As the days tick down to the grand-daddy con of them all, Gen-Con, I again lament the fact the East Coast of Canada is devoid of any real gaming conventions. To my knowledge we have one convention here that is primarily an anime convention with a sprinkling of gaming going on but nothing really devoted to rpg (or comic) goodness. It is times like this that I let my mind wander and think about what it would take to get a convention on the go here on the East Coast.
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The group has decided that we are going to have a full day session to serve as a season finale of our Ptolus campaign. If I time things properly we can get to this by next weekend (August 2nd). So, the plan is to make this an event. I have shuffled the wife and daughter off for the afternoon and early evening to avoid distractions. I am planning a suppertime BBQ (burgers and hot dogs with potato salad) which will allow for easy cooking/cleanup and then back to gaming quickly. So, the event is prepared now I must prepare the session to make it something worthwhile.
The season finale of our campaign is going to be the end of the Night of Dissolution (NoD) module from Malhavoc Press which we have been running since we ran out of the adventures in the Big Book (BB). The party just crested 9th level so I am looking to make sure that the module is challenging enough but that they can achieve success after some tense moments.
Usually I use my Tact-Tiles for mapping. These are great for large maps but the company is no longer in business so you can’t buy them new. You can try second hand or go the do-it-yourself route. For this session I have decided to do something a little different. For those of you who aren’t my players, read on. Players, please stay out. 
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Now that our group is sticking with the 3.5 ruleset we are faced with the task of figuring out what hacks/tweaks/changes we will make to freshen it up. So far we are looking at Monte Cook’s Book of Experimental Might I and Book of Experimental Might II from Malhavoc Press as well as the new Pathfinder RPG from Paizo. The biggest issue is to help the melee types (mostly our group Knight) to have more to do in a round especially since he was the biggest supporter of a change to 4e.
When deciding to hack 3.5 the questions most on our minds were: what needs to be freshened up and what is broken in our opinion? Foremost on our knight’s player’s mind was that he had little to do in a round other than swing his sword and absorb damage. He also found that he was absorbing a lot of damage for himself so he had little chance to use his abilities to absorb damage for others negating much of his classes’ special abilities.
It has been an interesting few weeks here that has led to little posting but some time to look at the new 4e rules which were leaked to the internet within the past week. Word spread like wildfire and forums are crammed with opinions of both the initial adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell and the core rulebooks themselves.
Those of you who have read some of my earlier posts know that most of my group were not very enthusiastic about the new edition based on the information that was released throughout the year by WotC. We agreed to give the new rules a shot and my pre-order from my local FLGS will be filled on Friday. This is the first of series of posts as the group works it way through the first module provided by WotC.
THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY!!!!
Over the past few weeks my gaming group took on the short playtest adventure (this link is to the reloaded version – we played the original) set up by some folks over at ENWorld using the playtest characters given out at the D&D Experience. Our group was short two people on the first night so we doubled up on the characters so that we could try everything. So, finally we started the ‘adventure’. Given that the adventure was a playtest we really didn’t do much roleplaying throughout the session since people didn’t really feel invested in the characters. So, an important element of why we play D&D was missing from the get-go and I think that has flavoured some of the group’s opinions somewhat. Read the rest of this entry »
In his blog over at Gleemax, Dave Noonan talks about using colours to represent the power abilities of respective PCs
One of the things you’ll see when you get a real copy of the Player’s Handbook is that color conveys meaning in the graphic design. Specifically, at-will powers get green headers, encounter powers get red, and dailies get black. When we started talking about power attrition and frequency issues in 4e, we didn’t have the "real" terminology yet. We talked about powers as "green buttons" (which you could press whenever you want), "red buttons" (which you could push once per encounter), and "black buttons" (which you could push once a day).
Some of you will see parallels to computer games there, especially MMOs like Warcraft that have buttons on cooldowns. Others will see a parallel to Magic: The Gathering’s color wheel. But the colors have just been a useful shorthand for us here at the office. We’ll often say things like "I just finished up the druid blacks," or "That’s a good effect, but it’s too good in red." That sort of thing.
Okay, does this bother anyone else? Read the rest of this entry »