I’m sure that magic items in D&D have been talked about for countless hours, but with Wizards of the Coast finally releasing Mordenkainen’s Magical Emporium for 4th Edition in September and my home campaign nearing the middle of the epic tier I’ve been wanting to talk about them here. The handful of times that I ran 3rd Edition D&D I was guilty of handing out items of a much higher level than the party, but I would try to balance it out with concepts like staves only having a small number of charges. The players/characters always loved it, but I would hear from other D&D players outside of the game that they didn’t like what I was doing and that they had the impression it was “contrary to the rules of the game” or something like that. I didn’t mind them much, but was very intrigued by what they were saying.
Archives for August 2011
My Favored Enemy Is Mean People
In case anyone didn’t see the entire Internet on fire yesterday afternoon, there was an article on Gizmodo yesterday entitled “My Brief OkCupid Affair With A World-Champion Magic: The Gathering Player”. The short version of this article is that the author made an OKCupid account, accidentally met Jon Finkel (a former Magic world champion), and then proceeded to not date him – because he played Magic. She apparently disliked this so much that she thought it was a good idea to use Gizmodo as her personal Facebook page and blog about her experiences and decided to let millions of people know what a clearly bad date one individual guy is. I’m sure his self-esteem has never been better. I’m not going to excoriate her in this here article. That would be unbecoming. Also, I think the Internet is going to do that all by itself without any help on my part.
Critical Bits for the week ending 2011-08-28
Via PR: Settlers of Catan novel coming 11/15 "…a fascinating, action-packed adventure full of surprises and intense character conflict." #
Chatty DM, Freelancer, Part 5: OMG! I Made it!
In which Chatty comes full circle and ends up being a freelance designer of the games that brought him up into the hobby in the first place.
The Architect DM: Campaign Building
It’s good to be back! The first week of August saw us at GenCon and very happily winning a Gold ENnie award, and then in the weeks after I’ve been catching up on things post-convention and getting back into the swing of things. Lately I’ve been discussing and toying with the concept that the best world building happens through playing a campaign, and so I suggest the world building DMs out there spend less time before play and just jump into things with a published or a bare bones adventure and then let the world build from there. This also opens your game up to the possibilities for players to contribute to the world building which for me has always turned out better than I could imagine.
One Late Gen Con Report
Yes, it’s been a few weeks now since the convention ended. Between some post-Gen Con business and a bit of con crud in the house, it’s been difficult to get back to the blog. But at long last, How I Spent My Gen Con.
Hints From Dire Heloise
This week, I decided to open up the floor to reader questions. I am committed to answering these in the most serious way that I can.
Critical Bits for the week ending 2011-08-21
From the archives:: When Horror Meets Awesome: CthulhuTech http://t.co/k67kVBv #charchive # All files to run your own session of DD&D are now available on this page: http://t.co/nq7hVa0 # RT @ChristianLindke: Great news regarding D&D Digital Rights http://t.co/rOx3wWK # RT @gregbilsland: New #DDI Article by @davethegame (Rumble in the Valley) http://t.co/0hO2sef (DDI sub required) # Great […]
A Year at Critical Hits, and GenCon 2011
Gen Con is always tough for me. When I first started attending, I just ran a few games, played a few games, and hit the Exhibit Hall. I didn’t really know anyone, no one knew me, and I could absorb it all without over-extending myself. Now it is getting more complicated. I still know very few people, and very few people still know me, but there are more obligations that go into a convention now.
Game Previews from GenCon 2011
While at GenCon this year I was floored by the amount of new games that were being previewed and available to purchase at the convention. Checking out these new games is one of the big reasons that I go to GenCon, so today I’d like to talk about some of the games that I got to demo while I was there. This post is titled “previews” because I haven’t had a chance to play any of these games in their entirety, but they all stood out to me either from before I went to the con or while I was walking the exhibit hall.
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