5E Playtest: Dwarves!

We're currently getting ready to run another round of 5e Playtest, using roll20.net.  This is going to be a dwarf-only campaign, and we currently have 4 characters confirmed and ready to go, with a couple more on-deck.


Stalac(tite/mite) - Guide/Circle of the Moon Druid.

Hilbo "The Hammer" Huggins - Soldier/Reaver Fighter.  

Khidre of the Eigar - Noble/Ogre Hunter Ranger

Korrum - Underdark Guide/Thunderpriest Cleric of Moradin

Current Campaign Background:

The Kingdom of Goldhills is ruled by Andrik Ironhammer, of the Ironhammer clan.  When the Old Kingdom fell, the Ironhammers were the noble house who controlled the gold and iron mines around the Goldhills settlement.  They consolidated themselves quickly and Andrik's grandfather, Falrik, set himself up as the king of Goldhills.

Their main competition since has been from the Eigar Clan, another Old Kingdom noble house who control many of the upland farms, ranches and logging operations.  Several other smaller clans make up the balance of power.  Generally speaking, the Ironhammers control mining and forging operations, and make up the bulk of the Goldenhills Guard, and the Eigar control food production, trade and logging, and make up the majority of the Paths Command and Traders Guild - however, both those organizations are severely restricted in size and budget due to the century or so of isolationist policies of the Ironhammer clan.

Goldhills Hall and surrounding valleys are the main settlement, population is about 7,500 - 5,000 in the hall and 2,500 in the immediate vicinity.

There are also 4 smaller settlements, Greatrock, which is built alongside the river and has a number of waterwheel-powered sawmills, Coalbellow - a  mining settlement at a major coal seam further down the valley, High Grass - surrounded by most of the highland farms, and Shalecliff, a new mining outpost on a major silver and gold find.

I also set up a Campaign Tumblr to post pictures and maps:  http://kootenaymurph.tumblr.com/.

Lots of good tools out there right now, hopefully this will be successful.

Oh, WotC, You're SO Close.

So WotC just put out their contest to create a character sheet.  Which is nice and all.  If you're into that sort of thing, I encourage you to submit one - the world can always use more cool-looking character sheets.

Just one little problem.  Section 4 - must be submitted as a 300 dpi jpeg file.  Presumably so you can make a FUCKING NON-EDITABLE PDF FILE out of it.

I went straight to the yelling pretty fast there, so I'm going to back up a little and take it slowly.

I must assume that you know of these things called computers, which people have and use now, right?  I mean, the whole playtest is digital.  Digital sign-in, digital feedback, digital files only.

So why in the NAME OF FUCKING IUZ THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE are you sending me character sheets that I have to print out and write on in PENCIL?

It really isn't that hard to create a fill-able, savable form that I can type my character information out on, save like a grown-up and email to my DM.  The community is stepping up and making these things because we need them.  They aren't hard to make.

Please - listen carefully to me.  I don't print any of the playtest material in hardcopy.  I don't want or need character sheet hard copies.  I play full-digital.  Work with me here.

D&D Next Character Sheet Form

Yes, yes.  Don't distribute.  Hardcopy forms are not useful for those of us that play online.  Fillable forms, though.  Much better.  If WotC had half a brain, they would provide them.  But then, the terms of the playtest are "in-person games only", so they clearly do not have half a brain.

So - a fillable pdf form for the new character sheet.


Update 4/11/13

I figured out Adobe Acrobat 11.  Here is the fillable, saveable form:  D&D Next PDF Character Sheet.

Couple of things:  First, you don't need to share it to play with it.  Open it in your browser, go to the File Menu option and select Download or Save a Copy.  Then you have your own copy to play with.

I won't be sharing it, so don't request that.  Just make a copy.

Second, saving problems, tab order, issue with it putting +1's in multiple fields are all fixed.  But let me know if there are other issues.

Malazan Character Background

So a DM on Reddit/r/lfg wants to run a Malazan-themed campaign.

Thought up a character and decided to share.  This is about as much background as I feel a PC needs - notice that it doesn't have tons of history - just a little flavor, a basic description of the guy and some hints about class/stats (mage, high dex).

For you Malazan fans, Tanner Rhyse is a low-level squad mage, Malazan Army, and practitioner of Serc, the Path of the Sky.

Tanner Rhyse

Everyone comes out of Malazan Basic with a nickname.  Braven Tooth makes sure of that.  Since most recruits are interested in leaving their past behind, a new name is OK with them.

Another Malazan Basic tradition is the obstacle course.  It’s a horrible course.  Mud, walls, rusty spikes, iron-heavy logs to carry, rough hemp rope to swing on.  It’s designed to break down a recruit so that they can be rebuilt as Malazan soldiers.

For Corlis Rhyse, the obstacle course was a revelation.  He’d always been too tall for his own comfort – a lanky connection of sharp knees, elbows and bony angles.  On the obstacle course, he discovered that he was, quite simple, the best.  Flowing over and around and through and under like some sort of clockwork mechanism tuned to this specific task.

His competency annoyed the drill instructors.  The obstacle course is a place for exhaustion, pain, filth and ultimately, failure.  Redemption and competency are supposed to come later – not on the first run on the first day. 

So they made him run it again.  And again.  And again.  He did.  Happily.  Easily.  Smoothly.  Corlis Rhyse was so overjoyed to be GOOD at something that he couldn’t do what the instructors wanted.  Couldn’t slow down.  Couldn’t get filthy and exhausted and clumsy.  He just blew through it twenty or so times while the rest of the recruits stood there and gawped like the farm-boys most of them were.

That wasn’t the worst thing, though.  Oh no.  The worst thing was that Corlis Rhyse was supposed to be EVEN WORSE at the obstacle course than regular recruits.  I mean, he’s tapped to be a squad mage, for Hood’s sake.  They only put the squad mages on the obstacle course for the first few days, so they’re happier about going and doing other squad-magey things.

It was Braven Tooth himself who really put his finger on what pretty much everyone – from the training sergeants right down to the gawping farm-boy recruits was feeling.  “He really chaps my hide,” said the master-sergeant, at one of the training officer meetings (held at Smiley’s – per long-standing tradition).  Everyone agreed. 

And so Tanner Rhyse – generally known at Tanner or “that fucking mage from the obstacle course” – emerged from Basic. Still too tall and gangly.  A loosely attached collection of overlong parts with a pale face, perpetually surprised expression and a warren which seemed to mostly be good for messing up his hair, blowing away important pieces of paper and making him sneeze at very inopportune times (like when a drill instructor is right up in his face yelling at him about how good he was at the obstacle course).  But a squad mage, right enough.  And one that understood the principle of the even trade.

7 RPG's (and 20-Something Years)

Red Box D&D:  Aleeta... Nooooo...  Hey, this is a lot of fun.  Oh, I have to DM?  Seems like a lot of work, but whatever.

1E:  There are so many rules I have no idea what I am doing.  I like the random treasure tables.  Monty Haul ensues.

TMNT: Character creation is awesome.  Making up adventures/stats for enemies is BRUTAL.  I will play this game but I won't DM it.

2e:  Soooo much content.  Activate collector mode.  Hey - I can do ANYTHING with this ruleset and all the splatbooks.  I'm going to make an Iron-Age Celtic-themed low-magic game in my homebrew world/rules and run that for YEARS.  2e, I still love you.

Palladium:  Kinda like D&D but with parrying and armor damage and psionics that actually work and I CAN USE TMNT CHARACTERS!  I love to play this game, but I still won't run it.  I won't RUN anything by Siembeda, but I'll play them all day.

Vampire the Masquerade:  Ouch, I have to unlearn my D&Disms.  This is a really fun and flexible game.  We still do quite a bit of combat.  Man, lots of the other people that play this game are pretentious, condescending douches.

4e:  As a DM, I love this stuff.  Easy to build, easy to run - scratches my tactics itch.  But I can't really homebrew.  It moves soooo slooowwlyyyy...  Roleplaying feels somehow harder.  Not EXACTLY doing it for me.

The Hobbit is the Great Goblin's Neck Wattle

I mean, look at this fucking thing!

Bloated, sagging and unnecessary, yet animated with care and attention to detail.

So, as you can probably already tell, I was not a fan of the new Hobbit movie.  Which sucks, because I was genuinely excited about this movie.  Hugely excited, since I adored the Lord of the Rings movies, and I've been a Tolkien fan from way back.  

Heck, this BLOG is named after a Tolkien line, and some of my most-read posts have been about Tolkien and his influence on me as a gamer.

Simply put - Peter Jackson was the wrong director for this movie.  He knew that, though, which is why Guillermo del Toro was initially tapped to do it.  Delays and general movie business made del Toro bow out, so Jackson picked up the reigns... and pulled a Lucas - smashing the movie into the bloated hubris of a director who has been so successful that people are no longer able to tell him things that should be self-evident.

Things like:

"Peter, rocket-powered rabbit sleds are FUCKING IDIOTIC."

"No, Peter, you don't need an additional nemesis sub-plot involving an albino orc with a prosthetic arm."

"Personally, I don't think that the bird shit on the side of Radagast's head looks good at all."

"Why do we need a 5-minute scene were an unnecessary minor character brings a HEDGEHOG BACK FROM THE DEAD?"

"Do we really think we have enough material to stretch a short YA book out into 3 3-hour movies?  It sure doesn't seem that way to me."

"Are all these really long CGI fight scenes really necessary?"

"Do we have to come up with a whole new, untested technology for making this movie?"

"Are YOU ON FUCKING DRUGS?"

Things like that.

Ultimately, the movie is neither fish nor fowl, and that is why it fails.  It can't decide if it wants to be big, sprawling, epic Lord of the Rings, or tight, slightly slapstick Hobbit.  It's OK when it's one or the the other, and miserably, execrably bad when it tries to be both.  Which it does in pretty much all the action scenes involving the dwarves.

I wouldn't have minded a harder-edged version.  A group of dwarven warriors heading out to reclaim their kingdom sits just fine with me.  Some of the battle scenes, the early scenes with Smaug, the encounters with Azog, those all fit this sort of movie, and they were fine and good.

I wouldn't have minded a slapstick, slightly comedy Middle-Earth road trip movie.  The party at Bilbo's, the encounter with the trolls, cooking with busted-up elven furniture, Bilbo's arc generally, even the Radaghast the brown (the brown is shit, btw) - those all worked fine for that sort of slightly goofy movie.

But having them all in the same movie was just, schizophrenic.  Some parts weren't even that.  The entire stone giants scene was solid shit from start to finish, as was the entire underground fight with the goblins.  The action was largely Keystone Kops, which clashed horrendously with the faux-epic stuff they tried to cram in.

Jackson, like Tolkien before him, needs a better editor.  And Christopher Tolkien will no doubt hate it and weep himself to sleep atop the vast pile of money his father's work earned him.   

D&D Next: Seriously, F#$% Lance of Faith

No, really.  Lance of Faith can fuck right off. 

 Wipe the drool off your chins and remove the long-range direct damage spells from the cleric repertoire.  They add nothing to the game except to blur the lines between the spell-casting classes.  They are a brainless default "pew pew" bullshit addition.  Clerics "direct damage" is putting a mace inside your brain-pan.

I didn't hate laser clerics back in the 4e days.  I thought it was kinda nice for clerics to have a ranged attack option at the lower levels.  But listening to players in my test game say "oh, I wonder what I'll do.  Right - the same thing I do every time - cast lance of faith" made me burn with the white-hot rage of a thousand suns.

Lovely - a default spell, and worse yet, it's ranged damage, and worse yet for some clerics it's at-will, and  worse yet it has higher damage than magic missile (albeit with a to-hit-roll).

Let's examine the evidence.

Evidence:

Cleric.

Not-Cleric.  Or Wizard, as the are commonly known.

Conclusion:

Fuck Lance of Faith.