game is "powered by" the Siege Engine, from Castles and Crusades. And what's interesting about that is that none of the game is OGL. It's all their own stuff, so no matter what WOTC does, they can still produce this game. And that's pretty nifty.

So, now I have a few different ideas for settings, and for stories in those settings. I could probably spend the rest of the fall and all winter just noodling around with the Trappings, getting everything just right for a game.

But I really wanna run something. Maybe I'll do something online? Who knows. Who cares?


It feels good to be optimistic again.