Alright, so three characters have been made for my upcoming 4th Edition game, with one more to be made at a later date. No names have been chosen, and little has been done as far as back-story goes; I figure we’ll take care of some of that (primarily the name stuff) on the first official session, and we’ll take care of a lot of the backstory as we play, in an improvisational way. But as far as the characters go from a broad-strokes prospective, here’s what we’ve got.

A warforged paladin of Avandra. He specializes in using hammers, and seems like a “righteous fire” type paladin to me.

A tiefling warlord who has made an infernal pact, multiclassing into warlock. He likes the scimitar and rides a horse, and he speaks Primordial, suggesting a certain antipathy for the gods.

A dragonborn fighter who wields a halberd, this guy is all about sweeping attacks and beating the enemy back, as far as I can tell. He also took the Enlarged Dragon Breath feat to make the most out of his draconic nature. He breathes fire.

Many of you are no doubt constantly afraid of the imminent threat of a zombie apocalypse. While it’s true that we’ll never be truly safe from that threat, and it will happen eventually, you can at least be prepared for such an event by observing this informative image:

I’m probably showing my age somewhat by posting this (not that I’m that old or anything), but I continue to be flabbergasted by my DS. I can still remember quite clearly when the original GameBoy was state-of-the-art portable gaming technology, and when people were amazed by the Sega Game Gear with its fancy color screen, backlight, and 16-bit graphics.

And now I’m playing an enhanced version of the original Resident Evil on my DS. This was originally a PlayStation game, requiring a CD ROM disk, and now they’ve managed to fit the entire game, cut scenes and all, with added content, on a tiny little DS card. And it looks just as good (actually, probably a little bit better because pixelated graphics are less noticeable when they’re small) as the original PS version.

Like I said, I wouldn’t consider myself old (I’ll be turning 29 in July), but in terms of game technology I’m probably a centenarian.

It should come as no surprise that I’ll be starting up a D&D campaign soon. It’s a given. I’ve even got some players lined up for the big show. And that got me thinking about the classic conundrum of D&D: where do these guys meet, and why do they adventure together? You could simply say that they’ve known each other for a while, but what if you don’t want to do that? These guys are all going to be new to 4th Edition, and some of them don’t actually know each other that well in real life. So it would make things a little bit easier and more natural if the characters, themselves, were just getting used to each other, both in terms of personality and abilities. So how do you do that?

One way you can go–and the way I plan on going–is via an organization of some kind that the PCs are working for. The organization that I’ll be using is a somewhat loosely-governed group of elite troubleshooters and professional adventurers known as the Queen’s Wardens, or just the Wardens to most people. Their mission is basically to keep the Demesne–that’s the territory that the PCs will start off in–safe and prosperous. In order to do this, they need a wide variety of character types, from diplomats to treasure hunters to lawmen to assassins. They’re also willing to overlook quite a lot if you pull your weight and get the job done. Thus, the players can still make pretty much any kind of character they want, and still be members (because I promise you, they’ll be pulling their weight).

Starting all of the PCs off as Wardens grants a couple of nice benefits to me as the DM. One, I can easily provide them with a reason for adventuring together without telling them that they already know each other. Simply put, they’re a newly-formed company of fairly green–but very promising–recruits. Two, it gives me an easy way to introduce quests. Ideally, I’d like many of the quests to be player-driven, in that they indicate through behavior at the table the kinds of things they’re interested in investigating, and I plan for that for the next session. However, when they’re at a loss for what to do, or for when there really aren’t any loose ends to tie up, it’s nice to be able to have the chain of command hand them something to do. Three, if (Pelor forbid) one of the PCs die and they don’t feel like raising him (or if that option simply isn’t available), or if one of the players gets tired of his character or feels its time to retire him, it gives me an easy way to introduce a new character, and to give that character a reason to join the party.

I really like the idea of using the Wardens in this way, and I hope my players are receptive to it (a few of them read this blog, so I’m at least giving them fair warning (I’m looking at you, Chris, Dean, and sometimes Tad)). I think they will be when I explain that Wardens have a measure of authority and respect above and beyond what a freelance adventurer would be likely to receive, and that they are compensated for their troubles with a monthly stipend, mission bonuses, and good sale prices on valuable magic items that the party may have acquired in their travels. That’s always nice, right?

Yeah, I just got my copy from Amazon. I’ve glanced through it briefly (and red through the entire quick-start guide), and I like what I see so far. The product comes in a very nice pocketed folder. The books themselves have paper similar to what you’d find in a magazine; not terribly sturdy, but if you’re careful they should hold up fine. It’s a little odd that the books have no back cover. They are in full color, though, with plenty of artwork. So far, I’m really digging 4E’s art style, as well as the new cover designs. Very nice. I also like that the adventure comes with three double-sided poster-sized battle maps, for a total of six encounter maps usable with standard 1″ minis or counters. I think I would have preferred it if Wizards had included counters for all of the creatures instead, but I’m hardly going to complain since Fiery Dragon already did that for us.

Also, while there are three pregens in the quick-start book, Wizards has released a sixth on D&D Insider. Nice.

[Edit: Five pregens. There are five pregens in the quick-start booklet.]

If you like to kill hordes of zombies–and really, who doesn’t?–you might want to try out The Last Stand 2. Contradictory titles aside, it’s a great little zombie game, and all it requires is flash player. Good stuff.

It occurs to me that I haven’t been posting lately, so I guess I’ll go ahead and update you all on some things.

Games I’ve been playing
Sadly, I haven’t really done much board/card/role-playing gaming lately since the big TPK. I did play a game of Three-Dragon Ante with my friend Dean; it was quite good. In the realm of video gaming, I’ve been playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on my DS. It’s an interesting and somewhat goofy game, and it’s suitable for casual play, which is what I’ve been using it for. It’s a good game for playing in short bursts, but in extended sessions I usually find myself wanting to play something with a little more meat on its bones.

On my computer (my semi-new computer), I’ve been replaying Crysis and BioShock, mainly so I can ogle the improved visuals and performance. That’s not all, though. I also recently purchased Indigo Prophecy from Steam (a service which is rapidly finding a place in my heart). Indigo Prophecy is an adventure game of sorts, though it’s unlike any adventure game I’ve ever played. It’s got a lot of timing-based mini-games, a lot of investigation, and the dialog is less forgiving than that of other adventure games in that the game gives you limited time to make your responses, and you’re not sure exactly what your character is going to say when you make a dialog choice. At any rate, I highly recommend the game, particularly since it’ll run on older rigs (being an older game, itself), and you can pick it up for $10 on Steam.

4th Edition
So much has been released on 4th Ed right now that I feel it would be folly to try to cover it all. Suffice it to say, Wizards’ marketing people are earning their money right now. They released some interesting teaser information initially, then gave us a drought of information for a while to increase anticipation. Now that release is only a month and change away, they’re hitting us with a torrent of crunchy goodness that, in my case at least, is amplifying my excitement to a fever pitch. We’ve learned how many powers you get throughout your career, and at what levels; we’ve learned about paragon paths; we’ve learned about modifying monsters (and seen a few examples of monsters, as well); and we’ve seen the building blocks that make up a power. Oh, and the warlord class, too. All good stuff, and lots of information, but they’re always very careful to hold something back, so that we stay excited and continue to want more. Good stuff.

At any rate, I’ll try to post more frequently, though I can make no promises. Later.

Wizards just posted an article about the 4th Edition rogue. Let’s see what we can learn from it.

1. Armor Training: Leather. At first blush, this seems pretty restricted; they’re only trained with leather armor? However, the Classes and Races book makes mention of the fact that terms that used to represent a single suit of armor, like padded, leather, or chain, are now entire categories of armor. Thus, the rogue is proficient with all types of leather armor.

2. Weapon proficiencies. Again, it seems restrictive to only be proficient with five weapons. It makes me wonder, though, of these weapons are categories or descriptors rather than individual weapons, much like leather armor. Perhaps there are several different kinds of daggers, several different kinds of shuriken, several different kinds of hand crossbow. Who can say at this point?

3. Hit points and healing surges. So now we see how starting hit points are calculated: a base number (12 in this case) plus the character’s Constitution score. Assuming an average Constitution of 10, that means the rogue starts with 22 hit points, significantly more than a 3rd Edition rogue with the same Constitution score, who starts at 6. Also, we now see that characters get a flat hit point increase at every level (5 per level, in this case). This eliminates the possibility of rolling a 1 on your hit die and being screwed, effectively, which is nice. It’s interesting to note, however, that Constitution apparently has no bearing on hit points per level. It does, however, have a bearing on healing surges. 6 + Constitution modifier. I’d assume that that’s a per day number, because 6+ healing surges per encounter seems excessive. Now, how do healing surges work? It’s been mentioned that the second wind ability, introduced in Star Wars Saga Edition, simply triggers a healing surge, presumably when you’re bloodied (1/2 hit points). It’s also been mentioned that many leader abilities allow you to use healing surges, so it would seem that healing surges are not something that you can just use whenever you want. Finally, it’s been mentioned that the fighter has the most self-healing ability of any class. Now that we see that healing surges are tied to class, we can probably assume that the fighter has a much higher base number of surges, and probably has a number of powers that trigger them.

4. Skills. Skills seem to be handled in much the same manner as Star Wars Saga Edition, with a simple trained/untrained differentiation. I’m actually quite happy about this; I like that system better because of its simplicity. The rogue class skill list is considerably shorter than it used to be, but the skills are, I’d imagine, considerably broader in application. It’s interesting to see that Bluff and Intimidate are still individual skills, rather than being rolled into a single social über-skill. The Knowledge skill seems to have been deconstructed into individual skills like Dungeoneering and Streetwise, and these skills probably have more application than the aforementioned skill did. And what does Insight do?

5. Builds. Probably a good idea to include these, for new players, but it’s nice to know that you can feel free to ignore them completely. It is nice to see that diversity of concept is being build right into the class description. Also, you still get a feat at first level, and you still get a bonus feat if you’re a human. You also apparently get to choose two at will powers, one encounter power, and one per day power, all at first level. That’s a lot of choice right out of the gate.

8. Class Features and Powers. It’s interesting to see that these are two different things. Class Features are things that all members of a class share in common, while Powers are more specific to the individual, and are up to player choice. I was wondering how they’d handle this, and the solution is pretty simple.

7. First Strike. So the rogue gets combat advantage over people who haven’t acted yet, which strongly implies that other people do not. It makes me wonder what other things grant combat advantage. Flanking? Attacking from the shadows? Feinting?

8. Rogue Tactics. These are both very cool and useful abilities. I wonder if we’re missing a few abilities here that will actually be in the PHB. Two doesn’t seem like all that many, so I wonder if they held a few back because they weren’t necessary to the preview.

9. Rogue Weapon Talent. This seems like a nice way to make choices that appear sub-optimal a little bit better. The rogue has three ranged weapons and two melee weapons available. Both the hand crossbow and the sling do more damage than do shuriken, so this ability helps to bring the shuriken up to par and make them a little more attractive. The short sword does more damage than the dagger, and both can be used for Sneak Attacks (assuming they’re both considered light blades, which I’d imagine they are), but now the dagger is a little more accurate. Not a bad idea.

10. Sneak Attack. These numbers are considerably lower at higher levels than I expected. 2d6 is a lot at first level in comparison to the current scale, but 3d6 at paragon and 5d6 at epic seems low. I guess you have to factor in the fact that you get this damage whenever you have combat advantage and are using the appropriate weapon, and that Sneak Attack can be used in conjunction with Powers that deal extra damage. There may even be Powers or Feats that increase Sneak Attack damage, or even weapons that do so.

11. Deft Strike. This appears to be a pretty vanilla attack (though it should be noted that rogue powers apparently allow the rogue to use Dexterity for both the attack and damage bonuses on both melee and ranged attacks; nice), with the exception that you can move two squares before the attack. This is a standard action, which means that you’d presumably get a move action as well, which means that this is extra movement, which is nice. It’s a little like Spring Attack in that you can move two squares to your opponent, attack, and then use your move action to get out of melee range. Or you could simply use those as two extra squares of movement when you’re trying to reach someone far away. Interesting, though, that this power can be used with every rogue weapon except for the shuriken, unless the shuriken is considered a light blade. Also, the power scales with level to some extent, doubling your weapon damage at epic levels.

12. Piercing Strike. A melee attack that ignores armor. On the one hand, that’s pretty nasty. On the other, you have to be in melee range to use it.

13. Positioning Strike. An attack against Will that moves your opponent. So not only does it ignore armor, it also can move someone into flanking position (or out of it), or away from an ally. A defender’s worst nightmare. It can only be used once per encounter, though.

14. Torturous Strike. A per-encounter attack that deals double weapon damage. Not too bad. Also, if you chose the Brutal Scoundrel tactic, you get to add your Dexterity modifier and your Strength modifier to your damage. Pretty nasty.

15. Tumble. So, not only do we now see a rogue power that isn’t an attack, we also see that the Tumble skill has been turned into a rogue power. You get to shift half your speed, which I believe means you get to move without provoking opportunity attacks. Not too shabby, and it doesn’t even require an extra roll. Only once per encounter, though.

16. Crimson Edge. So this is what a 9th-level daily rogue power looks like. Ouch. It ignores armor, deals double weapon damage, causes 5+ ongoing damage every round, and causes the target to grant you combat advantage, opening him up to sneak attacks. Nasty stuff. And, even if you miss you wind up dealing normal attack damage. An interesting note is that a save ends both the ongoing damage and the combat advantage. How do saves work, I wonder, and what is there relationship to defenses?

All in all, I’m very pleased with this preview. I think 4th Edition is going to do a lot of cool things for the game, and this clearly isn’t D&D 3.75.

I don’t believe I’ve shared this yet, but I’ve sort of been on an unofficial hiatus from game design. As in, I’ve just been too lazy to do it. At any rate, I’ve been bitten by the bug again, so I’m going back to designing Wild Blue. I’ve had some ideas regarding mechanics recently, ideas that have really excited me, and I’m starting to put pen to paper again, in a mostly digital, metaphorical sense. These ideas incorporate some elements of Saga, but many of the ideas are wholly new (though I’ll admit to some influence from other RPGs, most notably Dogs in the Vineyard. At any rate, I’ve decided that, as I design Wild Blue, I’m going to document the process, if only to give myself an outlet for some of the things going through my head. This will be the first of my design diaries.

This first diary will focus on what is effectively my mission statement for the mechanics that will provide the foundation for Wild Blue. I have a number of goals in mind, and I’m going to outline them here.

1. The mechanics will be easy to learn and use. A lesson I learned with Saga was not to overcomplicate things. In one particular playtest, one of my testers was a novice gamer; he had never played a role-playing game before, and had limited experience with board games, too. Throughout the entire four-hour playtest, I had to repeatedly explain what he should do, how many dice he should roll, and why. I don’t in any way consider this to be a failing on the part of the tester; far from it, it was clearly a failing on the part of myself and the system I designed. Despite my broad-strokes approach in Saga, I had made the basic mechanics a little too complicated, and while experienced role-players and board gamers seemed able to grasp them with relative ease, a novice gamer had considerable difficulty. This is a problem I aim to avoid in Wild Blue.

2. The mechanics will allow for narrative control for the players. This is a big one. Saga had leanings in this direction, but didn’t go quite far enough. In Wild Blue, successfully resolving an action means that you get to narrate its resolution. This means that you get to decide how you succeed, and describe it. On the flip side, it also means that you can choose to fail, and if you do so, there will be some form of compensation, and not just the fact that you can choose how you fail; I mean mechanical compensation, an incentive of some sort.

3. The mechanics will allow for a wide array of character options. Saga, I think, succeeded fairly well in this regard. The skills were broad enough that you could create specialties that described your character fairly well, and traits allowed you to do this even more so. But I want to go a little bit further with this idea. There will be certain aspects of your character that are chosen from pre-defined lists, that do pre-defined things. However, the most important aspects of your character will be wholly player-created, and will be descriptive of your character. I also want drives to be a more central, more important aspect of your character.

4. The setting will inform the mechanics. Saga was deliberately generic. While I want Wild Blue’s system to have some aspect of wide applicability (I’d still like the system to be open-source), I want to have mechanics that reinforce, and are reinforced by, the setting. I don’t want to create a generic system and try to shoe-horn my setting into it, I want to create a system and a setting that are intertwined and designed with each other in mind. If the system can be used for other settings regardless, that’s just a bonus.

5. The mechanics will make it easy to be the GM. I tried to do this with Saga, and to some extent I think I succeeded, but I didn’t define things well enough for the GM. During my playtests, it was easy for me to adapt on the fly to what the players did, and to improvise challenges for them quickly and seamlessly. However, I always felt that I was fudging things to some extent. There weren’t any well-defined difficulty scales, so it was never clear how hard a given challenge should be. I want to change that in Wild Blue, and define things better so that there’s less guess-work involved in being the GM.

It’s been quite a while since my last post, and for that I apologize. I have no particular excuse other than the usual: games and lack of motivation. At any rate, I read something just now that motivated me to make a post: the Monster Manual entry for the 4th Edition Pit Fiend.

Here’s some stuff I gleaned from the entry, in no particular order:

1. The Pit Fiend is worth 18,000 XP. No more referencing the CR chart; just a flat 18,000. Nice.
2. He has a teleport speed of 10. They’ve said that short-range teleports would be more common, and apparently (at least for more powerful characters and monsters), it’s just another method of locomotion, usable whenever you want to use it.
3. Action types for the Pit Fiend’s abilities are either standard, minor, and minor 1/round. I’m guessing that minor actions are similar to free or swift actions, probably a combination of the two, with minor 1/round being only somewhat more limited.
4. The Pit Fiend can summon some allies once per encounter, then effectively use them as short-range missiles. Very cool. Even cooler, there’s no roll required to summon, and no save required on the part of the devil/missile, which should speed things up.
5. There are Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses, as well as an entry for Saves, with only a +2 listed. I wonder what Saves do now.
6. The Pit Fiend has to use an Action Point to use his per-encounter power. I had originally wondered if taking the same per-encounter power more than once would allow you to use it multiple times per encounter. Now I’m wondering if you have X number of per-encounter powers, each usable by spending an Action Point. I wonder how quickly Action Points refresh.
7. One of the Pit Fiend’s powers, instead of being at-will or encounter, is listed as ‘recharge 4 5 6′. I wonder what that means. Presumably there’s some form of requirement for it to recharge.

That’s all for now. Peace.