YouTube of the Week: Dun Dun Dunnnn Edition
Just because I think it’s awesome, here’s the “Dramatic Chipmunk” (even though it’s really a prarie dog) video, and two of my favorite remixes.
Inq. of the Week: Comic Con
Last week, we asked what you thought of a certain Boy Wizard, now that his tale has found an end. Edging out first place at the last minute are those of you who are so-so on both the books and movies. Second place were the superfans, which is pretty impressive.
Over the weekend, Comic Con happened in San Diego, and from all appearances, it seemed to have broken records by selling out nearly every day of the show. None of us here at Critical Hits could make it, but I did spend some free time pouring through the reports for news of interest. Comic Con has way outgrown just being a con for those who subscribe to comics, but an epicenter of our world of pop culture. Movies and TV related to comicy subjects get announced alongside plans by the big two of comic publishing.
So though we could not be there, there should be plenty of announcements to excite everyone. Here are a few particularly notable ones, and I’ll link to some info about each after the poll. (And if there’s any I missed that you want to see added, let me know in the comments.)
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
Ending a campaign
Last night we played the last of a 2 sessions Nostaligia-ride that is the re-visiting of an old campaign. About 5 or so years ago, we started our second vanilla D&D campaign with level 1 PCs. Now I don’t exactly remember what players and what characters were there when we started. It started out as a 3.0 game and was morphed into a 3.5 game as the new version was released.
We played a lot of published adventures with that game and we went from level one to the lofty and seldom-reached 18th level. It was a great campaign. Not perfect mind you, we had boring stretches, long arguments and I even managed to lose a good friend somewhere in there. But it was a good campaign. The players beat the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil which was such a massive adventure that it covered level 4 to 14 by itself.
We left the campaign about 2 years ago. For various reasons, chief among them the desire for newness and because some characters (not players mind you) had evolved to a point in their stories that the party’s integrity could not be maintained. It happens pretty often in long games, and I would not want it otherwise. It’s a role playing game, the players are free to choses where the character goes and to push the character’s psyche in the direction they need. I’m not that much of a failed novelist that I wish to impose party unity. (Although to be perfectly honest, I did try to shake things up at the end bring the characters back together). Regardless, the campaign had run it’s course and we all agreed to leave it and start anew, with a side agreement that characters would be kept and we could return to it someday.
We did just that this summer. We played one last adventure with these old characters. It was really fun for me and I think the players liked it too. It was nice to see the mix of fond memories and wonder when each players were looking at their character sheets to review their capacities and items. On top of it all, the adventure was a classic effort-to-frustration-to-satisfaction arc. The characters were apparently severely outmatched and limited in their resources to address the problems at hand : negotiate with interplannar masters of deceit and bargaining. They spent a lot of mental energies to resolve the numerous non-combat challenges of this adventure.
As an unexpected bonus, the 3 fights seen in these 2 sessions were short, if somewhat anticlimatic. Thanks to Save or Die effects (or vastly superior tactical advantage in one case) all fights were very short. I say bonus because returning to a high level game after 2 years of low-to-mid level gaming (our recently abandoned campaign), there is a high risk of stalling the game while reading spells and rules and playing out the fights, and this breaks the fun. (I’ll have a rant one day against save or die effects, but this time I’m glad we had them).
Bottom line, the players ‘won’, the characters are off to new adventures in far off realms and the players are letting them go, apparently happy and satisfied. I know I am.
Thanks for the great game guys. Let’s hope the next one is even better!
Cheers, see you all in 2 weeks.
Hidden Trackable
As often happens, I found myself involved in a minor argument online. This is one of those arguments that can’t entirely chalked up to different tastes.
“Hidden Trackable” refers to any element of the game that could be tracked by a player with a perfect memory (or pencil and paper) but is supposed to be hidden using one mechanism or another. Hidden trackable comes in many forms, and is in a game for different reasons.
Simpsonize Your Life
As expected, the hype-machine for The Simpsons Movie is out in full force. The Simpsons are a television institution, containing around 10 seasons of the best stuff ever to be on television. However, there’s plenty of people (including myself) who are skeptical of the movie’s quality due to the lack of quality on the show in recent years. Of course, the advertising for the film is not going to speak to that: it’s just trying to get as many people aware of the movie as possible.
However, despite my skepticism, I remain a die-hard Simpsons fan, and so I looked at some of the promotions related to the film that I found interesting. As it turns out, they run the gamut from clever to broken.
RPG Software
I’m a complete and utter Geek (I scored Major Geek BTW) sometimes its a huge wonder that I actually got married, but then again, my lovely wife is also pretty up there on the geek scale.
Anywho, being the geek that I am, I’ve always been fascinated by using computers to make my RPG games better. And up to this year (2007) I’ve failed to find anything good enough for me to use consistently. I paid good money for the Dungeon Master Assistant for AD&D back in the 80′s (pure crap) and the D&D Mastertools from WoTC in the 2000s (even worse).
However, my players have found a few decent character sheets and they’ve been happy with them. For DMing however, nothing really was better than a notebook and a bunch of Index cards (To track initiative, Monster HP, magical loot, etc)
However, this year I’ve discovered Wikis and the Google Groups mailing list service. This is good stuff! The mailing list has the potential to be the perfect Game Webpage and has the super extra bonus of being access restricted, so we don’t have to worry about Copyright too much (Most of the cool stuff you want to share about D&D are outside of the OGL and are copyrighted). We have a forum, space to create HTML pages (like a limited-function Wiki) and spaces for files (like character sheets and loot!)
An offline Wiki like Tiddlywiki, I found out, is the also the perfect DMing tool. Since it’s basically a bunch of interconnected pages, it’s exactly like a campaign notebook. I can design adventures and critters and link them all together. And it fits all on a USB stick.
Time will tell if I’ll keep using these tools, but I’m giving it my best shot for the new campaign.
Update (August 24th 2007): The Google Group as been universally adopted by the whole group and the Wiki remains the best tool Ive had for DM prep. I wonder what 4E will offer in terms of online tools?.
Helpful Tips from Bloggers for Bloggers
I don’t think we’ve ever actually done one of these “meme”s before, but SciFiChick tagged us and we’re not the types to just let that fly by. It doesn’t hurt that the meme is actually about tips on blogging and it’s created by bloggers as they pass them on. In essence, I like it because it is actually quite handy, and it makes amazing use of the meme style to propogate not only people’s sites but also their good ideas.
I also just noticed that we have had an entire category titled ‘Web Meme’ for a while…what the hell? That worked out well for me.
-Start Copy-
It’s very simple. When this is passed on to you, copy the whole thing, skim the list and put a * star beside those that you like. (Check out especially the * starred ones.)
Add the next number (1. 2. 3. 4. 5., etc.) and write your own blogging tip for other bloggers. Try to make your tip general.
After that, tag 10 other people. Link love some friends!
Just think- if 10 people start this, the 10 people pass it onto another 10 people, you have 100 links already!
1. Look, read, and learn. ***
-http://www.neonscent.com
2. Be EXCELLENT to each other. *
-http://www.bushmackel.com
3. Don’t let money change ya! *
-http://www.therandomforest.info
4. Always reply to your comments. ****
-http://chattiekat.com
5. Link liberally — it keeps you and your friends afloat in the Sea of Technorati. *
-http://chipsquips.com
6. Don’t give up – persistance is fertile. **
-http://www.velcro-city.co.uk
7. Give link credit where credit is due. ***
-http://www.sfsignal.com
8. Pictures say a thousand words and can usually add to any post.*
-http://scifichick.com
9. Keep writing, no matter what, and the quality will follow.
-http://www.critical-hits.com/
-End Copy-
I will take the liberty of tagging Andrew the O, Steve over at the Foodist Blog, Denise at her Knitting/Crochet blog, Spankleberry at Spankledelia, Anna at Cookie Madness, Amber Night just to piss her off, Nyeng!, Yehuda from Gaming and Blogging in the Holy Land, and not that I expect him to do it but I always want more ideas out of David Airey’s brain. Consider yourselves tagged, and let the infectiousness of the internet rule all!
Making a Campaing villain
One of the 1st steps I do when I think about a new campaign is the Big Bad Guy. The too-often Shadowy hand that pulls the strings of the evil/insane/chaotic side of the game. Creating a good bad guy that will act as a motivator is not easy. If he’s too powerful early on in the campaign, the players risk being humiliated more than challenged. And humiliation, while a very powerful motivator to get even, is never a synonym of fun for the players.
I tried it in our 1st D&D 3.0 campaign, where an evil, unkillable (at the PC’s level) Gargoyle terrorized a village and forced the characters to perform quests for it. While the players wanted to kill the gargoyle really bad, the motivation was based on coercion, something that should not be done often or for long periods of time.
My 2 best villains were created more or less by accident and had this common theme: They were slightly stronger than the PCs and were able, time and time again to flee right before abject defeat at the hands of the PCs. They grew in power during the campaign and were the front man to the hidden overlord/power.
So for this campaign, I plan on doing something slightly different. The Big bad guy will have a name and a clear agenda. It will actually be a minor villain that the player’s defeated in the conclusion of our former High Level campaign. Since the new campaign shares the same Homebrewed world, the defeated villain will plan it’s revenge on the whole world once the High Level PCs move on to other planes for further adventures.
The new PCs will know early on who and what this new villain is. But being so much less powerful than it, the PCs will not register on the villain’s radar for quite some time, allowing them to build up their power and reputation, leading to a climatic confrontation much later in the campaign.
Time to start a new Campaign
I have been playing structured Role playing game like D&D and Gurps since I was barely 10. During the 1st year of playing that game I’ve discovered how much I liked being a DM.
24 years later, I’m still geeking out at the idea of starting a new campaign. We’ve been playing D&D 3.0/3.5 more or less every 2 weeks since 2000. We’ve played a total of 5 campaigns, some long (level 1-18 in 3 years) some much shorter (less than 3 months).
This fall, after a 2 year campaign characterized by many missed games and a DM that finally decided to tackle and recover from a severe depression, we decided that we needed to start a new one.
I’m pretty excited by the new campaign. Everyone seems to have made a character they really want to play and I’ve got a few ideas about the campaign’s backstory that are promising.
Blogging or bugging my friends?
I’ve been thinking for a long time about starting a Blog, I got an account at Live Journal (Unfinished 1st Post) and another one at Microsoft (3 Posts, hate the interface).
Since I have recently gone completely Googlely, I decided I might as well give Blogger a shot.
Anyway, I think I have always been blogging ever since I was given a email account. The only difference is that my readers (read: my D&D player’s mailboxes) were more or less captive of my musings. I think out of respect for them I should move away from that form of expression and do it on a Bona Fide blog. Of course, I can’t expect to have as many readers…. lol.
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