Category Archives: Reviews & Culture

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 8

Posted on by
2

This week I had the pleasure of enjoying D&D Encounters as a player at Andy’s table. As the start time of 5:00 rolled around there were only three players present, but we ended up with seven (so we ran one extra-large table).

The party had just finished exploring the basement of the Vontarin estate last week, taking on a gang of tieflings and discovering the the wizard Nathaire, possessed by Vontarin’s ghost, had apparently come to the estate, looked for something, not found it, and left in frustration. So, we returned to Duponde.

As night fell, Grimbold (captain of the town watch) asked the party to either defend some townsfolk who had taken refuge in the armory, or investigate reports of a small humanoid in the black hood near the south gate. The humanoid sounded like it might be Nathaire’s halfling assistant, so we took that route.

We spotted the humanoid through the window of a house, but before we could approach we were set upon by plant creatures. I was playing a Mage and had a good time blasting a bunch of twig minions. The party seemed to work pretty well together, and we really didn’t have too much trouble taking down the plants and then the humanoid, who turned out to be a shadow creature.

  

We took the shadow man alive and questioned him about what he was doing. He confessed that Nathaire hired him, and the wizard was working on building an army of skeletons at a nearby monastery. Ooh – creepy!

No maps this week, as just like week 5 we used a map that’s available on the Wizards of the Coast web site for DDI subscribers. But hey, at least I included the tokens I created for the plant monsters!

Previous sessions:

No week 6 – I was out of town

My thoughts on Pathfinder, based on the Core Rulebook

Posted on by
16

I’ve finished reading through the bulk of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook in preparation for the campaign in which I will soon be a player, and I thought I’d share my thoughts here. My background with RPGs is:

  • I played a little bit of D&D 3.0 around 2002. I got the core books, read them, loved them, played a session or two, wrote an adventure, never found a good group to play with, drifted away.
  • I started playing D&D 4e in early 2010, and here I am now. I’ve played and DMed a ton of 4e over the past year and a half.
  • In that year and a half, I’ve also had the chance to play one session each of AD&D 1e, GURPS, Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu.

So, I’m approaching Pathfinder as an experienced D&D 4e player, with some exposure to other games, including earlier editions of D&D – but just a little.

Introduction

The first thing that struck me about the Core Rulebook is that it opens with some mild politics. I understand that this is about the OGL and such, but it’s really awkward to read all the references to Pathfinder being an evolution of “the 3.5 version of the world’s oldest roleplaying game.” I get it – they don’t own the rights to the Dungeons and Dragons name, so they can’t say the name, but the OGL lets them say a lot of other stuff… it’s very weird.

I love that the single book is basically the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide rolled into one. I’ve really only been focusing on the player sections of the book, but I appreciate that the game master sections are right there if I want them.

The glossary on pages 11-12 is well-placed, too. Understanding things like Combat Maneuver Bonus right up front is helpful. The index in the back of the book seems to be pretty good, too. If you’re going to write a book that aims to be accessible to new players, a good glossary and index help a lot.

“Generating a Character” on pages 14-15 is not as helpful as it should be. I wish this had been an easier-to-follow step-by-step process, but it involves a crazy amount of flipping all over the book. I think an example would have helped a lot.

Races

Not much to say here. I’m fine with the races that get penalties to certain stats; it’s more flavorful. The races generally seem to have more flavor expressed in mechanics than 4e races do, but this isn’t always a winner for me. Some of the flavor is quite fiddly in practice, such as dwarves getting a dodge bonus to AC against giants and a bonus to Appraise checks involving precious metals or gems. I get the flavor, really, but the mechanics seem likely to be forgotten.

One other note: The illustration of the half-elf woman is fantastic. Half-elf males are lucky critters!

Classes

I see what people mean when they refer to the Essentials class presentations as being more like older editions. No two classes are alike in Pathfinder. They all have their own progression of different features that come at different levels, and that’s cool. Fiddly, yes, but I think the fiddliness comes from not having a Character Builder with power cards. If all of these special abilities were easy to follow and reference on the character sheet, they wouldn’t feel any more fiddly than 4e characters getting powers as they level up. So, no complaints about the progression of the classes themselves here, just a complaint about the lack of an easy-to-use character builder (though I’ve heard good – and expensive – things about Hero Lab).

It strikes me that Pathfinder seems to be a game that relies more on GM and player interpretation rather than rules – often phrased as “rulings rather than rules”. I’m fine with that, but it’s a meaningful difference with 4e.

Some things in Pathfinder make character creation harder than 4e, which gives each class a key ability score (and yes, there are some V-shaped class builds in 4e that depend on two different abilities, I know). When I tried to build a cleric in Pathfinder, I found myself gravitating toward a high Wisdom score. I then realized that Charisma is pretty important, too. And then I saw that if I wanted to have anything to do other than throw off the occasional healing spell, I’d probably want good Strength to get into melee, in which case I’d need reasonable Constitution in order to have some hit points and not just die in one shot… it’s just very different. If it leads to well-rounded characters, well, great! But it’s a very different approach.

Also, I love the way deities and domains are presented in the Core Rulebook. It’s a whole new pantheon of deities, of course, but I love that clerics pick a deity and then get spells and abilities from two of the deity’s domains. Again, good flavor.

Spells are, of course, one of the areas where D&D differs most from earlier editions and Pathfinder. All spells are “dailies” in Pathfinder (Vancian Magic). I have to say that based solely on reading the books, I prefer the 4e system. Any system where the wizard spends the first four levels of his career hiding from combat most of the time until he can start throwing the occasional fireball doesn’t seem that great to me. Yes, I know that the wizard becomes all-powerful later, but reading through the books does not make me a fan of the Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards phenomenon. Maybe it will be more fun in play.

I’m also annoyed by the difference between character level, caster level and spell level. I get it, but it’s terribly inelegant.

Skills

Again, more flavor than 4e. More judgment calls. More proliferation. More stuff that comes up outside of combat. It’s good, it’s bad… it’s just a difference.

Feats

I didn’t read them all, as you might imagine. But this feels like an area where 4e really didn’t change much from 3.5e / Pathfinder. Feats felt very familiar to me.

Equipment

Again, much like 4e in most respects (at least for starting equipment; I haven’t delved into magic items).

The various weapons confuse me a bit, as there seem to be cases where weapon A is Pareto superior to weapon B… is the difference really just flavor, or am I missing something? The Morningstar, for instance, just seems better than the Heavy Mace. It’s cheaper, it’s lighter, it deals two different types of damage… all I can figure is that dealing two types of damage is bad in some circumstances (such as against a creature that resists piercing damage, even when it’s paired with bludgeoning). I have much to learn, I guess.

A minor innovation that I actually like from 4e is the introduction of the Adventurer’s Kit. I personally think it’s fun to pore over the list of oddball equipment I could buy for my character, but I think it’s a good idea to provide a “default gear” option for players who aren’t interested in that sort of thing.

The illustrations of gear in this book are very nicely done too, in my opinion. Good artwork in lots of places… it’s strange that I’m not seeing artist credits on the images.

Additional Rules

It’s a little weird to me that we don’t see alignment spelled out until this chapter, but I guess there really wasn’t a good place to stick it earlier. I tend to think of alignment as being a very fundamental part of the character creation process. My only other comment on this section is that I find the changes to ability scores as characters age to be annoying rather than flavorful. I guess it’s both… sigh.

Combat

Okay, I read this chapter in detail. And I have to say that this is one where I’ll largely need to reserve judgment until I play the game. So many things are fundamentally different about combat between 4e and Pathfinder that I can’t accurately judge it until I try it.

I get that there’s sort of a Standard – Move – Minor action economy in this game, but I also understand that it’s still a different animal. Full-round actions have no clear analogue in 4e, except maybe the monk’s Full Discipline… but you can still take a 5-foot step with a full round action. It’s going to take some learning by doing on my part for sure.

I will say that combat seems a lot more complicated in Pathfinder. The difference between a weapon attack, touch attack and ranged touch attack is flavorful, but harder to follow. Holding a charge on a spell – also flavorful and hard to follow. Saving throws – I think the 4e system of different defenses works much better. Concentration checks for spellcasting seem like a huge pain in the butt. All the options to do things like fight defensively seem overly complicated. The different buckets for lethal and nonlethal damage seem like a pain. And oh, all the tables! It’s going to take a lot of learning for me.

Magic

Much like combat, I’m going to have to see it in action in order to really judge. Concentration, counterspelling, the shapes of spell areas, areas that originate on a grid intersection rather than in a square, spell resistance… again, it seems really complicated. More “realism” at the expense of clarity.

The Rest

I flipped through some of the spells. I haven’t touched Prestige Classes or the GM parts of the book. I haven’t delved into multiclassing, though I understand the gist of how it works.

Overall impressions

So far, Pathfinder looks like a game that does a much better job of handling the game world “realistically” than 4e, though at the expense of simplicity. I know that tomes have been written about “gamism versus simulationism” by people who’ve spent far more time comparing and contrasting various systems than I have, so I don’t have much I can add. Until I actually get to try the system out at the table, it will be hard for me to say which (if either) I prefer.

Fortunately, I’m not too worried. I had the chance to meet with my awesome GM, Phil, and I know it’s going to be a fun game. He’s not overly concerned about rules, and he’s interested in us focusing far more on the stories of our characters rather than their mechanics. Having played in his Call of Cthulhu game at Genghis Con, I’m really excited about playing in an ongoing campaign that he’s running. I honestly don’t think the system is going to matter all that much – with good people at the table, I’m going to have a good time.

Free RPG Day 2011 – my San Francisco experience

Posted on by
8

I live in Colorado, within walking distance of the excellent Enchanted Grounds game store / coffee house. Last year I went there for a Dark Sun game on the morning of Free RPG Day and then went back in the evening because they offered a discount on RPG books in addition to giving away free stuff (I didn’t really know what the free stuff was). This year, however, I’m out of town, on a business trip to San Francisco – so I don’t get to participate in Free RPG Day at my friendly local game store. Frown.

Of course, given that San Francisco is a decent-sized city, you’d think that there’d be at least one store that’s participating in Free RPG Day, and in fact there is exactly one – Gamescape (which does not appear to have a functioning web page of its own, so here’s its Yelp page). I used to go to this store when I lived in San Francisco, although I went for board games (it has quite the awesome selection). I found out that Gamescape would be opening its doors at 10:00 AM Saturday, and since I’d heard that other stores had run out of Free RPG Day stuff quickly in past years, I decided to get there early. It helped that I randomly woke up around 6:00 AM local time.

Thus at 9:15 AM on Saturday, I found myself sitting on the sidewalk in front of Gamescape… all by myself. No massive mob for Free RPG Day, it seems. Five minutes before the doors opened, one other guy got “in line” behind me, though I don’t think he was even there for the “event”.

As it turned out, Gamescape was not running any actual Free RPG Day events, though they did have the standard box of goodies to give away – one item per customer. I was interested in the items for D&D 4th Edition, Pathfinder and Savage Worlds. The D&D item was an addition to the Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond boxed set, which didn’t look especially interesting. Since I’m starting to play Pathfinder pretty soon, I opted for the free Pathfinder adventure (not sure I’ll ever actually run a Pathfinder game, but if I do I now have an adventure ready to go).

I also want to support stores that participate in Free RPG Day, so I browsed through all of their gaming stuff, eventually deciding to buy my own copy of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook (rather than continuing to rely on the copy I checked out from my local public library). Message to game store: You buy stuff to give away for free to me, I spend good money in your store (50 bucks plus tax – which is 9.5% here in San Francisco!).

So, Free RPG Day 2011 was… well, not at all exciting. Had I been back in Colorado, perhaps it would have been more interesting. Oh well; at least I got something for free, and bought something I’d been meaning to buy anyway.

Being non-judgmental about play styles

Posted on by
18

The RPG community seems to constantly be struggling with denouncing one another as having “badwrongfun”. I get it, really; people have a certain way they like to play, and they tend to see other ways of playing as “wrong”. I’m trying to fight against that tendency in myself.

This isn’t about editions or different games for me; I’m really quite happy with people who play 4e or Pathfinder or older editions of D&D or Savage Worlds or whatever game floats their boats. I hope to get the chance to play with them at some point, too! I really enjoy learning new games.

Where I struggle is within the game I’m playing (currently D&D 4th Edition). Different people get different things out of the game (as described very well in the Dungeon Master’s Guide). Some people are Actors and want to speak and act in character. Some are Explorers who want the party to discover new places. Some are Slayers who want to beat stuff up in combat. Some are Instigators who want to try goofy things to see what happens (it looks like Factotum is going to fall into this bucket).

And some are Power Gamers. They enjoy system mastery. They enjoy putting together super-powerful characters that can deal incredible damage or perform incredible healing or lock down armies of monsters or what have you. They’re optimizers, min-maxers.

I struggle with my own inner Power Gamer. If I didn’t have any kind of internal judgments of the way I thought was “best” to play, I’d be a Power Gamer. I’m good at it. I can optimize very well. I played Magic: The Gathering for years, and I was very, very good at it. I can evaluate the best options and the worst options and the options that work well together. And in a game like Magic, where the goal is to win, I embrace that.

But D&D is not about winning, at least not against the other players. It’s about working together with friends to have fun. You’re not trying to beat the DM, and the DM isn’t trying to beat you (at least not in the games that I’ve played, though I know that Lair Assault will be all about this type of game).

Thus, I tend to be judgmental toward Power Gamers, because it’s something that I struggle against in myself. And I don’t WANT to be judgmental.

Originally, I was a little judgmental toward Slayers. They just want to kill stuff and they don’t care about a story or role playing or anything like that. Give them a battle with some monsters to kill, and they’re happy. The occasional game I run with my family (my wife, her brother and his wife) is all Slayers. We played Reavers of Harkenwold, which has a great story and setting and I enjoyed running it – but I had to get comfortable with the fact that what the party really wanted to do was fight bad guys. And I got there, and had more fun because of it. With this group, I try to make sure they have lots of cool fights.

Now I’m struggling with overcoming my judgmentality (is that a word?) toward Power Gamers. Part of the problem is that a party with a mixture of Power Gamers and non-Power Gamers is going to have problems, as I discussed here. I’m still not sure how I’m going to overcome that issue, when a Power Gamer is in a party with non-Power Gamers.

But I really want to overcome it. Just because I like characters that are non-optimized and that focus on things other than combat doesn’t mean that someone who gets fun out of maximum possible combat efficiency is “doing it wrong”. I find myself rolling my eyes at discussions of “maximum DPR” and feats that feel “cheesy” to me. It’s great that your character can drop a dragon in two rounds, really, but it feels “wrong” to me.

I want to be more accepting. How can I overcome this? Just because I like to be more of an Explorer / Storyteller / Thinker at the game table (and now dabbling in Instigator) doesn’t mean that a Power Gamer is having badwrongfun. How can I welcome Power Gamers at the same table as non-Power Gamers who still enjoy exciting combats?

When I’m the DM, I maintain a little veto power over my players’ choices. If something is too crazily powerful (in my opinion), I’ll ask the player to choose something else. So far, this has worked well; the players seem to trust me enough to go with this (and I don’t have to use it very often).

When I’m a player, though, I obviously can’t restrict other players’ choices. They’re going to power game if that’s what they enjoy, and my struggle is to still have fun myself without judging them for their choices.

Does anyone else struggle with this? Do you have any tips for making peace with the fact that some of your fellow players might have completely different gaming preferences from yours, and not judging them for it?

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 3

Posted on by
1

I had the pleasure of stepping back into the role of Dungeon Master for Week 3 of the current D&D Encounters season. When the start time for the game rolled around, only one player had showed up, but five more came in the next few minutes and away we went!

Tonight’s group consisted of:

  • David (the brand-new 4e player from week 1) playing his drow hunter (the only character to have shown up in all three encounters so far)
  • Dan with his half-orc knight
  • Chris with his half-elf warpriest (his replacement character after I killed off his revenant in week 1)
  • Chris’s daughter Allison with the pre-generated human mage Jaren,
  • Two new Encounters players, starting with Nick and his pre-gen vampire Constanz (thanks to Wielding a Bohemian Ear Spoon for generating these!)
  • And finishing with Nick’s friend Ofir and his Bohemian Ear Spoon pre-gen blackguard Klaxu

The party members who had played last week (the hunter, warpriest and mage) had defended the armory, so this week we continued that story with the town guard captain begging the group to search Duponde for shadow monsters and to protect the panicking citizens.

To the skill challenge!

This was the first skill challenge of this Encounters season, and I think it was the first time most of the players had been in one. I tend to be a “don’t tell the players they’re in a skill challenge” kind of DM; I prefer to lay out the situation and ask them how they want to deal with it, asking for skill checks as appropriate.

The group came up with some creative skill uses (History to see if they remembered any maps of the city to help them figure out what areas might be vulnerable to attack; Athletics plus darkvision to climb onto a roof to look for trouble, Heal to help out injured townspeople). Sometimes I let this give someone else a +2 to their next roll, and sometimes I let it count as a skill check of its own.

Ultimately, this group had one of the most efficient skill challenges I’ve seen, in that they racked up three failures in a hurry! I believe they had only two successes (out of six) when they hit their third failure. Even though the adventure didn’t specifically call for it in this particular skill challenge (it did for the other branch skill challenge for this session), I gave out cards from the Despair Deck from the Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond box set whenever characters failed a skill check. I described it as the PC heading down an alley, seeing a horrible shadow apparition that quickly faded, and being freaked out by it. One ended up Craven, one Jittery and one Delusional.

Town Map - Dark Legacy of Evard Session 3, with grid

Town Map - Dark Session of Evard Session 3, no grid

Once the battle started, with the monsters getting a surprise round and the PCs not getting an attack bonus thanks to the failed skill challenge, the Craven PC (the hunter) spent the first round climbing onto the roof of a building. I felt that was appropriately Craven behavior, so I handed him a bonus point token.

I only had the Dusk Beasts visibly act during the surprise round. One of them charged the warpriest, one moved close to the front of the party, and one started coming around behind them. In the second round, the two Leeching Shadows revealed themselves, and one glued itself to the blackguard and literally stayed on him for the entire encounter (that shadow was the last enemy to go, because the blackguard failed four saves in a row). When the Shadow Bolter popped out from around a building and shot the warpriest in the gut, the group started worrying about a potential TPK.

The second and third rounds got better, though. Even though both the knight and the blackguard ended up unconscious, the party started taking care of the bad guys. A shadow minion dropped, and the Dusk Beasts started getting bloodied and finally dying. Once one dropped, the others fell in short order. The warpriest was planning to revive the blackguard, but when the blackguard’s player said “Halleluja!” the warpriest’s player said, “I’m sorry, I’m a priest of death and I can’t support that kind of thing – I’ll save the knight instead.” He was kidding, but I promised him a bonus point if he would actually do that because of his character, so he did. I later awarded him renown points for a Moment of Greatness there.

The Shadow Bolter was planning to flee, but the revived knight stepped in, hit him and slowed him, dashing that plan. A gang-up on the bad guy ensued, and the warpriest dropped the monster with non-lethal damage.

Once the blackguard finally shook off his shadow and the party squashed it, they turned to questioning the Bolter. This was some fun impromptu role playing (for me at least). The party wanted to know how the shadow man got to Duponde, who he worked for, etc. He was confused, though, because from his perspective Duponde and its people had invaded his land and he was just defending himself against the horrid light-bearers.

I really am enjoying DMing this season of Encounters. It’s a fun adventure so far, and I’ve got a fun group of players at the table. I’ll live with the every other week role I’m given (Andy, it’s only fair to let you run some of these – you’re an awesome DM!), but I can definitely see myself wanting to run this adventure for another group in the future in a home campaign.

D&D Encounters Dark Legacy of Evard – Week 1

Posted on by
1

I’ve volunteered to run D&D Encounters for the Dark Legacy of Evard season that began today. I’ve only played one session of Encounters before, but the store owner, Jeff, was trying to recruit enough DMs so that we could run four tables per night and still be able to have DMs alternate weeks (so, eight DMs total). One encounter a week shouldn’t be too hard to prepare, so I gave it a go.

Setup

I got the adventure last Friday and gave the first chapter a read-through. The Encounters adventure comes with poster maps and tokens, but if you’ve been following my blog, you know that I love to run games using my projector setup and MapTool. So, I began creating maps in MapTool and programming up the monsters.

Players

For tonight’s session, we had six players, which meant that we were only going to run one table. I was the first DM there, so I was fortunate to be able to run my game. Four of the players were Encounters veterans, but two were not.

The first of these newcomers was my wife, Barbara! We’ve played D&D together many times over the past year and a half that I’ve been involved with the game, but this is the first time she’s participated in public play. Huzzah!

The second newcomer was David, a complete newcomer to D&D4e. He had played a little bit of D&D 3.0 years ago, but he was really coming to the game fresh. Excellent!

The story – SPOILERS AHEAD

Tonight’s session started off with the party introducing themselves to one another. They were on a weeks-long journey to take some messages from the leader of Fallcrest to far-off Sarthel. Some of the players decided that they were actual couriers while others were either guards or hangers-on. One was a Revenant who, it was decided, had been found by the party near the side of the road a few days prior with no memory of his previous life.

It was a quiet evening in the Old Owl Inn in the town of Duponde, and the adventurers were resting and waiting a few days for the bridges over the Nentir River to be repaired so that they could continue on toward Sarthel. They spent some time chatting with other travelers and locals about the spooky weather and hearing rumors about the ghost of the shadow wizard Evard whose grave is in Duponde. The innkeeper and a visiting scholar told them some of the tales, and the group eventually went to bed.

In the middle of the night, everyone woke up to a strange feeling of being pulled in odd directions, the temperature dropped, and lights began functioning poorly. A scream came from downstairs in the common room. The adventurers geared up and went down to investigate

The battle

They arrived to find the old bartender knocked out behind the bar while a quartet of gargoyles, animated incarnations of the statues that adorned the front of the inn, flew around the room wreaking havoc. Battle ensued.

The encounter map (no grid)

The Shade Executioner in the group snuck up behind one of the statues and grabbed it with his garrotte, nearly killing it outright. Our Half-Orc Knight waded into combat to challenge a pair of monsters. The Revenant Hexblade found himself on the wrong end of a gargoyle attack and was knocked to the ground and dazed – and bloodied. He fought back from the ground with his single action on his turn. Our Drow Hunter finished off the gargoyle that had been garrotted.

At the end of the round, a pair of shadow creatures emerged from the darkness and attacked. One of them melded into the shadow of the Knight, dealing him some necrotic damage, while the other melded with the prone Revenant, taking his hit points into negative territory, but not dropping him to unconsciousness yet (Revenants get to keep fighting until they fail a death saving throw).

These shadow creatures turned out to be pretty tough – hard to hit when they were melded with characters, and insubstantial unless hit with radiant damage (which no one in the party could deal). The gargoyles started dropping, but one of them ignored the Knight’s mark to go after the prone Revenant (who, remember, was at negative hit points, but still fighting) – and killed him outright. Negative bloodied value, dead-dead. (This is only the second time I’ve killed a PC as a dungeon master.)

Truly scared now, the remaining five party members did what they could to finish the fight quickly. Our Drow Hunter provoked an opportunity attack from a shadow (a hit – the first against him – bloodied the Hunter) and succeeded in dazing the monster. That shadow was soon finished off, but its partner came after the Drow and knocked him unconscious. The Knight had been brought back from unconsciousness by the Half-Elf Sentinel already, and then fell yet again to the shadows before the Sentinel eventually stabilized him.

Ultimately, our Shade Binder dealt the killing blow to the last shadow monster, and the survivors could catch their breath.

Thoughts

This was a brutal encounter. We lost one PC, although had it been anything other than a Revenant who kept fighting while at negative hit points, we might not have actually lost anyone. Two other PCs ended the fight unconscious, and one was bloodied. The Shade Binder somehow escaped the fight unscathed (my wife’s character, but I swear I didn’t go easy on her – she just stayed out of the way). The Drow Hunter (David, the first-time player) spent four healing surges at the end of the fight and now has a grand total of two remaining for the next three encounters. The Knight took a total of over 60 damage during the fight (hey, achievement!). Brutal, brutal, brutal.

In talking to the players who had played D&D Encounters before, it sounded like the only similarly tough first session was Dark Sun (which I had read about, and I understand that Dark Sun was supposed to be vicious). This felt like a pretty random battle, but man, was it tough. I guess the Shadowfell is meant to be an unhospitable place.

All that said, I think that this party’s particular makeup was not well suited to this encounter. We had multiple controllers, but there were no minions. We had only one defender, and he took a ton of punishment. We had only one leader, and extra healing would have been really helpful (rest in peace, Revenant). And of course, we had no divine characters, so no one could deal radiant damage. A cleric would have rocked against those shadow creatures, but the party had to slog it out the hard way, dealing with the insubstantiality of the shadows.

Wrap-up

All that said, the players legitimately seemed to have a good time, and the newcomer said that he plans to come back next week, bringing a friend. I had fun running the encounter, and I’m looking forward to the next one. I already have set up the first three encounters in MapTool, and I hope to get all 13 in there over the next few weeks. The adventure looks like a lot of fun, and I could definitely see running it again for a home campaign.

The encounter map, with a grid

Heroes of Shadow – My Thoughts

Posted on by
6

I picked up a copy of Heroes of Shadow several weeks ago but only now got around to reading the thing. The content has been pretty thoroughly reviewed by others already, so I’ll try to be brief in sharing my thoughts.

Essentials or no?

First – is this an “Essentials” book? Well, that’s a meaningless distinction to me as I’m fine with PHBs and Heroes of… books at the table. But I understand where the anti-Essentials folks are coming from in referring to Heroes of Shadow as an Essentials book, because it never really acknowledges the existence of the Player’s Handbook options. The races and classes that are referred to in this book all appear either directly in Heroes of Shadow or in Heroes of the Fallen Lands or Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms. There’s no mention of goliaths, wildens, psions, shamans, etc.

That’s not to say there’s nothing that those races and classes can use in this book; the feats are open to them, as are the equipment options, epic destinies and many of the paragon paths. It’s clear, though, that Wizards of the Coast’s new books are designed to be friendly to players who aren’t familiar with the Player’s Handbook options and only know the Heroes of… books. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but I know it irks some people.

Fluff

The first chapter of Heroes of Shadow is fluff about the Shadowfell itself, the ways that characters might tap into shadow power, and the Raven Queen. Good stuff for role-playing and rounding out a character’s background. There’s also a lot of shadowy fluff spread throughout the book in all of the race and class descriptions, and even accompanying the various powers, paragon paths and equipment.

Classes

The classes introduced in Heroes of Shadow are the Executioner Assassin, the Blackguard Paladin, the Vampire (interestingly, no subclass name here) and the Binder Warlock. There are also new powers and the death domain for the cleric, new powers and the Gloom Pact for the Warlock (Gloom Pact is for the Hexblade Warlock only), new powers for the Wizard, and new schools (Necromancy and Nethermancy) for the Mage Wizard.

I won’t opine on the power level of any of these options, as I haven’t played with them yet. My main problem with them is that I just don’t dig the flavor of shadow… which means that I probably shouldn’t have purchased this book! I prefer my characters to be more straightforward heroic rather than dark, tormented anti-heroes or anything like that.

Of the classes presented, I think the Executioner Assassin seems kind of cool and the Blackguard Paladin doesn’t seem at all Paladin-like (he’s a striker rather than a defender). The Vampire is a class that offers no choices – your powers are pre-selected when you pick the class. It doesn’t appeal to me at all. The Binder Warlock seems fine, and if you’re already comfortable playing a Warlock I don’t see any reason that you wouldn’t enjoy this controller version (my wife just started playing one of these). The Cleric and Wizard options let you create a shadowy version of the basic classes, if that’s your thing. Some of the power options might be really strong, but again, that’s not really what I’m looking at.

Races

The races presented are the Revenant, the Shade and the Vryloka (basically a vampire). The Revenant is apparently unchanged from the version that was previously released on DDI (I never used that race, so it was still new to me). The Shade is a human that has embraced the shadows. The Vryloka is, well, a vampire. Meh all around.

Interestingly, there are several pages at the end of the race section devoted to Dwarves, Eladrin, Elves, Halflings and Humans who are “shadowy.” I was a little surprised not to see Tieflings here. It’s pure fluff, of course – examples of certain members of these races who have some connection to the Shadowfell.

Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies, Feats and Equipment

This is the chapter that cemented in my mind that I’m not the target audience for this book. I read through the paragon paths and found a couple of them to be pretty interesting. I have a 10th level Paladin for Living Forgotten Realms games who will soon be entering the paragon tier (my first paragon character), and I considered whether I’d want to take any of these paths. A couple of them had some interesting mechanics and flavor that was almost appealing… but then I saw something like a power that deals cold and necrotic damage. My good-aligned Paladin is not going to want to deal necrotic damage. If this were a home game I could re-fluff it, but not for LFR. And then I realized that if I’m thinking about re-fluffing a Heroes of Shadow paragon path, I’m doing it wrong. These options are for players who want to be shadowy. That’s not me.

One little bonus I’ll mention here is that the Ravenkin paragon path provides the character with a raven familiar. The interesting part is that this page includes the rules for familiars, which were previously only available in Arcane Power (they’re not in the DDI Compendium, frustratingly). So, if you’re a DDI user who’s been annoyed at not having the familiar rules at hand, you might have another reason to get Heroes of Shadow.

Overall

There’s a certain audience who will probably really enjoy Heroes of Shadow. Players who want to run dark characters with shadowy backgrounds now have a ton of options at their disposal. Those types of characters don’t feel especially heroic to me (I have trouble with PHB1 Warlocks, frankly), but that’s not an indictment of the book – it just means that I’m not the target audience. If you want a character who’s brooding and mysterious or perhaps flirting with evil, then you’ll enjoy the options in this book.

Me – I wish I’d passed. Oh well.

Review: Reavers of Harkenwold

Posted on by
19

Last week, I finished running my family campaign (my wife, her brother, and his wife) through the adventure from the Dungeon Master’s Kit, Reavers of Harkenwold.

I should start with a big, public “thank you” to Jeff, the owner of my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds, for loaning me the adventure from the store copy of the DM Kit, gratis. I had no need for the DM Kit book (I already have the Dungeon Master Guides 1 and 2) nor the tokens (I use my MapTool / projector setup for gaming), so I just couldn’t justify spending the money on the entire DM Kit just for the adventure. Jeff loaned it to me on the spot. Great guy, great store!

The Reavers of Harkenwold adventure is, in a word, excellent. It is presented in two separate magazine-type books. The first begins with a thorough overview of the plot of the adventure in both a super-brief format (here are the three or four major points of the plot) as well as a longer format for book 1 that goes over the flow of that section. It continues with some possible adventure hooks, detailed descriptions of the locations the PCs might visit in the adventure (complete with names of shops in towns and so on), and then descriptions of the non-player characters that the party might meet (including their motivations and role-playing tips for the most important NPCs). It then moves into the various encounters that the PCs may meet. Book 2 starts with the plot overview for that book, and then the encounters.

SPOILERS AHEAD. If you plan to play this adventure as a PC and you want to be surprised, I suggest you stop reading now.

The plot is straightforward, in a good way: Free a region of innocents from an evil outside army that has taken over. The players need to gather allies, fight in a large military battle, then infiltrate a keep. Book 1 contains the background material and the allies-gathering, while book 2 has the big battle and the keep.

I ran the game using MapTool online for a party of three PCs. My players were a level above the recommended range for the adventure, so I mostly left the numbers alone (higher-level PCs, but fewer of them than recommended), and it worked out okay. The only encounter that was TOO brutal, in my opinion, was Encounter D4: Yisarn’s Lair from the end of the first book. I removed the traps and one of the monsters from that battle and it was STILL too hard (the players retreated and came back the next day with an elf ally).

There is plenty of information in Reavers of Harkenwold for a party that loves role-playing to really get into the world and its people and their problems. However, that is not the kind of group that I have. My PCs prefer to get into fights and kill bad guys, and this adventure worked just fine for them, too. The order that they ran into the encounters was:

  • E1: Ilyana’s Plight
  • A little role-playing with Reithann, leading to Tor’s Hold
  • T1-T2-T3: The bullywug caverns
  • A little role-playing at Tor’s Hold, then on to the D1 to meet the Woodsinger Elves
  • D2-D3-D4: Liberating the underground lair for the elves
  • D4 again: The party retreated the first time and got a Woodsinger Elf to help them the second time (I made up a simple companion character)
  • E4: Hunted! on the way to Albridge
  • A little role-playing, leading into B1: Battle Plans
  • B2-B3-B4: The Battle of Albridge (Nazin fled when his minions dropped, and just barely got away, even with his action point)
  • Some role-playing to visit Old Kellar in Harken to learn about the Keep, then back to Albridge to talk to Dar Gremath about plans, then back to Harken for the infiltration
  • K1: Infiltrating the Keep. The PCs decided to pretend that one of the PCs was the sister of a Harkenwolder who had joined the Iron Circle and died in the Battle of Albridge, and she had been sent to collect his personal effects from his barracks. I ran this as the “Iron  Circle Poseurs” version of the challenge, more or less, and they succeeded (barely).
  • The party was escorted to the barracks in room 6, where they killed their escorts, went into the empty banquet hall (room 5) and then into the kitchen (room 15) where the servants tried to help.
  • K5: The Great Tower entrance
  • K7: Lord’s Chambers
  • K6: Gaol (after Nazin had already been defeated; the PCs produced Nazin’s head and I had the Mage therefore flee

So, I never ran E2, E3, K2, K3 or K4, and that was absolutely fine. It was refreshing to me that the adventure had more encounters than were required – it made me feel okay about not using all of them.

My players had a good time with the adventure, although they’re rather easy to please – let them kick some butt, and they’re happy. I think a party that likes more plot and role-playing and opportunities for creativity could also get a lot out of this adventure. The back story and information about all of the people and places is really well presented, and I think DMs can find a lot to make use of.

D&D Essentials: The sky has not fallen

Posted on by
6

I originally reviewed the first D&D 4th Edition Essentials book, Heroes of the Fallen Lands, shortly after it was released in September 2010. I’ve gone back to re-read my review, and I still completely agree with everything I wrote back then.

In a nutshell, the Essentials books presented some new build options and new feats and generally felt to me to be pretty much like any expansion books that Wizards of the Coast had published for D&D4e (Martial Power, Arcane Power, Player’s Handbook 2, etc.). Good new options; maybe not every player would use every option, but some would probably come in handy.

Lots of people in the online D&D4e community were worried about the Essentials books – was this a new half-edition? But I think most of that concern dissipated in the end.

Thus, I was surprised when I read Neuroglyph Games’s review of the new Heroes of Shadow book over on EN World (plus the somewhat different version on their blog) and the follow up conversation on the Neuroglyph Games blog. The review of the material was fine and useful (I just got the book today, in part because of the positive review), but the author made it clear that he saw this as an “Essentials” book and was therefore seriously considering excluding it from his no-Essentials campaign (which he referred to as “Traditional 4e” or “Core 4e”). From the poll on his review, he’s not alone – there are apparently a significant number of DMs who run “no Essentials 4e” games.

This baffles the heck out of me. I could understand excluding a book from my table if I feel that it’s inappropriate for the game I’m running, perhaps. Heroes of Shadow, for instance, is probably not going to come into play very much in the games I run because it seems to be aimed more at “dark” campaigns where PCs may be flirting with evil alignments, and that’s not the kind of game I tend to enjoy. That said, I would still allow material from the book if a player asked and it seemed to fit within the campaign.

My approach to DMing is to let the players make the choices they like, but to retain veto power. If a player picks a race that doesn’t fit in my world, I’ll let them know that and ask them to pick something else. If they pick a power that I feel is overpowered relative to the rest of the table, I’ll ask them to pick something different. If they make choices that just don’t make any sense with the rest of their character concept, I’ll ask them to change those choices.

It’s very rare that I ever exercise this veto power, and I’m always very nice about it, trying to work with the player to help them find something that both works within the game I’m running but also makes them happy.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I personally feel that excluding books entirely is a pretty silly way to run a game, unless every single thing in the book is completely out of line with a particular campaign. I have a hard time imagining that the Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms books would be completely out of line with very many D&D 4e campaigns, and I gather that the DMs who exclude them are doing so out of protest against WotC business practices, specifically a feeling that WotC has tried to sneak a half-edition by us without being forthcoming about what it really is.

I think it’s fair to disagree with WotC business practices or misleading statements and to not support the company because of it. But these DMs seem to want it both ways – they want to protest WotC’s behavior but still purchase WotC releases that are “non-Essentials.” I just don’t get it.

If a DM wants to run a non-Essentials game, they can absolutely have a lovely time running a game using all of the material that was published before September 2010 – there was a ton of great stuff already published at that point. Everything published since then will have been written with the existence of the Essentials books in mind, just as material written in the summer of 2010 was written with the existence of Martial Power 2 and Player’s Handbook 3 in mind. To expect WotC to publish books that ignore the existence of Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms is silly, in my opinion. Why would they do that?

Essentials is not D&D 4.5. It’s a bunch of new options, some of which you might love and some of which you might think are a waste of time. I honestly don’t understand why there is so much emotion around this topic. I’m not a DM who feels that the Heroes of… books are the greatest things written for D&D 4e or anything like that – they’re simply fine options, much like PHB2 and PHB3. I don’t see anything disturbing or objectionable about them that would lead me to consider banning those books and everything published in their style from my games. And I truly don’t understand DMs who feel strong, negative emotions about these books.

I wasn’t around for the 3.0 to 3.5 Edition Wars, nor the 3.5 to 4.0 Edition Wars. Maybe I just don’t get it. I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to get it!

It’s the people that matter, not the system

Posted on by
4

I’ve just come home from day 2 of Genghis Con 2011. Day 1 (Thursday evening) I played a game of Savage Worlds – my first non D&D role-playing game. Today I played a game of D&D 4e Living Forgotten Realms, a GURPS game and a Call of Cthulhu game. I intentionally decided that, with this con, I wanted to broaden my RPG horizons.

So far, the only game that hasn’t been much fun was the LFR game, but I know it’s not because of the system – I’ve enjoyed lots and lots of D&D 4e games before. It’s just that the DM wasn’t that great – not too prepared, running skill challenges in a very dice-rolling way rather than a role-playing way, not being especially creative with monster behavior, etc.

The Savage Worlds game was set in a sort of magical steampunk Victorian era. Our characters were basically trying out to be in something like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. We got to rescue Ada Lovelace and some other people from horrible alien egg implantation. The system was pretty easy to follow once I got the hang of it (a variety of dice come into play, with exploding die rolls). My character had the ability to turn into a huge wolf, and his main “disadvantage” was heroism – he would throw himself in harm’s way, with no attention to his own safety. That was fun to role-play.

GURPS was fun in a different way. Again, the mechanic was simple – roll 3d6 and try to get below your skill number. The GM was running us through a crazy kung-fu movie adventure, and the characteristics that we all had were plenty to give us a ton of role-playing opportunities. We had a sexy lady, a dirty cop, a drunk, a naive butt-kicker, and my character – an African with crazy luck, a stutter and a crippling fear of blood. Once we started discovering boxes of machine guns and explosives (thanks in part to my character’s Serendipity), things went nutty. I wouldn’t want to play like this all the time, but the GM had done a great job of creating interesting characters that were easy to get into.

Call of Cthulhu, much to my surprise, was way cool. I’m not really a horror / Lovecraft fan in general, but I was completely open to trying a game where it’s quite likely that everyone in the party will either go insane or die. I’m proud to say that, right at the end of the session, my character did both! This game mostly uses percentile dice, where you try to roll below a target number. I consistently rolled high on sanity checks, which meant that I kept losing sanity. When I got to the point that my character had to spend three hours nearly crippled by bacteriophobia, I think I really stepped up as a role-player. The whole group was well-developed, and even though we ended up “losing” in the end, I think we were very true to what our characters would do (even if it wasn’t heroic).

What’s the common thread? All of the fun games had great game masters and players, all of whom were enthusiastic about the game. I think maybe a game like D&D4e will be less consistently good with public games because there are so many people who play it, not all of whom are big RPG enthusiasts and not all of whom are really skilled at running and playing great games. With niche RPGs, only the people who are really into the game are playing it, which means that it’s more likely that you’ll have a great group of players and an awesome game master. It’s not that the system is better – it’s just that the random distribution of people is better.

As long as you have great people to play with, it doesn’t really matter what game you’re playing – you’ll have a good time.