Off for my trimestrial cardboard crack fix
It’s 6h00 on a Sunday Morning. My 5-year old son is watching Captain Flamingo on the Tube. I’m looking at the blog’s stats ,still somewhat bemused to have at least 58 unique visitors day in day out (I need to go to California, apparently they dig me over there!). I’m also touching up on typos and grammar mishaps here and there. I’m fighting the urge to spend hours on Facebook (do drop in if you are a FB addict, I’m Philippe-Antoine Ménard) and I’m writing this post…
Thing is, I shouldn’t be doing all that, I should be reading the Lorwyn Spoiler over at MTGSalvation.com…
Yup, it’s yet another Magic The Gathering Prerelease Weekend. I’m cashing in all my husband points to get to game twice in the weekend. Thanks hon!
I’m not half bad at Magic. Not as consistently good as Yan, but I should say I’m Strong among the Weak. I’ve won at least 2 such Pre-release tournaments as well as one or 2 Friday Night Magic. I know the rules really well…. well enough to overturn bad rulings from Judges. But what do you expect? I’m a crunch junky and Magic is Crunch heaven!
Thing is, I’ve been getting worse and worse at that game in the last year. Granted the current collection (Time Spiral) just doesn’t work for me as Ravnica and Kamigawa did before. (Clueless about what I’m saying here? Look here, massive link!).
Magic is a complex game that needs a lot of mental and emotional focus to win consistently. If you lose one, your game is shot. I’m currently lacking in both departments.
Aside: Yan and I share the joys of the Best Player Syndrome in our game group. While Yan beats me at deck design and Mental focus, I’m a better politician so I squeeze wins by having the others think he’s a bigger threat than I. He He! However, I do get distracted and have a weakness to Jedi Mind Tricks, so I often throw a ‘Certain-win’ away.
Aside Two: Always Always Always kill Yan first in a multiplayer Magic game. If you don’t know why, Yan does! My ignoring this cardinal rule explains a significant chunk of my ‘lost’ games.
It seems that this Bloggy thing has also cured me from more than my World of Warcrack addiction… it has had the side effect of diverting my mental energies from Magic. So I’m going today to see if I can ride to success on Raw talent alone. Now I have a Spoiler to read. It’s 6h30, I have an hour and a half to do it and take a shower (Havast Gamer funk! I stab at thee!).
Wish me luck.
Comic Snap Reviews: 9/29/07
Now with even more spoilers than usual! You’ve been warned!
Meet the players!: Franky
Three weeks ago, I sent a questionnaires to my 5 D&D players. I finally got all 5 responses (in exchange for 750 xp each) and I’m posting the 3rd one today, along with my usual editorial comments. See here and here for previous postings.
What character do you play in our current D&D campaign? (Name, Race
Cixi, Sparkless (Iron Hero) Human(?) Archer
(With the strength to use a Large composite Longbow and a good Charisma to subdue Men)
She is part of a species that have been kept prisoner on the Carceri by some Devils or Demons. With some other Iron Heroes, she managed to escape the plane and enter the realm where the city of
So now, her key motivation is to find her real home-plane. Meanwhile, she works in getting some political influence in Ptolus. (Chatty DM: Cixi was salvaged from our last campaign. She’s one of the deepest most fluffylicious characters I’ve ever seen.)
What Quote would best summarize your Character?
“There are two kinds of Men: Those that need my “tenderness” and those that deserved an arrow in the head!”
“What are you talking about!? I’m Chaste and Pure!” (Chatty DM: She’s such a slut but it always, always happens ‘off camera’ so everyone is more or less forced to believe how pure she really is).
What other Role Playing games have you played other than D&D 3.x?
- The Dark Eye
- Paranoia
- All the White Wolf product (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, …)
- Elric
- Hawkmoon
- Cthulhu
- Bloodlust
- Lord of the ring
- In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas
- RuneQuest
- Shadowrun
- Starwars
Sorry, my memories stop there…(You beat me to the number of games you played, and you forgot Amber and Bloodlust)
What do you look for in a game session to make it a great session?
Good interaction with the DM and the other players (role-playing or not). Good progression in the story, with some fights and the apotheosis is a good old critical at the needed time.
What do you look in a multi-session adventure to make it a great
adventure?
A story that make my character (and me, of course) travel in an amazing world that I haven’t already imagined. Great Encounters, good fights and definitively,
keeping my character alive to make it enter the World’s legend.
What tends to decrease your fun the most in a single session?
Fatigue, crap dice roll and sometimes, lack in my skill of role-playing (Chatty DM: I find this funny that Franky criticizes his RPing skills when he’s quite possibly the best RP player of the group)
Tell me about your best RPG memory as a player?
It was the first time I played with my current group. I got to play the character of an absent player: a Rogue (my favorite type). I played him like I always think a true rogue should act in a party: always looking for good opportunities to get more money. Just not the money already gathered by the others members of the party (stealing the money and the goods of others players is always a mistake, in my opinion). (Chatty DM: Amen to that brother!!!!)
So that night, I managed to rob a poor female Inn Keeper. She was fat and ugly, but anyway, I used my “sex appeal” to steal the keys she was keeping on her breast. I ended up emptying her chest. My actions spurned such a funny reaction in my new gaming friends around the table. My introduction was complete. I will always remember that night.
Chatty DM’s take on the player:
François (Franky) is our Story-telling Explorer. While he loves a good fight like any D&D fan and he’s a mean Role Player, I’ve discovered what really rocks his boat. You have to bring him to something completely alien and different or you need to overwhelm him with graphic descriptions. I remember when I unveiled the secret of the Iron Heroes Prison world on the group. I was describing Carceri’s layers and appearances and how the world they knew was nothing more than a Texas-sized bubble. I remember quite clearly him saying ‘you’re so Evil man!’ Franky rocks and I hope he has as much fun playing with us as I have with him.
DM Chronicles, Session 3: Of Pools and Crashes
Image Source: WotC D&D Miniature Game
After having skipped a week from our usual bi-monthly game, I was really looking forward for this week’s. One of our players, Stef, had to stay home because his Wife was away and he was with the kids. So I offered to move the game over there.
So I rolled all the battlemaps I had prepared, packed the ziplocked minis, the adventure, the USB key with DM Wiki, the Core books and a few Splatbooks (Wow, Wikipedia has a definition for everything!).
It’s 4:15 PM, I hop in the car, put on Muse’s last album, real loud, and join the traffic jams that plague the Suburbs of Montreal. (Montreal is an Island, I’m lucky enough to live on it, but all my players live in Laval, a Northern Suburban Island).
At 4h30, I’m sitting behind a Mini-Van and I notice the right lane being free, I switch to the lane and accelerate…. and the van does the same thing 2 seconds later and crashes into my new 2007 Honda Fit. Result: The whole left side of my car is scratched, dented and my driver’s door can only open about 1 foot wide.
Now in Québec, crashes with no victims or ‘Hit and Runs’ are dealt with a ‘friendly’ exchange of information on specific forms that all good citizen have in their cars (I don’t). Anyway, long story-short (from me? HA!) the Mini-Van’s owner had 2 sets, we fill out the forms, we both deny responsibility (as should be) and we go our way.
I just had a car crash but I also haven’t played D&D in 3 weeks. What’s my decision? Screw it, I’ll call the insurance from Stef’s place!
Just so you know, the last time we were supposed to play at Stef’s, there was an Ice Storm. When I got there, I had a message from my lovely wife informing me that I needed to come back pronto because a Tree fell on our house! (True Story!)
Anyway, we ended up starting to play at around 7h00 pm. As promised, I’ll skip on story elements as Yan will tackle them in his player log.
The adventure was about finding the source of a weird creature in Ptolus. The initial investigation lead them to the the slums of Ptolus where they faced a 10-strong street gang. I had the occasion to test the Hit Point Pool approach I stol… huh borrowed from Greywulf.
It worked perfectly! All the energy I usually spend keeping track of individual hit points was shunted towards very graphic descriptions of wounds and deaths. You should have seen my player’s faces when I described heads exploding and Manga-like slicing of bodies that crumpled slowly in halves to the ground. There were a few weird cases where a Thug took an electricity charged arrow in the face and fell from the building and survived only to have his neighbor die from a rather average hit (Oh by the way, the re-vamped Duskblade rocks!!!!). So this house rule is a keeper. It was the best fight of the whole evening.
The players continued their exploration and found a link to the creature’s origin and followed it (yet again) in the Sewers. They quickly discovered a huge natural cavern filled with offals. Since visibility was limited, I described the room in bits and pieces as the players explored cautiously. I ended up pointed out a huge mound of trash and an exit.
I must have mentioned the exit more than once because at that point a player went Metagaming on me and said something like ‘If Phil (that’s me) talks about the exit like that it’s because that’s where he wants us to go…’ Hmmmm that’s grounds for a -2 penalty on Spot checks don’t ya think? (and a warning that I must ‘control the message’ as my old bosses used to say). The penalty was just enough to miss the Otyugh creeping up in the garbage pile and striking the players with it’s filthy tentacle, screaming ‘Trespassers! Me EAT Trespassers’.
Short fight, I mauled the Duskblade pretty badly, I wisely ignored all instances of potential Grappling with the creature’s 4 tentacles. When the players applied various healing powers, I described how the creature seemed to be leaching this energy to heal itself. Yeah, they freaked a bit. Twelve Seconds later, there was Otyugh sushi on the cave floor.
While the Duskblade let his armour regenerate him (The Magic Item Compendium is sooooo cool). Stef went to search the garbage pile, to cries of disgust from the other players. He found some valuables! Oddly enough, no one asked for their fair share… Go Stef, the loot is yours!
We ended the evening with one last encounter, an ambush by some Gnome-like Fey while the party was squeezing in a tight corridor (well, not Lillie the Pixie, but the rest). We were getting tired and the fight was more mechanical than flavorful. The players won and got some sweet piece of magical loot, a Human-slaying sword.
Overall a very fun evening. Now I have to wait until Monday to book an appointment with my Car Dealer’s repair shop.
Lessons learned:
- Hit point pools for mooks rocks!
- Graphic descriptions of a fight makes it a lot better than the actual mechanics (duh! about time I learned that)
What players liked:
- The gore and splattering of mooks all over the Slums.
- My ignoring anything Grappling for once.
- Yan loved that I worked the evil Feys into his backstory and gave him more info on the Big Bad than was warranted by the adventure.
- The Duskblade chucking ranged touch Spell-laced arrows and casting swift spells.
- Stef finding treasure where all others refused to go.
- The story hooked some of the players and they want to KNOW.
- Getting XPs for filling in the Player questionnaire! (I’m really looking forward to posting the other ones).
What players disliked
- The DM’s frequent breaks with immersion to joke around, bring reference from pass session and talk about his blog. (For my defense, I was dealing with a game and the shock of the crash… but I’ll be more careful henceforth).
- The adventure hook was a bit shaky and players had a passive aggressive reaction to it like ‘no we don’t do it, come on boys’ I don’t know if it was that I wasn’t enthusiastic enough or what… (See Yan’s comment, he’s right…)
What’s next:
- I’m not saying anything other than ‘we finish the adventure’.
Overall a great evening. For everything else, there’s Insurance.
Blasts From the Past: Virtual Adepts and Captioned Best Brains
I have two blasts from the past to share today. [Read the rest of this article]
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