Most Disliked RPG Setting

Tenkar had a post up at the Tavern that is an interesting side discussion to the topic from yesterday (Favorite Gameworld), what is your most disliked gameworld.

Just realized this was a
Silver Anniversary item.
Of all the things...

His choice was Council of Wyrms. I could definitely see it being a contender. I own the hardback*, but never used it. The premise seemed interesting, but it never inspired me enough to roused my group to attempt to game with it. Expected something a bit ... More ... seeing as dragons are the mascot creature for D&D.

* Can't believe the boxed set actually did well enough to warrant the hardback, which I was suckered into purchasing. I guess anything with dragons in it does sell books, worked on me. Thankfully it was the waning days of 2E. I'm pretty sure I grabbed for a few bucks.

Still, it's not my least favorite. Now, I try not to rag on most setting as I realize they're a matter of personal taste. I also find gems in each setting adaptable for other purposes in every setting I've encountered. No matter how much it doesn't strike my interest. Council of Wyrms was uninspiring but it didn't rub me the wrong way.

I reserve my ire for a particular transgression to settingdom. None other than the 4th edition version of my favorite gameworld not so freshly wrung through the cataclysmic Spellplague - the New "Forgotten Realms."

"They told me the portrait was for a
"Save the Dragons" charity.
Those bastards!"

There are many things to dislike about the setting, from the oddball changes to arbitrary shenanigans used to bring about those changes to the ugly as mud map. For a setting supposedly trying to divorce itself from the baggage of the prior edition, it sure spends much of its limited word count (in larger font size and big blank margins) trying to describe how things changed and why people should care now. Trying to please everyone meant it appealed to no one*.

* [Mini-rant] Or not enough people. I'm supposed to be careful not to tread on the eggshell sentiments of 4E Realms fans, lest I be labeled a hater and troll.

Actually, hold on. 

*CRUNCH* 

Oops. (By 'oops' I mean 'up yours', excuse my gnomish.)

I've been dealing with Realms hate and anti-Realms trolls since before 4E, Drizzt killed my puppy that, or Elminster seduced my character's mother this. You will deal with setting negativity as I had for years as a Realms fan. Get in line, it's your turn. [/Mini-rant]

The 4E transition for the Realms is something I wish on no setting. To take something with a fanbase and change it so thoroughly, so obtusely, and then use negativity to sell the new product by standing on the remnants of the previous work is just insulting. I surmise Greyhawk fans felt the same after the last few TSR products before publication switched to the Realms (mind you, at least they didn't say Greyhawk was now the Realms a hundred years later, which is what 4E Realms is to the old Realms.) Dragonlance fans have experienced this as well with the different ages. Even Realms fans had the Time of Troubles as the poor precedent, but the ToT was a school-yard scuffle compared to the Spellplague and century timeline jump.

Look! I found out who ate all the split pea soup.

Fans riled against the transition at the onset, loud and clear, voices upon ears which heard but didn't give a damn. Quite a bit of arrogance there to assume the words of proven fans are worthless and there exists some other imaginary fanbase willing to sweep up the franchise due to your big relaunch, which focused on how the setting is different but the same as before. How's that working out WotC?

Now 4E Realms apologists would say the setting is actually doing quite alright and the upcoming Sundering event is by no means an admission of issues or a rescinding of the 4E/Spellplague-derived problems. Of course corporations never apologize, but the writing is on the walls. They used the same marketing to convince people the 4E Realms would be different, except there's less immature "Holy Cow Slaughtering" and "Kill it and take it's stuff" talking points.

If this uber-RSE doesn't work, well I expect a reboot to the Grey Box era Realms, which would be an excellent choice.

Of course they could make things worse by going for a Spellplague II equivalent. What are they going to do then? Kill Mystra (4.0 by now) again (death #4 by then)?

Either way it will be interesting, the latter more comical than anything. At least the setting would still provide entertainment value.

We need a BIGGER Realms Shattering Event.
A Realms *Sundering* Event!

Thirty Days of D&D, Day 5: Favorite Dice/Die

The topic was more fully: "Your favorite set of dice/individual die", which is weird wording open to several interpretations. I'll just run with whatever comes to mind.

There are many sets of fancy premium dice I could mention, but I don't own many of them. There is one idea I thought was genius, true to its marketing and actually useful to gamers:

Chessex's Pound-O-Dice.

Boom. Plop it on the table. There is a monolithic quality to a pound of assorted dice, and sold by the pound at that. It's relatively cheap and expendable. It means it's time for serious gaming, this quantity exists, it's present, it's bone throwing time. And it's good for not so serious gaming as you have some spare plastic polyhedrons to toss at players.

There's also an element of mystery at what you'll end up getting, some of it is crap, most of it is useful. Most importantly it's fun, if only for one time.

Favorite individual die is easy - d12.

It's one of the more spherical polyhedron and rolls well like the d20. It's aesthetically pleasing and easy to read. It has a good amount of granularity. Unfortunately the d20 and d10 in all their rounded number dominance have shuffled the d12 to the sidelines. The d12 is underused. I'm glad the 3E Barbarian puts the d12 to use, it was like hitting a quota or something. The Greatsword should have been a d12 like all the other "great-" weapons.

Come to think of it, I feel the two-handed sword in 2E should have dealt 1d12 damage by default instead of 1d10. The glory-hogging mystical-mundane katana also did 1d10, had a speed advantage, and one-handed/two-handed versatility. By comparison, it was a disservice to the 'king of big blades' (in terms of fantasy games) to make the two-handed sword with the inferior d10.

Let's see how that looks.

Two-handed sword:
Weight 15, Size L, Type S, Speed 10, Damage (Sm/Md) 1d12, Damage (Lg) 3d6

There we go - gameable material. Can't say this blog never contributed an iota to the cause of the dice gods.

Thirty Days of D&D, Day 4: Favorite Gameworld

"TSR Jam" by Todd Lockwood

Gameworlds.
Campaign Settings.

This was intended to be the meat and potatoes of this blog ... if I ever pick my brain off the floor and gather any momentum in writing half the things I want to.

I've dabble in a bunch of gameworlds over the years from Dark Sun to Ravenloft to Planescape to Eberron to a veritable library of settings during the d20 boom to Golarion and beyond.

As in previous posts, there's a short answer to the question: The Forgotten Realms.

Why the Forgotten Realms? Some people hate the Realms (and I mean red hot, teeth-gnashing, it killed their mothers, violated their fathers, shoved a puppy up their kitten's rear, while yammering too loudly on a phone in a foreign language and breathing second-hand smoke into an orphanage kind of hate). It (merely) doesn't work for others, some find it okay and nothing special. Some, like myself, love it despite its noted shortcomings and recent upheavals.

Then what about the Forgotten Realms makes it my favorite setting? Let's gloss over the novels and related characters and the preponderance on big Realms Shaking Events (RSEs, even the authors and design team has adopted the term, it's that prevalent). Let's take it as a setting presented in most of its gaming sourcebooks and in its articles (often by its creator).

To me it feels like home or a place I wouldn't mind living in, therefore a place I see my character living in and a place worth fighting for. Other settings often try too hard to establish these goodly places, makes them boring or too mushy. Others do this then slathers on layers of corruption and intrigue to the point where the good guys are worse than the bad guys. Others don't bother at all and revel in their supposed grim-dark. FR gets the balance right, nice places are threatened (both from without and within, don't mistake lack of extremes for lack of complexity), but there's a chance to make a difference.

I've heard the setting described as a typical Tolkienesque setting at its core that expands into a rather Howardesque or more accurately Leiberesque periphery and these areas get even more dangerous, exotic, and weird. I find that's pretty accurate. The world is not without its horrors, of both mortal/human and immortal/inhuman varieties. There is never a lack of things or people who will make your day a terrible day. There are plenty of troubles large and small, it's a setting that lives because there is no single monolithic trend but lots of factions, peoples, religions, cultists, individuals out for themselves.

It has a suitable juxtaposition of safe and unsafe that established a natural 'points of light' setting, which the 4E version missed entirely and scrapped in favor of its own take on the setup. It's also not just this binary black and white world as so often explained in summary. I once read a brief blurb by Ed Greenwood on the fate of one Halruaan wizard and I came away realizing the setting at times has a cold gray callousness that few settings can manage to capture even on their best examples.

It's not just a place, it's a set of characters (not just the Chosen or the pantheon either). In a couple of paragraphs, Ed showed humans not thinking or acting like humans we know would act in this modern day and age, but they sure as heck sound like what humans would act like given the same circumstances. The Realms became real in that instance and there are many instances like it throughout Realmslore. Ignore the marketing (the events and some of the novels), there's a sharp gem of a setting past the facade.

Forget other settings espousing their ambiguous pulpiness, their harsh pseudo-medieval grittiness, their cool fantasy punkiness, their hard-rated adult maturity, or whatever zeitgeist they've latched onto. The Realms doesn't say what it's about, the Realms shows it. The setting is pure sword and sorcery goodness albeit its own take on the genre.

Kickstarters: Myth & Magic Player's Guide - Update and Shipping Status

Today I found on my Kickstarter feed a rare update from the Myth & Magic Player's Guide. The update is set to Backers Only, but I don't feel there's any information in there worth isolating to the 400 people who backed the project. It is included below. It's good news the project person is getting a move on the shipping. At this point I would be satisfied to received the player's book in hand.

Would still like to get a coupon link to the DriveThruRPG copy we were supposed to get. I missed the link last time as it was sent over the Kickstarter updates and not email.

The project is long delayed, but many Kickstarters are at this point. What rubbed people the wrong way initially were the unresponsiveness and the evasiveness of the project manager's actions and posts. There's still a bit of that defensiveness, even something a bit snarky, in the tone of the project runner's post. Understandably he's under pressure to get these books out. Holding out on backers without reasonable updates would set them off, backers can be an aggressive lot, they have to be with the rate of Kickstarter problems accruing. Rightly so, people are literally owed money at the least, that's a motivator which in turn self-encourages them to motivate the tardy projects.

Now I wouldn't go after the guy's livelihood as that decreases the chance of ever getting these books. I would ease up on the threats. Patience pays off in the end. We still have to see if these books make their way to all the people due physical product, but if it does, I would still count this as a success.

Major lessons of Kickstarter are once again:
1. Don't over promise without running numbers and locking in prices. Not always possible and that's the danger of these things.
2. Shipping (and fulfillment) is scary. There is never an exception to this. Some projects disclosing their info (like Fate Core) showed shipping to eat up a third of the total funds. Forget scary, shipping is hell.

[Update begins here]

Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to update on you on shipments. I wasn't able to ship out 10% during each of the last few weeks, but I have 98 shipments out. I put out 20 today but couldn't get any out last week. That being said, I've asked a few local gaming youngsters to help me package things up, and they're going to come by either this weekend or the weekend of the 21st. With help, my hope is to get ALL orders ready for shipment. That would mean that 100% of the orders would be ready for the mail as of Monday, Sept 23rd. This is a tedious process alone, with order tracking, packaging, weighing, printing, delivering, etc. I know you don't care. Just wanted you to know that I'm going to get this done. I actually CAN'T wait to be free to discuss things more positive.
Just so you know, I cannot get anything ready for shipping during the weekend of the 14th due to my daughter's 3rd birthday party on Saturday and an anniversary party on Sunday.
Also FYI, I need some more shipping supplies and I need another 100 or so Player's Journals, which I'll order today. I have also designed a softcover Player's Guide to ship to those folks who ordered softcover versions of the Starter Guides. I think they probably thought they were ordering softcover Player's Guides anyway. It shouldn't take long to get the shipping supplies and the Journals, so I should have everything ready soon. If there is a delay on the printing of the softcover Player's Guides, it shouldn't be long and it doesn't affect that many of you, but I still think I'll be good to get all of them ready on or before the 21st.
I'm attaching some pictures. I certainly contribute to the various posts calling me a scam artist, thief and worse. There are droves of backers that think the books do not exist. The pictures were taken today. They show the remaining boxes of PGs and Journals ready to be stuffed into some sort of shipping box and sent on their way.
Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3, Picture 4, Picture 5.
You certainly owe me nothing, but I'm asking anyway. There have been some very nasty, accusatory posts over the last few weeks, some calling for drastic actions that could potentially put everything on the line for me - not in terms of NHG but in terms of my career and home life. I really hope that will stop. I sincerely do apologize and have apologized for the delay and lack of updates, but campaigning to take everything I've worked for and have it destroyed is taking it to a very drastic level. I already know that collectively this Kickstarter has been an epic fail, but I hardly think the delays and lack of updates have ruined any of your lives. I really hope the few of you that have started a campaign to ruin mine will have second thoughts and rail it in. What keeps me even slightly positive is the fact that they're really more disappointed than angry, because they really love the rules set and they really think the books do not exist. I know that once they get their orders and start gaming, the nasty conversations will change and we'll all feel like gamers again.
I know that I need to update more, so please do not comment here about that. I'll update you after the weekend of the 21st.
On a different note, I wanted to talk about the expansion material. Jeff Scifert did a great job with the expansion races and classes. He is still working to tighten them up after reading your comments and suggestions (some of which are very spot on by the way). There are more updates to what you have and more expansion material in the works that really rock. Thank you to all the backers that have contributed to that discussion. He deserves the feedback and the game will be better for it.
Until the 23rd,
Tom

Thirty Days of D&D, Day 3: Favorite Playable Class

Okay, cop-out time. My favorite class is fighter/mage.

I know it's cheating, that's two classes, but I've always been enthralled by the idea of wielding both sword and sorcery. It's the name of the genre and from there many derivations of the theme arose, might and magic, swords and wizardry, wizards and warriors. I want to do a little of both. I don't expect to be great at either, but hopefully (system willing, but not always the case) the two disparate parts meld together into a capable whole, something greater than the sum of their limited components.

Ranger 
by William O'Connor

In systems where this is not possible or easily feasible, I often tend towards the half-casters such as paladins, rangers, or bards. A battle cleric can sometimes fill this mold, as can druid-types. Currently playing a Ranger in 2E, haven't reached the level where I get spells, but having a blast either way.

Rangers in this regard may be a bit of a rough gem for this archetype. Even if they're not quite mechanically up to the task of being 'gishy' all of the time in all of the game versions, some of the older sources gives them arcane spell access and this has carried on to some of the retro games.

Read the Ranger write-up in Swords & Wizardry Complete. Now that is some stimulating reading just for a class entry. Some games gives them a spin as down-to-earth woodsmen and hunters, archers, skirmishers, or physical combat-oriented whirlwinds. I see plenty of precedence for variants to go the other way, a more mystical skill set to fit with their mysterious ways, a direction that shouldn't be neglected in favor of making them just another warrior class. Not that there's anything wrong with warrior-rangers.

We are Rangers.
We walk in the dark places no others will enter.
We stand on the bridge, and no one may pass.
We live for the One, we die for the One.

Heck, rangers even have enough sentinels-of-an-ancient-order appeal to make the leap from fantasy into science fiction, such as the generic "space rangers" of yesteryear or the Anla-shok rangers of B5. it is also an archetype well tread by the mystic warrior culture of the Jedi knights.

That's like three or four classes under discussion.

We're also crossing genres.

Told you this would break the rules.

Thirty Days of D&D, Day 2: Favorite Playable Race

Favorite playable race? There's a short, boring answer to this.

Humans!!! 
Frell yeah!

Humans. Some people get sick of playing little old humans, but I find there's always relevant play opportunities present with humans. I dabble in dwarven characters, sometimes elves, or half-elves a little more, but humans are my default as they are for many settings.

Tiefling by Tony DiTerlizzi

The longer answer without relying entirely on the old stand-by of humans? That would be Aasimar. Again, a half-human variant, but why the plain homely aasimar instead of other more thematic planetouched?

The genasi offer an immediate dose of elemental cool, the mortal descended embodiment of primordial forces like fire or air (or water or earth or any of the para- or quasi- variants).

What about tieflings, progeny of the lower planes, spawned by fiends and corrupted or violated mortals (perhaps with a Faustian pact or two amongst their ancestors). Lots of potential there from angsty to noble-despite-their-heritage to utterly without redemption. Sure tieflings are blatantly sexier in the sense of character potential. They have easy, immediate character hooks.

Aasimar by Tony DiTerlizzi

The aasimar by comparison seem more monotone and one-dimensional. Yet they're still firmly outside of the norm and deal with all the same questions, peculiarities, and prejudices as the other planetouched, but that's in-spite of their innate predilection towards goodly tendencies. Depending on the setting specifics there is something 'ur-mythic' about them from the pseudo-Nephilim angle.

They're a spark of the cosmic factions constantly under siege and barely holding back the ravenous hordes of fiends from all sides. Definite underdog vibe to them and I find plenty to work with there.

Thirty Days of D&D, Day 1: How I Got Started

Saw several blogs in my feed participating in this nice blogging prompt initiated by Polar Bear Dreams and Strange Things: 30 Day D&D Challenge

Thought I would pick out a few of these topics and blog about them. Since (school) classes start this upcoming week and already I have assignments due by the end of the month, I know completion of all topics on appropriate days will be highly unlikely, but this will get a few posts out of me, perhaps. So onto the topic.

How did I get started?

The first person to proselytize D&D to me was my friend Andrew during lunch hour in junior high. This was during the mid-'90s at the height of Magic: The Gathering. I sat with the Magic playing kids. He talked mostly about the settings of D&D, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape. I didn't play D&D at this point, but the concept stayed with me as did the evocative setting discussions. Andrew went to a different school in high school and years later I heard he delved into Warhammer.

During high school, I continued to hang out with several of the guys from the Magic table (and gathered at the new Magic lunch table in HS) and eventually enjoyed weekly gaming day on Fridays after school. We would always gather at Wil's house for alternating games of Risk or Monopoly or just an afternoon of movies or video games (rented from Blockbusters when they were still a relevant company).

Sometime in the very late '90s, probably 1998 or 1999, I suggested we supplement our board-gaming with D&D. Our small reluctant group agreed and we scoured the still nascent internet for anything we could find. Yahoo (or perhaps Infoseek) brought us to the era appropriate Wizards of the Coast site where we downloading the FREE AD&D 2nd Edition Fast Play booklet by Jeff Grubb downloadable in PDF format. The PDF is still available after all these years: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/ADND_Fast_Play.pdf

Now grognards or edition elitists could and would groan about starting with such a weak introduction using a vastly simplified rules system (to a watered down version of AD&D to begin with) that vaguely resembles D&D. Also, having reread the adventure recently, even I found it somewhat uninspiring by the standards of time/era/edition and arguably for the purposes of a gratis fast play game. No offense to the most excellent master Grubb and let me explain why.

I simply didn't care at the time about the relative quality of the free material. Blissful ignorance of the quality of other materials would do that. The fact that it was freely distributed on the internet (and remains so 15 years later), readily accessible via a printout from a now-antiquated clunky inkjet printer, and playable with the d6s we commandeered from our Risk game was good enough to get us started.

We were enticed enough to search through eBay to look for second-hand core books (after balking at the price for full-priced new books on Amazon, all fairly new sites at the time) and managed get our hands on someone's modest 2E collection, the black spine 2E core rules, plus some of the derided Player Options book and a couple of the Complete Class Handbooks. Most likely they were liquidating their stuff in anticipation for the next edition. We were such noobs, but I think I'd rather have started with 2nd Edition than not. Had we known more then, we would have stalked eBay to snag a meatier 2E collection, or even some of the mixed edition lots. Would have been nice to grab hold of some vintage gaming swag before they became recognized as such. Net auctions were still a bit like the wild west back then and price varied quite a bit.

D&D 3rd edition would release around 2000 and the OGL would change gaming as we knew it. I stuck with 2E for a bit, especially on PBeMs, before making the switch to 3E then followed through with 3.5E then onto Pathfinder from my Dragon subscription remainder. Looking back, I actually realized 2E remained a fairly consistent part of my gaming even during the 3E/OGL era, so much so in fact my current games are 2E. I wouldn't even say it's a full circle, just a steady ever-expanding continuum.