Chatty's blog 1/2 year in review.
In which Chatty DM rambles about the cool things brought on by blogging.
On July 24th, 2007 after 2 failed attempts on MSN Space and Live Journal, I finally made a jump to blogging using Google’s Blogger. Having no clear idea what to actually talk about, I started rambling about my future campaign, online tools, a trip to Boston, RPGs. Magic: The Gathering, Meta-blogging and Webcomics.
Yan started commenting and I pestered some of my friends about this new blog thingie I was trying.
I rapidly realized that writing about RPGs helped me shape my thoughts around things that and allowed me tofocus on what I needed to do to make the experience better for all.
Then I stumbled upon the age old tradition of stealing stuff from other bloggers (linking them) and discussing their posts on your blog instead of commenting on theirs.
That’s when I made 1st official contact as a blogger with some of the blogs I was reading fervently:
- Bartoneous , Dave et. al. over at Critical Hits.
- Martin from Treasure Table
- Dante, Vanir and Stupid Ranger
One month after having started this Bloggy thing, I started posting my campaign log, which chronicled the harsh beginnings of our latest D&D campaign. It has since then continued and we concluded the 1/2 half of a very successful gaming season here. I’m particularly happy with my Post Mortem analysis technique which helps me summarized the good and not so good of each sessions.
On August 28, when I was musing on the hope that 4e would address some mechanics that hindered our games (grapple anyone?), Yax left the 2nd comment on the blog. I had commented on Yax’s excellent blog quite a few times (I think I scored top commenter in August). But getting someone to actually acknowledge your presence gave me quite a high.
At about the same time, Jeff over at The lair of the Evil DM and Dr Rotwang from I waste the Buddah with my Crossbow posted a link to my fledging empire of Crunch.
I was hooked on Blogging.
September rolled in and comments started coming in. I was participating on a lot of discussions between Yax and the Stupid Ranger crew. Especially on Vanir’s excellent series on Evil PCs. I felt like I was getting invited to join is a small community of people sharing similar interests. I was having fun!
Then I discovered the TVtropes wiki and the Rule of Cool…
It’s funny when you write something out of sheer enthusiasm, with no plan or idea where it will go. This 300 word text defined what the blog was going to be all about from that point forward. It also seems to be a point of entry for new readers.
From that point on, traffic increased, comments started appearing and I created a great ongoing series on RPGs and tropes. I couldn’t believe that people other than my friends and a few bloggers could enjoy what I rambled about. I’m was and still remain so thankful!
I also started other series on RPG group dynamics, the profile of my players and Adventure Preparation.
I even went a little crazy and started rambling about the Crunch/Fluff of RPGs and some stuff about being an Evil Overlord of Crunch. So much so that I actually got me an honest to goodness Industry Nemesis.
(Expect a face off at Gen Con, MWa HA HA HA!)
Things became so successful that I decided to level up my blogging package by creating my very own domain and moving to WordPress. That’s where I was absolutely blown away by the niceness of people who dropped comments here. Chief among those was Graham (ve4grm) Poole who came to my rescue and helped me out with all that gibberish about php, templates, plugins and widgets. You are a prince among humans Graham.
Others joined up my little operation and started co-writing a player-centric log of our D&D campaign (Thanks Yan) as well as an emergent RPG gamer sharing his ambitions to jump into the DM seat (yay PM!).
Lately the community grew so much, which such varied interests that I went ahead and created a forum to allow the growing community to voice the many interesting things they had to share.
While the membership is still quite small (24 members so far, come on join!), I’m amazed at the activity level and cool things everyone brings there (575 posts after 3 weeks, yeah about a third is mine).
I take a few instant to point out that there is one member only area that you can’t see as a guess because it covers DM-only stuff. So do join if you want to see this also. It’s really a nice, very open and inclusive environment and I hope we’ll be able to maintain it as such.
Actually this is what truly and completely blows me away about it all. I can’t believe just how nice and open to frank, but respectful discussion, everyone is around here. I’m impressed by the fact that I see Storytellers mingling with Grognard, RPG theorists and D&D heads, exchanging tricks, tips and opinions.
Heck we even got 4e naysayers rubbing elbows with 4e optimists and everybody keeps a check on tempers, even when there is disagreement.
You guys made me renew my faith about the Internet… So far. 
So what do I take with me from this last incredible year (I leave out the personnal and professional stuff, let me just tell you it’s all good) before I revert tomorrow with my goals for the next one?
- RPGs are fun and you never cease to learn new tricks and ways of making it cooler, even after 25 years!
- Friends are precious commodities with little free time and have to be treated accordingly
- A shared-interests community is one of the most awesome things I’ve discovered. I’ve made friends with people I’ve never seen or talked to, yet I somehow feel they would come to my help if I needed it, and I would do the same.
- I might actually have the talent to do something more than blogging but I have the luxury to see it unfold slowly and see where this gets me.
Happy New year all and thanks for reading!
Congratulations, Original Sultan!
A hearty round of congratulations from everyone at Critical Hits to guest reviewer and frequent commenter Original Sultan who was married this past weekend. We wish him the best in his life to come (aided by his new magic ring that has many powers and bonuses, I’m sure). As an added bonus, here’s an embarrassing photo of him, myself, and The O from the bachelor party! Tons of debauchery there, of course! [Read the rest of this article]
Inquisition of the Week: Best Game of 2007
We’re going to run the poll for another week to see if more people will come forward to defend the honor of 2007. Reverend Mike makes a great point that it might not be as good as we hoped with the Writer’s Strike messing up the movie and tv schedules. I should also point out how many great new shows I started watching in 2007: Chuck, Journeyman, and Pushing Daisies being instant hits in my household.
To go even more into defending the year that is about to end, I’ll ask you for a minute to think back over the games that you have played this year. This has been a great year for gamers, especially video gamers. It seems that all the major genres have been covered with ground breaking titles or solid sequels. All the major gaming websites look like they have a difficult time choosing just one 2007 release to highlight as the best of the year. But this is not about what they think, it’s about how you’d answer the question:
What was your favorite game of 2007? [Read the rest of this article]
My D&D Flavour: House Rules for Badass Heroes.
Tommi made a post suggestion in my last Adventure Prep post: “How about a brief summary of the house rules you use for those who have not read everything you have ever posted”?
I’m happy to comply…. except for the brief part.
The core of the rules we use is D&D 3.5 with a metric ton of sourcebooks (most of which I own, check my library here).
Some players have the full Core set, the Players Handbook II and Stef even has the Magic Item Compendium (his D&D Sears Catalog he calls it I believe) .
Of course, many, many, many changes were made to the rules:
First, we borrowed most of the system-neutral cool stuff from the Iron Heroes Core book. Mostly because that game is crammed with stuff that makes character into Badasses:
Point buy:
Abilities Scores are purchased as per the option presented in the IH Core Book (which mirrors the DMG, I think). All players have a 10 in each ability score and buys increases at the rate of 1 point per +1 increase until 15, 2 points per +1 until 17… etc. All players had 16 points to buy their character. (Except Cixi, who had 24).
Cixi :
Franky plays the only fully Iron Hero Character, a throwback from our last campaign. Iron Heroes are classes that were designed to be equivalent to all other d20 Fantasy classes but without needing to use Magic Items and Buffs. Iron Hero, as the name implies, is a low/corrupted magic game.
In order to make Iron Heroes fit in a Generic D&D world, I tweaked a lot of rules for them:
- Immune to all Spells and Spell-like abilities that allow a Fort or Will Save (prevents healing, Divination and Charms, but a fireball hurts).
- If they die, they become incorporeal spirits that can possess a body (like the Fiendish Codex I) and transform it into their original forms (over 5 days).
- No Magic Item function in their hands. (There’s a whole lot of fluff behind these 3 rules)
Skill System:
All skills made into groups of 3-4 skills. Each classes has access to specific groups (Download Yan’s excellent cheat sheet here). Each skill point spent buys one rank in each skill in a group. All other skills can be bought at 1 point per rank. (So yes everyone gets to use Use Magic Device, great for a non-cleric party like ours).
Furthermore, all skills rolls and effect are handled as Iron Heroes. This means you can, for example, take a +5 DC to Climb faster or retain your Dex Bonus while doing so. The one exception is Perform and Search/Disable device where one must be a Iron Hero class, a Bard or have Trapsmithing to use as written.
Combat Challenges and Stunts:
Players can trade Base Attack and Defense Bonuses for extras in combat. These extras are all basically watered down combat feat effects akin to Power Attack, Combat Expertise, etc.
A stunt is an improvised attack that uses a skill (or a combination of skills). For example, I allowed tumble checks to deal damage to a swarm by using one’s body as an area attack.
Self Flanking and Attacks of Opportunity:
A Character that starts his move adjacent to a foe and moves to the opposite flanking position in the same turn gets to flank the opponent.
Also, the only way to provoke an AoO is to move more than 1/4 your speed within the threatened area of the same foe.
Draining:
Level and ability drains are now temporary. Negative levels are recovered at the rate of 1 per day.
The rest of the house rules were taken here and there…
For character design and management, we use the following House Rules:
Custom Classes:
- Math plays a Mashed-Up (not multiclassed) Duskblade Arcane Archer that can cast spells through arrows and Melee weapons.
- Yan plays a Shaper, a mashup between the Pixie racial template and Monte Cook’s variant Sorcerer with a unique spell mechanic.
- Stef plays a ‘standard’ 1/2 Dragon Barbarian, boosted a bit to give him a higher breath weapon DC, and recurrent breath weapon (every 1d4 rounds like a Dragon)
Hit Points:
All players have the choice of taking average Hit Point or Rolling them. But they must chose before, not after rolling 
XP:
As mentioned earlier last week, I use Clinton R. Nixon’s Keys system. I took the one from something he called Sweet20, but it seems to have been incorporated into another of his creations called Shadows of Yesterday. I am still implementing this one to reward my player’s natural tendencies to start building their character’s stories. I’ll read SoY a bit more to see if the implementation of the key system is any different than the one I cobbled up here.
Other House rules we use:
Damage Reduction:
A high enough enhancement bonus penetrates material-related DR. For example, a +2 weapon overcomes X/Slashing and a +3 weapon overcomes x/adamantine. I took this from an old Monte Cook web post.
Spell Resistance:
When you target a monster with Spell Resistance with a magical effect that is subjected to it, make an SR check as usual. If failed, you do not spend any resource (Spell Slot, Spell, Charge, etc) but you still lose your action.
Golems now have very high Spell Resistance instead of pure immunity (Sorry Yan, I forgot that one last time).
Action points:
We use the full gamut of Action Points featured in the Unearthed Arcana variant rules.
Critical Hits:
Last but not least, now that Franky and I fixed a little rules error with Cixi’s Critical Hit rate, I’m re-instating the play test of Crit Resistant creatures instead of Crit immune ones (Taken from Graham’s very 1st post here). All creatures usually immune to crits can now be, if the player confirms a crit twice with the roll of two d20s.
Well, that’s about it. Once it’s all there in one post, it does seem like I’m not playing D&D 3.5 anymore…
Holy Green Giant Clay Golem!
This is a short mini-post just to showcase my latest D&D Miniature acquisitions. As I usually do, I buy 2 boosters of each and every D&D mini series they make.
The latest one, Desert of Desolation is full of goodies for my future game sessions. Look a Bone Devil, a Spined Devil, a Fire elemental, Drows, an animated statues, swarms and even a tiefling cleric!
As for that Huge Green Clay Golem?
Well I gotta thank Andy of Geeknews.net for that particular gift. He offered it (and a Pokey figurine) to the 1st two people to comment on his 1000th post. Thank you Google reader!
I also got a pack of the latest D&D tile set: Dire Tombs (which I would have needed in my Seed of Sehan Dungeon Crawl).
Uh Huh, here’s another mini rant coming:
Wizards! Stop publishing books (especially crappy ones) before 4e! The Dungeon Survival guide, WotC presents…. Ahhhhhhhhh!
It also kills me that the Examplar of Evil and Elder Evil books look so good but I can’t buy those and expect any significant mileage out of them.
Here my suggestions, go wild on D&D tiles, 4e preview Miniatures, Battle maps, heck publish adventure design books or re-print 3.5 versions of old classic modules but please, for the love of god, stop putting out crap that my local FLGS has to buy and then stays stuck with and gets hurt with the inventory.
Ahhhh I feel better now.
All right… it’s another weekend of Holiday cheer and parties. I’ll be back on Monday morning with more substantive stuff.
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