Unprotected Delving with Multiple Encounters: Saturday Night Delves
Posted inFourthcore

Unprotected Delving with Multiple Encounters: Saturday Night Delves

Original Artwork by Taylor Bennett www.deckofmanythings.net

Greetings fellow readers, today I’m here to tell you about that very cryptic something that’s been taking up a majority of my free time lately. For once I’ve been absent from blogging for reasons other than my dayjob, life in general, or pure procrastination and I’m really excited to tell you a bit more about it.

I’ve been working with Sersa V from Save Versus Death and a handful of other very talented individuals on a project of somewhat epic proportions, a little something we’re calling Saturday Night Delves.

Saturday Night Devles (SND) are a series of one shot adventures for 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons set within the fourthcore vein, our aim is to recapture the fun and excitement of dungeon crawls of yore. Aimed at actually being able to pick one up and run it on any given night where you and your group have a few free hours, SND’s also come with all the materials you need to run the game along with optional tournament rules for competitive play and scoring.

SND adventures are challenging, innovative, deadly, evocative and most importantly – a ton of fun to play. Saturday Night Delves are not for the faint of heart, they will test both player and character skill as well as the DM’s. If you’re not familiar with what fourthcore is, I can give it to you in a nutshell; it’s a high risk – high reward, over the top challenging and often bleak playscape where ‘step and die’ rings as loud and clear as death bells themselves.

Turning my wife into a gamer
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) The Hobby Updates

Turning my wife into a gamer

It’s an every day occurrence for some of us lucky ones, but a pipe dream for others – gaming with our better halves, that is. “Quality Time” with my wife is often spent rolling dice or shuffling cards at the kitchen table, cloistered up in our bedroom in front of our PC’s playing a game or vegging out in the living room around the xbox with the kids. Speaking of kids, mine are much the same (though in moderated and monitored amounts). We are a family of gamers, and I couldn’t be happier about it but for others even so much as convincing their loved one(s) to sit down and game with can be like pulling teeth.

Mind you, getting my wife into gaming may have been a bit easier for me than others, but it was no cakewalk by any means. She grew up playing Sega and Playstation games, board games and the like but always had reservations about the “D&D Nerds” her older sister hung out with in high school. Computer games were not really a thing in her household either, aside from maybe The Sims or flash games online, so when I met her and told her I was a ‘gamer’ she vastly underestimated what I meant by that.

A few years ago, during the first few months of our relationship and several days into the first of many reactivation/cancellation cycles of my World of Warcraft account, she got her first glimpse into what true ‘gamerdom’ could be.  At first WoW wasn’t even something that really appealed to her, and I was definitely going about it all wrong in attempting to show her what the game was all about.

At one point she was finally about fed up with me playing the game, so I decided it was time to re strategize my approach and explained the elements of the game that I thought she would enjoy most, as opposed to my own gaming-malformed brain. So I marketed it as a game where you get to create a little person, buy her fancy clothes, blow things up with fireballs, go shopping and ride pretty animals – and somehow it worked. She had said [paraphrased] “Okay, show me how to play this game if you’re going to be spending so much on it” and then, not before long – Dibbles the gnome mage was born.

A Guide to Heroic Tier Parenting: Ages 0-6
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) Humor

A Guide to Heroic Tier Parenting: Ages 0-6

After many a silly yet somehow profound conversations with my wife, I’ve decided it’s time to turn our D&D references to parenting into a post for your reading pleasure. Granted some of this may all seem silly at first but I have hidden some true wisdom within these lines. I’ll be doing a 3 part series of posts each one focusing on one of the parenting “Tiers”. So let’s get this thing started, enjoy.

UPDATE:This got published at Kobold Quarterly as a Friday Funny. Woot!

Heroic (Ages 0-6): This tier of parenting is simple yet dirty business and somebody has to do it! It’s not glorious when you first start out, though after all it is unavoidably the foundation you’ll build the rest of your adventuring career on. You start out battling one dirty diaper at a time and your party has no real sense of cohesion or tactics just yet. It’s all fly by the seat of your pants no matter how well you think you’ve prepared, that cleansing ritual will not keep the diapers of eternal stench at bay no matter how many times or how loudly you repeat it’s canticle. Sleep deprivation is going to sap away most of your healing surges, what’s left may be consumed by that soured milk breath weapon, hope you’ve got a high fortitude defense. Oh and all those torches you packed… they aren’t going to help your reflexes any against toys you trip over when waking up in the middle of the night due to nightmares or having to prepare an alchemical concoction for the little one.

By your “party” I do mean your child(ren), yourself  and your significant other of course, if you’re lucky enough to have one that is. Some adventurers aren’t so blessed and must quest alone. So keep in mind If you’re a single parent the encounters don’t scale down and doing even the most mundane tasks can seem trying at times. You have even less time for short rests but the rewards are fantastic – bragging rights, double XP and hoarding all the loot for yourself! After a while you obtain a rhythm and things seem to get easier, challenges you face are easily overcome with at-will’s and encounter powers. You’ll have to break out the dailies when certain situations arise, such as questions like what happens when you lose all your HP, or what that funny dance is that they saw you doing in bed with mommy/daddy the other night. Not all situations are so trying however, which in this case feel free to use minor actions to make some shit up and those curiosities drop like minions.

Cryptic’s “Neverwinter”, looking bleak?
Posted inDungeons and Dragons (D&D) Video Games

Cryptic’s “Neverwinter”, looking bleak?

Neverwinter Nights EyeI’m gonna come right out and say this, I have some pretty low expectations for the next installation of the Neverwinter PC game series. However it’s not because it’s hard to live up to or come close to standards set by the Bioware/Black Isle folks when it comes to PC RPG’s. Any company can come out of nearly nowhere and blow us all away with an outstanding title, video games a bit less often though because of costs involved in making one. Nevertheless I’d really love to root for the underdog here and hope that Cryptic pulls off a winner, but so far that’s looking to be a dismal prospect.

Cryptic’s past titles have been mediocre at best, and this is where my suspicion lies. It’s also worth mentioning they probably should get their lore right, before they go attempting to win over hardcore FR fans. While I may have started playing D&D when I was 13, I’ve been playing video games since I was 5 – which means I can honestly say “20+ years of experience” when it comes to this subject matter. When the announcement for “Neverwinter” was made, like many of us I was pretty excited at first glance.  I’ve always beeg a huge fan of the series and the Forgotten Realms world, but a lot about this title (so far) seems iffy.

Given a projected quarter for it’s launch date, already having determined it’s 5 classes (via the front page graphic), the creation tools being announced and more, yet they still don’t know what the hell the games core genre will be other than an RPG?

One shots: Introducing a new player & refreshing old ones.
Posted inDungeon Master's Musings

One shots: Introducing a new player & refreshing old ones.

First go read “Burning down the tavern” over on @rjschwalb’s blog to understand where I’m stealing this concept from. Go on….go. Okay now that we’re on the same page allow me to introduce the cast of my Monday night one shot coming up next week. I had originally planned to have a good friend of mine (@danjbailey) who’s never played D&D come over for a night of beers and some role playing boot camp but after realizing I’d only have  two players I put some calls out.

I only expected maybe 3 of the 6 people i contacted to respond with a possible yes but instead I got all of them. Turns out when people don’t get their D&D fix they pull out all the stops to get together for a game – either that or my exquisite DM’ing skills are just that alluring (just kidding, I’m terrible).

Anyway, I decided to ditch the tavern for the first time in a while and opt for something more predetermined on my behalf and chosen to go for the ‘band of traveling entertainers’ option. Hey, anything beats that awkward “uh yeah so we’re all in a tavern, we have drinks and become friends – can we kill stuff now?” I’m pretty excited about running this one shot because it’s going to be the first one shot I’ve done in a long while and because of the following:

  • Group dynamic should be much better than those starting arbitrarily in a tavern.
  • I made all the characters myself so class synergies are already built in and optimized.
  • Players don’t have to bring anything but dice and their imaginations.
  • This will be a great first time experience for some and really encourage role play.
  • I can’t wait to get @danjbailey playing D&D!

I’ve come up with a light background and personality trait or two for each character to help in adding flavor and since the players will all have the option to pick whichever character they want I think they are unique enough everyone should feel they have a specific role and there won’t be any squabbling over who get’s to play who. Since this is a first time for at least one of the players