4E from One Year In

4e PHB alternate cover image I had sitting around... from the German version, maybe?

Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons is a little over a year old now, and I’ve been playing or running it for almost exactly a year today.  On the whole, I’m finding it a pretty robust system.  It’s not my favorite system, or even my favorite D&D (that would be Cyclopedia D&D), but it’s become my favorite version of AD&D.  A few of my favorite parts:

Philosophy

I’ve said before that I’ve been playing the same game since I first picked up basic D&D.  That game is a cinematic game about daring heroic exploits with the fates of villages, nations, worlds hanging in the balance.  Not every campaign has had the same elements, to be sure; many were high fantasy, but some were low fantasy, or even bizarre science fantasy.  Some were set in mythic Asian locations, some in the Bronze Age, one memorable one in the prehistoric during an ice age.  There were flirtations with dark fantasy and steampunk.  But the game remained the same.  With few exceptions, the characters were heroes and did heroic things (or died trying).

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5 Games I Want to Play

I’ve never played any of these, but I wish I could:

Even catchier than snakes on a plane...

Primetime Adventures.  I’ve got the rules and it looks like an elegant and rules-light universal system.  Universal because of its conceit:  the players play the star characters in a (nonexistent) television series.  Gritty crime drama, soap opera, shoujo high-school romantic comedy, post-apocalyptic cooking show, new Star Trek series… pretty much anything works as a topic.  If the group gets bored with one genre, nothing’s stopping you from skipping to another… possibly even using the same characters.  (We’ve all seen those “nothing will ever be the same” episodes, right?)

Spirit of the Century.  Pulp is another of my favorite genres, but one I get to indulge much less frequently than superhero (despite their similarities).  And look at that cover!  A gorilla flying a biplane, a masked avenger, a zeppelin aflame in the background… how can you not love that?  That’s pure Rule of Cool right there.  It’s not quite Giant Talking Space Monkey Pirates, but it’s damn close.  Also, Spirit of the Century uses the FATE system, which I’ve been wanting to see in play for a while.

Dogs in the Vineyard.  I haven’t got the rules for this one yet, but reading play reports intrigues me.  It’s a Western of sorts where you play a posse of divinely-sanctioned avengers.  You go from town to town, root out the sources of their troubles, and decide whose sins to forgive and whose to judge.  You’re the law of the faith — but not necessarily the law of the land, which might lead to some interesting conflicts.

Mutants & Masterminds.  I keep hearing good things about this, and it’s at the top of my to-read list… I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.  I’m a Champions player from way back, but I like superhero systems, for whatever reason; I’m always picking up another one.  If half of what I hear about M&M is true, it might just take the #2 spot away from the 1980s Marvel Super Heroes RPG.  Maybe even dethrone HERO, although I doubt that; HERO has the ability to do damn near everything, with pretty minimal effort required beyond the initial investment of learning the system (which is significant, but which I paid long ago).

Capes.  Speaking of superhero games… I’m not so sure about this one, actually, but the flash demo on the website intrigued me.  It seems as if it would be a lot of fun for a one-shot or a short campaign.  I don’t know whether it would sustain a longer run… but then, that wouldn’t be what I’d be looking to it for.  I’ve got HERO for that.  The no-GM, competitive-round-robin style of Capes seems like it might offer a different set of opportunities for story development, and I think that’d be a good experience for me and my players.  Never hurts to shake things up a bit.

Maybe at Gencon this year, I’ll be able to track down a session of one of these…

In other news, 6d6 Fireball is running an adventure writing contest.  Adventures need to either be written for 3.5e (and follow the OGL) or be system-neutral.  The deadline is May 12, which means time is pretty tight, but the winners get published in July.

And speaking of contests, don’t forget to enter to win a copy of the Open Game Table Anthology right here at A Butterfly Dreaming.

Ten Monsters I Love (But Rarely Use)

I thought I’d chip in on the latest subject to be making its way around the RPG blogs.  Instead of just my favorite ten monsters, which would include common reliables like kobolds, dragons, and vampires, though, I thought I’d list the ones that are favorites of mine but that I rarely find myself using.  They might be too specialized, or might not fit the flavor of my plots often enough, or might just be obscure, but I love the concepts anyway.

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The Making of a Villain

Since I promised to share some stories about adapting and running with players’ ideas along the way, here’s a topical one.  It’s about a superhero campaign I ran almost ten years ago, and how through sheer serendipity I ended up with a villain who became a recurring antagonist through much of its run.

The Enigma was never intended to be a recurring character.  He was a fairly stock character — a “superhumanly-skilled normal” motivated, originally, by fame.  His modus operandi was the theft of bizarre objects; his targets included the world’s largest ball of string, a symphony orchestra, and several hundred tons of green tea.  And he’d leave his calling card, reading “It’s an enigma,” in anticipation of the inevitable question:  Why?

The Enigma wasn’t a very dangerous guy.  He could have been; he was a technical and scientific genius, a talented athlete, a well-trained thief, and pretty handy in general.  But he wasn’t interested in causing outright harm.  He was certainly no murderer.  He was simply an audacious headline-grabber.  I imagined the characters would hunt him down, confront him, and ultimately emerge victorious.  The Enigma was a gentle sort of villain-of-the-week, a four-color-style antagonist to throw into the campaign early to help establish the high-heroic flavor I was after.  This was at a time when dark anti-heroes were all the rage, but none of us wanted to play that way, so the Enigma would be a bit of insurance against it.

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Virtue: A Homebrew Alignment Variant

There’s an RPG blog carnival going on, and the topic is homebrew.  It’s certainly a broad topic.  To some extent, every campaign is homebrew.  Even if you try to run completely by the book, avoiding house rules, there are still rules interpretations to be made.  The interpretations of your table are not going to be the same as the interpretations made by another GM.  Roleplaying is an inherently creative activity, and even in a game sticking entirely to published sources — the official rulebooks and official modules and official everything else — differences of interpretation and of player character action and personality are going to lead to differences in play.

This is, I think, the biggest strength of roleplaying.  You can play Monopoly or Risk by the book, and it will be the same experience every time.  You can run through Keep on the Shadowfell as published, and it will be subtly different every time, because every GM will need to interpret and improvise, and they’ll do so in different ways.

We all homebrew.

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