Humor and Gaming Blog Carnival Roundup
The carnival has moved on to Roleplaying Pro, where this month’s topic is “The Future of Roleplaying.” April’s carnival on Humor and Gaming produced quite a few posts, though, so let’s get to them:
Here at A Butterfly Dreaming, I presented the pun-laden Grape Jelly monster, and also discussed how such humorous stuff might be used in an actual game.
An Undisciplined Oaf Quartet discusses useful shortcuts for comedic roleplaying: powered by tropes.
Viriatha of Bard of Valiant offers some easy notebook projects… with a bit of bite. Don’t ask to borrow a pen.
Having the right quip at the right time is pretty important for comedy, and Campaign Mastery talks about how different forms of comedy can be used in a game, and how to do so effectively.
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Wizards’ Monk Playtest
Although I’m not a D&D Insider subscriber, I got a look at the playtest version of the 4e monk — a class that is dear to my heart. I’d speculated previously that the PHB3 classes would be more complex than their earlier counterparts, and the playtest document seems to confirm that, to an extent. At least, this particular class seems fairly complex.
What I didn’t expect: The monk is a Psionic striker. Evidently the designers felt that the Ki power source was too limited, and have more or less stricken it from development. Psionics, as a power source arising from inside, was the next-best fit. Although it caught me off guard, it makes sense — although I’m sure the “use the Force” jokes at the table will proliferate. But I can live with that.
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The Rules Gap
In my experience, people who play D&D — and roleplaying games in general — have two ways of looking at the rules.
Some try to make their games fit the rules.
Others try to make the rules fit their games.
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers touched on this in an excellent post about two months ago, but it comes to mind now because of what I wrote about in my previous post, and because of several unrelated recent conversations I’ve had with other gamers and bloggers. My take on it is slightly different from Joshua’s; for one thing, I’m coming at it from the player perspective instead of the system perspective.
Categories: Philosophy and Rants | Comments (5)
Developing Roles
Last July, I originally published a piece about how classes in fourth edition D&D now serve to define a role, a set of abilities, rather than a specific archetype including flavor text. In other words, how the Ranger, the class, is not necessarily the ranger, the guy who runs around in the woods making friends with animals and shooting orcs — and vice versa.
In my review of the Player’s Handbook 2, I mentioned some thoughts about where that book was taking the game. Now I’m finally getting around to digging into that.
Like any edition, 4e has changed as new books are published to support it. New classes, new races, new powers, new feats, new items — new everything has appeared. In some ways, the game is much the same. The system is robust in its exception-based design — and, even more so, because it divorces the mechanics from the special effects, the “fluff.” It remains an extremely adaptable game, although the system itself almost seems to hide this fact. The ease of refluffing is one of 4e’s greatest strengths, but, even with the permission granted in the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, many players and GMs seem reluctant to do so.
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