Gleemax’s Failure and other thoughts

At this point, it’s pretty old news that Wizard of the Coast‘s Gleemax is dead.  (My excuse?  I don’t do news; I do commentary.)  At least, Gleemax will be dead in September, presuming one can consider it “alive” now.  And Wizards’ publishing arm is going to be pulling back to focus on its Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons brands after the end of 2008.

There’s a lot of discussion about what exactly this means.  Randy Buehler’s post (which I thank Critical Hits for referring me to) reads, in part:

Wizards of the Coast has made the decision to pull down its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on other aspects of our digital initiatives, especially Magic Online and Dungeons & Dragons Insider. We continue to believe that fostering online community is an important part of taking care of our customers, but until we have our games up and running at a quality level we can be proud of, it will be the games themselves that receive the lion’s share of our attention and resources. (emphasis added)

Chatty DM finds this an encouraging sign.  His is the guardedly optimistic approach:  that WotC has realized it’s overextended itself, trying to offer too much too soon, and is scaling back to concentrate on their key properties.  And, moreover, that this signifies a change in their… corporate policy, I suppose.  A redefinition of their scope of operations.  Working on doing a couple of things well, rather than a lot of things piecemeal.

I’d like to believe that.  Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I remember WotC’s earlier foray into the internet with the third-edition E-Tools.  In particular, I remember that grand promises were made, and that in the end the tools were delivered past deadline and missing promised features.  And that what features there were were not necessarily user-friendly.

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Skybreaker session 3: Rocks and Hard Places

When we last left our motley band, they were trapped between a barricaded bunch of kobolds with crossbows (and who knows what else) and the shuffling approach of things as yet unseen, but likely to strongly resemble zombies or some other such undead threat.

That’s where our session began, and it put us in a rather interesting place.  There were only two obvious options:  if we went in one direction, we would need to either overcome the kobolds or negotiate with them.  If we went in the other, we would encounter whatever it was that was approaching us.  We knew there were no side passages to escape along.

Negotiation with the kobolds would seem to be the strongest hand.  If all went well, we would gain cover and some temporary allies in the fight.  Of course, if all went poorly, we could end up in a pitched battle, having forfeited any chance of surprise, with another encounter certain to follow before we had time to rest.  And there was, after all, some reason to believe that the kobolds had killed the miners in the first place, even if they weren’t responsible for their corpses’ reanimation.  There was no guarantee they wouldn’t attack us on sight.

Fighting the kobolds might gain us surprise, but it would cost us any hope of an alliance, and we’d still be dealing with the approaching undead.

Fighting the undead meant going into a battle without any real grasp of the forces arrayed against us.  Rarely a good idea.  On the other hand, it might mean only having to fight one battle… unless the kobolds got curious.  It was a fair bet they’d hear the sounds of the fight.

Rodrik supported that third option.  Both the Raven Queen’s hatred of undead and his own pragmatic approach seemed to push him in that direction — take care of the undead, then, if necessary, take care of the kobolds.  There was always the chance that the kobolds wouldn’t become a problem.  I as a player wouldn’t have considered it the best choice, but he would, and did.

I think it might have worked out okay, too.  Needless to say, though, it’s not what we did.

We went instead with a modified version of plan A, wherein Cat and Tomal (who was trained in Stealth) would hide, to help conceal our numbers and hopefully give us an advantage if things went south.  Meanwhile, Rodrik would attempt to parley with the kobolds, with Matias along to provide some support if he got swarmed.  Zaz would be somewhere in the middle, playing lookout against the zombies while also being ready to step in and throw a spell if we needed him against the kobolds.

I’m really not sure how Zaz’s role was supposed to work.

That was the plan.

What actually happened was that the kobolds almost uniformly broke and ran as soon as they spotted Rodrik.  A couple of crossbow bolts came our way, but by the time we’d reached the barricades, those had begun to withdraw, too.  We wondered about this, but we let them go; they were scattering, and there was no hope of the two of us catching up to all of them in time.  I’m sure something evil is going to come of this in a future session.

That did give us the barricade, along with a couple of abandoned crossbows.

After a moment of discussion, we almost unanimously decided that we didn’t wish to see what had driven off all those kobolds, who a minute ago had seemed ready to fight.  (Rodrik was again overruled here, and I still think we’ll regret it.)  We proceeded down the corridor, making a few turns, until we could no longer hear the creatures behind us.

We came across some more bodies, mostly kobolds; none of them were rising as undead yet.  They burned nicely.  We also had a few combat encounters, with a nest of giant rats and a rather nasty giant spider, and we found two more traps, a classic pit and an arrow trap.  We never saw a trace of a kobold.  Occasionally we would hear distant echoes of metal on metal, which I took to mean a battle somewhere.  The entire thing was getting a bit eerie, actually.

That’s when the zombies attacked.

I say zombies, but these weren’t typical zombies.  Typical zombies shamble along, possibly making noises much like the ones we’d heard earlier, near the barricade.  These zombies were walking corpses, but that’s where the resemblance ended.  They were fast, mean, and hungry for flesh.  And did I mention inhumanly strong and almost impossible to put down?  And to top it all off, utterly silent.  They actually surprised us.  Zombies managed to get a high enough stealth score to overcome our ranger’s passive perception.

They were also reptilian.  We thought.  We couldn’t identify them, but we did know they were nothing we’d seen or heard of before.

This was the toughest fight we’d been in yet.  Despite the best efforts of both Tomal and Rodrik, Matias went down beneath a small swarm of velociraptor-troll-zombies.  (At least, that’s what they seemed like, and I have to say Ron did an excellent job of describing the confusion of the fight, with weird quasi-reptilian zombie-things flashing in and out of sight, attacking from every direction, and all that good stuff.)  It took a very lucky turn undead, several daily powers, and at least three action points from different characters to turn that fight around, and at the end we were all bloody and battered and standing over a pile of dismembered reptile-zombie corpses.

(“Zombie corpses” might be somewhat redundant, but hey — what else do you call them?)

This was a victory we, the players, actually celebrated.  It was a hard fight, and we could have come out on the losing side at any time, but we managed to pull it together and win.  Our groups don’t fudge die rolls.  We play fair — no instant-death traps, or anything — but defeat and death are both real options in our campaigns.  It leads to some loved characters being lost, yes.  But it also leads to situations like this one, where the entire table was happily recounting the fight for upwards of fifteen minutes.  This is the main reason I discourage fudging rolls — it takes away from the thrill of a skin-of-the-teeth victory like this one.

We all thought that was going to be the end of the session, in fact.  But Ron had one more surprise up his sleeve for us.

As our battered, weary, and in one case unconscious heroes started to rest after the long, bloody fight, the kobolds showed up.

Looking forward to seeing what develops next week.

Skybreaker session 2: Deep as a…

After a week’s break thanks to some real-life issues, we got back to our Skybreaker campaign yesterday.

Having learned about the kobold incursions, our party’s next step was fairly obvious:  visit the mine and see what we could discover about the kobolds’ motive.  After an overnight rest, we set off early in the morning, to give ourselves plenty of time to get back to town before dark.  None of us liked the idea of trekking through mountain territory full of hostile kobolds at night.

Despite our worries, we didn’t come across any more of the little monsters on the way to the mine.  The entrance, too, was clear of guards — a strange detail.  We took some time to search for traps, bearing the kobolds’ reputation in mind, but we turned up nothing there, either.  Finally, we went in.

Outside the dungeon, Cat had led, scouting ahead of the party.  Inside, Matias and Tomal were our vanguard.  Cat, with her bow, and Zaz stayed in the center, where they could still strike freely at range.  Rodrik was at the back, since he’s less squishy than the center two in case of a rear attack, and more capable of attacking at range than Tomal.  Rodrik, being a fairly easygoing type, didn’t object; I figured he’d be pretty pragmatic when it came to survival, and it seemed like a decent plan.

The first passage proceeded into the mountain, downward along a slope.  We soon came to an open area, used to store some of the miners’ equipment, judging by the picks, lanterns, and other paraphernalia scattered along the outer wall.  It also featured a number of bodies — humans and dwarves we figured for the miners, and kobolds.  It seemed the miners had tried to make a stand.

Then, after a cursory investigation, as we prepared to head deeper into the mine, the corpses began to stand up.

This was a rather creepy moment, actually, and I tip my imaginary hat to Ron for it.  It also presented us with quite a challenge:  over a dozen kobold, human, and dwarf zombies, all of them now standing between us and the mine entrance.

Rodrik was now in “front,” but I rolled poorly on initiative, and would be acting last.  Cat started out, sticking one with a few arrows; down it went.  Zaz scorched a couple.  Matias moved to the front and tossed a throwing hammer; it missed, but it allowed him to mark the enemy.  Zombies started to swarm us.  Tomal moved up to support Matias.  And Rodrik, naturally, turned undead.

It turns out that turn undead is a pretty impressive power when you’re surrounded by zombies.  Most of the uncoming horde got seared by brilliant white light and driven back, and a couple crumbled to dust.  Since the ones I’d hit couldn’t move for a turn, we had a chance to clean up, and we turned the tide pretty quickly after that, especially once Zaz pulled out a Force Orb on the enemies I’d pushed into a nice clump.  Zombies, unsurprisingly, have a low Reflex defense.

This turned out to be an easier fight than Ron had expected, he said afterwards.  There was some lucky rolling involved, but he hadn’t counted on the power of turn undead’s “push + immobilize” effect to set up further area-effect.

We took a short rest to recharge our encounter powers, while in-character we talked over what this meant.  Was there a necromancer among the kobolds?  If so, he was sufficiently ruthless to animate the kobold dead, too.  If not, then we had corpses rising as zombies for some other reason.  We didn’t have any real information to go on, yet, so we chalked it up to another mystery and pressed on.

We carefully explored the branching passages of the mine, occasionally coming across another body.  We burned them, just to be sure.  We didn’t see a single live kobold, although we did trip a dart trap at one point that poisoned Rodrik.  Fortunately, dwarves have a strong resistance to poison, and he shook it off quickly.

We fought a couple of fire beetles that had turned aggressive, and later a smaller group of zombies that was shambling about a room, but on the whole we were surprised by how quiet and empty the mine seemed.  Darstan, the reeve, had led us to believe that the mine had been suddenly flooded by kobolds.  Where had they gone, then?

Cat signaled a halt, telling us she’d heard something.  She crept ahead into the darkness, returning five minutes later and silently gesturing us back.  She’d found the kobolds — some of them, anyway.  They’d barricaded the passage up ahead and were huddling behind the makeshift barrier with readied crossbows.  They were definitely expecting trouble, and soon.  And it would have to be coming from our direction, because there were no other branches between us and the barricade.

One Perception check later, we became aware of a soft shuffling sound from back the way we’d come, growing louder as it progressed toward us…

And there the session ended.

Skybreaker session 1: Into White Haven

We played through our first real session under 4e rules yesterday.  The campaign opened, as I mentioned earlier, on the mountain road near the mining town of White Haven, which was our characters’ first definition.  Our motley crew included:

* Rodrik the White, human cleric of the Raven Queen, played by yours truly.

* Zadjik Ildan Zarifi, human wizard, played by Steve.  Instantly assigned the nickname “Zaz.”  This is what you get for choosing unpronounceable names in one of our campaigns.  Someone always does anyway; it’s a running gag.

* Katryn “Cat” Silverpine, half-elf ranger, played by Lydia.

* Matias, no last name given, dwarf fighter, played by Jen.  A lot of people have “Scottish” dwarves.  Ours are inspired by Roman culture.

* Tomal Dreamwalker, tiefling warlord, played by Jeff.

The reasoning for starting the campaign on the road became evident pretty quickly:  we were ambushed by kobolds as we made our way toward town.  A good Perception score on Cat’s part saved the party some possible pain, but we were still facing down a dozen kobolds.

Now, kobolds are among the weakest of basic enemies in D&D.  They’re known for setting lots of traps and ambushes and dying by the score.  Sometimes, in the hands of a particularly fiendish GM, they’ve been known to annihilate an entire party of adventurers through cunning rather than might; for the most part, though, they’re the fodderiest of cannon fodder.

In 4e, though, kobolds have one more benefit:  a power called Shifty.  As a minor action, they can shift one square.  That means they move quickly, can generally avoid opportunity attacks, and they’re hard to corral; they’ll slip right past the front lines and swarm the squishies.

Which is exactly what they started to do.

Kobolds were dropping left and right.  A fair number of them were “minions,” a new 4e class of monster that dies after one hit, and Zaz killed off a couple right away with a miniature fireball.  Cat took down another as it approached, and Rodrik used his lance of faith power to smite another.  After that, things got a little trickier; kobolds were shifting all over the place, flanking Zaz and Cat.  A couple of unfortunate die rolls left the party taking some damage, and the kobold leader, a non-minion, proved surprisingly resilient, taking four hits to defeat.  (Low damage dice didn’t help there.)  With most of their number, including their leader, struck down, the kobolds started to retreat.  Not being the chivalrous type, we cut them down before they could get away.

A couple of healing surges later, we were back on our way into town.  The townspeople were somewhat distrustful of outsiders, but their situation was evidently becoming more desperate.  After some investigation, we ended up speaking with the shire reeve, a gruff ex-soldier by the name of Darstan.  Getting information and support out of him, Ron declared, would be a skill challenge.

We found almost immediately that the rules for skill challenges are somewhat broken, as written.  It’s nearly impossible to successfully complete a challenge at the DCs given, and a lower-complexity challenge is actually harder to succeed at than a higher-complexity one (or can be, depending on the difficulties involved), due to the smaller number of die rolls involved.  (Check out this Skill Challenge calculator for a better illustration.  ENWorld has a more detailed mathematical analysis.)

We quickly house-ruled a solution:  All skill challenge DCs were to be reduced by 5, and the number of skill check failures allowed before the challenge failed was increased to be equal to the number of successes needed to pass the challenge.  That served for this session; we may need to look more into it before running another.

(On the plus side, designer Mike Mearls has acknowledged the problem with skill checks in a forum thread.  He writes: “We came to a few conclusions on what happened, what our intent is, and what we’re going to do about it.”  So evidently we’ll see some errata soon.  In the meantime, Stalker0, who did that mathematical analysis on ENWorld, has come up with a system whose success probabilities are rather better.)

Our party succeeded with our revised skill challenge and learned some of the story behind the mine disaster.  White Haven had historically had troubles with kobold incursions into their iron mines, but recently, the intrusions became more frequent, and the kobolds more motivated to stand up to the townfolk’s resistance.  Recently, the miners had been all but entirely driven out; a work detail under heavy guard was left scrounging for ore in a side shaft site, while the mine proper, with its richer deposits, was now under the control of the kobolds.  The ore doesn’t seem to be the kobolds’ main purpose, although there’s mining going on — according to the reeve, the miners’ accounts agree that the kobolds seem to be looking for something.  Something that can inspire zealous fervor in kobolds.

We were given a mine foreman’s key, and permission to enter, but he warned us that he couldn’t spare any guards to escort or guide us.  (I’m wondering whether he might have, if we’d done better on the skill challenge — but it shouldn’t matter.)  On our way to the mines, we happened across another group of kobolds.  This time, we had the advantage, and we worked out a plan to catch them by surprise.  This group ran as soon as they saw us, but the plan worked out — Cat and Zaz had made a wide circle around their group, getting between them and the mines, and we managed to defeat the entire bunch.  Fewer minions, this time, and it entailed a running battle.  Emerging victorious, we continued toward the mines, and there ended the session.

I suspect things will pick up as we get used to the new rules.  Combats were still a little slow.  4e combat is a lot of fun, though — there’s plenty of movement, and tactical considerations play a big part.  The new system really does seem brilliant, at least for the moment.  Maybe its luster will fade, as 3.5e did for me, but for now, the entire group agrees that the raw combat part of the game has never been as entertaining as it is in 4e.

Skybreaker

That’s the name of the test campaign we’re running for 4e. Skybreaker. Our GM, Ron, loves obscure single-word names, but I’ll admit that it sounds intriguing. (I may not have much room to talk, though; my last GMed game was “A Plague of Angels.”)

We spent the first session creating characters and establishing a basic background. For the sake of simplicity, we agreed that the party had come together at some point in the past, and that we’d all traveled to the initial setting, the mining town of White Haven, because of rumors that a recent mine disaster was something more than just a typical collapse — that the miners had uncovered something meant to be kept hidden. Supporting this evidence was the influx of monsters into the area; it had had occasional problems with goblins and the like in the past, but now things were getting dangerous. The campaign will open with the party on the mountain road outside of White Haven. It’s up to us to decide where to go from there.

I often end up GMing, so it’s nice to have the chance to play.

I was tempted by the warlock, but I’m also one of those odd people who enjoys playing a cleric, so I decided to go with a cleric of the Raven Queen. We’re also using the standard array for stats, and no house rules. All of the core races are available.

This is what I ended up with:

Rodrik the White, human cleric of the Raven Queen

Strength 14, Dexterity 11, Constitution 12, Intelligence 10, Wisdom 18, Charisma 13

Hit Points 24 (bloodied 12)

Healing Surges: 8 per day, for 6 hp each

Defenses: AC 16, Fortitude 13, Reflex 11, Will 17

Alignment: Unaligned

Proficiencies: simple melee weapons, simple ranged weapons, cloth, leather, hide, chainmail

Skills: Arcana (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), History (Int), Insight (Wis), Religion (Int)

Feats: Action Surge (+3 to attack rolls during any action gained by spending an action point), Raven Queen’s Blessing (new power), Ritual Caster (cleric bonus feat)

Rituals: Comprehend Language, Gentle Repose

Equipment: Chainmail (+6 armor bonus, -1 check, -1 speed, 40#), scythe (+2 prof., 2d4 damage, 10#), standard adventurers’ kit (33#), holy symbol (1#), ritual book (3#), 30 gp

(Carrying: 86#; normal load: 140#; heavy load: 280#; max. drag or push: 700#)

Powers:

Channel Divinity: Divine Fortune (free, encounter, personal, +1 bonus to next attack roll or saving throw before end of next turn)

Channel Divinity: Turn Undead (standard, encounter, close burst 2, Wisdom attack vs. Will; hit: 1d10+4 radiant damage, push 3 squares, and immobilize until end of next turn; miss: half damage and no push or immobilize)

Healing Word (minor, twice per encounter, close burst 5; target can spend a healing surge and gains 1d6 additional hp)

Lance of Faith (standard, at-will, ranged 5, Wisdom attack vs. Reflex; hit: 1d8+4 radiant damage, and one ally in sight gains +2 power bonus to next attack against that target)

Priest’s Shield (standard, at-will, melee, Strength vs. AC; hit: 2d4+2, I and one adjacent ally gain +1 power bonus to AC until end of next turn)

Sacred Flame (standard, at-will, ranged 5, Wisdom attack vs. Reflex; hit: 1d6+4 radiant damage, and one ally in sight gains 1 temporary hp or can make a saving throw)

Cause Fear (standard, encounter, ranged 10, Wisdom attack vs. Will; hit: target moves its speed + 1 square away from me, avoiding unsafe or difficult terrain if it can — this movement provokes opportunity attacks)

Cascade of Light (standard, daily, ranged 10, Wisdom attack vs. Will; hit: 3d8+4 radiant damage and target gains vulnerability 5 to all my attacks; miss: half damage, no vulnerability)

Raven Queen’s Blessing (free, encounter, ranged 10; when my attack drops an enemy to 0 hp or fewer, I or an ally within 5 squares of that enemy can spend a healing surge)
That took about 20 minutes to work up, mainly because I’m not familiar with the new character creation system yet. I was pleasantly surprised to find the new encumbrance system takes up only about half a column, and it includes this note: “The amount you carry should rarely be an issue, and you don’t need to calculate the amount your character is hauling around unless it’s likely to matter.” Goodbye, encumbrance bookkeeping. You won’t be missed. (Hell, most of us never did it in the first place, I’d wager…)

Rodrik’s background is still a little sketchy, since the world’s history isn’t exactly filled in yet. But the basic story is that he came from Durinhal, the last bastion of civilization amid the trackless northern wastes. A land where winter holds sway for most of the year, and the goddess of winter is, accordingly, among the most popularly worshipped deities. Rodrik’s parents were both ordained in the Raven Queen’s service, and he followed in their footsteps, displaying at an early age the talent for channeling divine power.

Before he showed his talent, he was a quiet boy, an earnest if not particularly gifted scholar, more often to be found reading a book from the temple’s libraries than anything else. When he became an acolyte, the power changed him. He became more confident and more assertive, though he retained his love of reading. While the northmen are stereotyped as grim, Rodrik is typically lighthearted, quick with a laugh or a quip. Those who meet him are often surprised to learn of his devotion to the death goddess.

This is not to say that he takes his devotion lightly. He feels free to carouse, to laugh, to joke in the face of danger precisely because of that devotion. The Raven Queen teaches that death is the natural end of life, and Rodrik has accepted that his fate lies there — and so he sees no purpose in obsessing over an inevitable end, or in avoiding what pleasures he can find along the way. His cheerful disposition reflects his philosophy, and rarely does it crack. Only when faced with the undead does he radiate the grim purpose most expect to see in a cleric of the goddess of death.

Rodrik earned his styling “the White” from his hair, which turned shock-white when first he channeled divine magic. He’s since developed a preference for the color — his armor is enameled in white, his cloak is of heavy white wool trimmed with white fur, his clothing is white with only accents of color. Even the handle of the scythe he bears as a weapon is shaped from a bleached white wood. Only the black raven’s-head symbol of his deity diverges strongly from the color scheme.