Why I Lik(ed) It: 3.5 Edition

My favorite part of 3.5 Edition was hands down the prestige classes. They were a way to specialize your character and help forge it into exactly what you thought it should be. Towards the end of the edition, they were reaching, but for the most part, there were a lot of cool options to be found for prestige classes. With the qualification requirements and everything, it just felt like prestige classes were a major way to define your character and what they were about. Don't get me wrong, you should be able to show what your character is without ten levels of prestige class just by playing the game and making choices while role-playing, but I felt like prestige classes were a very nifty way to mechanical way to represent your character and what they were about.

Feat and Skills kind of go along with prestige classes, I thought they were great ways to bring your character, via game mechanics, closer to being what you envisioned in your mind. Your fighter didn't have to depend on Strength or Dexterity to determine whether or not he hit hard or was hard to hit, you could take Power Attack or Dodge or Combat Expertise. I dunno, it just felt like between feats, skill points, and prestige classes, it was easy as Hell to make your character into what you wanted to be.

Challenge ratings were another concept I really liked, every monster had a challenge rating and in the DMG there were tables for building encounters and awarding experience based on the party's level and the challenge rating of monsters and traps and such you put in the encounter with them. It was somewhat tricky at times, and I don't think I fully understood it at times, but it made building encounters of the difficulty I wanted a lot more easier. It kind of just gave me some guidelines for building encounters that eliminated a lot of the guess work. I'm not a huge fan of taking a stab into the dark and hoping things work out.

Level adjustments and templates were pretty cool, a nice and easy system for indicating how powerful a race or template was and how much more powerful than other players that the race or template was going to be. It kept the power level of the players fairly balanced so no one was surging ahead of the group for most of the campaign, unless they had like a +4 level adjustment and some racial hit dice, then thing admittedly got a little crazy.

The d20 mechanic. Pretty much everything came down to a d20 roll, whether it be initiative, attack rolls, or saving throws. I liked that. It made the rules a lot easier to explain to new players and a lot easier to adjudicate situations not covered by the extensive rules of the game. You want to do something? Roll a d20 and apply pertinent modifiers.

Ascending attack rolls and AC and so on. High was good, low was bad. This kind of ties in with the d20 mechanic, but this made the edition glorious. Don't get me wrong, I had the THAC0 tables for each class pretty much memorized by the time we stopped playing 2nd Edition AD&D, but positives always equaling good and negatives always being bad was a great addition to the game I thought. It made it easier to explain to new players and it made combat a little easier as we didn't constantly have to reference attack roll sheets.

Ultimately, I think it was the complexity and wealth of options of 3.5 that made it appeal to me so much. This however eventually left a sour taste in my mouth with the advent of the 160 page splatbook for 35 dollars that was produced on a pretty much monthly basis. There is such a thing as too many options and too much of a good thing. Complete Arcane, Complete Mage, Adventurer, Scoundrel, Divine, Champion, etc, etc, etc. Spoiler alert, none of these books were complete anything. They just kept coming, never once creeping up above the 160 page mark. 

Why I Like(ed) It: 2nd Edition AD&D

I've been thinking real hard lately and reading a lot of flame wars (or more accurately called napalm shoved so far down your throat that your asshole burns wars) on forums and shit. I've decided that if I wasn't already, I am officially an Edition War Nonparticipant. Edition wars are stupid. Each edition of DnD is different, which is why different people adhere to different editions and abstain from and levy napalm at other editions. Each one has merits that made and make it popular. As long no one comes into your basement and throws your books into an oven, leave the issue alone and play what you enjoy for the reasons you enjoy it. 

The thing I read most recently was a forum thread on the Wizards of the Coasts forums where some chucklehead was acting like Fourthcore was ruining 4th Edition for everyone. He was complaining about everything from save or die effects to the overpowered nature of a boss monster in Revenge of the Iron Lich that you were not meant to fight directly that was only there to be an obstacle to avoid. That is the way Fourthcore is, insane difficulty coupled with getting real fucking lucky instead of having your PC splattered by a caving in roof. The guy would just not accept that Fourthcore is Fourthcore and some people like it. It was stupid and dumb and unfair and counterintuitive to the 4th Edition design standards, so it is dumb and everyone should stop playing in that style. He kept stating that Fourtcore represents fake difficulty, not actual difficulty, which is fair. There are save or die effects in Fourthcore, there are traps that will kill if you don't avoid them. So what? That is Fourthcore. If you like the random chaos and hardcore difficulty of that style, play it, if not, play regular 4th Edition.

Anyway, to continue. This thread really inspired me to talk about what I like about the various editions I have played. I enjoy this game and have had fun with every edition. I remember having fun when I played 2nd Edition, despite my comments to the contrary. A lot of fun, I only decided I hated it when 3.5 came out and it seemed like a better system to me. There is no need to burn the bridge on past editions when one I like better comes out, it is ok to still like stuff about 2nd Edition, even though I liked 3.5 more.

So what, thinking back, did I actually like about 2nd Edition?

First and foremost, there was a shit ton of material out for it. I mean, I didn't have spending money to spend and I had no idea what a torrent or modem was back then when we first got into it, but there was a lot of material out there and I had access to a good chunk of it. There was an option for pretty much everything you could conceive of between all the race and class books and all the kits and whatnot. I mean you didn't have sweet things like skill points or feats to customize your character, just non-weapon proficiencies and kits, but the kits were enough at the time. Unfortunately, I cannot recall a single instance of anyone in my group actually using a non-weapon proficiency outside of something like Blind Fighting or Bowyer/Fletcher. I guess it is no surprise though, we were strictly kill it and take its shit back then. And we enjoyed it.

I guess I also liked not worrying about the narrative so much as well. It was just fun to put the guys in a room with some monsters and watch them slaughter everything, though these were not exactly complex battles being fought on my college ruled note paper. This might be more of a feature of our group than of 2nd Edition though, so I'm not sure it is legitimate. Whatever.

I remember never once wondering if a kit or class or race was balanced against the others, that obsession is something I developed later. I miss that, it was fun just creating cool stuff and letting my guys play it. It was hard enough balancing encounters in the first place though, so it made for some added difficulty guessing what monsters would be appropriate for a fight. Without the fetishizing of balance, it was just easier to put what was in my head to paper though, and I miss that.

Thinking back, one thing I really liked was that there was this table in the DMG that tabulated the difficulty of a monster based on its AC and spell abilities and powers and calculated how many experience points it was worth. This table made my life so much easier when I started creating monsters and putting the guys up against creatures with levels. I don't think I've seen such a clear cut method for assigning experience point value to monsters since then.

Character creation was a breeze, even more simple than creating a character in Pathfinder or 4th Edition. Roll your stats, roll your hit points, pick a few proficiencies, write it all down as you go, done. Very quick and simple, so much so that you could roll a character immediately after character death and not tie up the game for two hours or so.

I guess you can attribute most of what I liked about 2nd Edition to nostalgia and not really caring about the rules and such, but hey, I was in junior high at the time and we all had fun, so who cares. 

DaMaging/ Tribute

I have made a few observations over the last 16 years of gaming, one of them: the DM does all the work. I have had the pleasure of watching Clint go from notebook-and-pencil-my-way-or-the-highway to the pretty damned good DM he is now... He has kept me from quitting a few times as well, and always bends over backwards for his players to make their experience fun for them and everyone else.

That being said, some of you may think I am copping out when I went ahead and purchased a premade adventure set, as Clint has built his from the ground up (over sixteen years, a lot in the last couple), but I say to you, nay, WE ARE BUT MEN! Wait, what?!?

Anyway, as I was saying, typing, whatever... there are a few things I would like to point out about me: I have attempted in the past to be the DM/GM a handful of times, most with utter failure. I have tried world building and then I get to the point where I don't know how I want to set something up/ anal for detail occasionally. I have a lot on my plate lately and the summer off I have isn't enough time to try and make something solid. Also, I have some learning to do/ nervous about a lot of things in the game world, people laughing, for example, at something I think could have had the potential to be really cool and neat if you could have only seen it through my eyes (I use undead carnival as an example).

So what am I trying to say? I am got us a premade adventure for several reasons, the first and foremost is time constraints for me and the second being that I need to learn how to set this stuff up without making myself look like a buffoon. Hell, I guess there is a third as well, how to manage a group...

I hope I am going to do this game justice for the two people we will be introducing it to, and I won't lie, that makes me even more nervous. My own girlfriend and one of my best friend's wife, I would love to show them what makes us all love gaming for the different reasons we do (friendship, crazy and the story/ choose your own adventure).

I would like to be all set to game on the 26th of June, with all characters made and ready to go so we can get as much done as we can before the eventual boredom I perhaps foresee happening. I don't know, hope it doesn't feel like I am bugging everyone to get their stuff done. Ker already said if feels like homework.

Till next time, ROCK OOOOOOON!

Magic: The Recidivism

Back in junior high, I used to play the fuck out of this game called Magic: The Gathering. I enjoyed it, primarily for the flavor text and the fact that it had goblins and dragons and such in it. My friend Jason used to be big into it, I saw him paging through a big book of cards one day on the bus and I saw some nifty artwork and he explained that it was a card game and you bought cards and built decks to fight against one another with. I asked him if there were any dragons in it and he showed me a picture of one. 

Eventually I got into the game as well. Now, in junior high, I had no money. My parents were extremely thrifty in the department of non-book entertainments for me as a youth. No video games, no allowance to buy video games, and my collection of toys was somewhat motley and limited. I was not rolling in expendable income you might say, however, I was on Ritalin and was issued a few dollars for lunch money. 

A side effect of Ritalin for me was appetite suppressant, so I was never hungry. I think in three years of junior high, I can probably count the times I actually ate lunch in the cafeteria on one hand. I just went to the library and read, which is where I met Eric and Jeremy and all of them and we all got into DnD, and Magic.

As a side note, I bitch and complain about ADHD and how my parents drugged me rather than deal with me as a human being and that sort of thing, but thank Dog for all the drugging of the children. I don't think I would have been so introverted and ended up reading Dragonlance and learning about DnD and meeting Eric and Jeremy without my parents drugging me. 

To continue, I skipped lunch for about three years and bought Magic cards with the money. However, my parents finally found out and I had to conceal my spending because I assured them that I was in fact eating at school. Which was simple enough, Jason and I would just walk to the Stadium and buy far more cards than we needed. Huzzah. Sometimes, I forget things like this and when I remember, I think perhaps my mother was right when she repeatedly assured me that I was a lying little shit. 

I have an issue with collection. It is not enough to have a book or card or whatever. I need to have the set. I am bad. If I have one book in a series, I must have all of them. Thus the dozen or so Dresden Files novels on my shelves and the majority of the Essentials collection of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition books. I can resist this compulsion pretty well, nowadays. When I was in junior high and high school, not so much. I obsessively bought packs and boosters and everything. I didn't care that my decks were shit, what mattered was that I was within a few dozen cards of having the complete Chronicles or Fallen Empires or Homelands set. 

Mind you, Homelands and Fallen Empires are widely regarded as the shittiest two Magic sets in existence, but they were two I focused on. I bought Chronicles obsessively, until they stopped selling boosters, because it was very mythic and had all the Summon Legend multi-colored cards, and the Elder Dragon Legends. That's right, I had a Nicol Bolas from before he was a planeswalker. I also traded Eric ten levels for his DnD character for an Arcades Sabbath card. Heh. 

When Urza's Saga came out, I got hardcore into purchasing that and again went into collection mode. Later, I stopped buying and playing after Jason kind of fell by the wayside. Later, when Scourge was on its way out of production and Jason and I kind of reconnected and he mentioned that after selling all of his old cards, he was back to playing again, I tried to collect all of Scourge, which got hard, because it was ending its production cycle and new sets were coming out. 

I focused on collection, that is my addiction. I like to own sets of things. I buy DVDs and books so that I can complete my collection of books and movies I like. I download pdfs so that I can have a complete set of DnD books, not because each book has awesome stuff I like in it. Anyway, Fred and Martel started playing Magic, and it has been...difficult for me. Game stores of any kind are a bad place for me, they are where I do the things I will come to regret once I venture back out into the light of day. 

I have spent ten dollars and sixty cents on the game so far, and that was to buy a deck that is essentially a more perfect version  of a deck I've loved since my attempts to collect Scourge. My deck building is much more mature now. I am more concerned about the merits of cards than about having a set and I am slightly more competent than "Let's throw everything cool in the color red into the deck!". I still really want to start buying a set, but I have resisted so far, partly because the most recently released set, New Phyrexia, is the last in a three set block, and later this year a whole new set will be released. It is called Innistrad and looks suitably gothic and the tagline is "Horror Lurks Within."

I'm pretty pleased with my decks so far. I have a black discard deck, a red goblin/direct damage deck, and a green horde/big creature deck. I think I need one more card for my discard deck and it will pretty much be perfect, however, it is only really good against a single opponent and our three person battles make it more difficult to implement. The red deck is fun, but needs a lot of tweaking. The green is good, I like the way it plays and it uses a lot of Fallen Empires cards, and I love the mechanics of those cards. I think I might focus on land access and big creatures though, and downplay the horde elements of it. 

I find that I prefer single color decks I guess, you can really focus on the core concept of your deck, and it eliminates the difficulty of having good cards in your hand, but not the right combination of mana to put them into play. I think what I am going to end up doing is create a deck for each color of magic and kind of try them all out. I've always favored black and green with red being a close third. I just have a hard time coming up with anything when I look at blue and white. I have played some white weenie decks, but there isn't much appeal to me in them. Blue's elements of control and denial interest me, but  is has so many control and denial options that I have a hard time picking and choosing and it is hard to balance control and denial vs. the need for creatures to fend off/deal damage to the enemy players. Oh well.

I guess we'll see how long this fad lasts, and perhaps I'll post about it again. 

Entombed

We played through the AD&D Tomb of Horrors 3.5 version with some Pathfinder characters. It did not go super well. Originally it was supposed to be seven players entering the Tomb. By the week of the event, two guys bailed due to work, and a third had to cancel last minute, and a fourth had to go about two hours in. 

They explored one room, two frescoes, and a hallway full of pit traps in that time. There was a gargoyle in there as well, it dealt like 169 damage to Jeremy's Rogue over the course of two rounds. He died. Lance and John very creatively defeated the mutant gargoyle, with a combination of a second level laughing spell and a storm of lightning bolts. Everyone seemed to enjoy the savagely difficult fight, but walking around gave them a kind of analysis paralysis where I told them their surroundings and said, "What do you do?" and they stared blankly at me, terrified that touching a door would unleash death. Which did not stop Jeremy from just yanking on a lever he found in a trapped chest built into a fresco. Luckily, his Reflex save was good enough to leap away from the pit trap he opened under his feet. 

They ran into some trouble when they encountered a magical arrow trap that fired arrows every round and Eric the Monk and Jeremy the Rogue decided that there was no way they could deal with it other than to do nothing on their turns. They figured out that it was a magical trap though and everything ended up being alright.

No one really communicated with each other at all as to what they were going to be, so John ended up making a Druid with no real healing abilities and Lance came as a Sorcerer and not a Cleric like he had said, so the group had no healing and they had to rest outside of the Tomb after the fight with the gargoyle. Lance was pretty useful, but I think overall that the Tomb would be easier if they had a Wizard, that class has so much utility for a place like the Tomb. I mean, a Sorcerer works fine, but a utility Sorcerer just doesn't have the same feel as a lightning bolt flinging fireball dropping draconic bloodline sorcerer. 

Also, evidently Sorcerer bloodlines are too complex a concept for Mr. Butch-Ass-College-Educated-Worked-For-Boeing-Engineer-That-Doesn't-Own-Graph-Paper-Or-A-Ruler. You know who you are, bitch. Hehe.

Overall, it could have gone better, but things come up and shit happens and the majority of the group seems to be interested in wandering back in to see if they can conquer the evil of the Tomb. Hopefully we end up being able to schedule it again, I'd really like to see how they deal with some of the more interesting and tricksy traps in the place.

Labyrinth Lord

Specifically the Advanced Edition Companion.

I purchased the book first, rather than the normal Labyrinth Lords rules, kind of because I am sort of nostalgic for 1st Edition AD&D, despite having never played it once in my life. I've spoken before of old school clones and how Labyrinth Lord really stuck with me and how I decided to attempt running something with the Advanced Editon Companion version of the game because it is based on 1st Edition AD&D. Anyway, I bought this book first from Lulu, because I felt like it.

The first thing I did was hand the book to Jeremy for him to assess the paper and binding and layout of the book. His initial thoughts were basically as follows: "I have no complaints, it appears competent." Then he handed it back to me and we looked in the monster section to see if there were any boobs, and there are. This is a point in the book's favor. 

I like the cleanliness of the book, everything is black and white and there isn't a whole lot of distracting art or full page color drawings of dragonbewbs or anything like that. The book just looks clean to me, I don't know how else to describe it. The fonts are very appealing as well, though I cannot recall their names at this precise moment. I'll likely add in an edit after the fact containing that info. 

Overall, I am pleased with the purchase. The book is exactly what I was expecting to get, and outside of adding in stuff like ascending attack rolls and armor classes, I basically plan on using the book as is for my Old School campaign. This review isn't about the rules, it is basically AD&D and of you have experience with that system, you either like it or don't at this point. This review is about the book, and I am pleased with the purchase. However, I have one complaint. The book is one hundred and sixty pages. Fine, it isn't the main ruleset, I expect it to be slim. 

Interestingly enough, the main rulebook is like 144 pages or some such, heh. 

However, his one hundred and sixty page book sells for thirty-four dollars though, plus roughly ten for shipping and handling. That is exorbitant. Worse than WotC's madcap pricing system of the mentally disturbed. Mind you, the book and the main Labyrinth Lord rules can be legally downloaded from Goblinoid Games for free, so it is only the insanity of a book collector like myself that makes the purchase mandatory. Regardless, the price point of sale is somewhat disconcerting to me. Nonetheless, I am still pleased with the purchase and will likely pay the same price for the smaller main rulebook. I'm kind of getting excited about this idea. Wee!

Edit After The Fact:

Walking Tall

I took a walk the other day. This isn't super notable, people walk all the time. I have a love-hate relationship with exercise. I very much love the physical act of working out, but I hate how boring it is. I can't exercise to videos, because I find the people and programs boring and annoying. Listening to energetic music like Mindless Self Indulgence or The Blood Brothers or various metal bands can alleviate some of the mind numbing boredom, and podcasts work quite well too.

The best thing I've found though, if I can maintain the discipline and focus necessary to do it, is to explore my stories and my DnD plots while exercising and kind of separate the mind from the body. Most physical activity during workouts is repetitive and doesn't require a lot of forethought or consideration in my experience, at least not much thought beyond, "Is doing ten more crunches/push ups/etc going to leave me weak and groaning tomorrow?" Back to thinking. This is a great thing because my mind is engaged during the workout and I'm not doing the mental equivalent of mumbling "Blurg." for forty minutes or so. It is also great because it gets shit done.

While my ability to plan and adapt with my Hekinoe campaign has impressed even me at times, I am not what you'd call an ideal planner. I tend to start things, like my stories, willy nilly with little thought for the eventual outcome of events. While I'm not going to expose the whole behind the curtain situation of Hekinoe, suffice it to say that sometimes, I don't have everything planned out and am forced to adapt and alter the way things interact in the story of my campaign. 

So on this walk, I spent a lot of time thinking about Hekinoe and my formerly titled The Last Blade story, a name which continues to make less and less sense as the years go on, considering the major alterations to the naming and canon of the background material. Anyway.

During this walk, I was able to come up with a pretty epic (in scope) capstone for this particular campaign. This capstone for the campaign is entirely dependent upon my players paying attention to their surroundings and being willing to venture outside the walls of Meroteth, and perhaps the borders of The Known World. These are two things that were not exactly their forte during the previous campaign. Again, I don't want to allow anyone too much of a view behind the curtain, but I have a fifty year timeline for events that occur over the next fifty years across the face of Hekinoe (including places they have never even heard of that have not even been listed in the wiki, I am adamant that this world is not on pause until the players show up, and stuff happens whether or not they are there to see it) and how those events can be affected by or affect the players and how their actions or inactions alter the outcome of this campaign finale event. 

While the players ignoring the epic plot is not ideal, I have contingency plans for that as well. If there is no way to involve them with this plot (at least not without giving them a wise and mysterious quest giver, which I will not do), well, the consequences are dire, but I think I am ok with the potential outcome. Shit happens. If they do get involved with the epic plot, and fail, well, that would be bad. I have a contingency plot for that too, heh, and it is probably even more epic and kind of awesome. Jeremy would get a kick out of it I think.

Now, not all of the above is a result of my focused, undistracted, thought process during my walk. It was the walk that allowed me to weave it all together into an end game though, and I think how it all gelled together is pretty cool. I'm pleased with the whole process and what came of it. 

Back to Keroen Skathos for a moment. I spent some time thinking about him as well. If you've been paying attention to the blog and some of the stuff I've posted here, specifically, The One-Eyed Man story, you know by now that Keroen Skathos = Cenn the Reaver. If I've spoiled everything for you now, bummer, you should have payed closer attention to details. Hehe.

There is this one detail of Keroen Skathos, a defining feature that I spent some time thinking about. He has this thick, curved line of scar tissue on his forehead, kind of starting between his eyebrows and arcing over above his left eye. When he gets angry or the bloodlust comes upon him, the scar splits open and begins dripping blood and shit gets all balls to the wall bloody and dismembered. 

A long time ago I decided that Keroen Skathos received that wound as an injury from an ally. I noted that and saved it in the labyrinthine areas of my mind where I store a wiki of shit that has no good place to put it in the written world. After noting it, I proceeded on with the story and didn't spend one second ever thinking about the details of how the scar got there, beyond who put it on his face in the first place. I just figured that all those niggling little details would get figured out when I eventually wrote the story that the injury happens in.

Spoiler Alert: I never wrote that story. At least not beyond the first four chapters or so. Heh.

Seven years or so later, on a walk the other day, I settled upon the details of the injury, why it was put there in the first place by the ally, and what its overall purpose is for modern Keroen Skathos. It was this line of thought that eventually led my mind into the lines of thought that came up with the finale event/plot/whatever of  this current Hekinoe campaign.

So there is a story about me and my fat ass and some walking and planning I did. Huzzah.