Unessential essentials, and watch me insult Bill Slavicsek

So after months of teasing, we are finally seeing the new face of BASIC Dungeons and dragons.  Complete with n00b friendly choose your own adventure style character creation.  I speak of the essentials line that is soon to descend upon us.  My feelings are a bit...mixed.

Allow me to sidetrack - for just a moment.  I FINALLY got to game this past weekend.  With the wifey off to vegas to play with her girlfriends, I was able to do some serious gaming :)  After rounding up a handful of unlikely suspects, also known as folks that always wanted to - but just never got around to playing, I have a couple of observations that they actually asked me to pass along on the off chance one of the powers-that-be in the design department notices.

1. This is the most fun I (we've) had in YEARS!
2. Dude...too many books to look through - why are you even bothering to publish anymore?
3. I can't afford all this crap - thank the gods the DM used to be loaded!
4. Make DDI free with purchaseable content modules.
5. Mini's are expensive.
6. Why is WotC's digital initiative stuck in 2002?

While I realize that  some of these grievances are old - and I've mentioned before, I'm going to bore you with them again because THEY KEEP COMING UP.

1.) This is the most fun I (we've) had in YEARS!

This is number one for a number of reasons.  My players are all 25+, with two of them around 40.  In all that time, none of them can specifically recall having such an awesome night.  I can attest that it was phenomenal, and a good example of the synergy you get when you have 4 good friends sitting around the table learning to role-play
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2.) Dude...too many books to look through - why are they even bothering to publish anymore?

I suspect that this is the model of the planned future, and watching those poor bastards cross-referencing and discovering new options in book after book made me a little nauseous.  Between the BOTCHED release errata - rendering nearly a hundred bucks worth of books quasi-useless, and making me PAY to find it all in one place, this is a serious problem.  It is specifically because of this I will not be buying any more dead tree products from WotC.  It's not a protest so much as a consumer stand - I  will not pay a premium price for shoddy products.

3.) I can't afford all this crap - thank the gods the DM used to be loaded!

This dovetails onto #2.  So we have a sytem that is supposed to be easier to play (it is) and requires less book referencing (if you have a computer and DDI sub handy) and yet we are still focusing entirely on books.  WTF.  I shudder to think how long it took to code those databases DDI uses, and yet all of that potential is being wasted to sell more made in china dead tree books.  Branch that (logically) into a refusal to sell digital copies of said books (with errata corrections), and a hosted community that doesn't appear to be ANY kind of killer app, and you have to wonder how many monkey up ther in Washington have their tails tied together.

4.) Make DDI free with purchaseable content modules.

Steam for D&D - enough said.

5.) Mini's are expensive

I've been using the same .3 cubic foot bin full of minis for 5 years now.  Yes, my skeletons do double duty as orcs and gnolls.  Yes the players are sick to death of them.  But considering I spent just shy of fifty dollars for that 4lb pile, there will be no "new" additions.  They are all older 3E releases because neither I nor my gamers can afford to go out and buy them at will.  Maybe once before, but definitely not now.  Does anyone have that kind of money laying around these days?  Don't get me started on that HAREBRAINED idea to make you BUY digital minis for the likely abandoned virtual tabletop.

6.) Why is WotC's digital initiative stuck in 2002? 

One of my normal gamers is our "tech guy".  He is an off and on military contractor who specializes in Database GUI overlays and query language, yeah, basically a master's certified DBA.  He loathes DDI and adventure tools.  Something about "shoddy code written by caffeinated lemurs with long hours and small paychecks."  Okay, I added the lemur part, but only because I do not wish to use the other term I replaced.  This goes back to my previous post regarding adventure tools - ONE F*CKING YEAR AGO we got the monster builder, a beautiful database with an unstable (STILL!!  A YEAR LATER!!!) GUI that crashes whenever I window out or get a zonealarm popup.  Is this REALLY the best that the premier RPG developer on the planet can do?  Look - either devote some resources to the digital initiative or kill it.  It is really that simple.  The status quo is, well, embarassing.

A side note to end my sidetrack - I'm not the only one to have this question.  Apparently after completely screwing multiple pooches on 4E release, the powers that be have decided that it is best to keep us nasty old customers out of the loop.  When you get egg all over the face, I suppose it is customary to hide said face.

Now, lets come full circle back to the beginning.  So we have the huge release of a whole new line of products for n00bs and such, with yet more buids and powers and all that jazz.  Based on my experience playing with a 48 year old pseudo-homeless greek alcoholic, a cross country drifter who teaches Tai-Chi, and a Sonoma state university economics major.  It took less than two hours to teach them enough about the game for them to realize how it all worked - and crave a new set of characters.  By the second game, they were using teamwork to combo-up.

I guess where I am going, is that IMO, the essentials line is completely redundant and unnecessary to 4E.  Why those resources couldn't have been used to hire a couple of additional programmers is beyond my ken.  I imagine that this is someones baby, and it WILL see the light of day at any cost...market or not.  Gotta love small business politics.

To recap and simplify:

Release finished products please.
Quit wasting our time and limited money on redundant supplements.
Invest in the future, seasonal layoffs?  What are you f*cking Wal-Mart?
Deliver my Gorram adventure tools.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to my ranting.  Until next my motivation peaks - I'm forgetting something...oh yeah.  Bill Slavicsek is a cheese weasel. 

Bloody gaping wounded sockets on my splash screen.

Lately there hasn't been much gaming going on, and with other obligations promising to extend that particular state of affairs until the second week of July (fingers crossed!), it's been tough.

I actually did a bit of a whirlwind roundup of the current state of affairs, and was impressed.  It was Antioch that got my proverbial "greenish ichor that churns like curdled milk through my cold black heart" pumping again.  In fact, I got really pissed the other day about it, and after remembering it over at points lf light I came to a realization.

I Love my DDI.  Seriously, it is awesome.  Every #$%%$# time I open it up I inevitable spend three hours making characters I will never have enough evil unlife to play.  So with this revelation, I realized where my anger and annoyance was stemming from.  It was the things I wanted to spend the "other" 21 hours of the day doing.  I speak of the horrible and gaping empty holes in my adventure tools splash screen.  I speak of my @##$# missing DM Tools.

I want to drag and drop monsters from adventure tools into an encounter manager, and print a beautiful stat block with lore, pictures (low res will do), and errata.  I want to click a button and auto-generate a treasure appropriate - and arm the beast(s) with said items when applicable.

I want a community tab with a (Dare i say it) a Facebook-esque social networking scene that will help me fill holes in my group or find a new one.  Basically I want my DDI to be steam for Dungeons and Dragons.

What I have is a beautiful, well managed character builder, and a well updated monster database nearly ruined by a clunky and unfriendly interface that takes 3 minutes to load, and still crashes if I need to window out and check my yahoo group email.

Am I the only one who feels this way?  I'm not angry, I'm annoyed.  I see clearly what "could" be, and see no progress even towards where we were "supposed" to be.  And yes, that is a dig on the virtual tabletop.

Ugh.  At least they are bringing back Dark Sun.  That has actually made my evil glands tingle rather pleasantly.  Unlike most of my group, I'm old enough to remember what it was like to kill a party with a silt horor :)

I want spelljammer as the next campaign world.  World peace too...and hammer pants, those things were as confortable as they were ugly.  Until I get one or the other - that is a decent set of DMing tools or a Spelljammer campaign world, I am going to say mean things about WotC staff on the internet.  This is how I got over being mad, and I encourage anyone else who feels similarly to save a little wear and tear on the 'ole ticker, and just ask - followed by threat of internet slander.

After all, it seems to have worked for everyone who wanted more fluff in their crunchy stat-O's.  Yes it's a DDI article, I assume if you are here reading even marginally 4E content, you have a basic account.

So, to start - Mike Mearls poops candied apples.  Let the chips fall where they may.

Heroic surges?..Hero points?..Willpower points?..My god, ANYTHING but healing surges!!

Not too terribly long ago - at least in dog years, I wrote about healing surges and a houserule that I have been using to make them more useful.  I wanted to follow up for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it seems that between PM's and comments, it was a well-recieved idea.  Secondly, I thought I'd share my thoughts on how it has continued to evolve.  Lasty, because if I write healing surge enought times, someone from WotC will find this and consider going back in time to change healing surges to something that doesn't make me cringe mid-game.  Anyone else not elated over the choice of words?  It's bothered me since release - but I digress.

Since that post, I have played 3 games, and ran two.  As I don't think I've ever actually said it in the last 135 posts, I am involved in two 4E games.  I run a generic encounter and event based game with 4-6 good friends.  I play an Eladrin War wizard/Battlemage 13.  We get together opposite weekends and play 4-6 hour games.  Mine has been running since release, and Sam's game about 6 months.  Those are my credentials (so to speak) take 'em or leave 'em.

As a DM, I've been in the position to watch this houserules useage pretty closely, and based on my (admittedly amateur) reckoning, it generally increases the party's firepower by about a level - n + 1 if I read their mathtalk correctly :) 

This is expressed in two ways, the first is the immediate amount of firepower that can be brought to bear.  A player with 7 healing surges can recharge two dailies, or three encounter powers between extended rests.  This would seem to really have an effect on the actual gameplay, and in practice is a profound positive.  I have yet to see the party crash more than three consecutive encounters (and even that was only once), with the norm being two.  This allows for a nice concentration of firepower in these what, 2.125 or so encounters?  Please indulge me a slight diversion - Monsters have too many hit points! - Thank you. 

This has made the game infinitely more playable for us.  Not only does the party do more damage per encounter - which REALLY helps with brutes and elites, but they are a "little" more inclined to not horde their dailies.  Please forgive another slight diversion - Anyone else have problems with stingy players causing encounters to grind on.  Specifically because they don't nova off their encounters, and rarely use their dailies? - Thank you.

Now...it's not all pie and ice-cream.  With the mechanics built the way they are, some classes - the Paladin and cleric come to mind seem to be at a disadvantage, as they use their own healing surges with some of their powers.  Having no cleric in either game, and a newbie paladin in the other, I havent been able to test it out yet.

The other drawback is the obvious, in my game, I've noted an average use of 3.4 healing surges per encounter, with lows of 0, and a few spikes of 6-8.  This is over 29 sessions.  In fact it was these "leftovers" that caused me to trudge down this path to begin with.  This would make it fairly obvious that resource management is still absolutely essential in a combat encounter.  In other words, to much pew-pew make hero dead.

I intend to keep this rule in effect, as well as an active version of Jonathon Jacob's Powers of war ability from his excellent series of skill challenges.  This one allows a bonus to skill rolls by spending healing surges.  In my humble opinion, allowing more options with a common and somewhat limited resource is just one more dimension of cool in one of my favorite hobbies :)

To aforementioned WotC employee, I am available, work cheap, and telecommute (you save on office space!) As a special bonus, I will burn down a games workshop retailer of your choice (in the continental US). 

In other news, I am fucking ecstatic about 4E gamma world.  I'm spazzing right now, which is scary when you're as big as I am.  Alpha omega is beautiful - and complicated.  And where in the hell have I been?  Battletech is being re-released in both tabletop and video game forms.  These are good times to be a geek, good times indeed.

Thank you for the compliments on the "redesign".  My crude and amateurish hack-job on the template's code seem to have finally gotten me when I wanted to be.  Until next time, have fun, game well, and be excellent to each other.

Only the truly intelligent can grasp the immensity of their own ignorance...or now I know why I thought I was abandoned.

So...my humble pie is rather delicious, I offer a short story to illustrate how it was prepared and brought before me...

So a month or two ago, I noticed that I had been abandoned.  Yup, abandoned.  You, my readers had left me in droves.  Strangely, my followers list continued to grow, but none of you were commenting anymore.  That made me one saaaaaad dungeon master.  So fast forward a little, as I try an peer through my unemployment beard, and I notice some kind of odd error with my blog - stupid widgets disappearing when I scroll past a certain point.  Extremely annoying.  I change my template - which seems to have fixed the problem, and notice that I had turned my comment moderation on...and forgotten about it...so now I am eating my dumbass flavored pie and see that I am still loved :)

Even though none of you actually left, let me still say that you were missed :)

So...open question.  Is 4E beginning to creep too much?  I only say this, because it appears that we are rapidly heading in the direction of too many builds for too many classes.  Seriously, WotC - PLEASE SLOW DOWN A LITTLE.  I am no longer buying books because I can't keep up.  Simpler system or no, you are rapidly filling the punchbowl faster than we can drink it up.  I don't think I need to tell you where that will inevitably lead.  I get the whole "evolution of a ruleset" idea, but as time goes by, it is going to be a repeat of the past...More campaigns, less new rules please.

And another thing, what in the hell ever happened to adventure tools?  Not a peep in ages about any of the other add-ons that were such a huge part of the release.  I know, I know, I get that you have scaled back your plans a bit, but still...not even an update?

I'm not going to hold my breath while waiting for a response, nor do I really expect one.  I just had to talk about it to someone who isn't obligated to agree with me on pain of death - it's a DM thing.

Until next time - game well, and be excellent to each other.

The things DM's don't say.

Alternately titled:  Growing a beard and becoming an unemployed shut-in who laughs too much :)

Want to plan ahead, want to keep a ready reserve of different deat-adventures and encounters ready for a moment's notice.  Perfect, spent 3 hours putting this chain together...of course they just portal travelled to another continent...it's not like they knew about the awesome treasure you put in there...great, okay, use same encounters - make them all asian, that's exotic, right?  Need more soda, I wonder why if this stuff has caffeine, I'm still yawning...Roll, roll, pontificate, NATURAL 20!!, SUCK IT BITCHES!!  Why do I keep thinking that?  F*cking internet.  Dammit, wife annoyed.  Kids screaming, gamer's yakking, why do I bother?  JOY!  Drowned fighter in pit of sewage!  That's why I do this :)  What time is it?  Where's the pizza?  Wife would look hot as an elf...How many goblins did I have in this fight?  Dammit, wasn't enough.  Why are these tools ending the encounter with all of their encounter powers?  Why won't this stupid breath weapon recharge?  How many natural 1's can one dice monkey roll in a day!? (edit: 19, go f*cking figure).

BREAK!  DINNER!  Who cleans up after these people when I'm not here?  Geez, I'm glad you like the pizza, got that 10 bucks you owe for the last 3?  Of course it's no problem, you swine.  If I think that the girls in avatar were hot, am I a furry?    God I hope not, my ass is too big for cosplay.  My god the SCA attracts OCD types.  I wanna play D&D with porn stars too...Or do I?  Save that one for later.  Why does the battlemat look nothing like my cheat sheet?  Who drew this F*cking thing?  I want to kill another PC...it's not like they wont raise him :)

Yeah right you rolled a 15, thet odds of three of those in a row are off the charts, roll on the table plz.  Wife would look good dressed as a witch...ooooh....INITIATIVE!  confusion, all speaking at once...numbers...first.  Ouch, these guys are good.  Treasure!  Sorry, it's what I randomly rolled up, and I realize it is completely useless to every member of the party - it's either random or not.  How much would 40,000 gold coins actually weigh?  Imagine chump PC's lugging around 11 200lb gunny sacks full of clanging gold coins :)  Dammit, didn't think of that, please don't notic-dammit.  Fine, cakewalk - SECOND WAVE (weakness fixed, hehehe) Yes, it IS a motherf*cking dragon in this motherf*cking dungeon.  God, will I ever get a chance to say that out loud?

Tired, this must be what being an actor is like.  More pizza.  Will these nat 1's ever end? (edit - no)  Sorry, thats what you get for wandering off alone :)  yes, it's broken.  Maybe, no I don't know what residuum smells like?  No you can't eat any.  Gonna be edgy and have a non-dwarf blacksmith.  Does an 18 CHA make you hot even covered with drying shit and blood?  What about the three-weeks-on-the-road cornchip smell?  ewwww.  I hate cornchips.  Wife mad again.  Kids crying again.  Wife would look good smeared with battle deitrus...

Too many dice.  Not enough pencils.  Need more minis.  Need job.  REBOOT!  Where was I...Orcs.  Yes, it's a surprise round.  No, you are surprised.  Why were you suddenly paying such close attention?  He doesn't know that I am willing the orcs to be in desperate need of a halfling sodomy doll.  God that's evil.  I don't want to be a halfling.  Or a sodomy doll.  MOVING ON.  Damn wizards.  Try some elites!  Damned paladin.  Try a solo!  Damned warlord.

That's it folks.  Good night, great game.  got to calc XP and treasure.  need to plan for next weekend.  Got to write review for Jonathon.  Need to write blog post.  Need to clean mess.  Need to buy tinkerbell costume for wife.  Need to find job.  want new books.  Glad I prepaid DDI.  OUCH!  Stupid mini on the floor.  Do I get xp for killing lizard men?  Why do I do this again?  Why does everyone have a health and mana bar above their heads?  I think if dragons really existed they would be as much fun as a musty bag of dicks.  At least they would be if I was their DM.




My own personal thoughts as they happened, more or less.  Feel free to add a stanza to the things DM's don't say, otherwise stay nerdy :)