gamergirl

Looking for ideas/help with a 4.0 DnD Campaign

It looks like we may finally have people to start a new campaign! I’ll be DMing and I’m pretty excited. I’ve had a couple chances to play 4.0 and I like the new system. However, it occurred to me that none of the people playing read my blog… which means I can exploit the expertise of the internet at large! Stuff I’d like input on:

1. What’s a good premade setting? I don’t want to use a premade campaign, but I did have an opportunity to play recently with a premade setting and I liked the way that went. I don’t want to make too many purchases though, so something where I could get the layout for a couple of countries and a major town and a couple of smallish cities would be ideal.
2. I’m probably going to have two players who are less reliable and experienced than the rest. Is nudging them both towards the striker role characters a good idea?
3. Anyone have a particularly good beginning for a campaign? I want the overall campaign to be good but I particularly want the first few sessions to be engaging and enjoyable because I have two new players that I want to “hook.”

Any other advice or ideas you have would be great also… I’ve DMmed some 3.5 but only one session worth of 4.0 so far, for a playgroup whose schedules never aligned again after the first meeting.

Some information about my players, to help you out with ideas:

• Player 1 is my husband. He’s a pretty good role-player and likes looking for Option C when anyone asks him to pick between A and B. To keep him happy I need to provide opportunities for creative solutions… but hopefully ones that allow me to still keep the overall story moving forward. Is very disdainful of DnD sessions that focus on combat at the expense of story.
• Player 2 is a friend of my husband’s and a fellow graduate student whom I have met only once. I know very little about him except that he has played DnD before.
• Player 3 is a mutual friend who’s a good guy but, like my husband, often very frustrated when he doesn’t feel he has the ability to make meaningful choices. A *bit* of a powergamer. He’s an experienced DnD player and I’ve played with him before.
• Player 4 is Player 3’s girlfriend. She’s willing to give DnD a shot but has never played before and is very skeptical of the whole thing. She also, according to her significant other, “doesn’t have much of an attention span.” It sounds like she may enjoy combat more (where things keep happening more frequently and dramatically) so I may have to try to balance between her and those in my party who like roleplay more, particularly my husband.
• Player 5 is a friend of my husband’s and mine who has grudgingly agreed to play DnD. We’re pretty sure he’ll love it, but he’s very wary of the “nerdiness” of it. This from a guy who plays DotA every day, used to have a High Warlord in World of Warcraft, and is a rated epee fencer. Anyway, he’s very skeptical and only gave in after we bothered him for a while, but he’s the other that I worry might not stick with the campaign the full time.

Thanks for any help you can give me! I really want to make a great job of this. I’ll make sure to post regular updates to let you guys know how it turns out!

Occasionally I will ask another woman what sort of games she likes to play. The majority of the time I get a fairly expected answer—i.e. Scrabble, Guitar Hero, DDR, the Sims—but a troublingly large proportion of the women I’ve asked this question to reply something along the lines of “I don’t like games” or “I don’t play games.”

I find this boggling. You don’t like games? Any kind of games? The image of the Burgermeister Meisterburger from that old claymation Christmas movie has to leap to mind.

Because it’s an utterly ridiculous statement. In a world where “games” encompasses Viva Pinata, Monopoly, Dance Dance Revolution, Halo and Duke Nukem saying you don’t like “games” is totally unreasonable. But people persist in saying it, and I can only think of a few reasons for them to do so:

• They might not like having fun. o_O This seems like a crazy one, but some people think having fun is for little kids and are utterly disdainful of anyone they see enjoying themselves who is over the age of 14
• They may enjoy games, but don’t want to admit to it because of the reactions of the people who think that fun is for those who are immature.
• They may have never found a game they like.

Whatever their reason, I think that most of us who like having fun would agree that the world would be a better place if more people enjoyed playing games. This may be especially true of women because those of us women who game seriously are often a bit lonely for our own gender, and those guys who game are often frustrated by significant others who don’t share their love of games and aren’t understanding that their guys don’t want to give them up.

Unfortunately, gamers are very factional. People playing MMOs will talk sneeringly of those who enjoy TCGs and tabletop gaming. People with handpainted Warhammer armies will talk disdainfully about “Warcraft nerds with no life.” The same group of people who enjoys a game of Munchkin might make fun of those “playing make-believe” with Guitar Hero. What this means is that people who don’t game much hear from every single group how nerdy/loser/weird the other groups are, and how boring and unfun their chosen activities are.

It’s really no wonder some women are so unwilling to try any of it.

I decided that I would pick up the new “Inscription” profession on my World of Warcraft main as I was rather tired of having Leatherworking without Skinning. I stockpiled a ton of herbs and logged out Monday evening on top of where the Inscription trainer would spawn when I logged back in.

My server’s stability was incredibly poor but through one thing and another I was able to reach 350 (the level of skill where you know all available recipes) very quickly. It’s hard to say for sure if I was the first, but if I wasn’t I was one of a very few who got there that evening, and I made quite a killing on glyphs that first evening. Since then, the market’s died down and it’s not easy to make good profits on Major Glyphs.

A guildmate of mine had quite the brainstorm today however. He realized that it only took 7-8 stacks of herbs to get to 75 skill and perform Minor Inscription Research and that you could do this with a level one character (if you so chose). So, for an investment that amounted to ~400 gold at the time on our server, he and I each leveled up Inscription on three additional alts. We both got a dud glyph or two but we’ve both already made back our investment there on Day 1.

Now, as I said, the glyphs everyone knows are ridiculously cheap so this is very much a short term gold-making scheme. In the medium-long term I don’t expect Inscription to be particularly lucrative as the market will be flooded with people making cheap glyphs as they level up. Long-term I imagine it will become lucrative again, after people stop leveling it regularly. However, at the moment it is inarguably the easiest Primary Prof to level up, so glyphs may remain cheap if the profession is disproportionately represented in newly rolled characters.

That’s my analysis, anyhow. =)

Very frustrating day today. 3.02 Patch was supposed to go live on WoW today… which it did, but my server in particular has been wildly unstable.

I had hundreds of herbs stockpiled to powerlevel the new profession, Inscription, with plans to get to cap quickly, supply my guild, and make a fair bit of quick cash selling glyphs to the server. I’m currently 290/375 skill and “Retrieving character list.” It looks like I have enough to get there though, so hopefully I’ll get back in in another minute and things will be working normally again.

My guild might still raid Sunwell Plateau tonight if the server stabilizes. If we do, expect an account of how raiding in 3.02 is on tomorrow’s post. =)

When visiting my brother this weekend I was relieved to find he had my copy of Empire Builder–I was concerned I had lost it. I will admit it’s not a game for everyone, but I love it.

Empire Builder is played on a board that is essentially a blank outline map of North America, with ~50 cities filled in and a few natural features such as rivers and mountains, as well as a grid of dots. You, the player, are a railroad baron from the early days of the United States. Your job is to connect up 5 out of the 6 “major” cities with railroad track and earn a hefty chunk of change. You earn money by delivering cargoes and it takes money to build track, so there’s a lot of fun optimization decisions–”Hmm, connecting up my track here will cost 8 million but it will save me almost a full turn on delivering my cargo. Is it worth it?”

It’s one of those games that is easy to learn but tough to master, because you get a lot of ways you can succeed, but some are much worse than others. It does tend to take a while though, even if you play the accelerated version, which I do recommend. If you decide to play, settle in for a good 3-4 hour session. But it’s tremendous fun, enjoyable by a wide range of ages, and you draw your track on the board using crayons. I mean, crayons. Awesome, right?

Another lackluster day. I’m beginning to think that Blizzard held this whole con for no particular reason.

As I mentioned yesterday they announced the Wizard class in Diablo III. They also announced that Starcraft II would be released in 3 parts instead of as one game. But other than that, not much. A few minor things of interest to people who play WoW:

• There will be graphical upgrades/ability to make druid forms unique in appearance in the forseeable future. No real “when.”
• There will be Dual Specs implemented, in patch 3.1. O… kay…
• Ground mounts will be usable in water in 3.1

Nothing that really merited the big to-do they put up. Maybe it was all a mechanism for handing out Starcraft II Beta Keys.

Surprisingly lackluster. About the only “Ooooh, wow…!” thing we learned was the identity and role of another of the Diablo III characters, the Wizard. There’s some cool casting animations and a short Wizard trailer avialable here. It really does look pretty badass, sort of part mage, part elemental shaman, part awesome.

Other than that though? Not much. A few other minor things of note:

• Blizzard confirmed that their mystery project is a non-WoW MMO. No word on when any more info will be available.
• The new dual-spec system is still in the works for WoW, probably for a patch shortly following WotLK release. We knew this, but the part of note here–you’ll apparently be able to swap more or less on the fly, without returning to a city/trainer. Nice. =)
• The WoW Dance Studio won’t be in at release, but it’s planned that characters will be able to create their own dances move by move when it *is* in. Could be a fun side thing.

That’s about it! Not much else of note. Perhaps Day 2 will be more interesting.

I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons for several years now, and it’s a genre of gaming I particularly enjoy. I used to play fairly regularly (perhaps once a week) with a group of friends, but several of the people I ran campaigns with have moved out of town and it’s been hard to get a new one going. So, when my husband and I were invited to play at a RPGA Event at a local game store, we decided to give it a try.

RPGA events have apparently been around for a while, nearly as long as DnD itself, but I’d never played in one before and I can’t say I’m likely to again. At its heart, Dungeons and Dragons is a roleplaying game, but the format of the RPGA events seem to severely cut out or limit both the quantity and the impact of roleplay. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t remove something central to a game and still expect it to retain the same level of enjoyability.

Wizards of the Coast certainly tries to leave the players choices and the ability to impact the game, but because they intend the sessions to be

• Self-contained
• Easy to Dungeon Master
• Over within a set time period

…they’re really hampered in this and the player ends up faced with an extremely limited palette of choices that will all ultimately lead the players to a very similar place in the story. There’s strong pressure to avoid extreme creativity, as any non-obvious solution probably isn’t going to be permitted. For example, if you’re faced with a choice between guarding Gate A or Gate B, you can choose to guard either or split the party up. What you can’t choose to do is have the mayor post guards at both locations with instructions to run and let you know the moment they spot any trouble. This isn’t because the mayor is unwilling or there aren’t guards available. It’s because the script of the game doesn’t consider that option and hasn’t told the DM how to proceed in such circumstances. That takes a lot of the fun and “creative” aspect out of the game.

Another place where the limitations of the format arise is in talking to the various NPCs (non-player-characters). The NPCs have pre-scripted responses that they will say to you when you ask questions of a certain genre. This is fine when you’re dealing with specific information. But if they don’t have a response pre-written for even the general-knowledge questions you ask them, you won’t get a response. This makes the “roleplay” portion of the event extremely tedious as you must talk to more or less every NPC to get the one piece of information he or she is allowed to tell you. You can’t get any more, and there’s little reason to stop talking to them before you get the piece you need. There are a few “optional” events you can do or not do, but the ones we did had very little noticeable impact on the progression of the campaign. Apparently they gave us bonuses to an important diplomacy check we made at the end, but we would have succeeded on that without any bonuses other than those our characters inherently had.

All that being said, I am glad I went once, to see what it was like, even if I would definitely recommend against the format. I’d never played in a pre-constructed setting before, and while I hated the pre-constructed campaign, it was great having maps of a a city that felt logical and real, and didn’t require the DM to scrabble at the last minute when you wanted to go somewhere he hadn’t planned. I think the next time we get people together to play, we’ll definitely consider going with a pre-built world, even if we’ll come up with our own storylines.

My husband and I got the game Carcassone from a truly awesome friend as a wedding present. It’s a strategy board game where you lay tiles to create what looks like a map of a medieval countryside. You place pieces to control this growing countryside, but you have a limited number you can have on the board at any one time. The bigger a feature being guarded by your piece grows, the more points you’ll score.

Its first and foremost virtue in my mind is that you can play it and have fun with a varying number of people. It’s built for 2-5 players, and while “best” strategy changes as you add more people, the enjoyability of the game doesn’t increase or decrease significantly. This is a welcome change from many games–Risk comes to mind–where the number of players the box claims you can play includes a lot more numbers than the game is actually fun with. With Risk having too few players takes a lot of the balance and strategy out of the game. With, say, History of the World, playing with the maximum number of players can make it take forever. A game just isn’t as much fun when a third of the people you’re playing with wander off to do something else in the half-hour between their turns. Carcassone’s a different sort of beast, however. No one has ever said, when we suggested playing it “No, we have too many for that to be fun” or “Nah, that game’s better with more people.”

If the game does have a flaw, it’s that once you learn it there’s an impulse to reintroduce the confusion and complexity the game had when you first started playing… However, I hear that there are multiple expansions to the game available, so I’ll have to let you guys know how those go when we check them out.

If you’re interested in checking it out for yourself, I see that Amazon has Carcassone available for a little over $20 with super-saver shipping, so it’s not a big outlay to start playing.

I’ve been very pleased with Magic: the Gathering’s new set, Shards of Alara. The past few sets have seemed to make a choice between having strong flavor and allowing the player a lot of options for creative deck construction, and I think the case could be made that Shards of Alara succeeds in having strong set and shard identity while not locking you in to making specific decks.

What I mean by that is that if you think back to Ravnica, you made a “Boros Deck” or an “Izzet Deck” and while your deck might be a few cards different from someone else’s Boros or Izzet deck, your overall direction was going to vary between one or two related choices and the deck you built would likely be very predictable. The Lorwyn/Shadowmoor Blocks had similar issues. The decks you made would be Tribal. You had one or two choices for how to build a deck for a specific tribe. And that was that. (Yes, I’m leaving Time Spiral out of it… that set allowed more freedom, but it also rubbed a lot of players the wrong way by having the cohesive theme of “incohesion.”)

Shards of Alara, on the other hand, has struck me as very interesting so far. There are five distinctly flavored shards, but a lot of ally shards arguably work very well together, and few cards are shard-limited. Yes, there are several tri-color cards per shard, but there are also a multitude of cards like Branching Bolt which is equally good in two different shards, or Thunder-Thrash Elder which seems built to fit well into three different shard’s strengths. He’s a Jund card, with the Jund devour mechanic, and a lot of Jund critters will grow slightly bigger as the Elder eats their buddies, but he’s not ONLY a Jund Card. For example, you can make him big enough to trigger Jaya’s “If you have a creature with 5 or greater” abilities. And, his cost is arguably lower in a Grixis deck, where you can Unearth the creatures you fed him, or Unearth creatures in order TO feed him. You could make a very fun deck by mixing him with Sedris, the Traitor King and some creatures with fun comes-into-play abilities like Blister Beetle.

That’s just one example, but it seems to me that many, if not most, of the cards in the set are not locked down to one specific kind of deck. I’m very pleased, and I hope they can keep it up when Conflux (the next set) comes out.