A little over a week ago we celebrated my birthday with raucous partying and the like, it’s always good to get a large group of friends together for communal debauchery. However, what really made the day for me was my lovely wife’s efforts into creating what has to be one of the best birthday cakes […]
Put the Phone Away: A call to gamers still in the dark ages of handhelds (Part 1)
Gamers have a predicament when they are away from their home base: they have a gnawing hunger for escapist goodness without a good way of appeasing the hungry gaming monster in their bellies. Too many of you are resigning yourselves to badly-made clones of golden-era games on your tiny little cellphone screens. Stop it.
The 5×5 Method
When working on chapter 2 of my D&D 4e campaign (in the paragon tier, chapter 1 having encompassed the heroic tier), I kept running into roadblocks when trying to map out the next major arc. I had left a number of dangling plot threads that didn’t feel right to abandon (that the players were just getting into, as well) so changing gears majorly didn’t seem like the right thing to do. At the same time, I wanted to give the arc a bigger scope than the specific mission-based adventures that I had been sending them on, as well as giving them more freedom to roam about the world I had spent 9 levels introducing them to. I also wanted to let them take more direct control of where they wanted to go next, but still script things out enough to let me plan ahead (i.e. not go full-on sandbox quite yet).
With Karate (And Psionics) I’ll Kick Your Ass
Monks are Psionic. (Yes, “Martial Striker” was half wrong). As per the Design & Development article that accompanied it, Ki is a dead power source (though some third party products have already tried to use it). Personally, I have no problem with this. On multiple occasions, I attempted to run campaigns with an eastern flavor, and banned most (or all) arcane and divine classes, relying primarily on psionic and ki powered characters. Conceptually, they always seemed very close together: an internal energy source with fantastic abilities powered by intense discipline.
Marvel’s X-Men Movie Mistakes
Stemming from some of the comments on Darth Cthulhu’s ‘controversial’ Star Trek post, I started thinking about the first X-Men movie and its relation to the rest of the franchise now that X-Men Origins: Wolverine is out. One commentor related the first X-Men movie, Ironman, and the first Spiderman to Star Trek as examples that […]
Lessons from the Heroic Tier
This March, I placed my game on hiatus so that I could graduate. At that time, some of the players were at 9th level and not too far from 10, so I decided to cheat a little and advance all the players to Paragon to begin the next chapter on the next tier. However, during the 9 levels of solid play we got in, I learned a few things about D&D 4e, at least as far as I could learn from the heroic tier. Here’s what I’ve learned about running 4e for close to 10 levels, in no particular order.
Fascinating, Captain
As I sat watching Star Trek on Sunday, I was struck with a strong (but familiar) thought: “damn, I really want to run a campaign set in this. ” About 4 years back now, I tried starting up a Star Trek campaign using d20 Modern/d20 Future and a few house rules (mainly for playable races). I […]
Origins Awards Nominees 2009: Picks and Commentary
icv2 has published the list of Origins Awards nominees. The nominees are decided by retailers at the GAMA Trade Show, and then attendees of Origins vote on the winners, and are announced at a ceremony on site (which we’ve covered two years in a row now). Here’s the relevant categories to the Critical Hits audience, along with my favorite from each category, and my guess of what will win.
PDFs Want To Be Free
While I’m a big proponent of open source and creative commons, I’ve understood past efforts to protect intellectual property. Shutting down the power card sites was unfortunate to those of us who found them to be a big aid at the table, but there were many good reasons not to open the door to all sorts of legal challenges later. But shutting down PDF sales with almost no notice and taking them inhouse? It just doesn’t seem to add up. Especially since there’s no alternative in place to buy them.
Pain of Campaigning: Actually Planning
After a long hiatus of actively DMing, I was roused from my gaming slumber. The results are a bit unusual and probably not going to be to everyone’s liking, but after droves and droves of articles detailing how to run games, I figure I’d do an article of my current work in progress: XIX.
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