What are the Best 4e Ability Score Arrays?
I’ve been following an interesting thread about 4e ability score arrays at ENWorld. Poster 77IM calculated all of the possible arrays on a 22-point buy, and posted the list. Turns out there are 121 unique arrays, in case you were wondering.
Then the analysis began.
Categories: Philosophy and Rants, Player Advice | Comments (3)
“No, Wait…”
Order of the Stick #1, by Rich Burlew. Upgraded to 3.5e!
There’s an interesting thread at the Giant in the Playground forums that deals, in part, with retracting an in-character action. (As a side note, if you’re not reading the Order of the Stick comic at GitP, you really should. There’s a lot of terrific gaming humor there.)
Among the questions the original post poses is the following:
- Do you allow your players to revise an action, if, a second or so later, they remember themselves why they shouldn’t do that?
There is, naturally, quite an array of views on the matter. Some espouse the “you said it, it’s done” school of thought. Others allow retractions with few restrictions. There’s a lot of ground in between. General opinion seems to fall toward “it depends,” which I realize isn’t terribly dramatic. But the question of what, exactly, it depends on remains intriguing.
Categories: Comics, Manga, and Anime, Philosophy and Rants, Websites | Comments (2)
Deep Psi
Side note first: I fixed a problem that might have been keeping comments from working correctly, so if you’ve tried to leave one lately and failed, you should be able to now.
On to the main post. Recently, I decided I’d try a subscription to Insider. Although I didn’t see a lot of purpose to it when I first got the core books, and I’m not terribly moved by promises of exclusive content, I figured it would be worth a try, and if nothing else there might be some interesting stuff in Dungeon that I could lift for my game. Plus, I’d get access to stuff like the Swordmage, a class printed in a book I have no intention of ever buying. And the Monk, in which I have something of an interest, if you hadn’t noticed…
I haven’t played around with Insider enough to really comment on it yet. I can say that I find the character builder fun to tinker with, and probably pretty useful (although I’ve never had problems with creating characters in 4e using pen and paper, either). Dungeon and Dragon look promising enough that the subscription might be justified, although the Dungeon content looks a little lighter than I’d like.
But the main thing that’s caught my attention is the Psion class, recently revealed.
Categories: Industry News, Philosophy and Rants, Reviews | Comments (0)
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).
Categories: My Campaigns, Philosophy and Rants | Comments (7)
Foxbat for President: Sacred Cows and Hamburger
Sacred cows make the best hamburger, or so the saying goes. When it comes to RPGs, they tend to provide grist for the mill.
There are sacred cows aplenty in rules systems, of course. That’s one of the reasons why we have edition wars: change anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it might be, or how much better you think the new version is, and there’s sure to be someone loudly decrying the change and lamenting that the new version just isn’t the same game any more. No more assassins or cavaliers in 2e? Sacrilege. No more THAC0 in 3e? A travesty. No more Vancian casting in 4e? Well, that’s fine, but not for any game whose title includes the words dungeon and dragon.
That’s not the sort I’m thinking about today, though. I’m interested in the sacred cows within the settings. The characters, locations, and other elements that are always present, if only lurking somewhere in the background. The ones that define that setting, that — in a sense — make it what it is. The ones that are iconic — not Tordek and Mialee, but the real icons. The ones with names like Bigby, Mordenkainen, Raistlin, Elminster, Vecna. (There tends to be a good share of wizards among them. I don’t believe this is a coincidence.) The guys you know and love. Or hate. Sometimes both.
A campaign set in one of these published settings must acknowledge its sacred cows at one point. Either it kowtows to them, making use of the pre-existing body of lore that surrounds them (however nebulous it might be in some cases — how much do most D&D players really know about Bigby, other than that he’s the guy with the hand spells?), or it slaughters them, creating some explanation for why they’re no longer present or have no impact. The former option limits the GM somewhat; the latter often infuriates players who have a fondness for that setting. Witness the reaction of Greyhawk fans to Greyhawk Wars, or the more recent reaction of Forgotten Realms fans to the 4e redesign of that world.
Which brings us to Foxbat.
Categories: Philosophy and Rants, Reviews | Comments (6)
