The doom of us all

Not really, but there's something just a little wrong about using an iPhone app to roll your dice. And that's just what my friend Colin did in a D&D game last weekend. He insisted on it, even when I shoved handfuls of dice under his nose. In fairness, he relented and rolled polyhedrals later in the evening—after his iPhone's battery started to die.

Here's the group shot. We were actually playing D&D 4e—a first for me, and I'm grateful to Andy (the DM, far right) for putting together a great game for the group, which included one rpg newbie and one fella who hadn't played since high school.

UPDATE: Stargazer notes a couple more dice-rolling apps.

My Kind of Fantasy

Pat has challenged me again: In response to my comments that I'll probably never play D&D again (after cutting my teeth on it in the early years, a year long sting with 3e, and playing the 4e demo), he challenged me to say what I look for in fantasy game.  I don't want this to be a D&D bash session, so instead I'll just try to focus on what I want a fantasy game to do for me.  Many of the characteristics I discuss below apply to the types of games I like to play generally.

First, I want a fantasy game that is dynamic and cinematic.  I don't want characters to move up to a monster and keep making to hit rolls - I want to see the sword slice down and watch the blood spatter on the wall.  I want acrobatic leaps onto the backs of bucking beasts and to have my character barely hang on to daggers plunged into the beast's shoulders upon impact.  Finding this level of cinematics usually comes at the expense of crunchy and tactical play - it's hard to make this kind of stuff happen with a lot of rules.  

Second, I want a fantasy game that's gritty.  In a land of sword fights and black magic, death happens and eyes get poked out.  The problem here is that gritty games often have lots of rules - it's pretty cool to roll the dice and find out exactly what location on your body gets hit.  Can a fantasy game be both gritty and over the top cinematic? I don't know, but I'd sure like to find one.

Third, I want a fantasy game that's about more than taking treasure and getting XP.  I like my characters to have goals that are well tied into the setting...like the desire to go on a mission of vengeance for the abandonment the party next to a wyvern lair.  In fantasy settings, I favor having somewhat grim or seedy personal goals.

Fourth, I like to bring the epic also.  No fantasy setting has every inspired me as much as LOTR (and this probably goes for many others out there as well).  As both a GM and a player, I love the possibility of changing, saving, or remaking the world.  The macro stuff is what got me into rpgs in the first place.  In a land where magic, powerful artifacts, and ancient evil are just over the horizon, I feel like games are lacking when they don't embrace these elements.  I recognize there's another tension here between the epic and the personal (and possibly unsavory) goals.  But that's the kind of tension that makes characters tick in the best kind of literature and that brings games alive for me.

Fifth, along the lines of bringing the epic, I want large scale stuff to be at least some recognized part of gameplay.  I just got a copy of the new game Reign by Greg Stolze, and it has a nice set of rules for dealing with "companies" and their interactions with each other.  While I'm not saying this system is the holy grail (hell, I just read it last night), it is certainly aimed at scratching the macro itch that I have.  What's the best part of the LOTR?  The armies clashing into each other.  The movie's nothing without it's strong actors, script, and characterization.  But the epic battles and struggles for power over the land are at the heart of fantasy for me.

Finally, it's worth noting that I don't really care as much about setting.  In general, rpg setting materials don't inspire me all that much (I know this isn't the case for Pat and probably many other gamers out there).  So, I'd rather create a setting for myself that contains the elements I find interesting.  I mean, if you've been playing rpgs for long enough, can't you just spout out "desert world" or "cities floating in a gas giant", start drinking a cup of coffee, and write down a page worth of ideas come out by the time you get to the bottom of the cup?  Though, I do like it when games throw out one liners or examples of cool situations that highlight cool aspects of the rules (like parts of the Dark Heresy PH).  

4e and the Red Box

I'm one of those who was introduced to rpgs with the Red Box and realized the heights gaming could reach with the Blue Box (still my favorite rpg product ever).  As much as I've grown away from D&D since those days, I still look upon them fondly.  In that sense, I think I enjoyed 4emore than Pat (even though I'll probably never play it again) as it reminded me a whole lot of the old days, except with more options.

When I was a kid, I didn't play with a battle map (maybe just some scrawled out shapes of dim  dungeon walls on white paper).  My friend, Rusty, and I would just swing our sword at the monsters we GMed for each other over and over again in endless dungeons and in encounters that we didn't prepare in advance.  We then took the monsters' gold and XP, and miraculously advanced straight through from 1st level to immortality in no more than 10 sessions. 

Pat's description of 4e is dead on - it is battle map heaven and even seems disjointedly elegant (like Manu Ginobli of the San Antonio Spurs?) with its balanced tactical options.  But in the end, it is about rolling to hit over and over again without much attention to the other stuff that I've become so fond of since rediscovering rpgs (and comics).  Even when it was clear that we were leaving without finishing the 4e adventure at Games Plus, the DM awarded us experience points for our pre-gen characters.  If that's not old school, I don't know what it.

I can't find it in me to care about rpgs like 4e that emphasize bean counting.  But at the same time, playing 4e really did remind me of those days in the mythological past with the Red Box.

After-action report: Dungeons and Dragons 4E demo

Last weekend I demoed D&D 4E (note that the rulebook itself doesn’t actually use this phrasing; it just calls itself Dungeons & Dragons) with Kevin, Ben and a couple pickup players at our semi-local game store (it’s 30 miles down the highway).

Lately I’ve been learning my way around D&D 3.5 for my occasional Midnight campaign, so I approached this 4E demo with any eye toward possibly switching over to it eventually. We spent two hours around a table, slugging it out on the battlemap; for this, we got a free miniature and a free d20. Here are a few random thoughts.

Battlemap Rules
Without a doubt, this ruleset was developed for use on the battlemap. Characters don’t move 25 feet in a round, they instead move 5 squares (a single square equaling 5 linear feet). Nearly all the special rules reference the battlemap in some way. The imagined spatial relationship that made old D&D so exciting (ex: “You’re about 20 feet from the bottomless pit and goblins are approaching from the west. What do you do?”) is completely gone, replaced with the sterile grid of the battlemap. Oh, and did I mention that WOTC sells its own D&D Miniatures game?

Feeble Roleplaying
A laugh-out-loud moment occured for me during our first combat round, when the rogue character used one of his new “powers” to skewer a shadow spirit. I asked the player to describe the attack visually - I wasn’t satisfied with having him say “I attack the darkness!” Well, he looked at me dumbly for a long minute, then looked down at his character sheet and read the power description verbatim. It was something like "The thief produces a curved blade from the depths of his cloak and slashes at his foe!" This, it seems, is the extent of creativity and originality possessed by today’s D&D players. Given a premade character and a demo adventure, they prove themselves unable to deal with even a modicum of storytelling. Hope they never want to DM!

Party Roles
I drew a little criticism from my group because I (one of the two fighters) chose not to participate in our first fight. Instead, I tried to figure out the dungeon puzzle while the rest of the group slugged it out with the shadow spirit. Afterward the cleric player made some comments about my “role” in the party, and I responded that I was roleplaying. Roleplaying, not rollplaying. I generally disklike the four broad categories of character (striker, controller, leader and I forget the other one) and the forced playstyles they represent.

Fewer Feats
I did like the common-sense solution for feats. The designers, it seemed, split feats into combat powers, which got cool descriptions that made you want to use them over and over, and feats that you call on for various situations (like Snatch Arrows or somesuch). I also liked the idea of at-will/encounter/daily powers, although in retrospect they did seem to be a little too combat-centric for a group that doesn't break its campaign up into neat little encounter-sized chunks.