World of Alidor » 4e

4e one more time

shent_lodge — Tue, 11 May 2010 02:42:36 +0000

Just as a sanity check, I tried 4e one more time. My neighbor plays 4e and he said I should try it with his group, just to see how it is played as a home game. Before his invitation, all my actual play time with this game system was either at a world wide game day, or as part of a RPGA event. The neighbor thought I should give it another chance, over at his house.

The game was fun, and the players and DM were all cool. What I got out of the game session was: My neighbor is extremely serious about gaming, and D&D in particular. He had the ultimate table built from MDF board (48x97inch) that he had hand drawn a 1inch battle grid onto and then he urethane coated it to protect the table from food and soda spills. He also had a server with Character Builder on it and three or four laptops so people could remote desktop into the server and update and then print out their PCs to a networked color laser jet. He also had a projector and an eight foot screen to project game maps. Serious gear, light years from pen and paper. I thought I was cool for having my game world on the web and an iPad.

Did I mention the buffet? The guy had a buffet with three different snack dishes nachos, tacos and chicken wings, all in food warmers next to a fridge full of pop. For my Tuesday games, I buy Papa Johns pizza to eat with the wife and kid before the game, and the players get leftovers. At my neighbor’s, I was waiting for a guy in a tux with white gloves to offer me horse-dovers… They said they always have about the same amount of food at each game. Wow.

He asked me at the end what I thought. I said I loved the food and the company, but I was unchanged on 4e, mainly because I sold off all of my 4e books, and that I just was not feeling it anymore. I suppose my 3.5 group and my Pathfinder group fill my gaming needs well enough.

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30 years of books

shent_lodge — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:44:18 +0000

I stacked all my dungeons and dragons books that I could find on my game table. I am one of those one genre gamers. I like fantasy role-playing games, and until this year that meant only one system, Dungeons and Dragons. Over the years I tried Shadowrun, Boot Hill, Traveler, Gamma World, but I never played them more than a couple times. Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, always held my interest, probably because of the Hobbit and Conan books I had read as a kid. I like to have dragons, elves, wizards and from time to time, a token little person as part of the theme when I game, all that plus cool magic stuff. If a game didn’t have those elements I didn’t play it.

30 years of books:

1980 to 1999 these are the books I bought to support my hobby:

I bought nearly every module made for AD&D and focused a lot on the Forgotten Realms, I also have a huge collection of Dungeon magazines.

2000-2008 I was way into 3e of the game I bought all of these, somehow I am missing about 10 books, so the stack should be higher.

Here from 2000-2008, I deviated a bit, I stopped consuming extra game material, and created Alidor for my game world and bought maybe 4 modules and three dungeon magazines. I started playing in the RPGA in 2003 and got all my modules for free after that.

2008-2009 Wow, it is so bizarre how many books I bought in such a short time, and had I not just, “up and quit”, 4e altogether, I’d most likely be buying the Players Handbook 3 this month…

2009-2010 Two books and my final goodbye to my favorite franchise.

Pathfinder picks up were 3e left off, but they added adventure paths like the Council of Thieves, where you can run complete campaigns from 1st level straight out to retirement at oh, about 15th level+. I am vague on the the whole adventure path things still. I can say, that for the first time in ten years, I have actually thought about buying more than the first three modules written for a game system. Paizo must be doing something right.

The best part about all those 4e books, when I traded them in, I got 100 bucks worth of cool “in store” credit, I told the guy I could honestly only take 80 bucks for the stuff, If I took more I wouldn’t sleep well at night. With my credit, I grabbed these two games to try:

Good bye 4e! Goodbye Dungeons and Dragons! The first 29years were great, last year not so much…

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My root canal was more fun than my 4e game this week

shent_lodge — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:46:20 +0000

I tried it again. Dumb me. I thought after a couple months off I would give LFR a go again. Big mistake. I drove two hours to hit a two game RPGA session at a hobby store. It was -8 degrees outside, and it was just about that cold at the game table during the first session. Important note to self, do not play a third level PC at a table of power gamers, if you don’t remember the rules too well. As you all know combats in 4e can go on, and on, and on… So I was asking guys around me, quick little questions about this and that, like, can I shift and mark at the same time. “No you can do one or the other!” Replied one player. What if my ability says… “No you can only mark at the end of movement. Come on! Read the rules!” I was just making conversation. I mean, it took and hour and a half to go through 18 seconds of combat in game time. I was trying prep ahead for my turn so I would get through my actions quicker. I did pretty well considering my mental haze from not playing recently.

By the second game, I was back up to speed, and started having fun again. The table changed out and I really had a good group of players around me. I was having so much fun being more unaligned than being the lawful good goliath that I was. If I continue, I will change my alignment.

Here are cool the things I observed:
The reintroduction of the javelin as a primary weapon
Who would have thought? Apparently RPGA games are being written with foes up and out of melee range. The power gamers retorted with the magic javelin. It just has be +1 magic and you can throw it, and it returns 40 minutes later, I mean, 6 seconds in game time, to your hand, to be chucked again. It has a decent range increment and decent damage and is perfect for the fighter types out there. It also fits into my generalization that the 4e PCs are all Jedi. It seemed like everyone around me had one, kinda like the way a light saber is the “trademark” of the Jedi, the javelin is the “trademark” of the 4e adventurer.

I still had my lame +1 flaming Maul. I had a ranged weapon too, but it was a mundane crossbow, I had to use amo, consumables, OK crossbow bolts… And people laughed at me… Come on, I had a root canal this week! How was I supposed to know I needed to have a javelin too.

The RPGA writers are getting better with skill challenges. Really they are. The players still expect to know what to roll to get through the challenge, they get conditioned that way, but even the DMs said they liked the last few modules skill challenge encounters. So good job LFR writers!

Was there anything else cool? Well, no, 4e still sucked. What really mattered was not the 4e game, but just being there at the table with some friends, and some strangers, joking and having fun at least during my second game. We laughed, and actually roll-played a bit. My PC jumped through a window with the party thief to get away from the local law. I am the law, normally, that PC is, and I never do that. I got caught up in the shenanigans of the thief and had a blast. That said, 4e is fun when you have a fun group to play it with. I just feel out of sync most of the time, where in the Pathfinder RPG, I can roll play just the same and an arrow is far better a weapon than a javelin, like it should be.

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4e Holiday Crack That Saves You Money

shent_lodge — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:53:48 +0000

The holidays are here and maybe you want to try the latest version of Dungeons and Dragons, but the books too expensive. Do not let the price of this popular fantasy role-playing game get you down. WotC marketing may want you to feel like you need every book to play the game, but really, you don’t. When I said I wanted to give up on the 4e game, a few people commented that they had found legal ways to reduce cost and still play and be on top of all the latest and greatest 4e crack.

Here are those tips.

If you DM you need:

H1 Keep on Shadowfell because it comes with a quick summary of the rules. This will help you introduce the 4e rules to new players without having to buy any books. You can download it from WotC here.

Buy a subscription to Dungeons and Dragons Insider (DDI) this will get you everything you need to play plus all the updated rules. One year should do, subscription wise. If you have a laptop then you can share this info with your players. You don’t need the books. Note: don’t share you account with your players.

A battle mat. Don’t waste money on the WotC dungeon tiles, draw out the map with wet erase pens and wash away with Windex or water. Be careful with red ink, it is the worst color to leave on the mat for extended periods. Like: days=bad… Paper tiles get ruined after soda and juice spills and don’t travel well, you will lose pieces. I have had the same battle mat since 1989.

Join the RPGA and download free modules and run games from your home or local game store. You can play for years without ever buying a dungeon module this way plus you can travel the country/world and play your same PC everywhere. I have a friend who travels for work and he checks for games on yahoo groups and Warhorn in the area he is traveling to and joins them after he gets done working for the day.

If you are the player:

Buy a subscription to Dungeons and Dragons Insider (DDI)

Start collecting 20oz bottle caps. Use the caps to track conditions. Don’t forget to recycle.

Buy plastic trading card protectors for encounter and at will powers that you print out with the DDI Character Builder. I just print out the character sheet and power cards and leave them intact.

Buy a Miniature figure that represents your Player Character. Be careful if you join the RPGA the WotC minies are common and I sat at a table with three other goliath minies besides mine, we had to wrap them in different colored rubber bands to tell the apart.

You Don’t need:
Dungeon Tiles
Power Cards
DM screen

You have to have:
Dice
A calculator
A computer running Windows OS or an Intel Mac with Parallels running XP-pro SP2
A place to play

If for the holidays, you are trying to convince parents or a significant other that you want to play Dungeons and Dragons these suggestion here could save you $290.00 a year and you don’t have to worry about erratas making your books obsolete almost immediately after purchase.

If you must buy the books, buy them second hand. Check local hobby stores for second hand deals. I found stores in college towns will have a decent collection of these on or around the holidays as students sell them off to pay for trips home.

Thanks Greentiger, Anarkeith & Olfactatron for their comments on the subject

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Tracking Combat Conditions -20oz soda loops

shent_lodge — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:38:28 +0000

I had to drink Diet Coke to write this, so please bare with me. Conditions during combat can be very frustrating to track. A couple players in the 4e RPGA group I game with found a neat approach to tracking that worked good with miniatures in the game. One guy likes to use loops from 20 ounce plastic drink bottles, so find some with different colored caps like I did here and we can use those to help track combat conditions. Others in the past have suggested pipe cleaners, but those are harder to find than 20 ounce sodas.

So here to help me out is a caimen fighter and a uber beast. The caimen entered the room and lost initiative to the uber beast which dazed the fighter.

Unfortunately the caimen fails to end the daze and is now slowed by the beast and secondary damage by uber beast makes her blind.

I am using a fork to get the loops off the bottles. Doing this on empty bottles help reduce spills.

The caimen is in trouble now. Failing all roles she is dazed, slowed, blinded and now the uber beast marks her with its next attack which also makes her immobilized and bloodied.

We could have used colored foam pads cut from stock bought at a craft store. I tend to use colored plastic magnets in my games for all medium monsters and I just mark the magnet with wet erase marker when a monster is dazed or bloodied. The flat magnets are not as cool as the figure WotC wants you to buy but it gets the job done and the players don’t seem to mind.

In the end I like the pads because it is easier to see the player’s mini.

The bottle caps made my caimen look like a hula hoop champion. Imagine six players and ten monsters all adorned with plastic hoops, sliding and shifting around the battle mat.

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