On the boardgames front: January is OxCon month and all of my boardgaming too place there.

I gave Civ a try only to remember that I’d played it once before when I was half way through the game. (It is quite fun, but I’m still not sure that it is a good game as it feels too much like a game of “Who will blink first”).

I got in a rare game of Seafarers which I proceeded to win by a large margin after discovering a 6 gold and a 5 gold next to each other on the same turn.

I also managed to play half a dozen games of Dead Rising which I’m growing increasingly fond of. The expansions have arrived now so I’m going to have to try it with some other races and custom warbands.

I entered the Settlers tournament and managed to come third (after new rules were invented to tie break the tied tie break for second place). I’ve now managed to come consistently near the top for a few years, so I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

Finally an honourable mention to Cities, an interesting tile laying game. Sadly it completely lacks interaction. A collection of tiles are selected in a random order, but each turn each player gets an identical tile and places it in their own play area.

Next up, RPGs: A GMing heavy month for me, I’ve been running Fantasy Craft with a Mythic Roman setting on Tuesdays. I’ve been very happy with my players as they’ve taken the plot in directions I hadn’t imagined and kept me on my toes. I think I’m getting better at improvisation. I’ll try to get a proper write up done after the final session next week.

The monthly Traveler game continues. We broke into a disturbingly insecure military base to sabotage the Giant Ancient Anti-Hyperspace Weapon Of Doom.

Finally I ran the adventure from the new D&D Red Box. It went down reasonably well, although one player was unimpressed with the dungeon crawl slog making things somewhat boring for his character (the party tank).

On to wargaming: No plays this month, but great success with my New Year Resolution, which I have so far failed to break.

If I have a quiet evening in, then I will do some painting.

Some nights I manage 10 minutes, some I manage 2 hours (and quite I lot I’m out and thus not subject to the resolution). It has meant that I’ve got through a couple of dozen skeletons, mostly finished a dozen elves, and have another dozen skeletons almost ready for the QuickShade stage. Decent photos coming soon!

I’ve also half assembled the Magnus the Traitor starter set for Warmachine after two people asked me to start playing the game enough times.

If you aren’t careful, it is quite easy you to let a set of Powers listed in front of you limit what you can do. The rules, however, are quite explicit (at least if you read the versions of the books that I do (Essentials)) that you shouldn’t let them.

To remind myself of this little detail, I have stolen an idea from WFRP3 and present: The Stunt Basic Power.

The party had reached the Keep on the Shadowfell, and received some new characters thanks to a combination of a new player, a lost character sheet and a dead PC. I took the opportunity to put together a Rogue (Thief) Elf and run around dealing out huge amounts of sneak attack damage.

I really liked having a couple of powerful encounter powers (Backstab, offering a bonus to hit and extra damage and Elven Accuracy, offering a reroll) and At Will powers that let me maneuver into and out of tricky spots (for flanking and getting out of Dodge) and get combat advantage (Escape Artist’s Trick and Ambush Trick respectively).

The trade off was that I didn’t get a daily power. This was a terrible shame as it completely removed the question of “Do I burn it on this encounter? Are we going to take a long rest afterwards? Is it worth it?”.

The rest of the party were using the PHBs. Sam and Louise took on roles that stopped us being swamped while Mickey played a Fighter who benefited from enemies clumping together (a good balance as I benefited from enemies staying apart).

Declan took on the role of Warlord and provided some useful maneuvering at the start of each encounter, the ability to trigger healing surges with a bonus (which probably saved the lives of both front line melee combatants at some point) but largely stayed out of the way so he could use his power to make us do extra basic melee attacks.

I think one round saw a monster take four hits with sneak attack damage turn thanks to the use of that power and some action points.

This section, at least, of Keep on the Shadowfell has a distinct lack of roleplaying and lots of tactical miniature combat. I’m not sure if it was due to the party being built to work better as a team, or if it was me finding a class that I liked, some other factor or (most likely) a combination of all of the above, but I enjoyed it more than any other game of D&D 4e that I’ve been involved in.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to find out if it as good an RPG as it is a tactical miniature game at some point soon!

(BTW, Troll in the Corner is running a competition in which you can grab a copy of the Essentials kit, so take a look if you want to try it yourself.)

It is a shame that the dice are missing though; I lost them years ago (they were really rather rubbish polyhedrals though). For that matter, I think there was a crayon that came with them so you could colour in the numbers…

Being more serious for a moment, if I were to buy the D&D Essentials box, how often would I grab the wrong box from my shelves by accident?

(I didn’t say how much more serious I was going to be, but perhaps there is such as a thing as too much nostalgia.)

My encounters, over the years, with Dark Sun have been short and fleeting, but the setting has always managed to catch my interest by virtue of being sword and sorcery but unlike just about everything else that falls into the category.

With the release of the new edition of the setting, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to do something about that interest. One nice book with the core of what was needed. Not a fan produced PDF (no matter how good, a book is a more comfortable read), not something out of print and impossible to track down, but a single tome to set the ball in motion.

Wonderful. Setting sorted.

Then I went to look for the rules, and that is when everything started to fall apart.

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have had a problem. Reservations about 4e in general aside, I would have just picked up the cores (helped by the fact that I keep coming across cheap offers for the limited editions of them). Two things are stopping me.

Errata. I gather that there is a big ball of errata out there that has made some fairly major changes to the core.

It doesn’t help when I come across comments such as:

The one thing keeping players sane is the Character Builder. Because it’s constantly updated, we don’t have to worry too much about keeping up with all of the updates. Of course, it makes us look at our core rulebooks and wonder why we bother to carry them around.

Really? I do not play any single RPG often enough to justify a monthly subscription to the rules.

We also have:

WOTC never actually updated the original monsters with the updated math we find in the Monster Manual 3

So, not only is there a lot of errata, but it seems there should be a lot more.

So we reach the second thing which, while being a barrier to me buying the cores, might just provide an alternative. Essentials.

The problem with Essentials is that it just isn’t all that clear if it is going to be enough to run Dark Sun.

I’ve seen forum comments which suggest it is just about possible, but might need a PHB3 to assist.

I’ve noted the utter failure on the part of WotC to mention Essentials on their Upcoming Products page.

I’ve seen the front loading of the product name completely wreck the usefulness of search results on the WotC site (and am having difficulty believing I’m in danger of veering off into an SEO rant on this blog).

I short, I just can’t find any guidance from WotC on the question “Does Essentials have everything essential to make good use of the Dark Sun core?”, which isn’t a good sign for a product that is supposed to make it easier to get into D&D.

I think I might be sticking to my usual system based around a 20-sider. Would anyone like to try to convince me otherwise?

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!)

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.

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).

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.

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.