DM Chronicles, Session 12: The Great Game! Part 1
I guess I had to complain about attendance in order to get a full house last Friday as everyone showed up! Yay!
Franky and Stef showed up first and I got to clean the floor with them in a few Magic game with my rebel and Elf decks. Then Yan showed up and we teamed up against Franky and Stef to beat them. So the evening was off to a good start.
Eric showed up at around 5 PM and started to level up his Crusader character to level 10 (although he had promised, at least twice, to do it beforehand… Not that we ever believed him).
Since Math missed the last game, we decided to start before he arrived. Last time, we had decided that his character, Aravard the Arcane Archer, didn’t tag along and stayed behind to fight the horde of Driders and the few Huge Dread Harpoon Spiders (MM III, p80-81) that were attacking Iridithil’s House back in Ptolus.
The Beastlands
So the PCs started around the tomb of the Fallen Hero of the Beastlands. Ignoring the wards, Cixi entered after Cruguer and studied the galleries of images, searching for any clues that might relate to her long lost people. None were found.
When they both left the crumbling tomb, the party observed the Wolf lord sitting on it’s hunches not far away from the forested island.
I envision this layer of the Beastlands like a darker version of World of Warcraft’s Ashenvale (see image). [Read the rest of this article]
First (Level) Impressions: D&D 4e
(To those of you coming in via search: this article was written after the D&D XP convention, which featured only a limited preview of 4e. This is not a comprehensive review of 4e. –ed)
With four games under my belt, along with talking to some of the designers and developers at length, I’m ready to give you my Critical opinion of D&D fourth edition! Of course, this was only a preview, and things could still change, but many of these are pretty core to the system.
Critical Hits:
- More choices for everyone. Just judging by what you can do at first level, I’m quite looking forward to higher level characters.
- Combat really is more dynamic. More movement around the battlefield, and they managed to do it WITHOUT changing the interesting tactics that existed in 3e. You still get attacked if you withdraw from combat and aren’t careful. You still have to plan your movement around. But there’s more powers and abilities that move around, and more advantages to doing so. [Read the rest of this article]
D&D XP Interview: Andy Collins and Scott Rouse (Part 1)
(This is the first part of our very long interview with Andy Collins and Scott “The Rouse”. In this installment, we cover how they came to Wizards and what their job entails, along with a few other personal matters.)
Critical-Hits: How did you get started at Wizards?
Andy Collins: I started about 13 years ago in Events, where we managed cons like this. I’ve been playing D&D since 1984. When I found out that Wizards was buying TSR, I said, “well, time to update the resume!” Because I always wanted to work on D&D, I figured I’d start at Wizards for a few years then move to Lake Geneva to join TSR. Then it turns out I didn’t have to.
CH: That was nice of them. (At this point, we were joined by Scott Rouse, who we introduced ourselves to and handed our business cards out.)
AC: Ah, Critical Hits. No longer necessary to confirm you. [Read the rest of this article]
Inq. of the Week: Systems Operational
Dave’s poll from last week asked what size of dice you prefer, the d20 came in at a huge 29% with the rare and exotic d12 in a surprising second with 27%. The entire spread is actually in descending order with the d10 at 18%, d8 at 12%, d6 at 5%, and d4 at 5% (with weird die types like d34 at 3%). I guess this means the d20 system is justified in its choice of flagship random number generator. We also took a few questions to ask the Wizards developers, and the results of the interviews should be up today or tomorrow. We have some rather interesting answers to what different devs think of Red Dragons and what they enjoy most about 4th Edition.
Now that we’ve been inundated with all things D&D, we’d like to get back to a bit more general rampant geekery. (someday spell-check will acknowledge words like ‘geekery’) Dave and I noticed quite a few macbooks at the D&D Experience, many of them owned by Wizards employees, which caused Dave to wonder why in the seminar it was mentioned that D&D Insider may not be available to mac users. This brought about an Inquisition poll that we’ve been meaning to ask for a while now:
Loading ...Slowing down… Spring break… and Akismet finally activated.
My kids are starting the primary school equivalent of spring break (i.e no school, but no partying in Florida either) so I decided to slow down a bit on the blog this week.
Expect a one or two-part post on last Friday’s game tonight and maybe tomorrow but not much else this week. I could use the rest…
Also, I was assaulted by about 70 spam comments last night on my Legend of the Broken Dice post that somehow got through the Captcha. So I temporarily activated Akismet while I look into it (I might need to update a few of the other plugins).
Have a nice week y’all!
D&D XP: Random Crunchy Bits
Danny and I are back from the D&D XP. I decided not to pay for the flaky hotel wi-fi to be able to do updates from the show floor. We played three games today: the first Living Forgotten Realms adventure,”Escape from Sembia” (which essentially ended in the second encounter as a TPK), press dungeon delve with James Wyatt, and a dungeon delve with Mike Mearls. So I have a little bit more play experience now, though the people who played through the entire first two LFR adventures will have a lot more (especially those who got to fight a dragon at the end of the second LFR module!)
Here’s just a collection of random 4e rules things I haven’t seen anywhere else. Keep in mind that some of these are very much conjecture. I list the source first.
- Sara Girard: Mounted combat is a higher level Paladin option. (She plays a Dragonborn Paladin, and she let slip that she wasn’t high enough level for a mount, but when pressed further, she gave us a “no comment.”)
- Rob Heinsoo: The same dynamic exists at all levels for characters. Without magic items, characters that don’t begin their career flying and teleporting won’t have powers even at epic that do that. [Read the rest of this article]
