How about another stab at mobile blogging?

Posting on blogspot on my phone seems to work, if I use the right browser, and for a few hundred words. After that the scripting on the page uses up too much memory and my phone closes the browser to resolve the issue, taking my work with it.

So now I am writing this out using Word Mobile, in the hopes that it won't cause me to lose a large draft along with 1d6 san. I can hope, right?

There has not been another Fishy the Ranger session since my last post on the subject. After losing all his money and equipment, another assault on the Caves of Chaos would be suicidal, so I have another plan for the next session. We'll see how it turns out.

My friend and 21-hour dm mr wh40d6.blogspot.com was kind enough to loan me his copy of the D&D boardgame Castle Ravenloft, and I have played a couple games of this with my son - on the second mission we re-picked characters and powers. He went with the Dragonborn fighter (from the Ashardalon game) and I went with the Eladrin wuss, I mean wizard.

It turns out that his plan of taking a character with the highest available AC and HP was sound, I barely got through the final fight alive, and he was ready to bash several more monsters if they had shown up.

I won't try to give a review of these boardgames, firstly because there are a glut of such reviews already online, and secondly because I haven't played very much yet. I will say that I like it, and the 4e system of power cards works well in the context of a boardgame. The suggested age for the game is 12+, but there is nothing excessively graphic or scary in the descriptions, and the complication of the rules means that someone should be old enough to grok the rules, but not everyone has to.

Not sure what the word-count is now, but I am going to wrap this up here. If I can tap out a post or two while I'm on the bus, it becomes far more likely that there will actually be new posts in this space.

Dungeons & Allies (Fishy the Ranger, Session 3)

Been a bit of a lazy sunday. Got up early with the baby but aside from time with her I didn't really do a lot of home-making today.

In the early afternoon my wife and daughter took a nap, leaving my son and I free to do some gaming.

First we tried out Axis and Allies Miniatures, which I picked up cheap in the "pick our bones clean" sale at Borders. Pretty fun, a bit of complication in learning the combat and movement rules. Beat my son with a point-inferior army (two units of which were pretty useless against his tanks) of a machine-gunner, a mauser, and a panzerfaust, and a panzer 3 (a 13 point tank, undergunned against his russian t34 and his sherman tank, 28 and 24 points)

So with such a deficient force how did I win? Cover and line-of-sight. Made a lot of "cover" rolls to avoid damage, and the panzerfaust's mysteriously unending supply of rockets won the day.

After a couple games, he asked whether Fishy could win versus a panzerfaust. I offered to make the german soldier as a D&D character and equip him out of the modern book, but he preferred to look at the meager attack numbers from A&A, pointing out that the panzerfaust could not hope to defeat his armor class with attack rolls that didn't go above four or five most times, especially as much as the d6s seemed to be hating my attack rolls in the last game. I mean really, if you throw ten six-siders, should not more than two of them give a result of more than three??

We only ran about an hour of D&D after this. Fishy effected an escape which is amazing, in that I am amazed I didn't have to fudge any rolls for him to escape with skin intact.

Fishy awoke on top of a table in the "banquet hall" (room 9 in your classic KoTB if you're curious and have that available) bound hand and feet, with two lazy guards in the room.

The winning strategy for escaping orcs, if you are curious, goes something like this.

1) Address the orcish guards in a random language, such as draconic or halfling.

2) Receive several beatings as you repeat step one, until you are reduced to a fraction of your original hitpoints.

3) Note that the guard, while he was smashing your face in with the non-business end of his sword, has accidentally dropped a small knife on the table next to you.

4) Having freed yourself, address the orc again, requesting he return your equipment. Fortunately the second guard has left temporarily to relieve himself (Legitimately he waited and watched for a moment after cutting his bonds with the knife)

5) Dispatch the orc with the knife, charge into an adjacent room carrying his sword.

6) After a couple rounds of combat with some orcish tribesmen and the other guard, flee through the banquet hall to exit B.

After it became clear the orcish guards were not going to go looking for them in the daylight, Fishy made his way back to the Keep, and tried to hire a patrol he encountered using the money that he didn't have.

Fortunately, his companion Jerin had been released after the first encounter, on his word he would return with ransom money for Fishy. Even more fortunately, Fishy did not go with his original plan after escaping of marching into the orcish cave with his two remaining HP and a small knife, demanding they return his equipment.

when all you have is a nail..

everything looks like a hammer.

Seriously the last time I posted was october 25th?

Wow.. I thought to post today (I always think of posting, but doing so takes a bit more effort it seems) because I'm working on a new project. I decided to create a set of rules and run a play-by-post or play-by-email strategy game.

Without going into details at this point, my rough idea of what I want looks very much like Masters of Orion II, but probably will be more of a fantasy game. Nothing is set in stone.

Yesterday I tapped out a bunch of ideas on the busride home on my phone. Just composed it as an email to myself.

Last night I thought it would be good to organize my thoughts, commit it to a paper medium and use that for my game design document going forward. I knew it would be a growing, living document so I rejected using a tablet, considered using a hardbound notebook, then looked for a three-ring binder. After spending some time doing this, and ripping unrelated pages out of the hardbound notebook, and removing old campaign notes from the binder, I had used much of the time and energy that I could have spent actually working on my project. Also wasted time I could have spent with family.

It was really a big waste, and once I sat down in the living room to start writing it became moot as my son wanted to start writing notes on his idea for the game (and I certainly don't want to discourage him from writing of any kind). So with a nail waiting, I spent far too much time picking out a hammer.

Most of the work I've gotten done hitting it with whatever rock was close to hand. At this point in the project I have lots of ideas and little organization, and I think I should take advantage of this. Spill as many ideas into text as I can, so I'll have them waiting when my ideas are dry and it istimeto organize.

Someone who knows game design better might disagree with me, but I think I'm better off driving that nail however I can for now.

Focus on the positive

So Saturday I ran this game, you know, and tied a module in for the adventure. A module that was very fond of monster manual 2.
It had the teratomorph, which some complete...ly different thinking person reckoned to be CR16.

Anyways, I will say what I liked about the teratomorph encounter..

Transformation: Target is changed as though targeted by Polymorph Any Object, changed to an object of DM's choice.

The DM chose to ask his five-year-old son to name something, which ended up being a "spray bottle". To keep it in appropriate tech level this became one of those things with a bulb that is squeezed to spray perfume (someday I will research before I start typing my blog)

fortunately the change was temporary, per the spell descriptor.

You see, every time the teratomorph hits with it's nearly unavoidable melee slam, the DM rolls on what I call the "random cornhole table", with such lovely things as 2d4 constitution drain, d6 strength or dex drain, change into a cosmetic appliance, or DEATH. Not just quick-trip-to-the-druid's-office death, this is 18th-level-cleric-and-25000-gp-worth-of-diamond DEATH. I rolled high on th table and this happened to Epik in the first round. I decided that this was a bit extreme(as is everything about the teratomorph), so he came back the next time I rolled on that table, with his skin turned a randomly chosen blue.

I am not even mentioning half of the insanity of the teratomorph.

But as I said, I will focus on the positive. Changing a player character into a spray bottle was hilarious. Asking a small child to choose the punishment of a character is like asking Ray Zelinski to choose the form of Gozer the Destroyer - pure fun and deliciously ironic to have a half-orc suddenly be a cause of good smells.

Little heroes...

(I'm fairly sure it's waiting for me to throw a stick)
So tonight I was able to get my regular group together here at Chez Grag.

Sometime between character level-up and starting the game session, we gave The Heroes of Hesiod a try. My five-year-old son got his first taste of something approximating the old delta ampersand delta, and rolling a d20 in battle.

The party faced off against their foes, a fearsome bulette, a reptilian creature of some sort, the least threatening beholder I've ever seen, and a swarm of pixies.

The system of battle is pretty simple. Roll a d20 (or 3d6) plus your character's attack bonus, deal one point of damage. Each character had some special ability which was simple to use and understand (except spectral shackles), and on a critical hit you get to drop a glorious d6 of damage. The monsters had little candies for hit points, which I presented to each player when they dealt damage. The game took about twice the half-hour suggested by the front cover as we all got used to the system, but it never felt like a drag at any point.

While the character types and abilities had a very 4e feel to them, thankfully the designer shied away from concepts such as encounter powers. Aside from the youngest player, who didn't pay attention to his little pile of hit points, the players felt a great amount of concern as they were whittled down by the monsters. It wasn't until the final two monsters were on the board that a character was knocked out, and they were quite surprised by being healed soon after. I suspect a group of 5-7 year-olds might not have thought about it until someone was knocked down.

Playing this with adults, it is hard to avoid the creepiness in some of the descriptive language in the opening story. I don't know whether the writers intended this or not, but there was a lot of snickering around the table at my delivery of lines like "No one your age knows what exactly goes on at the cabin, and no adults are telling."

Would I use this system for further adventures? Probably not in it's unmodified form. The special abilities are rather more complicated than I would like, and what is written on the character sheet feels very limiting. I would probably give monsters a few more hit points, and have d6 damage on all hits, and double that on crits.

If I were going to run Hesiod again, I would print the character and monster sheets on cardstock for easier handling. Also, the light paper battle map needs to be anchored better. Maybe cut out a piece of cardboard and glue it down nicely before the game.

Should you run Hesiod? It's not bad, 4/5 for what it is trying to be, a light and fun introduction to D&D concepts, aimed at a younger audience. It falls flat as the basis of a campaign, but had no such ambitions in that regard.