Just One Week to Go!

Just one week to go before D&D resumes!

The babies improve almost daily. At this rate I’ll be able to go home after work, help with the babies for a little bit, eat a quick dinner, and then all I’ll be missing is a late evening feeding. Obviously by writing this down the plan is doomed to failure because the irony gods have an evil sense of humor.

As of this writing, Justin won’t be returning to the group when we start up. He’s got a new job and is looking to get somewhere in it, so he can’t commit.

There is still no word from Brian, so that’s still up in the air.

So sometime this week I’ll send out an e-mail to at least one person who was previously interested, to see if they still are.

The Rappan Athuk needs just a little more polish, but if we started gaming this Friday, I’d be able to run it pretty smoothly.

Right now I have paper scratch maps of the village and the wilderness area, and I’m almost done tweaking the rumors list. I just need to convert those paper scratch maps to electronic or draw them better on paper, finish the rumor-tweaking, and create the “coupons”.

The coupon use won’t get as crazy as they do with Knights of the Dinner Table, as I won’t be creating any of super nasty coupons that they have used.

Now to balance the players’ use of coupons, and the power that the PC’s will wield being gestalt and all, I’ve had to figure out a few ways to give the monsters some equal footing without making things worse.

Basically I can’t just increase hit points and AC for the monsters because that makes the monsters last longer thus making combats longer. So I will probably only use this solution just to make sure that some of the chump monsters have a little more staying power.

I can give the monsters better damage and an increased chance to hit. But that’s easier said than done. If you give too much you risk killing a PC too easily when your goal was to challenge them.

So I’ve decided to give each encounter a little boost, instead of each monster. An encounter will have a certain number of “DM points” that he can use to give creatures in that encounter an extra something.

Burn a point, and the monster makes his save versus damage if it was close enough to look up (thus I won’t have to look up the information on the critter’s saves).

Burn a point and the monster gets a bonus on his swing, but again, only if it’s “close enough” and I’m looking to save time.

In other words, I’m using points to make sure that the DM can pay more attention to the game and a little less attention with his nose in the NPC booklet saying “Where is it? Where is it? Ah there it is.” while still keeping the game challenging for the party.

I’ve effectively tossed almost all of the wilderness encounters from Rappan Athuk and replaced them with ones of my own design.

And these are not just simple monster X at location Y.

Most encounters have a little something extra to them. When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean that combats will be tougher (though some will). I mean that hopefully most of the encounters will have a feel like they belong there instead of me just tossing some monsters in a spot and charging the PC’s.

That’s the kind of campaign I prefer to run; everything has a reason for being where it is. Unfortunately I forgot about that during the last campaign I ran. I almost wish I had time to do podcasting again. Almost.

As for speeding up combat, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of changing the movement rules to reduce the excessive chess-thinking that tends to go on with our group, usually just to avoid attacks of opportunity.

So I’m making two changes to them that are small, but will require some re-learning by us.

Number one, leaving a threatened square of a combatant does no provoke an attack of opportunity. Instead, leaving the threatened area of a combatant does. In other words you can dance around your opponents much easier and get flanks more often, but you can’t just up and walk away from your opponents without giving them a free swing.

Number two, the 5’ step is gone as a combat maneuver. You can still use it to slowly walk over various terrains and all, but you can no longer use it to continue a full-attack action, nor can you use it to step out of melee combat.

This means casters will require more points in concentration to cast if in melee as they won’t be able to 5’ step back and cast. They are stuck in the thick of things.

It also means that melee freaks are going to be more apt to only get their one primary attack and will lose out on their others. But like I’ve said before, most of those attacks tend to be wasted of time as they just don’t hit as often and they suck up a lot of time.

There, two simple rule changes that should hopefully have a large impact on the speed of combat. And only one feat gets the shaft, but I’m the only player I’ve seen in a couple years who took the Combat Reflexes feat.

Now I wish I could just figure out a way to adequately handle delaying actions and readying actions without totally throwing the system out of whack, because that’s another combat time-sink.

On the 4E front, I’m not seeing anything new that has caught my attention.

WotC released the racial information about elves, which looked pretty good. They still get +2 to their Dex, but penalty to Con, which is a decent change. They retained their affinity for bows, but not longswords and short swords. I’m not sure of the reasoning behind it, but I’d prefer they still have all of their proficiencies, but overall there’s no real harm done.

I’m still not seeing much to me that reduces combat time, which is something they very much promised they would fix.

I do like the idea of how their making clerics less of a healing monkey during combat, but I want to see some more information about how it all works together. My understanding (which I do not claim to be correct on) is that clerics’ actions help others heal themselves during combat. The particular concept is cool and makes the cleric a bit more playable in a lot of people’s eyes. But now each class becomes his own caretaker – and I picture a lot of barbarian-lovers not being happy about that.

Forgotten Realms-wise they have recruited Ed Greenwood to be more involved in the revision of the Realms. This gives me hope, but after their pathetic initial touting of their plans for the Realms, I’m still prepared to wipe the last 20 real-world years of Realm’s revisions and jump back to the grey books.

4E views (on a range of -5 to +5):
Crunch: Bumped up to a +2 thanks to new healing ideas. I still hate having draconians…I mean dragonborn and tieflings as a core race though.
Fluff: A horrible -3.5 thanks to their horrible handling of the Forgotten Realms, but I’m getting hopeful, thus the increase from -4.
Average = -0.75, a new high.

The Time is Approaching

And I am not talking about Christmas.

I’m talking about resuming our game.

Friday January 4th is our target day.

The babies even appear to be cooperating with the schedule, which is great because it was touch and go for a couple of weeks there. I was getting a bit concerned that the magical “12th week” was a lie. Let me tell you, there’s a big difference from week 9 to week 11.

As for who is coming back to the group, I’ve heard from Aaron, Dale, and Joy with no response from Brian or Justin. But there’s still time for them to respond.

For group size, I think we’re all pretty happy with 6 people total (5 players + 1 DM). Any more can easily become a morass of opinions and slow action, while any less would leave us vulnerable to canceling too often when someone misses.

My views on 4E have really not changed for good or ill. Fluff gets a -4 and crunch gets a +1. So for the time being, my opinion of 4E can best be described as “malaise”.

There was some discussion I read that D&D might suffer from an inverted Star Trek movie failure syndrome. The joke being that all odd numbered Star Trek movies suffered from high levels of suck while the even numbered movies were pretty decent, so many are expecting that D&D 4E will suck along the lines of AD&D 2E.

Hmmm, I’m not quite sure where Original D&D (OD&D the white box stuff) and Basic D&D (BECM D&D) fit in. I never played OD&D, and I loved BECM D&D.

But anyway, plenty of new bits of information have been released, mostly about the new preview book relating to changes, but not much in the way of crunch.

It appears that humans now have a homeland in the plains (like dwarves do with mountains, and elves do with forests). That’s no real change to me, but it’s nice to see them come out and say it. But increasing the height of halflings, moving their homelands from hilly plains to rivers, and making them more like kender than hobbits just doesn’t set well with me. Kender need to stay on Krynn while true halflings are just hobbits with a different name so the Tolkien family won’t sue but we still get to play them.

My preparations for Rappan Athuk are coming along well. After rereading part of the rather large wilderness encounter additions to the areas surrounding the dungeon I decided to just do my own encounters while leaving enough open in case I want to add some of the stuff back in.

I’m better with encounters I plan myself anyway, at least as long as I prep up fully. I did “borrow” some of the ideas I read.

I’m probably going to keep the dragon stuff in.

Plus it allows Rappan Athuk to be the hack-n-slash dungeon it was meant to be while I supply the kind of role-playing I’m more comfortable with outside the dungeon (I doubt I could do well with the Krrka-tink encounter, even though I like it) and I can more readily scale the wilderness encounters to match the party’s strength.

The village itself just needs a few tweaks and it’s done. I just have to tie in some of the new wilderness information to the existing information, give some of the NPC’s a little more information, and then create a map of the village and the surrounding areas.

That’s all for now.
Hopefully I’ll get another entry in before the end of the year.