Topic: Feature Requests / Mini-Message Board

I just found a Project Wonderful ad for LaughingStick Forums. It looks like they fully intend to support PBP games. Folks who were interested in having such a resource available to them may want to check it out.

I’ve also pimped ObsidianPortal to the people over there. Just call me Dolly Levi. ;)

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Elizabethtown, PA checking in...

I’ve not yet read the Gaiman book, but my DM is currently running a Scion: Hero campaign that had the initial premise of “American Pantheon”. We were encouraged to be the children of archetypes like Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Babe Ruth, John Wayne, etc.

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Hello from over here

Hello over there, wherever that is! =)

Topic: Introduce Yourself / DM from Seattle

Hello! Envy for the Everett location (I spent three summers in the area for what is now the Soundsation Jazz Camp).

Topic: General Discussion / Tips for DM's - DND

Single silly thing that really goes a long way: If you use a grid mat and water-soluble markers to draw your maps, spend another two dollars (or local currency equivalent) and obtain a sponge bottle usually used for wetting envelopes. It makes erasures much quicker, and I’m convinced I go through fewer paper towels blotting it up. (Maybe one of these days when I have another really ratty towel, I’ll just reserve it especially for marker wipe duty.)

I’ve never actually bothered to use this tip, but I’m fond of it: Making people pre-roll their Spot/Listen and Hide/Move Silently checks. It helps keep down the meta-gaming (oh, she’s making us roll, something must be there!).

I know that if I ever start running a campaign (and I keep telling myself I will so I can get just that much more mileage out of the old 3.5 books), I intend to pre-roll the Hide/Move Silently checks for the monsters. However, I would still roll Spot/Listen checks for the monsters at the table. Even if you do this behind a screen, it really helps to build that “awww crap” tension.

I also have grand notions of making up notecards that contain all the needed data for random encounters so I don’t have to fumble with a Monster Manual. Oh, and Post-It flags are great for marking pages in the MM for monsters that you know you’ll be using a lot during a session.

And one random bit of cruelty that I really loved when someone else did it: a random NPC handed our party a book. The person holding the book decided to open it. (Several of us, having had bad experiences with trapped books in previous modules, scattered.) The DM picked up as many d6s as he could lay hands to, including borrowing one from a nearby player, rolled them all, then said “Okay, you open the book. It’s about this guy…”. It was just a beautiful fake-out. Come to think of it, I have used that one myself since then, with doors and such.

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Greetings from New Jersey!

Ooooh, thanks for the heads-up. The younger of the two is nearly twice that age, so yeah, maybe not this time around. =)

Topic: General Discussion / 4e d&d paragon path - dwarven defender

For some reason I recall the original DD prestige class required the use of a shield. I’m still new enough to 4E that I don’t remember if clerics or dwarves automatically get shield proficiency, and I don’t know if it’s fair to require it in order to take a paragon path. (I’d think so but I could be swayed.)

I like the “Defend the Clan” utility, but I’d probably reword it to say “+2 to all defenses, increase this to +4 at level 21” just for the sake of clarity. Ditto for Defensive Stance – say “1d6, or 2d6 at 21st level and above” or something.

Do you really want “Defender Presence” to mark everyone on the field, or just those within a certain blast range? Also, just to make the stupid kind of clarification they apparently needed to make for some people w/r/t Hunter’s Quarry: Does this also affect enemies that cannot see you? How about those you cannot see?

The action point thing is good – it seems every paragon path requires something along those lines. =)

I’m not keen on “Dwarven Constitution” as written because it deviates from other methods of regaining hp. I think it would be more in line with the rest of the game if instead it were written “Once per day, when you become bloodied, regain hit points as if you had spent a healing surge, plus additional hit points equal to your Constitution modifier. This does not expend a healing surge.” I realize it probably doesn’t give back as many hit points this way, but it’s still freebie hit points, and by the time they get this ability they should already be very familiar with “surge + Con”.

I’m also not keen on “Dwarven Strength” as written, because it doesn’t fit my image of dwarves. In my mind, “force the DM to re-roll” is too capricious to really suit the dwarven ideal of stoic order. I’d much rather see something like the old shield other spell, where you can choose to take half the damage that was intended for an adjacent ally. And perhaps at 21st level you can add the ability to shift up to 2 squares as a free action in order to activate this ability.

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Greetings from New Jersey!

Hi Doridian!

Where in NJ, and are you playing 4th edition yet? I’ve got a couple of friends who are telecommuting to a 4th-ed game here in TX – they’re near wherever Rutgers University is.

One of them is a little on the unsocial side, and the other would be made so if you tried to contact her without any sort of preamble on my part, but if you’re in their neighborhood, I might mention you to them this weekend.

Topic: Help and Tips / Colors?

I am a little bummed that “bgcolor” isn’t an allowed attribute right now. I had wanted a non-grey background for my adventure log “top post” (which links to the first session’s writeup), but had to settle for coloring the text instead.

I’m sure it’s probably a horribly low priority for you guys, but if I’m ever in a campaign where everybody contributes to the wiki, I’d love to be able to color-code everyone’s contributions via the background (I find colored text a little hard to read sometimes).

Topic: General Discussion / 4E - Powers, not Treasure

Hmmm. I didn’t look too hard at them, and I’m not yet familiar enough with everything else in 4E to know how they stack up, but IMO if you’re going to replace a magic item with a power, it should be encounter-level or more frequent.

A magical sword will lend its bonus to any attack you make – at-will, encounter, or daily. How many rounds of combat can you reasonably expect a party to engage in before taking an extended rest? Is this daily power really a fair trade for that?

Relatedly: what level are your players right now? It could be that it’s a fair trade now but will leave them hurting later on. And I guess as long as you aren’t completely throwing out the idea of encountering magical items in the future, that’s okay, but DEFINITELY keep an eye on it, especially when throwing new monsters at your players. It’d be no fun at all to realize that your daily powers are useless (or expended!) and your normal attacks with non-enhanced weaponry aren’t damaging it quickly enough.

Topic: General Discussion / 4E question

I’ve no 4E experience to lend here, but I have some Amtgard experience:

The Monster Manual for Amtgard lists the average Quester:Monster ratio for various beasties – how many regular players it should take to defeat a monster of the same level. But there’s one thing that the MM can never EVER account for: Amtgard is live-action combat and so personal skill levels often count for more than character levels.

It’s the same here. Heck, lots of other things will come into play. Terrain can give advantage to one side or the other, for example. But one really big advantage you have by creating the BBEG character is that you should be intimately familiar with what it can do, and in what circumstances it’d be most advantageous to do them. That’s the “personal skill level” in D&D, and it can mean the difference between fighting smart and leaving yourself open. My friend Dennis could be a terrifying GM when running published modules in 3.5, because he’d look at the stated tactics of the BBEG, look at what else it can do, and throw out the published tactics because he had a better idea.

Oh, another Amtgard anecdote: People joke that people playing spellcasters have a Q:M ratio of 10:1 because the rules only allow you to have 1 of each spellcasting class per 10 people on a team. I haven’t played enough 4E to know if magic still has a parabolic power progression, but even with what I’ve seen of the low-level stuff you could easily have hand-picked a few powers that are guaranteed to stymy or outright counteract whatever the players planned to do.

Topic: General Discussion / Joint Game?

Hah – Florimel does this in real space all the time, to much groaning and rolling of eyes.

I’m not running anything and don’t have the time for it, but my idea is that you could team up with somebody who wanted to run an evil campaign. They can be each others’ main antagonists. =)

Topic: Site Announcements / OpenID

No questions. I am familiar with OpenID ‘cause a friend of mine has a no-anonymous-posts InsaneJournal and I have no desire to use an IJ myself.

I think this is neat. :) I’ll mention this next time I’m pimping the site to friends.

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Hey

Hello!

Way too wiped to look at anything, let alone finish updating “mine”, but figured I should say hi anyway.

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Oregon here, P-town represent'n

I actually saw a copy of the Star Trek RPG at Half Price books. It was in the box, and still in decent shape. They wanted $50 for it.

I’m not actually GMing anything, so my coolest ideas are sort of just lying fallow. I had a pantheon spring into my head during my last trip to San Antonio. The goddess who shapes the earth itself is literally nearsighted, and inadvertently swallowed up three villages when she decided she needed to open up a canyon to divert part of a river. What? Villages are TEENY compared to mountains and canyons and major rivers. So now every settlement that can afford it builds a HUGE building somewhere in or near their town and paints it bright red, hoping it’ll mean Kuth sees them and takes them into account when she next gets a fit of inspiration.

Oh, and might I add…SERIOUS FRIGGIN’ ENVY for the Stumptown location. I grew up there and really miss it sometimes.

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Hello from St. Louis!

I’ve heard of Fear the Boot ‘cause for a while I read Chainmail Bikini (had to stop because it was giving me nightmares about when I start GMing).

Topic: Site Announcements / Who's going to GenCon?

Micah,

I’m not going to GenCon, but I live in Dallas and we have a few conventions here with a gaming presence. Strangely enough, A-Kon and AnimeFest have been fairly fruitful recruiting grounds for the RPGA even though gaming is far and away a secondary purpose to both cons.

I mention this mostly to say that if you have an electronic copy of the flyer available, you could email it to the address in my profile, and then if I end up going to any of the D/FW cons I can print copies to bring with me.

Topic: Site Announcements / Obsidian Portal beats WotC, film at 11

Hi vermilion,

I don’t ever remember hearing the PTB saying “we’re gonna outdo Gleemax”. Again, I was always under the impression that Gleemax was strictly going to be focused on WotC/Hasbro products, which would mean OP was not strictly competition since they were platform-neutral.

And technically it’s hard to claim that OP “defeated” Gleemax because nowhere in the official announcement did WotC/Hasbro say the site was abandoned because there were other sites available to fill the void. Granted, they have nothing to gain and potentially plenty to lose by so saying, so it’s not surprising they didn’t, but it still makes it hard to decisively claim “victory”. We OP-fen will just do it anyway. ;)

Topic: Site Announcements / Obsidian Portal beats WotC, film at 11

This was during that database hiccup.

Topic: Help and Tips / Apostrophes in Wiki Page Titles

Ooh, I ran into that one a while back when posting a “fanfic” epilogue to a campaign

I ended up having to just be really creative with my choice of words to make it something I could bear.

Though if it makes you feel any better, I find my eyes tend to skip right over the page’s title and go straight for the meat of the text.

Topic: Feature Requests / Multiple pages on Wiki Portion

Hey spidie,

If it makes you feel better, making new wiki pages was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. It still feels backwards to me.

And back before there was the “entire page GM only” box, I felt REALLY awkward doing it that way, since somebody could conceivably be looking at my campaign and seeing a “dead” link while I was creating the new page. Not quite as bad as changing clothes in public, but that flavor of awkwardness. =)

Topic: Introduce Yourself / Greetings from Seattle

Welcome, and serious, SERIOUS envy for the Seattle location. I grew up in Portland and miss the Northwest tremendously sometimes.

And the guy running my friends through a 4e campaign is particularly enamored of MapTool – I don’t know if that’s a D&DI freebie or not, but it’s making it much easier to include a couple of our New Jersey friends in our group.

Topic: Site Announcements / Database backup restoration - flames here, please

Ah! Would that explain why some posts I’d read earlier showed up as unread again?

(I also lost a response, but it was to the death of Gleemax, and assertions that y’all rock can go anywhere! ;)

Topic: Help and Tips / Truncating the adventure log

....nngh. I wish I could explain why your using the word “retard” bothered me. Maybe I’m just a freak for honestly finding “dumbass” less offensive.

Topic: Site Announcements / Last Nights Outage

Oooh, sorry to hear that! Hugs and I hope there are minimal repercussions.