The Core Worlds

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. 

My first real exposure to D&D was with third edition, which features a wonderful economy… OK, so it doesn’t. It features an insane system where the raw materials to construct anything, anything at all, costs exactly one third of its retail price. This is compounded by the wonder that is the price list.

A ladder consists of a pair of ten foot poles with a number of rungs between them, but this costs less than a pair of ten foot poles. It is feasible that an enterprising merchant, given a large enough supply of nearby adventures, could make a living chopping ladders in half and selling the pieces to passing adventurers while having the rungs left over for firewood!

The Wizards of the Coast website is previewing 4e, and I’ve been keeping half an eye on it. I was pleasently surprised when I read:

Be sure to return Wednesday for a look at the economy!

What is this? Could they be making the economy sane?

No, of course not.

It seems that treasure is going to be made available to Dungeon Masters in preprepared baskets to hand out to monsters and NPCs. I wonder if they will be gift wrapped?

Friday night and I set off for Nottingham. I started by going south from the office to Oprington to avoid the most expensive railway line in the country. Things would have worked out better if Jim hadn’t got lost trying to find the station.

Still, we got there in the end and Adam was pleased to receive the Xbox 360 that Simon had collected for him. We were saved from suffering through people playing on it all night by virtue of the absence of any games for it.

Saturday dawned.

Several hours later we got up and found some breakfast before recapping York by Night. The trouble with late starts is that lunchtime arrives before you know it, and the pub is far too close to places which sell video games.

Andy prompted fled to retrieve his jumper from the pub, while the game was played.

WoD began in earnest when he returned. I won’t provide any details, since I know Andy is working on a proper write-up, but suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, and we players were driven sufficiently insane.

Sadly, it was the last session of York by Night, but we’ll be kicking off York Unveiled sometime next year so we spent a fair chunk of the weekend tossing around character ideas (and playing Halo 3).

Sunday was a relaxed wind down with a number of games of Infernal Contraption and a little bit of fighting over Mage: The Awakening books. We finished off the day with Ingenius! but came to the conclusion that we were playing it with too much focus on scoring points and not enough on blocking other players. According to the rulebook scoring 18 on every track should happen “very rarely” but it is how I won the game on my first attempt, with at least two other players coming very close to matching the score.

Sadly the trip home was less than fun. The weather turned so the drive back to Kent took so long that I was stranded in Tonbridge for the night. Happily the commute to the office from there is only marginally longer then from my current address so the major consequences were a slightly more expensive train ticket, and turning up at the office with a large rucksack full of my gear for the weekend. I think this is scuppering my plan to collect some times to take home tonight - I’ve too much to carry already.

Photo credit: Jumping the ‘phant by Neil Crosby, Ingenious! by Jon Bristow

Mongoose have released a playtest document for Traveller. I’ve only skimmed it so far, and it seems to be little more than character generation, skill resolution and combat rules, but what it does have looks quite nice.

Hopefully I’ll be able to put together a group and give it a run through.