Articles by Danny Rupp
Danny works professionally as an architect and serves as managing editor here at CH, which means he shares many of the duties of being an editor but without the fame and recognition. He also writes about RPGs, videogames, movies, and TV. He is married to Sucilaria, and has a personal blog at Incorrect Blitz Input. (Email Danny or follow him on Twitter).
Preview: D&D Insider
This afternoon Dave and I had the chance to talk to Randy Buehler and Didier Monin while they showed us some of the D&D Insider features. Dave will be posting an interview that we conducted with Mike Mearls, Scott Rouse, and Randy Buehler which will discuss some of overall aspects of D&D Insider such as prices and timeline so this preview is more about the hands-on demonstration we were shown by Didier and our impressions of what we saw. [Read the rest of this article]
GenCon: Live ENnies Coverage
Dave and I are at the ENnies Awards, Dave is covering it live on our twitter feed.
Winners to be posted here when we have wireless!
EDIT: Winners below cut and pasted from ENWorld‘s Homepage. Or check the archives of our twitter feed to re-experience it. Also check out our pictures from the event.
Inq. of the Week: Dungeon Crawls?
I’d begun to notice a distinct lack of D&D posts here lately, which was partially orchestrated and partially just because a lot of other news and thoughts came up here, so last week I ventured to ask who would win in a super big monster brawl. It looks like we have a tie!!! The one and possibly only Tarrasque tied for first place winning the fight with a Gargantuan Gelatinous Cube, with the joke entry of a totally badass Nunchuking Bear coming in second place. I’m very glad I included him, because of how precisely badass he is (even without chainsaw-chuks….which is a ridiculous concept). Third place went to Orcus, demon lord of the undead, but honestly he really has little over the Nunchuking Bear.
I’m posting this week for Dave, who asked me to take care of it but was so very kind enough to provide me with a topic for the inquisition itself. He really just does all the work around here, so why break the mold? What we’d like to know this week is how many of you really enjoy dungeon crawls, or how much combat you like per game session.
Loading ...Inq. of the Week: Monster Brawl
The Dark Knight dominated its second weekend, but who is surprised by that with competition like the way late X-Files movie sequel and Will Ferrell’s latest movie Step Brothers? It raked in $75 million on its second weekend, which is very impressive and left the second place movie way behind at $30 million. Last week Dave asked, quite poignantly, which Batman characters should appear in the next / third ‘new’ Batman movie. The results are that 36% of you would like to see Catwoman in the next movie, with a whopping 30% considering the Riddler as a good fit to take on Batman after the Joker and Two-face. Rounding it out was Superman with 20%, Poison Ivy with 19%, and somehow 14% of you voted for the Penguin. Come on, seriously? Have you SEEN the penguin? I suppose Nolan’s creative takes on the characters so far could translate to a very interesting villain with the Penguin, but compared to Mr. Freeze? I won’t even get into the 11% that voted for Robin showing up…
Fresh off of a weekend chock-full of D&D, Dave ran his game on Saturday and I ran mine yesterday, we’re ready to solve a debate about which epic Dungeons & Dragons monster would win in an all-out fight with the other classic / hilarious monsters that have shown up over the years to terrorize high level characters and destroy worlds.
Loading ...Everything is better with the addition of a Nunchuking Bear! Watch out, he’s a ninja!
The Most Mega of Men
Must…stop…hyperventilating! They’re coming out with Megaman 9, and some holiest of holies has inspired them to make it a retro game! Sweet mother of Christmas! It looks like it will be available for download for the Wii, 360, and PS3 for whatever amount of money equates to 1000 wii points. You should totally go read more about this game, as it looks like they took the Megaman 1, 2, and 3 engine and just made a new game with it. This pretty much instantly takes me back to the mental state of a 10 year old…except I’m pretty much always in that mental state so there’s not far to travel.
As someone who played Megaman and any Megaman game no matter which combination of numbers and/or letters were placed behind it, I can tell you with no ego that this game will rock your fucking socks off. They nailed the equation so well the first time around that even Pythagoras had to do a double-take. Chaos in civilized lands? Check. A grouping of six to eight robot masters causing all the trouble? check. Some big bad mo-fo with a terrible afro behind it all? Typically, check, though sometimes they tried to make him cooler but it ended up just being more lame than an evil doctor with crazy hair. This will only add fuel to my propensity for randomly including Megaman villains in everyday conversation.
It also looks like Capcom is selling t-shirts for the game with hilarious bad spoof artwork that mocks their screw up on the original game’s artwork. Also, if you’re visually inclined (sorry to those of you reading this in braille) then head over to AZM and watch the gameplay youtube. Did I mention that I’m flipping stoked about this? I hope it opens up the potential for tons more NEW retro games to be released on the virtual platforms.
YouTubes of the Week: The Conchords are Flying
Wait, you might be saying, we’ve got some Bartoneus in your YouTubes of the Week? Oh noes! I can’t just sit back and let Dave do all of the work, after all, he did travel quite a bit over the weekend and deserves a break. Just this once. Besides, I simply must share something which has completely overtaken my wife and I. That something is the Flight of the Conchords, New Zealand’s premiere musical comedy duo (or at least they’re probably in the top 10). Not everyone is cool like Dave who has known about these guys for “years”, but they’re so hilarious I just have to share some of their youtube videos here!
Frodo, don’t wear the Ring!
More hilarious videos after the break! [Read the rest of this article]
Watchmen Trailer
If you haven’t heard yet, the Watchmen trailer is out! I believe it’s showing before The Dark Knight, in which case I’ll be very excited to see it on the big screen at midnight tonight. But do you really think you’d have to wait until then to see it, of course not! You can check it out over at firstshowing.net in pretty good quality, and if it’s not there just search the youtubes for it!
To the right you see Dr. Manhattan from the trailer, but honestly you just have to watch it to see everything for yourself. Needless to say, I’m excited. I think that all of the characters look pretty much spot on and though the feel definitely reminds me a bit too much of 300 (and I loved 300), I’d rather this not ride on the coatails of another movie and stand as fantastic all on its own. We’ll just have to wait until March and see!
D&D 4E: First Major Round of Errata
Wizards has posted errata and updates to the 4th Edition D&D core rulebooks, and there are quite a bit of changes / fixes. Head over to the Wizard’s site and check out the text pdf’s, I’ve printed them out and am wondering how exactly I am going to efficiently going to use them.
Some highlights from the errata:
PHB:
- A lot of the class specific powers (hunter’s quarry, backstab, etc.) were clarified so that if they are used in a round they cannot be used again until your next turn. [ stop breaking the rules, please ]
- Ranger Attack – Blade Cascade was given a maximum number of 5 attacks [ Less awesome, more balance ]
- Several skill DC’s were brought into line with the rest of the game’s numbers, no longer based on straight level but now 1/2 levels [ the best min-maxing is to miss every other level ]
- You can now buy oil for your lanterns [ thank. god. ]
MM:
- Angel of Battle’s HP dropped (halved), tons of monster attack damages have been increased, many of them doubling. [ Yeeouch! ]
DMG:
- Difficult Class by level – all reduced, now 1st-3rd level easy = DC 5, moderate = DC 10, and hard = DC 15, all higher level numbers were equally reduced [ time to go back and re-negotiate with the king ]
- Every complexity level of Skill Challenges now end with 3 failures [ buh? ]
It seems like most of the PHB and MM changes are corrections, whereas the Skill Challenge changes in the DMG feel like a major overhaul in reaction to people’s complaints that they are simply too hard. I haven’t had time to fully ponder how the lower DC’s but easier failure translates into different skill challenges, but I’m very curious to see how it works out. This does kind of invalidate much of Keith Baker’s famous blog post though, because his whole claim was that the numbers did in fact work and now Wizards has gone in and torn all of the numbers down. Thoughts?
Inq. of the Week: Why So Serious?
This Friday is the day many of us have been waiting for since we saw the last 10 minutes of Batman Begins, back in 2005. At that point it had been exactly 10 years since any real effort was put towards bringing the caped crusader to the big screen, and even those results were questionable. This Friday we’ll all get to see how the latest Batman series of movies attempts to break through the sequel malaise that has claimed many other superhero franchises until X-men came along.
Last week Dave was hot off the heels of his coverage at Origins and was curious about the popularity of Podcasting and how frequently all of you listen to them. The poll was one of our closest in a while, with the slight majority of you (30%) saying you never listen to podcasts at all, with 25% of you saying you rarely listen to them (myself included), but close behind was 24% who listen to them regularly. The smallest group was still 20% of the votes that listens to podcasts occasionally. The way I qualify the poll is grouping them into a positive category and a negative, resulting in 44% who like podcasts and 55% that don’t caring about them with a 1% remainder.
This week we’re asking you about Batman, because it just makes sense. We’re also very curious to know in the comments when you’re planning on seeing The Dark Knight, so stop by and let us know if you’re seeing it at a midnight showing, opening night, opening weekend, waiting a few weeks, or not bothering to see it in theaters at all.
Loading ...Gaming Now on the iPhone
It’s a good thing I was randomly floating around a few sites on the internet today, otherwise I might have easily missed the launch of Apple’s oh so appropriately named (haha!) App Store for the iPhone which allows you to download games for the glorious piece of sexy technology. I bought one back in september of 2007, so going to their site and see the “Twice as Fast, Half the Price” slogan for the new one doesn’t exactly make me all tickly inside, but I am very excited to see this new store launched. I’m not sure which direction they approached naming it from, whether its from their name Apple or from the fact that it provides you with Applications, it got at least a chuckle out of me but then I just had to go and describe it as being “app-ropriately named” and then came the pain.
I wouldn’t say that I’ve been waiting for games on the iPhone, as it has quite a lot of functions that even though the initial amazement of owning one has substantially faded I still haven’t been sitting around wishing my phone could do more. The idea has always excited me, but it’s not something that I would call grossly overdue. They claim that it is a service handy for both gaming and business, but I imagine the “business” applications as of today are few and far between compared to the gaming, but I might just be a naive so please enlighten me if this isn’t the case. [Read the rest of this article]
