by | February 18, 2012

RPG Blog Carnival: What Do You Love? What Do You Hate?

Dalibor Tower Dungeon, Prague Castle
I have just recently discovered the blog carnival, and have been enjoying reading through the archives. This topic is perfect, what with the D&D Next announcement and all the response it has had in the community.

I definitely go back and forth thinking about what I love in RPG. Ultimately, I think it is just quality.

What are the best adventures made of?
The best adventures have a number of common features for me. First, they aren’t too long. While I love hearing from my friends who buy them synopsis of adventure paths, I have no real desire to buy or play them. I know that there is no hope with the groups I play with to ever complete one of them. Instead, I like sort, quick adventures that hint at, but doesn’t enforce, a setting. In fact, some of my favorite adventures were the sets of adventures that TSR released with some of the campaign settings in 2nd edition. They could be tied together if you wanted to, but each adventure was self-contained. Which would be perfect for the people I play with, as we all have lives and most of us have kids. We want to roleplay, but we just don’t have the time to play long drawn out campaigns.

What do the worst adventure do wrong?
I think this is pretty simple for me: non-sensical story or encounters, railroading and overly long adventures.

What kills an adventure before it even gets off the ground?
Playing a game system that no one wants to.

What’s your favorite system? What are the things you love about it most? WHY?
My favorite system is the one my friends are playing. Secondly, I value simplicity and fun. I don’t want to be bogged down while creating a character by complex options and plans, but I like to have the options I make at character creation have both mechanical and roleplaying implications.

With D&D Next on the horizon, I’m sure you have an opinion regarding what the next edition should or shouldn’t be once it’s out.
I don’t really have a ton of opinions on what it should be, other than I really hope it gets more players into this great hobby of ours.

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by | February 18, 2012

PlayFic Looks Awesome

Saw this over at boingboing, a great website to get people to create text games. I never really played text games, but I did play a lot of the sierra games like King’s Quest and Police Quest. I love the idea that people can quickly create games by using pieces of other people’s games. I tried a couple of them, and they are really great.

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by | February 17, 2012

Great Random Table

From Jason at 1d12, a table of weird pools. I think my favorite is 2. The Black Soup of Life: coughs up random embryonic magical beasts. It reminds me of an experience I had once as a player. We were on a quick little side quest while traveling through the desert to refuge in a cave. The cave wasn’t very big, but as a throw away description, the DM said there was a black pool at the end of the cave. Well, 2 hours later, with nothing happening, we finally decided, with one final longing look back, to give up and leave the cave. Of course as soon as we exited the cave, we were attacked by giant beetles.

I could totally see my players freaking out when the first embryonic magical beast pops out of the black pool. And then spending the next 2 hours trying to figure out just what is going on.

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by | February 16, 2012

Review – Zogorion: Lord of the Hippogriffs

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Quick Summary
Zogorion: Lord of the Hippogriffs is written by Jason Sholtis and is a short but sweet mini-adventure in folio zine format. You might know Jason Sholtis from his blog Dungeon Dozen where he publishes a new random d12 table every day. It concerns the PCs encounter with a band of Hippogriffs led by a strange and unusual creature. The adventure uses the Swords & Wizardry ruleset, otherwise known as original D&D and is for level 3-7. It was written originally as a quick google hangouts adventure that the author fleshed out into a great little adventure.

Artwork
The artwork was great. It was mostly in a late 70′s black and white cartoonish style. The cover by John Larrey was excellent and features the party enjoying a dinner Zogorion. The map is very much in the style of classic adventures, with lots of little details to help the DM describe each room and evokes the cave locale well. My one complaint is that the lines to show elevation are a little too dark, and distract from the actual cave map. I would actually recommend they be removed all together. The interior artwork include a hippogriff, a vampire, a goblin and, my favorite, a scene showing a hippogriff carrying a large catfish.

Adventure
While I’m not a big OD&D player, I really enjoyed reading the adventure. I could easily see myself converting and running this as a 4E adventure (although with the longer 4E combats, I think it might take twice as long to play through). He includes lots of good suggestions as to how to run it, while giving the reader many ways to adapt it to their own play style or campaign. He starts of with a quick introduction and then details each room of the cave. There’s a definite direction that events are expected to go but the writing makes clear that there are a lot of different ways for the PCs to go through the adventure.

Additional Information
The zine is $2 and ships very quickly. I ordered it and got it within 3 business days, which is faster than most online purchases.

Final Recommendation
I highly recommend that you pick this up. For $2, it’s a steal!

4 1/2 out of 5 stars. Highly Recommend.

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by | February 15, 2012

Becky Cloonan’s Story in Heartbreak

Becky Cloonan, one of my new favorite comic book artists, has a piece in a comic anthology called Heartbreak: Just Friends It’s great, and they’ve given it away for free!

Not only is it a great story, it includes a reference to Magic: The Gathering and d4′s.

Enjoy!

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by | February 14, 2012

Mathematics in Roleplaying: Random Chances to Play a Class

James Nosack at The Mule Abides talks about how randomly rolled abilities affect the chances of getting to play a certain class.   I’ve got nothing to add to what he has done.  I basically just drooled looking at all his statistical analysis of Original D&D through 2nd edition.  Definitely makes me think about how one should approach random ability rolling when you have a ability stat requirements for classes and races.

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by | February 13, 2012

Bellona: A Broken City Rebuilding

So, I have this new idea for an ongoing sandbox game after playing an adventure in Wheloon in 4E, the prison city.  As we continued to adventure in the city, a throw away component of the game was gaining control of a gang. That got me thinking, how would a sandbox game work where part of the “treasure” that the players gained would be territory and gang members?

Right now, I’m not entirely sure if this game will take place  in the past, present or future.  I imagine it’ll end up being a D&D type game, as it’ll get more players interested in playing, but I could see it using a sci-fi ruleset.  Really, this is less about the individual character ruleset, but more about the ruleset to manage territory controlled by the players and the gang members/residents they have in their employ.

Inspirations: 

Dhalgren: One of my all time favorite novels, Samuel Delaney’s tour de force concerns a surrealistic city cut off from the rest of the world by some apocalyptic event.

DMZ: America has devolved into a civil war between the Government and the Free States.  A reporter lands in Manhattan and begins reporting on the experiences of the residents still in the DMZ.

Batman – No Man’s Land: After a earthquake has destroyed Gotham, the U.S. has decided to declare the city no longer part of the U.S.  So of course the gangs take control, and Batman, along with his allies, have to fight to win back the city block by block.


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