of Dice and Dragons

This past weekend just before the gaming group arrived at my house for a rousing session we lost power. Ok, since we game with pencil and paper no big deal right?

Wrong.

My group is slowly becoming more and more electronic in nature. Myself and one other player keep our characters on the laptops we have at the table, the GM keeps his campaign information on his. We have campaign notes on Google Docs, use dice rollers both on and off line, access the SRD (we’re still playing D&D 3.5), routinely perform Google searches for relevant facts and information, the list goes on and on.

Without power, there’s no Internet, no printing of information if needed and after a couple of hours, no laptops. Gaming would grind to a halt.

Now, I know that if you’re using a computer for gaming you’ve got a backup of that material somewhere (you do have a backup don’t you?) but that really doesn’t help if you have no power so I would recommend that you include in your “disaster planning” at least the following:

1. A hard copy of your character sheet
2. A hard copy of campaign notes and information
3. The rule books for your gaming system
4. Dice!
5. Cell phone numbers/corded phone - most wireless phones do not work without power

I know that’s not a complete list but you get the idea. I also know you can’t plan for everything in this life but taking a couple of minutes to print out a character sheet at each level was something I hadn’t really thought about. Of course after I dealt with the questions from my kids on why they couldn’t play the Wii anymore and realizing that game time was a mere two hours away my thought process changed.

Luckily the power did come back on (about 15 minutes before the first arrival) so the power outage didn’t impact the session but it did cause me to start thinking about my own disaster planning.

Do you have back ups in place? Do you have a contingency plan for an event like this? Please share.

May your dice roll well.

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Last Friday the latest incarnation of D&D was released, the 4th edition, which was followed on Saturday with Worldwide D&D Game Day 2008 when a lot of folks got to take it for a test drive.

So how come I didn’t post about it? Well, first off there are a lot of other bloggers out there that did post about it and I would recommend checking out (if you haven’t already) Gnome Stew’s A GM’s First Impressions of D&D 4e:Looks like Fun as well as Chatty DM’s Game Day post Playing 4e: Initial Thoughts.

The other reason why you didn’t see a post here was the simple fact that I didn’t run out and get a copy of the books - that’s right, I didn’t buy the books. Now I know that that may come to a shock to some but from where I stand I just couldn’t bring myself to do it primarily because my group currently has no plans to move to 4e.

How will this impact what I do here at of Dice and Dragons? That’s hard to say as I’m taking a hard look at why I’m blogging and what I’m blogging about (I know, more self reflection after the Realms postmortem maybe I need professional help). I’ll have a post up concerning those questions and where this blog is going soon.

With that I’ll leave all of you that are moving to 4e to your rule books, those that are GMs to your plotting - I mean planning - and to those that run PCs to your dreams of large treasure hoards.

May your dice roll well.

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I was reading through my RSS feeds this evening and came across a posting by Yax over at DungeonMastering - Your inner dragon and after reading through his results and a few of the comments I went ahead and took the quiz myself and found out . . .

I am an Amethyst Dragon!

In the war between good and evil, a Amethyst Dragon tends to walk the fine line of Neutrality….

When it comes to the powers of Chaos vs. those of Law and Order, your inner dragon walks a fine line between Law and Chaos….

As far as magical tendencies, Magical spells come as natural to the Amethyst Dragon as breathe from it’s body….

During combat situations, whether by spells or by claw, your inner dragon will do whatever it takes to get the job done….

Formed from translucent amethyst, it is an awe inspiring sight to see one in it’s true form. Light passes through the dragon’s body creating a deep purple glow. It’s scales will magnify the light rays into bright lavender beams to highlight this effect.

Amethyst dragons spend most of their time homebound but do occasionally feel the need to take a sojourn to a far destination. These dragons love books and will often pick their destination from one of the many stories and histories they may have read. Amethyst dragons are very solitary in nature, but do keep a distant watch on the world around them. They tend to be highly intelligent, and often amuse themselves in human form by building gadgets and toys. Amethyst dragons are very learned creatures.

So, what’s your inner dragon?

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Seems I have a bit of an issue with links on the site at the moment. All the content is there but if you try to access something directly (like trying to go to page two of the blog) you get a 404 File not found error.

Wanted to pass along I am aware of the issue and will hopefully have it resolved soon.

Scot

Update - I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress and now everything seems to be back on track. Please let me know if you come across anything that looks or acts more unusual than normal.

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After reading through the alpha release put out by Paizo for their Pathfinder RPG I have to say I’m more than a little exicited about the possibilities it holds.

The document itself is more about mechanics and where they are deviating from the SRD and OGL which is fine since it is designed to work with those documents and not be replacement for them. It also only covers the four “core” classes - Cleric, Figher, Rogue and Wizard - the remainder will be covered in future alpha releases along with some of the other modifications they’re making.

On the whole I like the graphics and layout as they match up with what we’ve come to expect for publications in this genre of gaming. The designer notes that are included are a nice touch and tie back to the open nature of the design process that Paizo is taking - they want those that are playing the game to have input and in my experience the best way to get quality feedback is to share the whys behind something.

As for the mechanics and game play - only time will tell and I’m hoping to run at least a few session under the alpha version with my group - I like a lot of what they’ve done. I’m not going to go into every detail (that’s what their rulebook is for) but I will share a few of the things I do like.

First, the slight changes to the races. In a departure from “the norm” they’ve opted to give both half-elves and humans a small bump (+2) on a single attribute, not much in the grand scheme of things but does allow you a bit of customization that wasn’t there before. Human can also now pick a favored class, which grants a +1 to hit points for every level taken in that class - the same benefit gained by the other races when achieving levels in their favored classes.

Second, I really like the changes to the skill system. Gone are skill points and the apparently redundant skills and it’s been replaced with a simpler system which uses the character’s level as part of the modifiers. Also in this system you select a number of skills at character creation and as you go up in level you add skills - no points to figure out just add the skill to your list and move on.

The four classes they included also had some additions. Now you get to add a new feat at every level odd level and a new skill at every even level so there’s always something new to look forward to. They’ve done away with bonus spells for specialist schools (wizards) and domains (clerics) and replaced them with powers that are granted at various levels and both the fighter and rogue now gain abilities at every level.

On the whole the mechanics are designed to streamline what is already available in D&D 3.5 and I would say based on the read they’ve done just that. They’ve also taken the time to write up methods for designing encounters which in my opinion are much easier to follow and look to scale better than what we currently have as well as how to convert from SRD to Pathfinder so you can bring over your favorite PC, NPC or creature.

So now for those of us that play D&D we have three choices when it comes to staying with the system, stay with 3.5, move up to 4.0 or move over to Pathfinder which I think is a really good option at this point and would recommend that if your group is looking to move off 3.5 that you give it a look.

Have you read the Pathfinder Alpha 1 release? If so I would really like to get your thoughts on it.

May your dice roll well.

Other takes on Paizo sticking with 3.5 can be found at Critical Hits and Musings of the Chatty DM

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