The perils of 4E and Power Cards

There's a good thread going on over at Enworld.org about a recent promo video posted to YouTube in which the DM, a WotC employee I won't mention by name because I think he seems like a good DM and innovator aside from this cited instance everyone's ganging up on, made what seemed to be a debatable call about a D&D power card that a player wanted to play. It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, especially on a game as open to interpretation as D&D, and that's not where my concern is. But, if you read through the below thread, you'll see that the objection many more of us are starting to have deals with the actual 4th Edition powers themselves. If a player can or can't do something based upon a series of actions built into the rules, that kind of limits the game. Sure in AD&D, a wizard was only as good as his spell list, but typically he/she had other ways to contribute (at least after 1st or 2nd level...). But to this poster's point that I quote in my response, below, it seems that in 4E, you spend a few hours debating what card justifies what, whereas in many other RPGs, you'd be well into the adventure by that point.

Original Post By WarlockLord on Enworld:

This mentality needs to die

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This. This is videogame logic, the logic that won't let you get past the Ragecandybar man despite the fact that you have 2 dragons and a ghost in your pocket. Tvtropes. Why is this considered good? And would you want your DM to do it?

Quote from another poster, and my response:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/271990-mentality-needs-die-14.html#post5095561

Quote:

Originally Posted by nedjer WTF? Did I just watch someone spend about a month not opening a door. Wasn't even an interesting door. I assume the guy who left the table popped out to hang himself. Was playing rules light with a kid last night. In almost the same amount of time as that video she knocked out a couple of goblins, then wounded, healed and befriended a timber wolf, duelled with a goblin shaman, interrogated another goblin who told her to drink from a fountain. Didn't drink from the poisoned fountain but evaporated some of the water to form a blade venom and . . .

Bingo - and that's the problem I'm finding the more and more I run 4e. It becomes about "but I have a card that does this" rather than, "Wouldn't it be cool if I tried this action that's vaguely justified by this elaborate game of pretend we play?"

Obsidian Portal

I'm building out my old RuneQuest campaign on Obsidian Portal, tonight. Has anybody out there used this for managing a campaign? It's got some great features for managing your maps (you can drop markers for different adventures and locations on the map), integrating a forum tool, wiki pages... Lots more cool stuff. Check it out!

Also, major points for leveraging Vimeo streaming video as the instructions for using the tools. Very cool!

PS - I'm also updating the campaign to RuneQuest II. Any advice there is appreciated.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/runequest-the-destroyer

I don't know what Microsoft Surface is, but this makes me want it...

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/playing-dungeons-and-dragons-on-microsoft-surface

Why do I feel like I'm being punked...?

WotC is releasing a new Dungeons and Dragons red box using Larry Elmore cover art?!?

New product description here.

Nostalgia kick or April Fool's gag being posted to the wizards site months early???

UPDATE: 2/19/2010 - So, Wizards has updated the cover box art to remove the Larry Elmore image - a shame...

Kingdoms Live Update on iPhone

Riding off of my post about how crumby the iPad sounds to me, I feel I should give Apple some love. The iPhone does have a lot of cool stuff going for it (although, my wife's Droid makes me jealous), and the volume of stuff in the app store is one of its biggest assets. Shortly after getting the phone, I downloaded a bunch of free games, including Dungeon Quest and Kingdoms Live. Both are casual social games (billing themselves as MMO's, but that's a stretch...) Most of the functionality is of the FarmVille model - complete a quest, get a prize, buy stuff with fake currency to complete another quest. You can invest real currency into the games to upgrade your character, and Kingdoms Live is the only instance in which I've ever done that - to expand my party. For a while there, Dungeon Quest was my fave - its tie-in's to both Facebook and its cross-platform support on Android devices are hip. But check-a-dis! Kingdoms Live now has support for achievements/badges, much like an XBox game or 4Square. Pointless, true, but it adds a new aspect to the gameplay that adds to the social/competitive nature of it.

Check the release notes here:

http://forums.storm8.com/showthread.php?t=9538&page=1

and the overall description here:

http://www.storm8.com/games/kingdoms-live/

And for those of you Android people out there, check this out and let me know what you think - a game called "Parallel Kingdom," which is basically Zelda using Google Maps... Hip! http://www.longlivegeeks.com/2009/03/android-games-parallel-kingdom.html

EnWorld Post - Gamma World coming back?!?

Eeee! One of the best RPGs of all time is rumored to be coming back?

http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/271150-wednesday-27-january-2010-a.html

Did anyone play the D20 incarnation? My pals and I had a great time playing it, using the D20 Modern rules. We leveraged an absurdist setting in which Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney led an army of mechs and zombies across the U.S. Ah, when this comes true one day, we'll all just sit around and laugh...

iPad and D&D - the enworld thread, and my take

There's a good thread going on at enworld.org right now about using the new iPad in gaming.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/271168-ipad.html

A few good ideas, to be sure, but I'm not sold. The iPad won't make reading PDFs any easier at the gaming table than a 10" net book - if anything things will still be shrunken down too much. Had they made the thing as big as apple's tablet-style laptops oh 5 years ago, this would be a slam dunk of a device. But at the size of a large iPhone, I really don't see this changing things all that much. One idea posted on the thread that was neat was laying the iPad flat and putting minis on it, but in practicality being able to use a real - much larger - actual battlemat seems to be more useful for combat in rooms wider than 5 squares by 7 squares or so... (and if you're playing 3rd or 4th edition d&d, those scenarios will be rare at best...)

No native support for a camera or SD card for PDF's... That's kind of the piece that seals it for me. I like the idea of integrating technology with gaming - heck, that's the point of this blog - but this device seems like form over substance for me, as it relates to my hobby.

Robot Chicken writers playing D&D

New feature up on the Wizards of the Coast site, showing the writers of Robot Chicken playing D&D...

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/videos.aspx

DriveThruRPG.com - Dragon Age RPG, Set 1 Reviews

I just posted the following review to DriveThruRPG.com of the Dragon Age boxed set, which I was fortunate enough to playtest. Huzzah! Great stuff, and I hear the box is finally coming out, so get your hands on one.

DriveThruRPG.com - Dragon Age RPG, Set 1 Reviews

I was fortunate enough to playtest this game, and I feel it's a solid game that I believe should have some longevity. Licensed products are often catch as catch can, and going in with my prejudices along those lines, I was quite surprised to see how effectively the rules set was defined as its own entity - not just an extension of "here's something you can do in the video game, and here's how it works on pen and paper." While I like playing World of Warcraft occasionally, that's something I saw as an issue with its pen and paper incarnation.

Dragon Age succeeds primarily based upon its core mechanic - the dragon die. I haven't played too many games where the roll of the dice was anticipated quite as heavily as in Dragon Age. Due to the dragon die mechanic, a roll doesn't define just success vs. failure - it also defines side effects based on the value of one of the dice - think of it as critical hits with a higher chance of success but with effects that further the narrative of an encounter.

The setting itself seems to have greater depth to me through the way it's presented in this boxed set, as compared to the video game which I find fun but inconsistent throughout.

The PDF version of this does the game justice, but I look forward to the now-releasing boxed set itself. There's a tremendous nostalgia kick to a box containing adventures within. Even with the more serious subject matter of Dragon Age compared to say the old Red Box, it ignites the kid-sized gamer in me all over again!

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Did you hear about the fight that the Gamers had with the Crips the other night?

Game over: Inmate can't play Dungeons & Dragons - York Dispatch

Yes, it's true - a Wisconsin court ruled that a prisoner could be banned from playing Dungeons & Dragons behind bars. Apparently - no joke - the concern is that the game could foster a gang mentality amongst party members, much like other serious gangs in jail (Crips, Latin Kings, Aryans, etc...)

The image of a bunch of guys making D20's in the wood shop instead of shivs seems amusing to me for some reason...