Pen and Paper D&D

[Fordel]

Doppelganger and Changeling are the same thing now if I remember right.

[proudft]

Technically changelings are official, they're from Eberron.   

I need to whip up some 4th edition stats for dromites & vanara, though.

[Sjofn]

Yeah, my changeling is 100% actual intended player race.

I am utterly boring that way, though. I never played races that had level adjustments if I could help it during the 3 and 3.5 days either, too much of a pain.

[Strazos]

I liked 4th edition enough. Played in 2 campaigns and DM'ed part of one. The social encounter nonsense sucked, but I'll futz with that in exchange for non-magic classes actually having neat things to do. The whole miniatures angle worked very well for me and my main group anyway as we've always been SRPG/TBS whores.

As far as improvised attacks...I always just made shit up and let people give it a shot if it seemed even somewhat plausible, such as minotaur characters charging through weak wooden walls after making a STR check. Or a player who wanted to use the Endurance skill in a social encounter to argue until the NPC just became flustered.

I really wish I had folks around here to play SOMETHING with, but alas...

[Sky]

I have a character, a dwarf fighter, that I've been playing on and off since 1996  (2nd edition) in proudft's game.

Wait. What?

[proudft]

Or a player who wanted to use the Endurance skill in a social encounter to argue until the NPC just became flustered.

Lawl, that is gold.   I am remembering and using that.

[Sjofn]

I have a character, a dwarf fighter, that I've been playing on and off since 1996  (2nd edition) in proudft's game.

Wait. What?

Ingmar and proudft have been gaming buddies since roughly the dawn of time.

[Sheepherder]

I am utterly boring that way, though. I never played races that had level adjustments if I could help it during the 3 and 3.5 days either, too much of a pain.

The stat bonuses and racial abilities for some of the less exotic monsters are present at the end of the Monster Manual, so for those it's possible to roll a standard level 1 character.  But you're letting proudft off too easy, next time you roll characters for a new campaign tell him you want to play as a Lamia, or something else equally bizarre.

EDIT: So long as that something else is a shapechanger that eats elves.
EDIT2: Or a mind flayer with a dwarven body.
EDIT3: Or a night hag, but only if proudft is willing to do the "killing you in your dreams" part in full detail rather than it just being a standard power.

Ingmar and proudft have been gaming buddies since roughly the dawn of time.

And they let you join them in their tree fort?

[Sand]

My initial assessment of 4th Ed was the same as Bunks, it was like WOW with dice.
Reading this thread and learning their are now 3 player's handbooks isn't helping to lessen that intial dislike.

[Hawkbit]

2.5 was the best, all downhill from there.  Thac0, bitches. 

We ran a single FR campaign for nearly three years as a thieves' guild from Westgate, eventually causing world-wide destruction.  Our DM was amazing, as kids we always thought it had to be good vs. evil or humans vs. monsters, but he showed us how awesome it can be to do something else with the story.  I was a human dual class 10thief/16invoker when we ended it.  I think the dragon ended up winning that story, after three damn years. 

[Sky]

We always ran 1st ed. Too many rules just get in the way of the game.

[bhodi]

That's kind of the reason I prefer storytelling systems. When you're gathered once a week for about 4 hours, and it takes 30m-2 hours to do one combat, the game ends up being shallow plot wrapped around a single end-of-the-evening encounter. Not a fan. If I wanted miniatures combat, I'd play a wargame. As I get older, I find storytelling even more interesting than whack-a-foozle. After all, that's what I play computer games for.

[Goumindong]

That's kind of the reason I prefer storytelling systems. When you're gathered once a week for about 4 hours, and it takes 30m-2 hours to do one combat, the game ends up being shallow plot wrapped around a single end-of-the-evening encounter. Not a fan. If I wanted miniatures combat, I'd play a wargame. As I get older, I find storytelling even more interesting than whack-a-foozle. After all, that's what I play computer games for.

Combat is much faster in 4e.

Anyway. If you have a laptop (and a projector, or a TV that everyone can see and you can connect your laptop to)

I would suggest maptools instead of minis. www.rptools.net

With a little work you can take pretty much any encounter you want to make and put it into maptools.

Its easiest with online published adventures (rip the maps out of the PDF by taking a picture if your screen, scale it to 25 pixels/square, import and align the grid). Prep time for me was about 2-3 hours for a full published adventure which lasted 2-3 sessions.

For examples of what you can do, when I had the time I was running with an online group of friends, the first adventure path that WotC put up.

These won't let you run them without the materials. And they're for outdated versions of maptools (should still work). But it ought to give you an idea of what you can do which is pretty damned comprehensive.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=2688ee0762664e0eab1eab3e9fa335ca4bad1f63b54647b1

The biggest advantage of course is that if everyone makes their own macros you can automate rolling really really fast. The only thing that slowed our games down was a lack of mics. Other than that, if we went over 30 minutes a combat it was a quite long one.

[Quinton]

My initial assessment of 4th Ed was the same as Bunks, it was like WOW with dice.
Reading this thread and learning their are now 3 player's handbooks isn't helping to lessen that intial dislike.

I'm skeptical of 4th for this reason, but am curious to try it sometime and see how combat actually plays.  From reading the rulebooks it certainly feels like it's heavily inspired by WoW / modern MMORPGs, but at also seems like it might lead toward relatively fast paced and not terribly tedious combat, which would allow for a bit more focus on roleplaying and a bit less on fiddly details of combat simulation, which might not be bad.

[Sheepherder]

4e Monster Manual II is terrible.  I downloaded a scan and I still feel cheated.

[Strazos]

Screw Thac0, it was needlessly complex.  BAB is perfectly fine.

Made some pretty damn broken characters in 3.5e.

And I wouldn't say 4e is like WoW - I'd compare it more with SRPG/TBS.

Different strokes and such, though this thread is really making me crave some table top. Too bad my imminent move makes trying to join an in-person group kind of pointless.

[Ironwood]

Doppelganger and Changeling are the same thing now if I remember right.

I laughed.

[Slyfeind]

And I wouldn't say 4e is like WoW - I'd compare it more with SRPG/TBS.

If it's like any game (and they admittedly drew on lots for inspiration and ideas), I'd put it closest to Final Fantasy Tactics.

[Sheepherder]

Doppelganger and Changeling are the same thing now if I remember right.

I laughed.

These are matters of dire import.

[Malakili]

Oh man, 4th ed is mini-based? I wondered why they were pushing so many painted plastics at the bookstore.

For 1st ed, we used an 8' cafeteria-style table covered in plexi and grease pencils for mapping/notes/art/etc. Worked really well and didn't cost much.

You can still get away with that, but you really do need a grid of some kind.  I have a grid that you can write on with wet-erase pens that I use for just this purpose., but it does help to have 1 mini for each player.  There is no reason you can't use generic tokens though.    I guess my point is you don't really need to invest heavily in minis to play 4th.  It is however super combat focused (which is does pretty well, flows a lot better, much less an hour per round stuff like I'd sometimes see in large groups in 3rd)

[Bzalthek]

Instead of mini's I just bought a 3/4" dowel  and cut off small slices and pasted pictures of tokens onto them.  For larger creatures I'd have to spend more time.  I did this mainly because I wanted to give 4e a fair shot, though I still prefer 2nd Ed. since that was the system I first played.  I really like the 4e combat, but it takes too long in my opinion.

Oh I found a couple shots of my tiles on my comp:  Yeah, I'm anal retentive when I decide to do a project
spoilerd for size.  It's a hasty set up I called The Cathedral and most of the tiles haven't been textured yet at this point but you get the idea.

[RhyssaFireheart]

So (most) of our group leveled last night (level 4, whoo!) and while updating my stats, I realized I hadn't been doing that for the past 2 levels.  Duh!  That goes right along with forgetting to give myself level 2 cleric spells when I reached level 3.  /facepalm

Anyways, our group is currently playing 3e and it's been fun.  Some of the debates about rules and techniques really makes you wonder why they exist though, like flanking.  If you have an opponent in flank and another PC comes up and stands next to one of the flanking PCs, it -is- a bit silly that the new PC doesn't get flank bonuses as well.

And our DM kept throwing mobs of goblins backed by trolls at us.  After the party was out of spells and seriously down on HP.  And then after we managed to survive that encounter, we tried to rest and ended up having to run, then found a way out from under the mountain we were in, only to run into.... goblins and trolls.  It's amazing we only lost 1 party member.

To stay marginally on topic - while I think Bzalthek's setup is a bit crazy, it would be kind of fun to have that kind of terrain to play on.  I rather like using minis for the games.  Sure, you might not need them, but it sure makes it more fun and then you can have the debates about which square/hex your char was really in.

[Bzalthek]

Yeah, that setup was intentionally crazy.  I wanted to use every tile as a showcase.  Most adventures only used a few large tiles and some additional smaller ones connecting them.

[Tannhauser]

Anyone else like "Castles and Crusades"?  It's DND 2nd ed, cleaned up with BAB instead of THACO.  It's very easy to learn and play and feels like DND more than even 3e.  (Full disclosure:  I started playing DND with 1st edition)

4e (The Dark Ages) is OK, especially if you like very visual combats, but it's not DND.  Our group just couldn't embrace it. 
3.5 (The Bronze Age) is great as long as you're not the GM.  Prep times are long and the game seems to mudflate after level 10 or so.
2e (The Silver Age) was the mainstay for our group for years.
1e was the Golden Age as we did the bidding of Ferroman, the blacksmith who was more than he seemed.  First and greatest DM I ever had.  EPIC.

[JWIV]

That setup is seriously awesome.   

As I said earlier, I just do a lot of printouts on cardstock and taping them together prior to the game session. 

I'll add a few props here and there for 3D emphasis, but nothing like the awesome multi-level 3d creations I've seen floated around here and there.

[Sand]

Too bad my imminent move makes trying to join an in-person group kind of pointless.

Life makes me trying to join a table top group these days kind of pointless.
I can already hear the wife,"You wanted to spend 5 hours on a Saturday within someone other than meeeeeeeee!?!  "

[Goumindong]

4e is so combat focused that you will spend less time in combat than in any other DnD system. Frankly I don't understand the complaints. Not only does adherence to details in combat with little adherence to details in other aspects of the game seem ideal for DnD given that you're most likely to have differences about combat, combat is most likely to take up a disproportionate amount of time compared to what it should, and rules for non-combat are the most often complained about, the most often house ruled, and most often ignored.

I mean, was anyone really made better off by the rules about how to make chairs in 3.5? Did we really need so many skills and so many ways to organize them (that no one used, since everyone pretty much just put the full ranks into some set number of skills anyway?)


4e is not like WoW in any sense of the word, unless you think that any game is like WoW. The rules are, in fact, much more like a tabletop wargame, modified to fit the tropes of RPG's. We could think of this like an SRPG, but SRPG's don't tend to focus on movement and placement nearly as much as 4e does so i don't think the comparison is apt.

Also, seriously give maptools a chance. Its great for roleplaying and 4e in general

[Evildrider]

Just 5 hours?  Lightweight!     

[Strazos]

Fack, someone needs to come up with a decent way to do this shit online with Skype or something - I'm jonesing as I look at my nerd bag in my closet, which I know contain my books and dice! 

[Sand]

Frankly I don't understand the complaints.

Nostalgia. We are old.

4e is not like WoW in any sense of the word, unless you think that any game is like WoW.

D&D never used the term "tank" to my knowledge until 4thed was released after WoW. Add in all the new fruity special races tiefling (ie night elves), dragon born, etc.
And you can at least see that they purposefully made and marketed 4thed with an eye to the MMO fan and market.
Which upset nostalgic traditionalists (ie old farts) such as myself.

[Strazos]

Or a "tank" is just a catch-all for the guy who is best at taking a beating.

[Trippy]

I don't know when and who first used the term "tank" to describe somebody with low AC but certainly by the early 80's it was a pretty common term among those who played RPGs. There's even a picture of a literal tank representing AC -10 in the Wizardry I manual.

[Polysorbate80]

There's nothing to really "get" about why some people prefer one game system over another...they just do.  Which unfortunately means you'll really have to try any given version to see whether it works for you personally.

I started with AD&D back in the 80s, and there's still things I like about it, warts and all.  Particularly the multitude of ways to horribly murder your party (it's always seemed silly to me that in 3.5, it's hard to kill someone with poison.)  There's times the group geezers wish we could get "nostalgia night" going and run some 1st edition, but it's probably too hard to retrain the younger players into it.

2nd edition I never played, outside of the computerized stuff like Baldur's Gate, but some of the players grew up on it and they have fond memories of it.

My current group started 3.5e 4-5 years ago.  We started off with one fellow DMing a single campaign, but he's bipolar and his campaign eventually fell apart during one of his harder emotional crashes.  We wound up doing a round-robin sort of campaign at that point--a home city, everyone with one character, and we'd take turns DMing short games for two or three weeks within that setting, depending on who had an idea.  If you've ever read the "Thieve's World" series, you'll have a good idea how it went.  This way, everyone got to play and nobody had to spend an inordinate amount of time doing DM prep.

After a little practice, though, I switched over to DM and I've been running the game for about the last year & a half.  By this point, I only had to spend the time setting up a little campaign world background, a few house rules to fit the scenario, and start everyone at level 1 with enough plot material to go a few weeks.  Once that initial period was over and the characters' personalities & styles had developed, I dont' think I've had to spend more than about half an hour every week planning things.  It all grows out of their actions.  The only exception is when I want to include a plot villain that the munchkins can't murder outright in 3 rounds...that takes some planning.

When 4th edition hit most of the players hated it.  We've got one guy who loves it, and he's also now playing in another group that does 4e.  I'm indifferent to it;  I can see how it would be fun, but I'm not sinking a bunch of money into it if the rest of the group isn't going along (I don't have time for a second D&D session each week).

We're probably going to be transitioning into Pathfinder; several of the players are familiar with it, one person is comfortable enough with it to DM, it's close enough to 3.5 the rest can pick it up pretty quick, and everyone's got pdfs of the materials.

[Ingmar]

Frankly I don't understand the complaints.

Nostalgia. We are old.

4e is not like WoW in any sense of the word, unless you think that any game is like WoW.

D&D never used the term "tank" to my knowledge until 4thed was released after WoW. Add in all the new fruity special races tiefling (ie night elves), dragon born, etc.
And you can at least see that they purposefully made and marketed 4thed with an eye to the MMO fan and market.
Which upset nostalgic traditionalists (ie old farts) such as myself.

It doesn't use the term "tank" now either.

[Daeven]

That's kind of the reason I prefer storytelling systems. When you're gathered once a week for about 4 hours, and it takes 30m-2 hours to do one combat, the game ends up being shallow plot wrapped around a single end-of-the-evening encounter. Not a fan. If I wanted miniatures combat, I'd play a wargame. As I get older, I find storytelling even more interesting than whack-a-foozle. After all, that's what I play computer games for.

That's pretty much why I stick with L5R or Feng Shui. *shrugs*