• A session report. Last Sunday was game day, and it was a good one. I’ll be posting a session report soon.
• My thoughts on Monster Manual 3, which I just got.
• Post mortems on how things like my Grit and Last-Ditch Effort rules worked, as well as some other things I tried out.
• Other stuff, quite possibly.

That’s all for now, folks. More to come.

Currently, we’re on our way to the French Quarter, umbrella in tow, to find some dinner and shopping. I’ll let you know how it goes.

First, I may not be able to post as much game-related material during the trip. I have a few posts planned, and I will have a laptop (and my Android, from which I’m posting this very article), but I’m going to be doing a lot of sight-seeing.

Which brings me to the second thing. I’d like to blog this trip. Over the next two weeks, you’ll see some posts with the “Travel Log” prefix. If you’re only here for the gaming, feel free to ignore these posts. If you’d like to hear about my trip through the South, though, that’s what these posts will be there for.

Onward to adventure!

Dead Space: I’m possibly a bit late to the party on this one, but I picked up Dead Space for a really good price around Christmas and just now got around to playing it. I’m not finished with it yet, but I’m eight hours or so into it and I’m really enjoying it. The atmosphere is suitably creepy, and while it doesn’t really create fear (what video game does, really?), it does succeed in creating an awful lot of tension. The fact that the main character, Isaac Clarke, doesn’t speak is a little bit strange considering how much he gets spoken to, especially when you take into account that there’s a character in the game who is supposed to be personally important to Isaac. The game spins a good yarn, though, and the combat is pretty good.

The Humble Indie Bundle: This is a group of indie PC games, for which you can name any price you want, pay it, and get them all. You can choose how much of your money goes toward the developers, and how much goes toward Child’s Play. There are some worthwhile games in the bundle, and while I haven’t liked all of them, I like enough of them that I’m happy I paid for the bundle. Plus, it’s for charity. Go buy it.

Of the games in the bundle, I’ve played World of Goo, which is excellent (I own this on Wii, too). It’s got a great Tim Burton-esque aesthetic, and even has Danny Elfman-esque music, and the puzzling is very, very good. I’ve played about twenty minutes of Aquaria, and I really like what I’ve played. Simple controls but apparently deep gameplay, and the music and art style are fantastic. Gish is sort of a mixed bag; it’s got a really neat premise and some cool mechanics, but the controls are frequently fiddly and annoying, and I feel that the game gets in its own way a lot. Samorost 2 is a Flash-based adventure game that is visually very charming. The problem is that there are a lot of pixel hunts in the game, and some of the puzzles are a little obtuse. Worse, there are puzzles that you can bring almost to completion over the course of a few minutes, screw up one thing (without realizing that you’re doing anything wrong), and have to do the whole thing again, from the beginning. It is very short, though, so you should at least give it a try. The other two, Lugaru and Penumbra: Overture I have yet to spend any real time with.

D&D Encounters: I got to play in Encounters again, and had a blast. I’ve played two different characters so far, both from the Player’s Handbook 3. First I played a human monk, which was very satisfying. I like the monk class quite a lot; very mobile and capable of some pretty spectacular stuff on the battlefield. Flurry of blows is also one of my favorite striker damage-spikes because of its versatility. The second character I played was a longtooth shifter seeker, which was also a lot of fun. I didn’t do a whole lot of damage (I was using a javelin, meaning that all of my attacks dealt 1d6+4 damage, even encounters and dailies), but I really felt like I was effective at controlling the battlefield, and my daily power made a significant difference in how the encounter played out.

My Home Game: My friend Dean isn’t going to be able to DM his mini-campaign for a while, so the campaign I’m DMing is resuming. I’m very excited to get back into the DM’s seat, and I’ve got some stuff planned. I’ll be updating the wiki as we play, as usual, and I’ll probably post some of the more exciting encounters on this blog, for your own use. Game day is the 23rd, which is only a week away!

There’s a school of thought in indie RPG design that says that failure should never be a dead end; it should always serve to make things interesting for the players, to complicate their lives, and to provide more fuel for the story. To an extent, this is already true of most skills in D&D. Think about it: when you’re trying to sneak past the guards and you fail your Stealth check, what happens? You get caught, meaning that you trigger a combat, skill challenge, role-playing scenario, chase scene, or any number of other exciting things. If you fail your Perception check when you’re keeping watch, you likely get ambushed. That’s exciting, too.

I think a lot of people tend to treat knowledge skills (by which I mean skills like Arcana, History, Religion, and other skills whose main purpose is to convey information and represent how learned you are in a field) as binary switches: you either know it, or you don’t. I think they can be a lot more interesting than that. What if, the next time your wizard makes an Arcana check to try to figure out what a set of magic sigils does and fails, rather than just saying, “You don’t know what they mean”, you instead tell the wizard what they mean, but change some of the important details? Suddenly things get interesting. The wizard knows something about the sigils, but that something is likely to get the party into trouble if he acts on it. If your players tend to meta-game (and really, who doesn’t, to some extent or another?), he may realize that his roll was pretty low, and he may think that some or all of that knowledge is suspect. Now he has a choice to make. To make that choice even more interesting, consider requiring knowledge checks for information that you were just going to give the players, so that you’re occasionally giving them good information for bad rolls. That way, they may be wary of the information gained from such a roll, but past experience may cause them to take a chance on it anyway.

I brought with me a copy of Fluxx and a copy of Zombie Fluxx to be signed, both of which Mr. Looney graciously signed for me. He also threw in an autographed promotional Andy Looney card, which went directly into my Fluxx deck.

When I first got there, Mr. Looney was explaining the rules for Are You the Traitor?, a party game about lying, table-talk, and reading people. Luckily, I had already played the game before, so he didn’t have to restart his rules explanation for me to sit in. It was a great game, with six players (my previous games have all been with four, and it’s definitely better with more players), and I even won the game.

Next, we broke out Monty Python Fluxx, and during this game Mr. Looney was actually playing four simultaneous games: Monty Python Fluxx, Chrononauts, Treehouse, and his upcoming super-secret game, which you’ll have to wait to find out any more about.

All in all, it was a really good time. Andrew Looney is a really nice guy, and is a lot of fun to play games with. He’s very animated when playing his games, and clearly loves what he does.

I bought it with a Best Buy gift card over the holidays and started playing it immediately. At first, i really liked it; it was more of the same, which was exactly what I wanted. However, the more I play the game, the less enamored of it I become. Things that I found fun in Phantom Hourglass have analogs in Spirit Tracks that simply seem tedious, and where the former game seemed to have a lot of personality and charm and soul, the latter seems somehow soulless. That’s not to say it’s a bad game; mechanically, much of it is very sound, just as much as these same mechanics were good in Phantom Hourglass. The dungeons and temples, too, are well-constructed and enjoyable. But something is missing.

At any rate, I just thought I’d post quickly to let everyone know that I’m still alive, and also to talk about what’s been on my mind and what you can expect to see posted on this blog in the next couple of weeks. In no particular order:

1. Steam. I love me some Steam. Steam, for those who are unfamiliar, is a digital video game distribution platform on the PC. Over the holidays they had some killer deals and, as a result, experienced serious growth. Because of this growth (I assume) they’re offering more great deals than ever before. They used to always have a weekend deal, which the still do; now, though, they have mid-week madness, too. Good stuff. Some games that I’ve purchased since the holidays on Steam, some of which you might hear about in more detail later on: Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Freedom Force, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Torchlight, Medieval II: Total War. All for cheap (as in, not one of them was more than $10).

2. D&D, as always. Haven’t played for a while (the last time was in November, I think). I’ve got a game day scheduled for later this month, toward the end, and I’m pretty excited. We’ll probably be wrapping up the current adventure in that session, which will give a friend of mine a chance to step into the DM chair for a little while. Also, if you’ve noticed that the most recent session report is not yet up, you’re very astute. Here’s a cookie. It will be going up soon, don’t worry.

3. Indie RPGs. I recently donated to Haiti through DriveThruRPG and, as a result, got a coupon for a bunch of free RPG PDFs. I got some indie RPGs that I’ve been wanting for a while, including Don’t Rest Your Head, Chronica Feudalis, Full Light Full Steam, Beast Hunters, and 316. I’ve read all of DRYH and played it once (more on that in a future post), and I’m in the process of reading through both Chronica Feudalis and Full Light Full Steam. I’d also like very much to get my hands on a copy of the Mouseguard RPG, but that may not happen for a little while.

4. Other games. I got various and sundry video games for Christmas, some of which you will be hearing about. Expect to hear about Dragon Age: Origins, Left 4 Dead 2, Metroid Prime Trillogy, and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and possibly some others.

Yes, I now have a tattoo. Yes, it’s a very geeky one.

Hitman: Blood Money: This is actually the first Hitman game that I’ve actually completed, and I liked it quite a lot. Some of the missions were very difficult for me to complete gracefully, but you can jump into any mission you want to at any time once you’ve beaten it, so I may go back and remedy that at some point. Like its predecessors, it’s less an action game and more a game of patience and problem-solving. You have a target (or, in many cases, multiple targets) that you have to eliminate. You’re rewarded for not killing other people, for not being seen killing people, for not blowing your cover, and for not leaving any trace that you were there (including bullets in your targets’ heads). The best kills look like accidents, and it’s entirely possible in most (if not all) missions to go in with no guns and complete the mission. Again, I liked it a lot.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: I may wind up giving this one back. I liked it at first; I’ve always been a fan of these action/puzzle-solving games, and I like spatial puzzles like those presented in the game, and in the most recent Tomb Raider games. I must say, though, that this game is frustrating despite its time-rewinding feature, largely because I feel like I’m fighting the controls and the camera every step of the way. The camera is obstinate and uncooperative, frequently becoming lodged in places that give me no useful vantage point. The controls are floaty and imprecise, making it difficult to accomplish the precision that the puzzles require of you. All of this may have been better on the Xbox, its original system; I’m playing it on PC, and I’m not having much fun.

Gun: Guess what? I’ve decided I like western games. At least, I like this one. I’m having a lot of fun shooting bandits, riding around on horseback, and layin’ down the law, Eastwood style. It’s great fun.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition: since you can swap between the original graphics and the new graphics on the fly, I can tell you that the new graphics are a huge improvement, though the animation looks strange at times. The voice work is good for the most part, though the game has its fair share of delays between lines. The hint system is great, and it saved me from frustration many times, particularly toward the end where there’s a lot of pointless and annoying backtracking over fast stretches of Monkey Island. Worth the $10; not sure I would have felt okay about it if I’d paid more.

Plants vs. Zombies: Yeah. The title says it all, really. This is a fantastically fun and addictive little game. It gets difficult (especially in the unlockable mini-games), but it ramps up pretty gradually, allowing you to get a handle on what all of your plants can do, and on what all of the zombies can do. Definitely worth the money.

The Sims 3: As many have said, it’s The Sims, with a “3″ after it. Is it more of the same? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. It is more of the same, but they’ve managed to update enough so that it remains fresh and fun. If you like Sims games, you’ll probably like this one; if you don’t, I doubt this one will change your mind. If you’ve been curious about this crazy Sims thing that everyone’s been talking about since you got out from under that rock, this one’s a good entry point into the series.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: I just got done playing the demo, twice. I like the game. The brawling is pretty simplistic, but is very cinematic and makes you fell like a badass. The stealth portions are good and, again, make you feel like a badass. In short, this game makes you feel like Batman, a badass. I liked the demo. I’d like to play the full game when it comes out. Do I want to spend $50 on it? Well, that’s a bit thornier. $50 seems steep for this game; I’d pay $20 or even $30. Maybe I’ll wait for it to come down in price a bit. Or try to get it on Goozex.

I must say, I like the psion’s powers a lot. The power point mechanic works pretty well, and with three at-wills that can each be augmented into three different versions, plus some dailies and utilities, I only felt like I had run out of interesting things to do once, during the second encounter. The second encounter was pretty sloggy, against a tough solo that seemed to have never-ending hit points and high defenses; we were whiffing quite a lot.

The first encounter, though, was very satisfying. I got a chance to inflict someone with lots of psychic vulnerability, then whack them with psychic damage and a big attack penalty. I also got to command someone to jump off of his rooftop perch and attack his ally, which is always fun. Unfortunately, I only got to use that particular at-will twice in the game, since it requires some setup and isn’t much use against solos with no minions.

All said, it was a really fun way to spend the day, and I got to donate some canned food to charity, too. Not bad.

You can see pictures from last night’s game, if you want to. Toward the end, you’ll see two things that I picked up recently. One is a very nice storage solution for my Dungeon Tiles and minis: a 9-drawer rolling storage unit that I picked up from JoAnn Fabrics. Also, at a back-to-school sale at Target, I picked up a magnetic whiteboard and some magnetic index cards for it, all of it dry-erasable. The nice thing about these items is that they’re perfect for tracking initiative and conditions. One card per combatant or group of combatants, and plenty of space to write things like ‘weakened’ or ‘dazed’. I just need to find a good way to prop it up for all to see; it was a little unstable last night.

I also ran a skill challenge last night that I’ve been looking forward to for a while. The skill challenge represented the PCs trying to navigate their way through the darkness after the ritual came to fruition. The PCs failed the skill challenge during the first round of checks, but everyone was into the mystique of what was going on, so I extended it a little, calling for a few more checks and such, and adding in more description and requiring more description for how they were to escape. It went really well, I thought.

Drinking Contest (Complexity 1 [4 successes before 3 failures], Level equal to the character/party level)
Note: the idea here is that this skill challenge represents a drinking contest with a single individual. For multiple individuals, add additional skill challenges or increase the complextiy.

Primary Skills: Bluff, Diplomacy, Insight
Other Skills: Endurance, Thievery, History, others
Note: you might be wondering why the primary skills are all social skills. The idea behind this skill challenge is that the contest is a way for the participants to prove that they’re men. Drinking is the medium, but the challenge is won or lost through boasting, bullying, and insulting until the other man sits there sputtering in frustration.

Bluff (1 success, maximum 2, DC varies*): You boast of your achievements, inflating them to make yourself seem super-heroic.

Diplomacy (1 success, maximum 2, DC varies*): You relate your actual accomplishments, use clever words to make the other guy seem foolish, or otherwise use your skill with language and social situations to come out on top.

Intimidate (1 success, maximum 2, DC varies*): You bully, cajole, or insult the other guy, trying to incite his ire or make him lose his wits.

*The DCs of these checks will vary by individual. For example, one opponent might be easy to insult or bully, but very good at seeing through false bravado. Another, on the other hand, might respect eloquence rather than coarse language.

History (0 successes, maximum 1, moderate DC): You recall some fact about your opponent’s exploits, and you use it to your advantage.
You gain a +2 bonus on the next Bluff, Diplomacy, or Insight check you make during this skill challenge.

Endurance (0 successes, no maximum, DC somewhere between easy and moderate): You take a long pull from your flagon and slam it down, showing everyone just how manly you are.
Succeeding on this check grants you a +5 bonus on your next Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate check during this skill challenge. However, whether you succeed or fail, you gain 6 drunkenness tokens. For every 5 points by which you exceeded the DC of this check, you may reduce the number of drunkenness tokens you gain by 1. For every 2 points by which you failed the DC of this check, increase the number of drunkenness tokens by 1. See drunkenness tokens, below.

Special: You may make a single Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate check during this skill challenge without making an Endurance check to take a drink. After the first such check, each additional check incurs a cumulative -2 penalty to all Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate made in this skill challenge, as real men have no respect for weaklings who nurse their drinks. This penalty is reduced by 2 for each Endurance check you make to take a drink, whether you succeed or fail (to a minimum of 0).

Thievery (0 successes, maximum 1, hard DC): through slight of hand or clever distractions, you fool your opponent into thinking that you’ve just downed your entire flagon.
You gain the +5 bonus as if you had succeeded on an Endurance check, but you do not gain any drunkenness tokens. If you fail, you take a -2 penalty to all Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate checks for the rest of the skill challenge (and possibly any other drinking contest skill challenges running concurrently), because everyone now knows you for the coward and trickster that you are.

Note: depending on the nature of the drinking contest and the nature of the opponent, other secondary skills may be appropriate.

Success: You are clearly the victor, and you gain renown in some way (to be decided by the DM). In addition, the confidence boost you gain allows you to shake off some of your stupor; reduce your total number of drunkenness points by half (round up).

Failure: Everyone knows that you are clearly the loser here; you lose renown in some way (to be decided by the DM). In addition, you drown your failure in more drink; increase your total number of drunkenness points by half (round up).

Drunkenness Points
Depending on how much you’ve been drinking, you’ll suffer different effects. Consult the table below to determine just how drunk you really are. All drunkenness points are removed after an extended rest.

Hangover
You take a -1 penalty to Perception and Insight checks. In addition, in areas of bright light, or in the presence of loud noise (such as a thunder power being used within 5 squares, or a dragon roaring), you become dazed until the end of your next turn. This effect persists until you reach one milestone.

There’s a section at the end of the post entitled ‘Role-Playing Made Difficult’ that talks about the idea that all of the crunchy tactical rules in D&D make it more difficult to role-play because the rules focus on tactical advantage rather than flavor or character development. Specifically, an example is given that posits the notion that, given a choice between Skill Focus: Intimidate (+3 to Intimidate) and a feat that grants you a +1 to Intimidate but makes your eyes glow when you’re angry, most people would choose the former.

I agree. And they should. The main reason being that the second feat is almost wholly unnecessary. Why do I need a feat to say that my eyes glow? Why can’t I just say that my eyes glow? Any halfway-decent DM would allow a cool special effect that has no impact on the mechanics of the game. And if your DM insists that you need to take a feat to make your eyes glow, take Skill Focus: Intimidate, and say that you get the +3 Intimidate bonus because your eyes glow when you’re mad. Done.

Wizards has actually been very good in 4th Edition about making a distinction between mechanics and things like flavor or special effects. Many of the feats in D&D have no particular flavor to them, allowing you to skin them any way you want to. The powers, rituals, and other things all have flavor text associated with them, but it’s pretty easy to divorce that from the rules and re-skin any discrete mechanical element to your liking. I think that this fact makes role-playing easier, not harder.

To illustrate my point a little bit, I’m going to do something very taboo in the gaming world: I’m going to tell you about my character. A friend of mine is in the process of starting up a campaign, and I’ve already gone ahead and created my character for that campaign. The short version is that he’s a genasi storm mage sorcerer. The long version is that he’s the child of two human parents. When he was an infant he was held up to the sky to be blessed by the primal spirits, in accordance with the traditions of his tribe. He was struck by lightning, but instead of killing him, it changed him on a fundamental level. He became the physical embodiment of the storm (represented by the fact that he’s a windsoul genasi, mechanically speaking, a storm mage sorcerer, and also has the Mark of Storm feat).

You’ll notice a couple of things about that if you’re looking hard enough. One, there’s a clear concept. That concept came before I chose the mechanics for it, and I made sure that all of the mechanics supported my concept. I also re-skinned the genasi race a little bit, making my character a human who was transformed into something unique. The second thing is that I didn’t go for optimization. The sorcerer focuses on Charisma and, in the case of the storm mage, Dexterity. The genasi gets a bonus to Strength and Intelligence, two ability scores which are almost entirely useless to me. They also happen to be some of my lowest ability scores. Why did I choose the genasi, then? Because it fit the concept for him to be an elemental creature, and also for him to be able to fly every now and again (the windsoul racial power). If I had been going for optimization, I would have made him a halfling and gotten a boost to both of the ability scores that I wanted high. But that wouldn’t have fitted the concept.

Enough about that. I feel like I’ve gotten a bit off-track anyway. My point is, there’s room for both those who optimize and those who role-play, and I think that the game supports both methods of play equally well. I think that the mechanics are so easy to separate from the flavor and role-playing that it makes it incredibly easy to come up with a really cool character with lots of role-playing potential, even if you’re optimizing. And I think that offering feats that grant a diminished mechanical benefit for a cool role-playing effect is a silly idea, because role-playing effects can and should be free. And I feel like the game supports me in that assertion.

Into the Keep
An Unexpected Ally

Enjoy.

I love the new warlock pact. The vestige pact allows you to choose one of two “sub-pacts” after each short or extended rest, each with its own pact boon and its own augment to your at-will power, eyes of the vestige (which is a very cool power in and of itself). In addition, a lot of the new daily warlock powers give vestige pact warlocks access to additional vestiges that they can switch out for immediately upon using said power, and these vestiges last until the end of the encounter. The daily power vestiges tend to be a bit better than the basic ones you get access to, which is why they don’t stick around too long. The infernal pact warlock in my D&D campaign, Silus, is actually switching to vestige pact now that the option is available, which I’m all for.

Wizards get lots of cool new powers. Some classics return, and there’s a whole slew of summoning spells and illusion spells. What has me really excited about this is that Sredni, the party’s warlord, is multiclassed into wizard, and a lot of these new powers are right up his alley. Summoning servitors to do your bidding? Check. Using illusions to force enemies to do things against their will? Check.

The new sorcerer stuff is very cool. I particularly like the idea of a half-orc storm mage who zips around the battlefield as a bolt of lightning and tosses people around with thunderous magic. Very cool and evocative.

The swordmage now has an aegis that can teleport an enemy to him, and a lot of new powers that go along with that. Cool stuff, though I think I like being able to teleport and attack, personally.

The new prescient bard is thematically odd, but mechanically gets a lot of great stuff. The most interesting thing is that the lion’s share of the powers designed for the new build are ranged weapon powers, meaning that you can be an archer-bard now. Not quite an arcane archer, but pretty close.

The paragon paths and epic destines are all very cool. I like the arch-lich.

Lots of great feats. Some of the metamagic feats from 3rd Edition make a return, and there’s lots of new stuff, too.

Familiars. Oh, yeah. 4th Edition familiars are so cool that two of my players want one. The warlock is getting a familiar as part of his retcon; he had a feat that was only viable for infernal pact warlocks, so he’s swapping it out for a familiar. Sredni also plans on picking one up at the next opportunity, I think. I love the way they work; they’re simple and minimalist, but with tons of roleplaying potential.

Anyway, that’s all for now.