Airships

Can you tell what my players have been doing recently?  And where they've been doing it?  I mean really.  You'd think they'd get the hint after the first one.  But no.  This is why they can't have nice things.  Well that and the constant complaining.  That's not my players though.  They're good about not complaining.  Everyone else on the internet though...  There was another supposed leak of the D&Dnext playtest rules.  Of course everyone decided that they were the worst thing ever and they would never convert to the new edition.  Ever.  In a million trillion years.  What is it with the internet and people complaining?  Diablo 3 is announced for May 15th.  Not 5 minutes later there are people posting that they played the beta and that it is a horrible game that Blizzard completely ruined.  Internet people are crazy.  Same deal with anything that is revealed about D&D next.  The loudest and most frequent posters are the most negative.  I suppose when you have something nice to say it doesn't take nearly as long as saying something negative in as many was as possible.  Sheesh.  Internet, why you so crazy?

Art from GIS for eberron airship
LooneyDM out

Only in Eberron

Can you tell I'm a fan of Eberron.  No really, can you tell?  Okay yes I am.  It's my favorite published D&D setting so far.  It is also true that Hogwarts exists in Eberron.  Floating towers of magical academies!  The bowels of which are filled with strange, delightful, and  mysterious things.  Of course there's no explicit call out for a disgraced member of the academy who tried to live forever by splitting up his soul.  That said, there isn't any reason there couldn't be one.  If you don't believe that there's a place for everything in Eberron, consider this.  In Karrnath there is an alchemist.  She makes the most interesting magical item.  A piece of paper that shows the viewer whatever it is they are expecting to see.  It's most used as a magical means of forging traveling papers.  Yes, that's right.  Eberron has psychic paper.  You can't tell me there isn't a mad man in a blue box flying around the planes in Eberron.

Art from GIS for Arcanix
LooneyDM out

Critics

I have to say I was surprised by the John Carter movie.  All I had heard was gloom and doom and meh.  I went in expecting another Green Lantern.  Something that just didn't live up to expectations or didn't fit well with its own story.  That was not this movie.  The critics are liars.  Yes it is very tropey and cliche.  So are lots of other movies that have come out and will come out.  It executes the tropes superbly.  If you haven't seen this yet you should.  It is a lot of fun in an action movie way.  The players are slightly different due to the science fiction nature of the piece but they all player their parts well in a satisfying manner.

Art from GIS for "John Carter movie"
LooneyDM out

Mankini (NSFW)

I have no words.  Hopefully after seeing this poster you will have no words either.  This was drawn by one of my players.  Artistic players are lots of fun!

LooneyDM out.

Suddenly optimistic about 5e

I've had an epiphany.  One that makes me much more optimistic about how D&D 5e may turn out.  The big conflict I see in the design of 5e is the "simple vs complex" problem.  Specifically one person wants a character they created in 5 minutes and has few to no moving parts where another wants a character that can take an hour to create and has lots of fiddly bits.  The epiphany I had was that Legend could pull this off, so there's no reason that D&D 5e couldn't pull it off either.  You should check out Legend if you haven't.  They have possibly the most innovative multi classing system I have seen anywhere.  Each class in Legend receives three "tracks" these "tracks" are buckets of abilities that you receive over the course of leveling up.  Each level (other than first) gives you an ability from one track.  Each track has a theme that unites the track.  Paladins have smiting and ally buffing tracks.  Barbarians have rage and toughness increasing tracks.  Multi classing works by swapping one of your tracks for another track from a different class or from additional tracks not attached to any class.  Some tracks are passive abilities, while others are active abilities.  So you give the "I want a simple class" guy a class filled with passive tracks boosting attacks, defenses, movement modes, whatever is appropriate for the class in question.  Then you let the "more complexity" guy choose from more active tracks.  Of course this could all fall down if "I want a simple class" guy decides that a class ability every level is too many even if they are passive abilities like "do more damage", "take less damage", "boost your defenses", "move faster".  I'm still optimistic about it though.  It has been done before.  WotC could pull this off.  Or we could all just take up playing Legend instead.

Get Legend here
Art from GIS for Life of Brian
LooneyDM out

Strikers

I saw polls when 4e first came out indicating that people enjoyed playing strikers the most out of all the roles provided in the system.  I do admit that there is something quite satisfying about doing lots of damage, but it never seems to work for me.  Not the ability to do damage.  That party I can accomplish as a striker fine.  It's the part where I feel like my contributions have significant meaning to the combat encounter.  I tend to look at it like this.  The defender can mark enemies and do special stuff when they trigger the mark.  Leaders can buff, clear status effects, heal and sometimes debuff.  Controllers move enemies around, debuff, and apply status effects.  Strikers do damage.  But so does everyone else.  Some of them can even do as much damage as strikers with powers.  Sure striker at-wills do more consistent damage than the others but it never feels like enough to me.  It leaves me wondering if I shouldn't play a leader or a controller instead because they make me feel like I'm accomplishing more.  I'm just weird I guess.

Art from here
LooneyDM out

Puzzles

Puzzles are a thorny issue in RPGs.  Mainly because they work so very differently than they do in the inspiring fiction.  When a character in fiction gets stuck on a puzzle or riddle, it's because the writer needs to build the dramatic tension.  When players in a RPG get stuck on a puzzle or riddle it becomes a gridlock situation that rarely leads to anything fun.  This is why I avoid puzzles.  At least the straight up puzzles.  I prefer encounter puzzles.  Take a regular encounter.  Something the players can use conventional means to solve (skills, abilities, combat powers, etc).  Then add a shortcut that can be deduced.  For example I recently had a combat encounter with a pair of animated statues and some stone faces with firebolts firing from their eyes attached to a nearby wall.  The animated statues were tough and had the ability to immobilize targets they hit, but did minimal damage.  The stone faces were easy to hit and damage, but did lots of damage to anything they targeted.  The shortcut for the encounter being killing the stone faces first, thus decreasing the damage the encounter inflicted.  This was all circumvented by the fact that the animated statues didn't hit the player characters until the 3rdround of combat by which time the players had the statues down to bloodied.  This completely illustrates the issue with puzzles.  One missing piece of information can cause the whole situation to make no sense at all.

Art from GIS for Da Vinci Code
LooneyDM out