Author Archives: Michael the OnlineDM

Magic item distribution: Random wish lists

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I have some good qualities as a dungeon master, and I feel like I’m completely competent in most areas of running a fun game. But I do have a major weakness: Magic items.

Somehow, picking out magic items for treasure troves is a task that I put off and put off and put off and sometimes entirely forget about. Last week, I took the time to pick out a bunch of magic items to give to my Friday night players in my online War of the Burning Sky campaign… only to find out that I’d done a lousy job. I picked chainmail that nobody wanted. I picked a +3 rod for the warlock in the party, thinking that she only had a +1; I’d forgotten that she’d gotten a +3 the last time I’d given out treasure. Sigh.

Another option is wish lists, but I’ve never liked wish lists. I once had a DM ask us to put wish lists together, and it just felt… wrong somehow. When you just tell the DM “I want these things” and the DM later says “Here you go,” there’s no magic in the magic items. You know what’s coming.

One of my Friday night players suggested another option that I plan to try: random wish lists. I’ve asked each player to give me a list of three magic items they’d like. They’re at 13th level, so I’ve asked them to list a 14th, 15th and 16th level item (downgrading any spots they like). That is, items of their character’s level +1, +2 and +3.

I have seven players, so if they all participate I’ll have a list of 21 magic items. I’ll pad that out with a few of my own ideas (maybe an artifact, maybe a booby prize, maybe some coins) and create a table. When it’s time to hand out treasure, I’ll roll on that table (openly, in front of the players).

This way, almost everything I give out will be something that somebody wants (except the booby prize, which is intentional), but there’s no certainty that any particular thing will come up at all. I’ll ask for new items at higher levels, so some items may never come up. And if one PC keeps getting lucky, the party might swap things around or turn a few items into residuum to make new stuff (but only new stuff with DM approval). If I roll for an item that’s already been given out, I might roll again or I might give nothing.

I’m going to give this a try and see how I like it. At the very least, I won’t be scrambling to look through the Compendium to find cool items at the last minute (or beyond the last minute).

Have any of you tried anything similar? How has it worked out? Do you have ideas about how to make it better?

200 Posts: My favorites of the second century

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This is post number 201 on my blog, so I thought I’d continue the tradition I started with number 100 of looking back at my previous 100 posts and picking out a few of my favorites. The OnlineDM Greatest Hits, Volume Two:

1. My players are smarter than I am. This post talks about my experience of using player ideas during a session. In this particular example, one of my players mused that he thought the bad guys would try to push a wall over on the PCs. I’d never envisioned that possibility, but it sounded like a great idea, so I ran with it. If your players give you ideas about what might happen and they’re good ideas, use them!

2. Creating D&D converts. Lots of us have friends or family members who we think would enjoy gaming, but it’s tricky to get them into it. This post describes my experience of introducing my brother-in-law and his wife to D&D via Castle Ravenloft and then some Living Forgotten Realms adventures when they visited over Christmas. It obviously worked, since I’m getting ready to run yet another session for them this evening over MapTool even though they’re in Texas. Their characters are at sixth level now, by the way!

3. Bonus points. Lots of DMs have used similar ideas; this is my own take on it. Basically, when one of my players does something creative or cool or especially in-character rather than just focusing on the numbers of combat and tactics, I hand them a bonus point that they can use in the future to add 1 to a die roll they make or subtract 1 from a die roll made against them. They’re great incentives to encourage the kind of play I enjoy.

4. Out of the gaming closet. In my first 100 posts, I had talked about the fact that I’m in the closet at work about gaming; I didn’t mention it to my colleagues out of fear of… I don’t know, ridicule? Well, I’m over that now, and happier for it.

5. Running an online game for new players. I’m really excited about how this particular game went, because I’m such a sucker for introducing people to gaming. In this particular instance, I had some people coming to me online, saying that they wanted to learn D&D but weren’t sure how to go about it. So, I recruited a group and ran a game for them. It was a lot of fun, and something I’d like to do regularly (maybe every few months or so).

6. Tallinn’s Tower. I’m including this post as a representative of my free adventures posts. I’ve posted two so far; Tallinn’s Tower was the second. The third is almost ready, and I’ve just finished a major revision of the first. I’m personally excited about this, although I haven’t gotten much feedback yet. I love free adventures, and I love to share them with the D&D community.

7. My first Pathfinder game. Yes, I’m branching out beyond D&D4e! I love learning new games, and since Pathfinder is so popular I really wanted to learn it. I think that so far I prefer D&D4e, but I do get the appeal of Pathfinder, too.

8. MapTool flexible monster creation. This continues to evolve for me, but I was quite happy with my take on flexible monster creation. I’ve been using this method exclusively since I wrote it, and it’s made monster building much faster. Also, I love the goofy damage dice I can use (2d13+16 for instance).

9. D&D Encounters. I DMed for the Encounters this summer and loved doing it, mainly because of the opportunity to introduce new players to the game. This particular session was great because it was my grand finale (I missed the final week since I was at GenCon), my wife played, and I met a new friend. Encounters was a lot of fun, and I hope to run it again next summer when my Wednesday night bowling league is over.

10. GenCon – D&D New Products Seminar. I have to include this one, even though it has no original material. This is my minute-by-minute note taking from the seminar at GenCon where WotC talked about their plans for the next year. To say that it was a popular post would be an understatement! I typically get around 300 hits per day on my blog; I topped out near 1,500 during the weekend of GenCon when this post was live. You guys love GenCon news!

Thank you all for reading Online Dungeon Master. I’ve really enjoyed having this way of talking to the D&D community and hearing from you, too. Remember that you can also follow me on Twitter as OnlineDM1.

Review: Cairn of the Winter King (Monster Vault adventure)

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Tonight I finished running my family through the Cairn of the Winter King adventure from the Monster Vault. Overall, they seemed to really enjoy the adventure, even more than Reavers of Harkenwold. Of course, this is a party of players who can best be described as Slayers – they want to fight monsters and take their stuff, rather than spending a lot of time on story and such.

We ran this adventure over the course of three sessions, spanning about 12 hours of play. We played the game via MapTool and Skype (my brother in law and sister in law live in Texas while my wife and I live in Colorado). If you’re looking for the MapTool file we used, you can find it here. If you’re looking for my version of the adventure maps, those are here.

Like Reavers of Harkenwold, Cairn of the Winter King is rather non-linear, though for different reasons. Reavers involved political wrangling, traveling around an overland region performing tasks for various groups (in whatever order the party wished) in order to gain their help against an evil overlord before engaging in a big battle and an assault on the overlord’s keep. Cairn, by contrast, is a traditional dungeon delve in which the party is free to explore in any direction they wish. They can run into the various encounters in a variety of orders (though certain encounters are likely to come up later simply by being farther from the entrance).

SPOILERS AHEAD

Critical review

The skill challenge of flying the ship was well done. I like skill challenges that use scenes like this.

There were some cool set piece battles in the adventure, particularly against the tiefling lieutenant in a room with fiery forges. The fight against the gnome illusionists and the otyugh was also quite cool. I also liked the kitchen fight, where the transmuter could slide PCs over to the otyugh’s pit and occasionally turn a character into a piglet or a newt or whatever came to my mind (though this attack seldom worked).

I appreciated that the adventure allowed for some alternatives to combat, although I would have liked a little more discussion of how to handle the Winter King encounter for a party that simply gives him the Scepter and tries to leave (this wasn’t fully explained in the written text).

I wasn’t happy with the extended rest situation. It’s clear that the party is expected to take at least one extended rest and likely two while inside the dungeon, but at the same time there are patrols walking the halls. How do the patrols not find them? Also, technically PCs aren’t allowed an extended rest unless they’ve been adventuring for many hours. That just doesn’t happen here.

Players who want a lot of story probably won’t enjoy Cairn of the Winter King. Players who like cool fights and dungeon exploration will love it.

Narrative review

Cairn of the Winter King begins with the party visiting Fallcrest in the Nentir Vale, where it’s discovered that the whole region (and beyond) has been gripped by an unnatural and vicious winter for weeks. During a meeting to discuss what to do, a dragon-headed ship full of undead creatures flies out of the sky and the creatures start attacking villagers. The dragon head demands the Ice Scepter, and it is soon discovered to have been stolen by a half-elf passing through the area. The adventurers are to take the Scepter, board the dragon ship and fly to the lair of the Winter King to convince him to end the endless winter.

My party grabbed the Scepter and flew off without worrying about bringing the half-elf or anyone else. A skill challenge to pilot the ship to the Winter King’s lair followed. I enjoyed this particular skill challenge, since it’s presented as various scenes that the characters can respond to as they see fit (endure a hailstorm, fix a torn line, etc.). I much prefer this over static skill challenges that say things like, “The PCs must pilot the magical ship. Primary skills include Nature, Athletics, Endurance…”

Once they arrived at the lair, they saw the Cairn itself – a frozen pile of skulls that stands over a cave entrance. The first dungeon combat followed, against a big man who claimed to be the Winter King and who invited the PCs in for a feast. It was soon revealed that there was much illusion in the room – the man’s hunting hounds were Dire Wolves, his attendant was a gnome illusionist, and the feast table was actually covered with dead bodies. A fight broke out, which almost killed my PCs (scaling things intended for a quintet of level 4 PCs down to a trio of level 5 PCs is tricky for me). The gnome escaped, and the party decided they needed a rest, so they bedded down in the comfy beds in this first chamber. They had some bad nightmares, which were supposed to have a negative effect in future battles, but which I let slide.

From there, the party began exploring the lair. They came upon some wraiths that badly hurt them, followed by a run-in with a pair of gnome illusionists who claimed to be the Winter Queen and her attendant. Once the ruse was revealed, the gnomes attacked along with a zombie and a pet owlbear. This encounter was a lot of fun, as the gnomes made triplicates of themselves when they were thinking about fleeing (but the PCs beat them down anyway).

After this battle, the PCs heard some footsteps in the hallway and found themselves fighting a guard patrol (a relatively quick battle). They decided to try to take another long rest after this fight, going back to the beds in the first chamber. I allowed it, even though they really hadn’t been adventuring long enough at this point. After the second rest in the cursed beds, they found themselves suffering a -2 penalty to attack rolls in future battles.

That next battle was in the lair’s kitchen, fighting a human transmuter, a dwarf brawler, and an otyugh in a garbage pit. The transmuter was happy to chat for a while, but when the party was unwilling to just hand over the Scepter he started fighting them. His area burst slide ability was useful for moving the PCs next to the otyugh’s pit, at which point the tentacled beast started feasting on the warpriest. Yum! The party did ultimately prevail with good teamwork (eventually).

Wanting to eliminate the nightmare effect, the party had to take an extended rest elsewhere, but this time I ruled that they hadn’t been adventuring long enough. They decided to just hang out for a few hours in an alchemist’s chamber they had found, which I ruled would get rid of the -2 to attack rolls but not let them recover any surges or daily powers.

Next up was an encounter with a dragon. The frozen dragon had an ice key on a rope around his neck, and the PCs had already found an icy temple door with a ghostly dwarf trying to get them to unlock it. They snagged the key and then turned to fight the now-unfrozen dragon. Eventually they worked their way to the icy door during the fight and used the key, at which point the key melted. Some negotiation with the dragon followed (fortunately, two of the three PCs spoke Draconic) and they convinced the dragon that he could find better food by leaving the dungeon and hunting outside.

From here, the party found a room filled with frozen traps, but they were too nervous to enter. Instead, they explored a ruined library, and the warpriest was excited to discover a potion that would allow her to breathe fire for an encounter. THAT was a big hit in the next battle, where an ettin and two barbarians faced the party in a hallway. This battle normally would have taken place in the trap room, but since the party skipped that room I decided to have the bad guys jump them elsewhere.

At this point the party had gone through three fights since their last true extended rest, so I allowed them to take another one, after which they faced off against the Winter King’s tiefling lieutenant and his ogre and blazing skeleton allies. The party loved discovering that they could dip their weapons into the blue flames of the forge in this room to make them deal extra damage – that was another big hit. They happened to totally rock this battle, too, with only the warpriest taking any damage.

Discovering a fire key on a chain around the tiefling’s neck, the swordmage brought out a javelin and hooked the key’s chain around the end of it (the key was hot and would burn anyone who held it for long) and took it to the temple door that had previously been unlocked with the dragon’s ice key. The temple was filled with ice, but the ice had a keyhole that perfectly suited the fire key, which evaporated the ice. The ghost of the dwarf priest in this room bowed to the party and gave the warpriest back the two healing surges she had lost while fighting the tiefling before fading away in peace.

At this point, the party explored the remaining empty chambers and even tried getting into the vault beyond the trap room (none of them spoke dwarven, so they couldn’t figure out the puzzle) before finally entering the Winter King’s chamber (listening at the door revealed some spooky whispers, so they saved that room for last).

The hunter and warpriest navigated the icy bridge with no trouble, but the swordmage fell off twice. Finally, the warpriest walked up to the frozen skeleton in the throne and slipped the ice scepter into its hand…

Whereupon the Winter King burst from his ice and commanded the PCs to kneel before him. They refused to kneel and tried to reason with him, explaining that they just wanted him to end the winter and let them go. The Winter King spent a few rounds threatening and yelling at the characters, who wisely chose not to attack, instead continuing to talk to him. They got to the icy skeleton after a while (winning the skill challenge), who commanded them to leave and never come back. The swordmage asked him to melt the icy bridge to make her exit easier, which royally (pun intended) ticked off the Winter King, who threw a bolt of ice at the swordmage as a parting shot. Never ask the Winter King to melt ice!

At this point the magical cold from the outside world began rushing into the Winter King’s lair, and the party hightailed it out of there, hopped on the now-icy dragon ship and flew back to Fallcrest. The winter was over – mission accomplished.

As I said, the group had fun with the adventure. Give my party lots of fights and they’ll be happy. A story-loving party might not have as much fun, but there was nifty stuff for most types of players in the Cairn of the Winter King.

Fantastic D&D song – Tonight by Allie Goertz

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Here is a fantastic song about playing Dungeons and Dragons released by a California woman named Allie Goertz (she goes by the online handle CossbySweater on Twitter). It’s called “Tonight”. Naturally I love songs about D&D, and Allie’s voice is just beautiful. She has a couple of other songs, too – one about comedians and another inspired by the Steve Martin movie “The Jerk“.

Allie has also made Tonight available as a download where you get to pick your own price. I paid a dollar, and I feel like I need to go back and pay more now – the download version includes harmony in the vocals. I’m a total sucker for harmony, so, wow.

Check it out, and if you like it, throw Allie some money for the downloadable version. I think it’s worth it!

Running my third homemade D&D4e adventure at the FLGS

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Woo hoo – I finally got to run the third adventure in my Staff of Suha trilogy tonight! (Adventure one and adventure two have been previously published.) I ran it as a MyRealms game at my friendly local game store. This was the inaugural run of the adventure, so it’s still a work in progress, but it was so much fun.

First, I should mention that my players were awesome. I had a father and son at the table whom I’ve played with before (I love multi-generational gaming families). I had a new player who was playing his third game of D&D ever – super nice guy.

And I had a husband and wife pair; I had met the husband a few weeks ago at D&D Encounters when he was a brand new player, and I managed to kill off his character in that first session. We’ve kept in touch, and his wife was excited about playing, too. The wife made homemade gluten-free cookies for me and my wife (who’s allergic to gluten) to thank me for helping with their characters and getting them into the game tonight. How sweet is that? I really, really like this couple, and I’m hoping that I’m making some new friends here.

Anyway, the adventure itself started off with a little exposition, then moved into the first action scene. I won’t go into too much detail here; I’ll put up a full post about the adventure itself once it’s polished (after I run it at Tacticon over Labor Day weekend). Suffice it to say that the first battle began with the PCs in total darkness. I forgot some of the abilities I had given to the leader of that fight, but it was still a good battle. Lots of PCs were bloodied, but none fell unconscious. The party interrogated the leader, who gave them some information but then died in anguish (he evidently said too much). And the party discovered one of the three artifacts they were seeking.

We had some exploration after that. This was technically a skill challenge, though I’m running it as several scenes that each have their own success and failure consequences. I really, really liked this approach, and the way that the PCs worked together. I’m getting farther away from the formal skill challenge structure and closer to just scenes that use skills. This particular challenge consists of three scenes, followed by a combat encounter, followed by the final scene.

The second combat encounter began with some sneaking and spying and conversation, but erupted into battle when the assassin in the party had to be true to his nature and took a swing at a bad guy.

I skipped the final skill challenge scene because we were running way short on time, and just threw the PCs into the final battle with fewer minions than I originally planned. I was pleased that the party took advantage of two different terrain effects in this battle, and even though I forgot about a mini skill challenge that was supposed to be running during the boss battle, it was a cool fight. The boss wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped, but he wasn’t bad.

Enemy lair with ziggurat and magma river - no grid

I ultimately had to end the battle early because the store was closing, so I declared victory for the PCs and called it a night.

Lessons learned:

  • I need to shrink some of the encounter maps. One map has some terrain effects that work in blast areas; an overly-large map encourages the monsters to spread out too much, making the terrain effects less attractive.
  • Minions that explode upon death are fun, but only in moderation. I think my second battle is overdoing it. Maybe I’ll make them non-minions and have fewer of them.
  • If I’m going to give the PCs cool magic items to use during the adventure, I don’t want it to be too hard for them to figure out what the items do. I think I’ll have this auto-succeed during a rest (I was previously requiring an Arcana check).
  • Players are easily tempted by treasure. If you dangle something valuable-looking just out of reach (literally, in this case), they will move heaven and earth to get it.
  • Having an in-game time limit does a nice job of ramping up the tension (and provides an incentive not to take back-to-back short rests to maximize healing powers).

I hope to run this adventure once for my home game players before Tacticon. Once I feel that it’s polished, I plan to release it on the blog, and then I plan to release the whole trilogy (edited and updated) as a single big adventure. I’d like to make it look a little bit pretty, too, and I’d be willing to pay for some help with layout and maybe even commission some artwork. Does anyone have suggestions on this sort of thing? How do I find and hire a freelance layout person?

Missing D&D Encounters already

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Tonight begins the new season of D&D Encounters… and I’m not running a game. The story behind this is twofold.

First, my wife and I are in a bowling league on Wednesday nights. The league starts up on August 31, so I won’t be able to run Encounters after that. Thus, I can’t be a regular DM this season (though I will occasionally be a backup, running a 5:00 PM table if the regular DM is not available).

Second, my friendly local game store wasn’t planning to run this season of Encounters until recently, much to my surprise. They’ve been running Encounters every season so far, and I thought things had been going well, but with Lair Assault starting soon the store owner was planning to just run that and skip Encounters. He changed his mind when the Encounters players last week got upset that there wouldn’t be a game.

So, he belatedly ordered materials for this season of Encounters, but they haven’t arrived yet. We’ll probably be running the first two encounters in a single session next week.

Has anyone else seen a store that was dropping Encounters in favor of Lair Assault? I was shocked when I heard this suggestion, since they’re aimed at completely different groups (casual and new players versus hard-core optimizers).

GenCon update: Mordenkainen on Amazon or not?

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I realized with my follow-up post from GenCon that I still had some confusion about what Mike Mearls was saying during the D&D New Products Seminar about the availability of Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium online. So, I went to The Tome Show’s recording of the seminar and decided to transcribe what Mike said during the relevant section. The section of the Tome Show recording starts at 1:29:10 and runs until 1:30:08 (just about a minute) based on my download of the episode from iTunes.

The added emphasis on the section about Amazon is mine.

Questioner: What about Mordenkainen’s….

Mike Mearls: Oh, so that’s something too where we are selling into hobby stores, but plenty of those stores, they have an online presence; there are stores that’ll have a presence in Amazon, so you will, if you shop online, still be able to get it. We want to make sure people just can’t get the book, but… and Amazon could order it. Like, they will have the ability to order from us, because we are just really changing how we’re handling the distribution of that book. So. But, it’s definitely something you can still buy online I’m sure, and there are plenty of game stores that have online presences that are discounting, or free shipping and such. So, but it’s really, it’s our, one of the things we really wanted to is really help game stores be a place where people are going to. ‘Cause that’s how we can ensure the game remains healthy. And the industry as a whole, it’s a pretty complex ecosystem. At the end of the day, we can’t just walk away from game stores. Without game stores, we just, probably can’t survive. And that’s a hard sale to make to the guy who’s like, “Well I can just take my graph paper, my pencils and my Player’s Handbook,” and never need US again, so we definitely are aware of that and try to balance that.

After re-listening to that passage and typing it up, I feel better about being confused; Mike Mearls presented it rather confusingly. I’m guessing that he’s saying they normally distribute books to Amazon through some other wholesaler, and Amazon gets fantastic pricing. For Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium, however, they’re changing the way they distribute the book. It will still apparently be available for Amazon to order, but not via their normal channels – and, I think most importantly, not at their regular price.

Also, I’m assuming that Mike just misspoke when he said, “We want to make sure people just can’t get the book.” I’m sure he meant that they did NOT want a situation where people just can’t get the book if they don’t live hear a hobby store, so they want there to be some form of online distribution for those people.

I’m pretty sure the goal here is to make it hard for anyone to undercut your friendly local game store on price when it comes to MME. I don’t understand exactly how WotC will be doing that, but then I’m not a book retailer or distributor.

Post Script: By the way, my count has Mike’s answer at 229 words, spoken in approximately 56 seconds. That’s a rate of 245 words per minute. According to Wikipedia, audio books tend to be recorded at around 150-160 words per minute, which is the comfortable hearing and processing range for most people. 250 words per minute is auctioneer pace. The man can speak at a rapid clip!

GenCon 2011: Afterword

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GenCon is now over, for real. And I’m okay with that. I had a ton of fun, and if I were living GenCon every day it wouldn’t be as special.

I’m writing this particular post from my room at the Marriott – my wife and I decided to stay Sunday night and go home to Colorado on Monday. This was a good way to do it, since we were able to enjoy all of Sunday without having to worry about checking out of our hotel or scrambling to catch a flight or anything like that.

It also meant that I was able to do some gaming Sunday night. I put out a call on Twitter to see if anyone was around the Marriott post-Con and wanted to play some games, and I ended up playing a fun game of Smallworld Underground and having a nice dinner with four new Canadian friends. Cool people, cool game, and good food.

Quick-hit thoughts from GenCon

  • The RPG blog reading community loves GenCon. I got a lot of traffic on my blog during the Con. I’m glad you liked reading what I had to say!
  • The RPG blog reading community especially loved reading my detailed notes about the Wizards of the Coast New Products Seminar on Saturday. I’m not surprised, really, but my normal daily traffic is 200-400 hits per day; Saturday and Sunday had nearly 1,500.
  • True Dungeon is a must-experience part of GenCon. It costs $38 per person, but it’s worth it. And the token-trading community around it is amazing!
  • Watching all of the costumed attendees is a ton of fun. They’re clearly proud of the work they put into the outfits, and they all seemed happy to pose for pictures (though I personally wasn’t in picture-taking mode).
  • I think the way to try out RPGs you’ve never played before at GenCon is to sign up for a session in advance, which is a little disappointing. I was hoping to stumble into someone looking for another player for old-school D&D, Traveller, Dresden Files, Fiasco, etc., but it never happened.
  • Staying at a hotel connected to the convention center isn’t cheap, but if you can afford it, it’s money well spent. I loved not having to drag a heavy bag with me at all times, since it was easy to drop stuff off and pick stuff up back at the room.
  • Getting food at the convention was not the problem I feared it would be. The sit-down restaurants even a couple of blocks from the Con were able to seat us quickly every time, and if we went, say, 5 or 6 blocks away we pretty much had the place to ourselves. There’s no real place to buy groceries, though (I was glad I took care of this on Tuesday when I was staying on the north side of town for work).
  • The temptation to game late into the night was easy for me to resist, as I really enjoy a good night’s sleep. Had I given in to that temptation I probably would have had miserable days of exhaustion. Heading back to the hotel around midnight worked well for me.
  • Twitter is beautifully suited to GenCon. Being able to send out a quick blast to find people for a pick-up game is great. It’s also a good way to find out the location of people you want to meet.
  • I really enjoyed getting to meet so many members of the RPG blogging and podcasting community, and I wish I had met more. I at least said brief hellos to NewbieDM, Jeff Greiner, Mike Shea, Tracy Hurley, Thaddeous Cooper, Randall Walker, Ameron from Dungeon’s Master, BrainClouds, and Matt James. I also met Morrus and PirateCat from EN World and some other EN Worlders. I missed out on meeting Ryan “RangerWickett” Nock, which I horribly regret, but I never knew where he was.
  • Meeting folks like Mike Mearls, James Wyatt, Rob Thompson and Mike Robles from WotC was pretty cool, too.
  • Running into a friend from California who I hadn’t realized would be there was awesome, and he had two other awesome friends with him. Good stuff.

Clarifications

I also wanted to post some follow up comments about the D&D New Products Seminar from Friday. First, I did do a little light editing before I sent it live (a quick read-through to correct a few typos or unclear sentences, plus adding a little bold facing to the various new announcements); I wasn’t planning to do that when I wrote the intro, but decided I really ought to do a basic amount.

Second, I wanted to add some clarifications after a post on Greyhawkery to which I responded in the post’s comments. Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium is intended to only be available to game stores, though those stores themselves are allowed to sell it online. However, Mike Mearls did say something about Amazon being able to buy it, but this part was really unclear. I think the intention is to make it so that Amazon et al are not able to offer the book at a massive discount relative to what hobby stores charge, but it wasn’t clear how they were going to do that.

Also, Greyhawkery offered speculation that next year’s setting will be Council of Wyrms. I wasn’t familiar with that setting, but he linked to a post from NewbieDM in which the original was unboxed. From having sat in the room at the WotC seminar, I agree that Council of Wyrms would fit their description of next year’s setting.

Thank you – come again!

So, thank you everyone for reading my GenCon posts. If you have questions about any of it, please let me know. And I’m always happy to have more readers for my usual talk about running games online, creating maps, using a projector setup with MapTool and so on. Comment, email, etc. – I appreciate the feedback!

GenCon 2011 Day 4: The End

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And so it ends – GenCon 2011 is coming to a close. Today was all Exhibitor Hall, all the time. I hung there for an hour on my own, finally working my way to the far end of the hall, having seen all of the booths (however briefly). I chatted with the people from Fantasy Grounds; of the many virtual tabletop programs I checked out at GenCon, Fantasy Grounds is the one that would actually make me consider switching from MapTool (though it would cost me $150). I stopped by the Ennies booth to pick up my swag bag to thank me for volunteering on Friday. It contained a whole bunch of books – unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to get much use out of most of them (although Mythmere’s Adventure Design Deskbook looks intriguing). There was a nice mini in the bag, though, that will be great for one of my wife’s characters.

I then brought my wife over to the Exhibitor Hall and we did some shopping. She picked up a Dragon Pet (a rubber dragon that wraps around her arm), a copy of Caylus Magna Carta (a board game she played last night), some minis and some paints. Also, a purple cat tail to wear on her belt (we intend it ultimately as a toy for our cats).

We admired the Dwarven Forge and Hirst Arts terrain. We drooled a bit more over the Geek Chic tables (especially one that was filled with awesome Hirst Arts terrain). We tried to find T-shirts but didn’t really see anything that struck our fancy (I’m still shocked at that). I caught up one last time with Jason, the player from my Friday night online game who lives here in Indianapolis.

On the way out of the convention center, we stopped into the video game room where people were playing Kinect games and Rock Band projected hugely onto the walls, as well as playing other games while sitting at normal computers. The “center stage” area had people playing one of the original 8-bit Nintendo Mega Man games. Too cool.

And thus ends our experience with the best four days in gaming. We’re staying one more night in Indianapolis to give ourselves a chance to rest before getting back to real life. We get home Monday night. It has been a ton of fun, and I feel confident in saying that this first GenCon will not have been my last.

GenCon 2011 Day 3 wrap-up

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Sorry for not having an evening post for Saturday; I was gaming late into the night.

After the D&D New Products Seminar, I spent about an hour in the vendor hall. I bought myself a nice mini to represent my beloved bard, Factotum, from Dark Sword Miniatures. I don’t think I’d heard of that brand before, but they had some great options. I love the way miniatures sellers at GenCon display their wares by having glass cases filled with beautifully painted versions of their minis, so you can imagine what they could look like. You find one you like in its finished form, and they’ll sell you the unpainted version. It makes a ton of sense.

From there, I went to a late lunch at Shapiro’s with a couple of friends. This is a huge deli / cafeteria about a half mile walk from the convention center, and I had a delicious reuben sandwich. A nice thing about this place is that it was all Indy locals; I don’t think I saw any other GenCon folks there. If you’re eating where the locals eat, you’re probably getting a good meal. Amusingly, I put up a tweet mentioning this lunch, and then later in the day saw that @ShapirosDeli was following me. I guess they pay attention to social media! I wouldn’t have guessed based on the place itself, but okay.

After lunch was a little more time in the exhibitor hall, then to the 4:00 taping of the Dungeon Master Roundtable podcast. Being the D&D blog and podcast fan that I am, this was something I’d really been looking forward to all weekend, and it was great. Aaron from 4Geeks4e wasn’t on the panel, but they had Tracy Hurley (Ennie-award nominated Sarah Darkmagic – wild cheering, much to her embarrassment), Randall Walker (the “old man” of the group), Thaddeous Cooper (the frequent-talker – and yes, I actually saw him sip from a flask during the taping after his water cup went dry) and special guest Mike Shea of slyflourish dot com slash book. They spent a little time talking about the future of their podcasts (apparently some changes to the lineup of 4Geeks4e – Aaron won’t be in it?) and then basically took questions from the audience for an hour. I had a ton of fun.

Tip for seminars at GenCon (or anywhere, really): Sit in the front row. There have always been seats available in my experience, and dude, you’re there to get close to people you want to listen to! You can even interact (very briefly) during the talk itself if you’re right up there with the panelists. For both seminars I attended (D&D New Products and the DM Roundtable), I sat right in the front and really enjoyed it.

By this point my wife was in the exhibitor hall, so I joined her for some massive dice shopping for herself and for our gaming friends back home (my wife is so thoughtful – I felt like an ass for not having already gotten anything for our gamer friends). When the dealer hall closed at 6:00, we went to dinner at Palomino, which is only a block away. I read some blogs before the convention saying that you’re going to have long waits to get food; we really haven’t found that to be the case. We’ve often gone during slightly off hours, but right when the dealer hall closes on Saturday night is NOT off, and we were seated right away. I’m guessing that maybe cheap eats have longer waits (like Steak n Shake or Noodles and Company right down the street from GenCon), but sit-down restaurants (Palomino, Weber Grill) have been no problem so far.

After dinner, the wife and I checked in to the board games library. For the evening, you pay $6 in generic tickets and then can come and go as much as you like, checking out any of the massive number of board games they have available for no additional cost. The window lasts from 6:00 PM to 3:00 AM. It’s awesome.

My wife and friends got started on the board games while I made my way to the “media meet and greet” event. This was a get-together in a bar that’s below Union Station (it’s called The House, and Google Maps on my phone couldn’t find it). I’m terrible at mingling, but I gave it a go. I talked with Mike Shea for a few minutes, since we had interacted a little bit at the DM Roundtable. I had submitted a question asking about ideas for traps or hazards for the adventure I’m running on Thursday (Descent Into Darkness), and Mike gave me some good inspiration. Thanks, Sly Flourish!

I spent some time chatting with NewbieDM and BrainClouds, and then ended up getting into a conversation about D&D4e and Pathfinder with a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Sarah Darkmagic (Tracy and Frank). I didn’t catch his name, but it was useful to see his perspective on the issue. I imagine he’s a pretty typical Pathfinder gamer, and he didn’t seem especially rabidly anti-4e, but it was clear that he’s definitely the type of person WotC wishes they could regain trust with, and they’re nowhere close right now. They’ve got some work to do, and it’s going to take more than words. I hope they succeed – I’d love to see a more united gaming community, or at least one with less distrust.

At this point, a woman from a local Indianapolis paper came over to the table to chat (she liked my bright-blue Hawaiian shirt). I guess this WAS a media event, but I was still surprised to see anyone from the actual print media there! She said she and her husband mainly came in the (alas, vain) hopes of free beer. Anyway, we mainly talked about Indianapolis restaurant, their Fringe Festival for theater, etc. Nice lady… but wow, did she love to talk! Still, she gave me some good restaurant recommendations.

I left the media meet and greet after about 90 minutes (I wish I’d have stayed – apparently some Fiasco games broke out later) and rejoined my wife and friends in the board game library. We saw a game called Trailer Park Wars and simply had to play it once. Once is the correct number of times to play a game like this. It was really, really funny to us at this point, but I’m sure it would have gotten old. I was tied for second place with 23 flamingos at the end, falling to Ryan’s 24.

After the game I was getting tired, so we decided to play one more quick game. We went with Quo Vadis. I’ll come right out and say that I personally ruined the game right at the start, and I’m sorry! It was described as a political game, which I thought meant that politics was just the underlying flavor. It turns out that this can be seen as a perfectly fine trading game without the political flavor, but I didn’t get that for the first few turns. See, I can’t stand politics. And when Ryan asked if I would vote for one of his pawns to advance early on, for which he would give me nothing directly but the game would give me one point, I couldn’t see how this would be good for me at all, and I basically said, screw it, I’m not voting for people. This totally wrecked the game, and I backed off on that position two turns later once I understood that this was just at trading game, but my early actions had definitely screwed up the play of the game (Ted thought that I’d never work with him, so he never asked, for instance). I finished in last place, which didn’t bother me in the slightest. I just felt like a jerk for having ruined the last game I’d get to play with Ryan and Ted and GenCon. Sorry, everybody!

Now it’s the morning of the last day of GenCon, and it’s already feeling bittersweet even though I haven’t left my hotel room yet. We’re staying Sunday night as well, and I’m sure that Monday will feel surreal. But for now, there are hours of gaming ahead of me, and I’m going to make the most of them!