/var/log/vadept.log

I haven’t really said much here about D&D 4th edition or what my feelings were about it.  I really wanted to get my hand on a book, and actually play a game before I blasted on how much it sucks like most of the other D&D players on the internet.  So have just gotten back from my first game, here is my $0.02.

• Character Creation
  • Coming from 2nd edition with zany math, and having that simplified to the 3.5ed rules, making a 4th ed character was quite a shock.  I got the feeling that I was making a computer-game character with “Here are your 2 choices for a Warlord”.  The skills have been cut down so far that you can’t have a rouge that is good as forgery, disguise, and spying; It’s all been lumped together into “thievery”.  You can’t have a character that cant spot anything in front of his face but find a needle in a haystack if he/she is putting his mind to it.  Major skills are all lumped together into these broad reaching categories that really kills it for me.
  • The powers.  You have your at-will powers, your daily powers, your encounter powers, and utility powers.  In fact, WotC makes these cute little cards you can /buy/ so you can have all of your powers right at your fingertips.  Thats right, your choices now short of movement and basic attack have resorted down to little cards.  Let me peg you into little holes now.  Oh, did I mention that no matter what character class you are, everyone follows the exact same progression as to how many at-will, daily, encounter and utility powers you get? Wizards get cantrips, and certain classes get a few speciality powers, but the majority of everything is flat across the board and level dependant.
  • 1/2 your level bullshit.  Most all saves and AC have a positive modifier of 1/2 your level.  Thats right, the wizard, rogue, and cleric all get the same bonus based upon 1/2 of their level.  Long gone are the days of the Cleric actually having a better Reflex save when they are flat footed (and denied their Dex bonus of -3 from full plate) than when they see it coming.  Everyone gets treated equally.
• Saving throws
  • I dislike this so much that it gets its own section
  • In the 3.5 days, you would get a collection of modifiers to your Fort/Reflex/Will saves.  They come from your ability scores, feats, armor, etc.  When someone casted a spell on you; you would roll a d20, add your modifiers, and if the resulting number was higher than the DC of the power being used on you then it had little to no effect.
  • In the 4.0 days, you have a number that is like 10 + 1/2 your level + ability modifier.  The attacker now rolls and determines if he/she succeeds.  Saving throws in 4th ed are like attack rolls in 3.5.  You have a set number that you cant change, you cant roll a 20 to resist, you cant have that uber-god roll a 1 and fail.
  • The whole 1/2 level flat-across-the-board really bugs me.  Before the bonuses to your saving throw was 100% dependant on your class, not just what level you are.  A level 20 rogue should not have the same bonuses to his will or fort save that a level 20 cleric does, and a level 20 wizard should have a reflex save even close to what a rogue has.  4th ed obviously thinks differently.
• Healing Surges
  • Mechanically I have no idea where they got the idea where characters can just spontaneously heal when the conditions are right.  Every character has these ‘healing surges’ where they recover 1/4 of their hitpoints when conditions are met.  Clerics don’t really have any “Healing Powers” anymore per se, they just allow people to use up their healing surges.  Paladins use their healing surges to heal others with ‘lay on hands’, warlords can command people to use their healing surges.  So really why do we have clerics when every other class out there seems to have a power that allows characters to spend /their/ own healing surges on themselves?   Don’t really care for that.  How can a fighter just spontaneously heal after a Warlord gives him a pep-talk?  Why do healing potions just allow you to use a healing surge instead of actually healing you.  If you drink a healing potion and you have used up your healing surges between rests, then you just wasted a potion!  Its a hackish way of getting around the age old problem of not being able to heal unless you had a Cleric, Paladin, or a Bard in your party (uh, boo hoo? Make someone play a Cleric!  You wouldn’t march into melee with a rogue and a wizard would you?)
• Its so easy any idiot can play!
  • This is what I have a big issue with.  Back in the 2nd ed and 3/3.5 days, playing D&D wasn’t the “cool” thing to do.  You were nerds, you got made fun of when you broke out your source book and leveled up your character between classes.  Now all of a sudden since WoW became famous everyone wants to play D&D.  We have our little nerd club, and because you got a level 80 computer game character you want to be a part of it? I’m sorry, it doesn’t work that way.   I’m one of those “walked up hill both ways, while calculating THAC0, and wondering why a save vs wand was different than a staff/stave.”
  • WotC made 4th ed so dumbed down that any idiot can play.  Just look on the internet how many people refuse to buy the 4th ed books, look at how many people are angry just like I am at how they have fed the rules lead-paint until they drool.
  • Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition obviously has a few extra chromosomes in its genome.
• No OGL
  • One of the huge awesome things about 3.5 was the Open Gaming License.  This Open Sourcing of the core d20 rules allowed other people who make rule books that were 100% compatible with D&D (or new games that used the exact same rules).  There were a TON of 3.5 books that were published by 3rd parties that were perfectly compatible with D&D 3.5 (The Book of Erotic Fantasy was a big seller. Yes, someone wrote rules to incorporate all the wierd sexual fetishes in your D&D campaign).  All the book needed was to just have the OGL printed somewhere in the book, and not use any proprietory D&D stuff (like inital character generation, so you had to buy the D&D main book, understandable)
  • 4th ed has no OGL.  It has some free/low-cost licensing but who knows if WotC is going to renig on that.  Its not open source one big, and Paizo refuses to publish anything under the 4th ed ruleset just for that reason.

Now what I do like about D&D 4th ed, is that the books seem to be colorful. and nicely laid out.  Uh, it allows me to hang out with my friends (some of which who do like D&D 4th ed).  Some of the new classes are kinda neat.

Dax said it best.  The system is solid, and would be a winner if they wouldn’t have put the D&D name on it.

This weeks Mutants and Masterminds game was.. Interesting..

First off, we had 10 (!!) players show up to game.  I know all of the ST’s out there are are thinking to themselves “Wow, that’s a ton”.  It is a ton, an unplanned for ton.  Unfortunately in order to keep order I had to act like an asshole, understandable if you wish to get anything accomplished with only about 4 people playing in the game and the remaining 6 goofing off or having outside conversations.

An interesting tidbit of experience that I have gleaned, is that when you throw a few players a tidbit of information, they are more than likely going to make a whole bunch of assumptions, take those assumptions as complete word-of-God fact, then run with them.  Usually this okay, but sometimes it can invoke a bunch of arguing and drama (especially when it starts to get really late and tempers/patients grow shaky due to fatigue).  I can handle in-game drama to a point, but arguing over rules and semantics get to me (especially when I’m tired as well).  I guess when you have more ST-time under your belt you can see these things coming and prepare for them.

Game otherwise is going great.  The players got through the first part of my plot and are on now to diabolical plot number 2.

My current challenges:

• Player count has gotten way too high.  Need to send the word out that we are no longer accepting new players.
• Need to find out a method of increasing the difficulty of the game to compensate for a few players having some broken powers without making the plot unbeatable (when the burly players are not there) or party-wiping everyone.

So I havent wrote about the M&M game much over the past weeks.  Here is a recap:

I had the players go into this time-warp alternate-reality where the world (as they saw it) had been destroyed by an alien force.  They wake up without powers.  I wrote this awesome script to take everyone’s powers, randomize them, then assign them back to the players, so as time progressed, “random” powers started to manifest.  My original intent was to make them realize that sometimes throwing powers at a problem was not the only way to solve a problem.  Plus I was curious to see how the players would cope with not having the safety blanket of their powers at their immediate disposal.

Well, party morale seemed to drop considerably after that happened.  So this last game they did some events that allowed them to regain their powers again.  It was an interesting experiment, however I think my delivery was sub-par and really ruined (or didn’t get the message across) the experience.  Oh well, live and learn.

This last game however things started slow, but towards the end we ended up running past the allotted time of midnight to get to an ending point.  I think that the party could of ran for another hour or two but I had to cut it short due to myself having to work in the morning.  There was an obvious morale improvement as the powers were regained which made me happy.

As random things happen for random times, as I was at Starbucks with a player who is home on summer break (and thereby an active player yet again), we met a starbucks employee who is a UOP grad and what seems to be a die-hard tabletopper.  I shot him an email to see if he wants to jump into the M&M fun, so we’ll see how that turns out.  He recently graduated UOP with a degree in physics, so it would be a welcome addition to get another hard-science major in the gaming group vs all of the fruity soft-science (yes, that means you Brandon) majors that we have.

So the second game was this last Sunday.

From the general concensus, everyone had a really good time.  We were missing a few players, and there was one that I was really disappointed didn’t show up (school studying, understandable), but the night went on well.

The players haven’t gotten certain things to me yet, and I’m trying out a new DEMERIT system for the people who like to goof off during game and be a distraction.  They are moving along in the story quite nicely, but the acid test will be this coming week when the plot starts to get thrown at them from every angle.

Last Sunday (yeah, I’m a slacker), was my first game as the Mutants and Masterminds storyteller.

I must say, it went rather well.

There is one aspect that I got a taste of when I ran Shadowrun that I really see now.  No matter how concrete you think your story outline is.  No matter how much you have prepared for the game thinking of all of the possible sidetracking your players will go on, they will always think of something that you didn’t.  We spent most of the game ignoring the fact that all of the superheros of the world went missing (except the ones in Stockton) instead on trying to balance the budget of California so the Stockton Arena wouldn’t get shut down.

Yeah.  My players wanted to move the prision system to another dimension to save California money.  Yeah, I’m at a loss too.  It wasn’t until I made something very dear to them go missing did they get back on track.  Wow, screwing over the rest of the world to save the Stockton Arena and California.  Never saw that coming.

Other than that, keeping my fingers crossed for another good game.

After over a year of running the Mutants and Masterminds (MaM) game, our Storyteller Sky has decided that he has had enough.  He wants to play for a change so he put his game up for grabs to whomever wishes to continue it.

Needless to say, after my latest Shadowrun game exploding and collapsing, I was a bit hesitant to take the torch.  However, most of the Shadowrun players (some who play in the MaM game as well) told me that running the MaM game would be an excellent experience for me, so I gave it some serious thought.  After discussing time issues with Tiffany (whom if I was not running MaM, I would be there playing anyways), you are looking at the new Storyteller of the Mutants and Masterminds game.  Uh, yay?

I start in 3-4 weeks.  Melinda wants to try to run the game for 3 weeks as a transitional ST while I get some things prepared, but I think i’m capable of starting as soon as tomorrow night with some preliminary story/tying up loose threads from Sky’s game.  Everyone is keeping their same characters, time will just march on under my compassionate hand instead of Sky’s.

However the million dollar question is that I’ve been handed this running game of ambitious, good natures, fun-loving players who really dig their characters.  A part of me wants to turn the game from less zany/comic-bookish into a darker mood game.  Like turning  Adam West Batman into The Dark Knight movies.  I setup a quick survey on our internal gaming website, a few want a change, but the majority was right in the middle (and not everyone has submitted one yet).

Do I make this game darker, give the players more realistic challenges, more evil villains, and have them actually make planned decisions  as to what course of action they will take?  Or do I keep the same zany, wacky, no-real-fear-of-dying that we have had for the past year.  I can do the scientific way and make the game dark until people start to bitch, then back off 10%.  Not sure if there is a good way to do this that will make everyone happy.

I think I need to take a serious look as to why I like to play in the MaM game and what makes it fun for me.   I think I’m going to start writing about the MaM game more here to document how things panned out.

Many of you have asked “What is this Mutants and Masterminds game you always tweet about?”

Its a role-playing game that I play every Sunday with a group of people.  Its a game where you play a comic bookish superhero.  The rule books have every single power from every superhero in existence and allows you to pick and choose ones to fit your character.  The rules are quite ambiguous and at times outright confusing, however we make the best of it.

A really dark form of the Mutants and Masterminds genre can be seen on the TV show “Heros” where ordinary people get super-human powers.  Our game is no where near that serious/dark but more slapstick, goofy and funny.  The setting takes place in modern day Stockton, and we are to play ‘ourselves’ but with superhero powers.  Needless to say, this gets quite interesting.

I play ‘Dr Gizmo‘, a pharmacist exposed to a unique mixture of drugs during a pharmacy “incident” which gave him super-human powers.  Dr Gizmo’s power is ‘Gadgets’ meaning that he can create pretty much a gadget or gizmo that does anything.  To keep in the pharmacy paradigm, his gadgets must be explainable in medicinal terms (an injection to allow water breathing, or bandages to heal otherwise lethal wounds).  Yeah, I’m basically Inspector Gadget but a ton cooler.  Did I mention that Dr Gizmo has to wear his underwear on the outside of his pants for his powers to work? Its true, all superheros have their underwear on the outside of their pants.

Dax plays “Apollo”, a half-god of (you guessed it) Apollo.  Dr Gizmo’s theory is that he’s just delusional, and he got his powers not from a “God” but from some silly dental accident involving the x-ray machine.

Brandon plays “Brenden”, an “Alien” that has the ability to self-replicate.  His character is the most zany and absolutely psychotic in the whole game.  We have done everything to a Brenden replicate, cooking, launching, shooting, zapping, experimenting on, etc.  Crazy. Dr Gizmo thinks that he’s just a regular guy with some delusion of being an alien from another planet, although having a crashed space-ship on the moon as a base isn’t jiving with the ‘regular guy’ theory.

Other people play, but I really have no attention span at this moment to list -everyone- and their powers.  Maybe later.

I cant believe that I felt ashamed that I still play tabletop RPG’s with all the nerdgasms hooplah about some new WoW add-on coming out.
RPG Geeks – 1
WoW Tards – 0

I dont want to be at work today.
I want to be at home, coding my downtime manager for our tabletop games.
For once I know how to program something, i have it all mapped out and stuff, db stuff, etc.
Plus im forcing myself to use OO instead of procedural coding.