The Core Worlds

Tiny Adventures has been keeping some people rather busy on Facebook lately, but there is tiny, and there is tiny, and I think I might be partially to blame for the latter.

As far as I can tell (any errors are my own, feel free to send me corrections), the time line went something like this:

It all started last night during a game of 4e when the resident Dwarf Fighter swung his warhammer at a goblin and hit the wall instead. (Or, in mechanical terms, when Jim rolled a 1). It wasn’t surprising that he was a little unhappy about this, and exclaimed:

Stupid short things

… which I found amusing enough to repeat in public.

Despite the lack of context, someone enjoyed it enough to respond, and then had an idea.

@chattydm Did you see what @dorward said? Could you not oh great DM come up with a twitteresque world for us to game in?

… and after a little more discussion — he does. I’ll be watching with interest.

(On an entirely seperate note, this is my inaugural post to RPG Bloggers, so thanks for welcoming me to the community!)

When WotC moved to fourth edition D&D, Paizo picked up the discarded remnants of 3.5 and started work on Pathfinder.

Wanting to give it a go, and feeling the urge to GM something on Tuesday Knights, I threw together a five room dungeon and roped a couple of players into giving it a try.

This was my first attempt at running a home-brew adventure for D&D, so a few hiccups were to be expected — which was one reason I wanted to try it out on willing victims before using it to kick off a proper campaign. Lessons were learned:

• Knowing what you want to happen in each area isn’t a good substitute for actually writing down the details and arranging convenient stat blocks that don’t require flipping from tab to tab on a laptop
• The power level in Pathfinder has been upped
• Many weak creatures are rubbish compared to few large creatures, especially when in a confined space without room to maneuver
• If you fail to map a dungeon out properly in advance, you will end up with the final chamber being too close to another room and ending up in a disturbingly phallic shape in order to be large enough for your plans

Despite these setbacks, the game proved to be rather fun. I just need to go away with the above lessons and tweak it somewhat.

As of last night, I’m in a position to judge D&D 4th Edition based on something other than hearsay – since I have now played some. That said, I haven’t played much so I only have a keyhole view of things.

The introductory session involved rather a lot of combat. As usual with D&D, combat took up most of the session. It was, however, rather more interesting then first level combat in 3.5. Everybody got to do something active each round so there was none of the old “I hide (having expended by one offensive spell of the day)”, and given a choice of attacks the fighter got to do something slightly more interesting than “I hit him with an axe”.

So, combat is, in my opinion, rather better at low levels.

Roleplaying? No problems there, the system didn’t get in the way (or appear to cover it for that matter, skill checks were limited to knowledge rolls).

The one bit that I’m really iffy with is dealing with challenges posed by the environment or traps. I’m sure they could still be dealt with by ingenious use of mundane items, but my impression so far is that magic and skills won’t help matters at all. This, however, is still based on theories formed from glancing through the rules. We’ll have to see what happens when we get actual problems to solve (and I’ll hopefully be able to have a proper look through the rulebook at some point).

Well, I said it was all about superheroes in my last entry, and I couldn’t repeat myself.

The latest from Wizards is minions, a concept that worried me when I came across it. In a nutshell, minions are foes who are a decent threat to the PCs but whom only have a single hit point. Once you hit one, it is dead.

My initial reaction was “Oh no. Ogres that die with one hit. That’s rubbish. So much for Willing Suspension of Disbelief.”

Wizards can’t be that insane though, can they? Well, yes, they can, but not in this instance. While killing Ogres with one hit seems silly, it becomes less so when characters get to very high levels and going up against mature dragons and nasty demonic princes. At low levels, I would assume that the minions would be goblins, and it isn’t unreasonable to expect a low level character to have no trouble dispatching a mere goblin. 

The concept works in other games, Spirit of the Century springs to mind. So I’m cautiously optimistic about this particular change for D&D 4e. 

It might make the fireball spell interesting though.

The more I hear about D&D 4e, the more I think it is going to be even more high powered and grid based then 3.5. The latest bit of news (via RPGpundit) doesn’t break that pattern.

I don’t know if this is an entirely bad thing. From time to time, I rather enjoy tactical skirmish games (and I like grids as they solve all the questions about facing and distance — you get edge cases in 360° tape measure games). 

That said, I’m fairly happy with 3.5 for tactical skirmish, and I’m delighted with Exalted for the high powered style of game, so I’m doubting that I’m going to get much out of 4e.

I’m after something with a bit of grit, plenty of sword work, and a distinct lack of magic items and spells being the answer to every question. This has led me to take a look at alternatives, and RuneQuest is looking increasingly like it might be the answer.