bryant

Lady Blackbird, Vanguard, and Lunar Notes. A few pages, perhaps pregenerated characters, rules on the character sheets. That’s interesting.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

The Character Builder has been updated, so I started fiddling around with Players Handbook 2 ideas. The first thing I statted up was a human shaman named Bivvy, who claims to be of a noble family fallen on hard times. His spirit companion is a butler. “Whichever type of spirit companion you choose, it can have any appearance you like.” I’m just sayin’.

He’s taking Wrath of Winter as one of his at-wills, on the premise that the butler ought to be able to appear at someone’s side noiselessly. Also, I think, Blessing of the Seven Winds. Bit of a tornado, what?

I need to find a small figurine depicting Stephen Fry to make this really work.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Just in case anyone was missing it — most of my D&D commentary will wind up over here, since I wanted my compatriots to be able to post as well.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

I tried using a stack of index cards instead of an initiative tracker last session, and it worked out pretty well. I put most of the monster stats on each card, plus checkboxes for hit points. I think it was smoother than using the tracker.

I may need to put more of the stats on each card; I kept having to go back to the book. Maybe only for more or less simple monsters, and Big Bads can still require book reference?

I really like the ease of having defenses and hit points all in hand, though. The checkboxes in particular fit how my mind works.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Running: one straight-up 4e game. We’re working through WotC’s module series. This is fun.

Playing: one 4e game which I’ve played in no sessions of but I like the writeups. Should be fun.

Will be running: online 4e game heavily influenced by The Shield and The Wire, or possibly the Scales of War adventure path instead, although I’d need a couple more people for the latter. Sort of leaning towards Scales of War for the sake of easier prep, but undecided.

Thinking about running: something, since certain people are not inspired, which is OK. But I don’t know what. I was thinking about a 60s flashy spy game, but the more I think about it the more I think I’m trying to shoehorn the wrong stuff into the wrong stuff. And when I strip away the Orlando Trash-related overarching plot and the Seven Houses stuff I realized I’m not as jazzed; there’s no hook there for me.

So maybe the modern mysticism Seven Houses game I’ve wanted to run for a while. Heavy influences are the background to 100 Bullets — the intrigue, not the noir stuff — and Mystick Domination, which nobody ever played but it was evocative.

Heresy: Kingdom Come? Shadowrun? Dogs in the Vinyard?

Eclipse Phase looks like fun but is not out yet.

Hm.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

The thing that really surprised me about running 4e was how amazingly simple it was in practice. Setup is perhaps a different story, which I can’t speak to yet, but assuming you have an adventure in hand and a bunch of players, it’s nearly frictionless to run.

A well-presented adventure, as per WotC’s example, puts stat blocks for each monster with each encounter. These literally have 70% of what you need to run the encounter. You get each attack listed clearly, with the bonus to hit and the damage included, along with any other effects. Everything the monster might do is right there.

Each encounter also has tactics and of course room descriptions, which is another 15% of what you need. Tactics aren’t absolutely necessary but it’s handy to have the script for monster actions available. The room description gives you special features, treasure, and all that. Note that traps and such are statted up as monsters, so you continue to have the stat blocks handy and the mechanics aren’t any different. Skill challenges also fall into this chunk of material.

All in all, an encounter is going to be two or three pages. I haven’t checked but I bet the vast majority of encounters are two pagers.

The other 10% is condition modifiers, attack modifiers such as cover, and so on. I think I’ll have these memorized pretty soon, but in the meantime there’s an excellent Dungeon Master’s Screen which is stable and laid out in landscape format. The latter means you can see players behind it. It has all the charts you want. Literally. It’s impressive.

I added in Paizo’s GameMastery Combat Pad, which is a magnetic whiteboard designed for initiative tracking. I didn’t need it; I could have tracked initiative on the battlemat. But being able to slide counters around when people hold or delay is handy.

So what I discovered was that I could run the whole game standing up, with the combat pad tucked in the adventure booklet, in my left hand. Right hand’s free for dice, moving minis, checking off hit points. This may sound really trivial, but I ran four combats in five hours and I didn’t have to look anything up more than once or twice — OK, having players doing some lookups for me was handy, but even so. 4e is ridiculously easy to run.

I’m thinking about more tweaks. I found some full-sized 1″ maps for the WotC modules that some people did in Dundjinni and Campaign Cartographer (note to players: spoilers, try not to peek too hard), and I think I can use those to good effect to cut down on the time it takes me to draw maps. Also they’re pretty.

I’m definitely gonna use these encounter worksheets next time. It’ll make it easier to track hit points. I’m considering backing one of ‘em with magnetic paper so I could use the initiative magnets on that instead. We’ll see.

But it’s all gilding the lily. The core smoothness lies in the game. Kudos to WotC and the designers.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

The Core Mechanic wants to get an RPG Carnival started, which is pretty cool. Carnival, in blog terms, is a once a month thing where a lot of different blogs write on a topic and the host does a big wrapup post linking to all of them. Generally the host changes each month. I thought about doing one at 20×20, but by the time I had the idea I’d run out of steam.

The theme of the month is character death and resurrection. I’ll be trying to come up with something smart to say.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

One’s been out for a while, but just got upgraded; one just came out. I’ll do the latter first. Images follow.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

This isn’t my technique; I’m stealing it from John Harper’s posts on Story Games. But it’s cool.

What you do is this. Buy the following items:

• Mod Podge. This is the glue and the finishing surface. The gloss version is working for me but you may want matte.
• Bag of circular cut outs. “Cut outs” is craft jargon for “little piece of wood.” You want the 1″ diameter version.
• 1″ paper punch. That one is cool because it’s easy to see what you’re punching — other models are top-down, so you have to contort a bit.
• Little dinky foam brushes. For the Mod Podge. I hear you can use cotton swabs for this too, but I’m a geek, so I like specific tools.

You can get all this stuff at a craft store locally, which is faster than Amazon, plus no shipping charges.

OK. Now print out some pretty pictures on (preferably) your color printer. Use Photoshop or Gimp or Preview or MS Paint or whatever to resize the graphics down to around 1″ big. Save paper; print a bunch of them on one sheet. They’re 1″ big, so you have plenty of room. Copy and paste for multiple kobolds. I’m thinking I’m going to add initials to my kobolds to distinguish the soldiers from the minons and so on. You don’t need to use cardstock or anything.

Punch out the circles with the paper punch. This is way satisfying.

Splortch some Mod Podge on the surface of a cut out. Use a brush so your fingers don’t get sticky. You can use a fair bit — it doesn’t seem to need to be a thin layer. Medium, maybe. Splortch splortch. Stick the paper circle to the cut out; smooth it out so there are no bubbles. Splortch.

Wait a few minutes for it to dry. You’re supposed to wait like an hour or so, I guess. I get impatient. I also sort of bend the edge of the paper down to match the bevel of the cut out.

Splortch some more Mod Podge on top of the paper. Use the foam brush to smooth and thin it out. It’s gonna seal the paper in, make it less delicate, and in theory make it look like the paper and cutout are one. Mod Podge seems to be really prone to textures; the foam brush appears to be key here to keep it smooth and, you know, glossy.

Let it dry more.

If you’re very ambitious, print out duplicate pictures with a red tinge to them, and stick those to the other side of the cut out so you can flip it over when it’s bloodied. This seems like a lot of work for something you could do with a red poker chip, though.

N.B.: real crafts people call this decoupage. When you go to the crafts store, you’re gonna see a bunch of wooden boxes and random objects next to the cut outs (which is a good way to find the cut outs, actually). Those are for the same purpose. I find myself tempted to do a decoupage box for dice and such like, with a lot of Larry Elmore art glued on.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

After too much time spent poring through forums for D&D 4e character sheets, I wound up with this one, which worked out great in play. The form-fillable version, by some new Adobe magic, allows you to save your filled out sheet. Handy.

The landscape one found here is also very nice — much more compact — but not form-fillable. Plus I really liked the power card holder on the previous one. Yeah, I assembled it. Rubber cement and scissors and all. It’s handy.

Oh, yeah. Five hour one shot, four combats, a smidge of RP. We were focused on system. It’s a quick little combat system. It feels like D&D to me; you’re rolling a 20 sider and doing damage. Certainly PCs are way more sturdy early on. Still and all, rolling d20s, rolling damage, all that fun stuff.

Combat was really mobile. Lots of shifting and hitting and movement. I kinda wanna play Sunless Citadel in 4e to compare and contrast. Maybe I’ll go write up Cian now.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.