I can scarcely believe it (and almost forgot to post it), but today marks our one year anniversary!

I can remember what I was doing this time last year like it was only yesterday — Dante, the Stupid Ranger, and I were all scrambling to get ready for Gen Con. We’d been working like mad for about 2 weeks trying to get our D&D Crib Shirts in order, I was drawing comics as fast as I could, and our site’s namesake introduced us to the world.

One year later, what have we learned?

• About T-shirts: the ones you make through Cafepress come out beautifully. And cost so much that nobody wants to buy them. Even if you don’t charge anything over cost. Special thanks to those lucky 8 individuals who bought something. And of course, extra special thanks to Yax, our best customer, who was responsible for about half our total sales. You rule, Yax!

  One thing certainly didn’t help our sales: making crib shirts for a lame-duck edition of D&D results in no sales. Matter of fact, I’m relatively certain the three of us are the only ones who bought them. However, I used the hell out of my Bard crib shirt while playing Bat Loaf, so it wasn’t a total waste of time!

  Chalk this one up to understanding what our readership wants, and drawing up reasonable business expectations for one’s blog!

• Webcomics are fun to read, and very time-consuming to draw. So time-consuming that Evensbrook *cough* hasn’t seen the light of day since about Halloween last year.

  Despite this massive obstacle, it is still fun to do and we still consistently get about 20 hits a day looking for comics. I’m going to try and dedouble my efforts this year and see if we can get one out every couple weeks. I even have the next strip written and drawn! Dante’s seen it! I swear!!!!

• We love writing about D&D, especially when we’ve been playing a lot. But we really have no idea what everybody likes. The most seemingly innocuous “oh my god nobody posted last night quick come up with something” posts seem to get tons of comments or Stumbled, and the ones we slaved over for hours perfecting every word get no comments at all. (However, you will never know which was which. Mwahahaha!!!!!)

  We did learn, though, that the very best way to get people to talk about your article is to include them in on the discussion, and to jump in yourself. It is also, unsurprisingly, the most fun for us as authors — so expect more of this!

• R-E-S-U-R-R-E-C-T-I-O-N.
• We’d like to think the three of us are different enough from each other in style that people can instantly tell our articles apart, but we’re actually pretty sure everybody thinks Dante writes everything. That’s OK, when we get our first Internet stalker, it’ll be him they come for. I’ll be safe in the Vanircave.
• There are a seriously large amount of cool people out there. Some of them run blogs, and help you out in your first steps along the way. Big huge thanks to Martin Ralya, formerly of Treasure Tables but now of Gnome Stew, Jonathan Drain from d20 Source for giving us our first big surges of traffic. More thanks go to our good buddy Yax from Dungeon Mastering for allowing us to shack up in his banner ad space for awhile, which got us a bunch more traffic too. And thanks to everybody out there who responded to my copious emails asking for a link exchange.

  Of course, I would be remiss without giving extra special thanks (and administering a heaping helping of mad props to) Yax, Phil the Chatty DM, the crew from Critical Hits and a lot of the other D&D blogs we’ve come to know over the last year for being with us the whole year and forming one of the best damn RPG communities we’ve ever seen on the Intertrons. We’re proud and thrilled to be counted among the numbers of these guys, and we can’t wait to meet them in person this week.

It’s been a great year for us, and we’re excited to see what the next year brings. It’s pretty neat having Gen Con be your site’s unofficial birthday every year. Please come out and help us celebrate at our Out of the Box Roleplaying event on Sunday from 9AM-11AM. It won’t cost you a dime, and rumor has it there will be COOKIES. (Disclaimer: you may have to fight me for them, and I am tenacious.)

As a side note about that cake — Efreak and I made it for Stupid Ranger’s birthday about five years ago when we first started playing together during the Evensbrook campaign. She thought it only fitting that we use it for her namesake. Oddly, if memory serves, the campaign was at right about the place the comic is currently stalled. Weird!

Once again, thanks to everyone — and especially thanks to all of you for reading. We’ve really enjoyed our first year!

It’s just a few more days until Gencon…. some of the longest days of the year, waiting for the convention to begin. The blog-o-sphere has been abuzz with thoughts, events, and tips. And since I’m too excited to think clearly about anything else, I’m going to share some of my thoughts too.

Packing is essential.

I already shared some of my thoughts on what to pack, but I’m going to mention again, make sure you are prepared… you don’t want to forget anything!

Consider planning your events.

Depending on your level of planning-nerd, you may have already done this. If you haven’t, I recommend reviewing the events listings to make sure you don’t miss something. There is so much to see and do, and it’s easy to miss something because it’s so easy to be distracted. You can take a look at the event list on the website, or grab the Event Guide as soon as you get to the convention center. Either way, check the errata monitors to make sure your events haven’t been canceled.

I have to say, in the past, I haven’t always planned well enough, because one of the things I have regretted was missing meeting a favorite author. Wizards has a author signing schedule posted on their site. If you want to meet some of your favorites, you might make a note of when they are signing.

Also, I encourage you to take a few moments to participate in some of the Gygax memorial events. Zachary Houghton from RPG Blog II has a great write-up on events.

And if you still need something to do:

Out of the Box Roleplaying – You think we’re crazy online… wait til you meet us in person! The StupidRanger crew be unleashing all of our zaniest on the mostly-suspecting guest players in our own little campaign. And we have some fun stuff planned for the audience, so you should plan to join us!
SEM00075 – Sunday 9am – 11am

RPG Bloggers Unite! – Join many of the RPG Bloggers in our own little meet & greet!
SEM00192 – Saturday 1pm – 2pm

Queen of Geeks Pageant – I’ll be participating the pageant, and I could definitely use a cheering section!
ZED00001 – Friday 10am – 1pm

The road from Dungeon Master to Player can seem difficult and confining. On Tuesday, I outlined a few reasons why the transition from DM to Player has been exciting for me. I readily accept that the path is more difficult for some, and today I hope I can offer a few thoughts to help those of you that find it hard to step back into adventuring shoes*.

Learning to love your small pond

Phil, The Chatty DM pointed out in his comment that after 25 years of DMing he has lost the ability to be a player. I love Phil, but I disagree with this statement: he has just become very good at being a massively multithreaded player (to steal a Computer Science term). Putting on your adventuring shoes forces you to become a single threaded player, focusing on only one character’s development, storylinee, passions, and needs.

Instead of painting in broad strokes, you get to paint in fine details. It’s D&D pointalism, people! To me, part of the fun of being a player is obsessing about and exploring the fine details of this character whose actions I get to guide for awhile. Learning to love those details is the path toward enjoyment of being a player again.

Get yourself a big bag of contentment (max load 50 lbs)

Just as in life, we suffer from the ability to always want what we don’t have. Another key to becoming a player again is learning to be content with the pacing of the campaign and the treasure/spells/abilities/random miscellanea that you have been dealt. Feeling confined is natural when you’re used to calling all of the shots. You, the person (not the character), can make the choice to be pleased with your cozy new niche or you can be frustrated by the perceived restraints as Phil so articulately phrased it.

The choice, as they say, is yours and yours alone! Make the most of it!

Special thanks go to Phil for inspiring this post, and to Mad Brew Labs for accurately guessing The Simpsons episode, “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer”, that I was referencing yesterday! Thanks guys!

* Adventuring Shoes are magical shoes that appear tattered and worn and grant a +5 bonus on all Perform checks when telling adventuring stories.

This past weekend marked our triumphant return to D&D! This time, however, our sessions are being run by the other husband and wife pair in our group which finds me in a role I haven’t played for a long time: that of a player. This is how I made the adjustment!

It’s not all about you… well, ok, maybe it is.

One of the lures of being a Dungeon Master is the fact that you, for better or worse, get to be the center of attention. Many people don’t like playing the role of a PC after they have run the game for awhile, as the extra attention tends to feed into a very critical part of our nerdly personalities that yearn to be “The Cool Kid.”

Luckily, this was not my case this time around. My co-DM and I were lamenting that we were very close to the point of burn-out by the time our last campaign ended and he was right. We took a much needed break, nearly a month, before we even considered gaming again.

Now that I’m in “player mode” it dawns on me that while you’re not the center of attention as a player character, your actions tend to be a lot more relevant to the dynamics of the rest of the group. As I have reflected here in the past, the players hold a great deal of power over the DM to craft the story and change the course of events. To me, that is some pretty satisfying stuff.

The time is NOW to roleplay!

To steal a quote from one of my favorite Simpsons episodes (bonus points if you can figure out which one): “The mind is always chattering away with a thousand thoughts at once.” This is the state of the Dungeon Master. When I played, I was generally more focused on servicing the needs of my players and my plot than I was on actual meaningful roleplaying. There is a lot to track in an average session, and this load is dramatically reduced when you only get to worry about one character.

This is one of the obvious, yet great things about being a player character again… you get to roleplay! Not to say I didn’t do this for my NPCs, but I really like having a tangible backstory for my character and the breadth to grow his personality through his actions. I have a sense for where I want my player to progress, what is going on inside his head, and an idea of his motivations.

It could be argued that this is a function of being the DM for so long is that I’ve gotten good at quickly having a spec sheet on how my NPCs would act, and now I just get to execute this approach on a more grand scale. Regardless of how this cropped up, it is very satisfying to get to join Vanir on all of his crazy exploits.

Don’t stress so much, you’ll live longer!

The lack of direct attention and the relative simplicity of managing only one character seems to make a large difference in the amount of stress you have to manage as a player. Granted, things will still try to kill you, but you don’t have to look up 7 stat blocks for monsters while Vanir is busy crafting some event that will render the last half of your session completely invalid. You get to show up, roll dice, and have fun.

The fun you get to experience as DM is a little more high pressure. As a player, kicking back and enjoying the ride is key! If you acknowledge that your focus can shift internally a bit and now you can get back to serious roleplaying for theh sake of having fun, you’ll find the transition from DM to player a very satisfying journey!

A long time ago, I remember reading a strange letter to the editor in Dragon magazine asking for a rules clarification of a very personal nature — specifically, whether a woman could regrow her hymen through the use of a ring of regeneration and, more importantly, would a unicorn then once again be so inclined as to put his head in her lap. I do not know why this article stuck with me so, probably because it is the most exposure to sex 13 year old Vanir could get at the time, but regardless it did.

Ever since then, I have always loved considering strange cases such as these. And so it is that I unveil to you, our dear readers, the next revolutionary concept in RPG blogging:

Rules Grand Jury

The concept is simple: a weird (and hopefully amusing) D&D rules question is posted, and its fate is then thrown to the wolves. And by “to the wolves”, I mean everybody dogpiles on the comments section to determine what is just via trial by combat.

If you have a burning rules question troubling your sleep, please do not hesitate to email it to us so that justice may be served.

Our first case:

Magic Missile v. Oscar The Grouch

In 3.5e, the Magic Missile spell never misses its target.

Suppose one was hiding in a trash can, and had the lid barely open so one could peek outside. If a 20th level wizard 300ft away (100ft + 10ft/level) were to cast Magic Missile on this person, and the person was ready for the attack, could this person get the lid down in time before the missile struck him?

I’ve heard several theories as to what would happen in this case. One is that the missile would simply pass right through the trash can because it never misses. I’ve heard some say the trash can would take the damage. I’ve heard that this is impossible because the spell’s duration is instantaneous. However, the spell description mentions the missile “darts forth from your fingertip”, which implies to me that it does not reach its target instantly.

Personally, I’d like to think that the missile would hover over the trashcan and blast the target as soon as he opened the lid. And if there was a tunnel through the world at the bottom of the trashcan and the target were to escape, the missile would spend the rest of its days searching for its target, glowing sadly, crying 1d4+1 tears night after lonely night.

But I digress. Cry “Havoc!”, and let slip the dogs of JUSTICE!

I am glad to herald the grand opening of RPGBloggers.com, which (surprisingly enough) features an aggregation of great roleplaying blogs! This was the brainchild of the guys over at CriticalHits and Phil, The Chatty DM and we were honored to be asked to join them on the maiden voyage!

For me, the best part about this endeavor is what it brings to the eyeballs of everyone that visits: great gaming content from many different vantage points. I am a regular visitor to most of the blogs that are contributing over there, so I know you’re gettnig good stuff. Where this whole trip is headed, I’m not sure… but I do know that many dice will be rolled, many NPCs will be killed, and maybe, just maybe, we all might learn something from one another.

That is certainly an encouraging thought!

[ Join the SR Crew for Out of the Box Roleplaying at GenCon Indy from 9-11 am, Sunday August 17! ]

Well, true believers, we’re putting the finishing touches on our upcoming Out Of the Box Roleplaying event for Gen Con this year, and the further along we get, the more excited I am about this. For those who missed my last post about this event, please allow me to summarize:

• Half D&D, half improv comedy, all fun. Watch your favorite bloggers battle their way through a very rules-light, high-hilarity adventure run by Dante!
• Special guests/victims include Yax from Dungeon Mastering, Phil from Musings of the Chatty DM, and Dave The Game and Bartoneus from Critical Hits.

  Joining our fearless guests at the gaming table will be our very own Stupid Ranger!

• See Vanir roleplay and draw scenes from the game as they happen in a sugar-fueled frenzy! Watch as his heart and brain compete for the right to explode first!
• FREE STUFF including E.L. Fudge cookies for everyone and totally sweet prizes for audience participation!

Here’s the event information!

**PLEASE NOTE**
The event time has switched from 10AM to 9AM and the event will run two full hours until 11am. If you already signed up, you should be receiving an email from Gen Con notifying you of the change.

This is a totally free event, and we’re not going to turn anyone away, ticket or no ticket, until the fire marshal intervenes. And he may have a fight on his hands.

SEM00075
Out of the Box Roleplaying with StupidRanger.com
Sunday, August 17
9:00AM - 11:00AM
Embassy Suites Consulate

Come join in the fun!

My good buddy Vanir did a great job outlining his thoughts on fourth edition character generation, spells, and rituals. The group of us had some excellent discourse on the changes that we immediately encountered, however during the discussion on spells and rituals I really had a “oh good, they fixed that” moment.

My biggest complaint about a lot of the utility spells were the amount of suspending disbelief that was required in order to buy the fact that with a handwave a portal could be opened, or someone raised from the dead. My gut reaction when I saw that most of these focused magical events had been moved into the rituals category was “people aren’t going to like this” followed by “but as a DM I really do.”

The Rationale Behind My Opinion

One of the biggest pain points as my 3.5 campaign moved up into the epic levels was the relative ease that the player characters were able to exercise complicated, game changing magic. This made for several “Dante aneurysm” moments toward the end of the campaign, one of which left both me and Kanati, my co-DM, scrambling.

The players resurrected the dead gold dragon that we had placed in their path as they fled an oncoming army.

This completely derailed the rest of the plans for the session, and we had simply placed this dead dragon as a “holy crap, strong things are afoot” piece of set dressing. In 3.5, the players were high enough level to have the material components on-hand so I let them exercise their powers and do what they wanted to do. I could’ve said “hey, the dragon’s soul doesn’t want to return” but that is very clearly DM code for “NO” and I had no good justification for why the dragon wouldn’t want to come back and have at those that killed him.

In 4e, the preparation and casting time would’ve simply excluded this as an option. The oncoming army simply would’ve overtaken them.

This is the root of what I like about the new ritual system. The things that should take awhile (making a portal, raising the dead, and so on) takes enough time to give the DM some modicum of control over the situation. This allows the integrity of the written storyline to be retained within the game mechanics if needed, or at very least it provides a bit of time for the DM to get his head around the changed situation while the characters perform the ritual.

Does this mean that I think the players should be limited when they use the rituals? By no means. Do I think that people should roundly convert the rituals back to their 3.5 edition counterparts and treat them as per day abilities? Absolutely not. I can clearly see the value added by the distinction between spells and rituals, and I also see opportunity for growth.

I will be very interested to see what additional rituals get added and how their execution time gets tweaked in accordance with how much they disrupt gameplay or how much relative peril should be undertaken when casting. Aside from the battle simplification, I think that this aspect alone is among the best in the new edition.

After a hiatus of a month or so, we finally got to play D&D again last weekend. Well, technically. We decided to take the plunge and get into 4e so we aren’t completely incompetent when we show up at Gen Con this year. It was time to roll up characters, and with the exception of Sirgeekelot, nobody had played 4e before. God, it hurts to change editions. I’m sure many of you can sympathize here. In 3.5e, I’d been playing and using that book long enough that I could find whatever I needed pretty fast. (And if I couldn’t, Stupid Ranger usually knew the answer.) Now we’re all screwed!

That being said, it did seem somewhat more straightforward to roll up one’s character in 4e than in previous versions. I decided to try out the Wizard class, the lone “Controller” role in the book, to see how it stacked up against the 3.5e wizards I was used to seeing. Here’s a few thoughts on the experience:

• After some mild arm-twisting, Dante talked us all into trying out the various methods of rolling up stats. Sirgeekelot did the point-buy system, I did the standard array method, and Stupid Ranger did the traditional rolling method. I’ve always hated methods other than rolling, I think it lends to mediocre stats and I usually use a crappy stat as a personality quirk for my character. Even so, I did wind up with a Wizard with a 16 INT and no stats so low that he would not to be able to open a door or wet himself in public or something. I think the standard array would be a good way to roll stats up if you wanted everybody to be exactly equal stats-wise or you were in a huge hurry. But I think I’ll be rolling next time.
• The designers of 4e have been dutifully streamlining everything to make play go faster, more balanced and more smooth. This means they’ve combined and abstracted some features out from 3.5e – like Spot and Listen checks, which are now Perception. The list of skills is about one third of its former length, and choosing and training in these skills no longer requires a degree in calculus and a magical sherpa guide of leprechaun descent to guide you through the process — changes which I welcome.

  Saving throws now use 2 ability scores, the higher of which determines one’s bonus. This means that for the first time in recorded history, you can roll up a wizard with a good Reflex save. (Incidentally, our good buddy Sirgeekelot has designed a new t-shirt based on this discovery, which is now on sale in our shop.) I’m not entirely sure why INT would make one’s Reflex save higher, as I’ve seen some very smart people walk into some very hard punches in my day, but I’m going to chalk this one up to “it makes the game more balanced”.

• It seems like everybody has spells now. It’s just that melee types tend to cast their spells with swords and maces and call them “exploits”. Every class features a lot of picking of specifically named powers, which was always the part that took me forever when playing a spellcaster in 3.5e. Despite this, it did not take long for me to pick powers (probably because there weren’t many to choose from at 1st level). This was nice too.
• I initially looked at the wizard and cleric powers and got upset because all I saw was combat spells. How the hell was I supposed to magically lock a door or grease up a staircase/elk/orc princess? I’m a roleplayer, dammit!

  It took me several minutes of kvetching and about 8hp damage from Dante’s Clue Bat before I realized that rituals and spells were not, in fact, the same thing. A lot of the non-combat spells can be found in the Rituals section in the back, but not even close to all of them even the 3.5e PHB had. As previously stated, they have done some work to combine/generalize the usage of many game elements, so it may well be that I just haven’t read over the list enough. One thing I didn’t like, though, is that most of the rituals take a great deal of time longer than their 3.5e spell counterparts. Need to magically lock (or unlock, for that matter) a door before the bad guys catch up to you? I hope you have a 10 minute head start. I’m not sure why the designers felt the need to do this or what rationale is behind it, but this certainly puts a cramp in my “use spells for unusual roleplaying purposes” style.

  The other weird thing about rituals — why in the hell are they at the very end of the book? They’re literally the very last thing (besides a page of playtester credits) before the index. Did the people laying out the book forget that part until after the presses got started and just cram it in there at the end? Not that I really mind. It makes them much easier to find. My initial impulse was to say it would have been a little better to find it somewhere closer to the character classes, but I suppose the previous editions had the spells broken out into their own section as well. The fact that class-specific powers and everybody-gets-em rituals are separate was a little confusing to me, but it’s something I can get past pretty easily.

• There were some conventions frequently used in the book that I found, for lack of a better term, obtuse. It was like they expected you to know what it was, but hid the definition somewhere really obscure. Dante and I both searched for quite awhile before we figured out that [W] was shorthand for one’s weapon damage. A lot of the powers in the book say things like “and an ally makes a saving throw”. A saving throw against what? Does that mean he gets to succeed the next time he has to roll one, or is this some beneficial effect you’re giving him (and if so, why is he saving against it)?

  However, I have a feeling these are clearly defined somewhere I didn’t read yet, and that their usage will flow freely like water for all of us at the table once we get to play for a few sessions. I’m sure I’m going to feel completely stupid once I find out what this new saving throw business means.

• I got a definite impression that they’re approaching 4e as a work in progress, with errata being issued and the PHB2 slated for release next year. It sort of reminds me of how software patches work, except unfortunately adding and changing things to tabletop gaming means you either have to juggle 5 books to play with everything or you have to buy new books that have all the new stuff in it. My wallet, my back, and my all-consuming lust for convenience hate that part.

I think most of the pain of rolling up our first 4e characters had a lot more to do with the fact that we are playing with a whole new set of rules than any real problems with the rules themselves. That and we really didn’t get to use these characters at all yet (that’s next session).

I will have to reserve judgment until we actually get to play for a few sessions, but I’m hopeful about this new edition at long last. Overall, I still have some minor concerns with 4e but it’s not the “OMG ITS NOW WORLD OF WARCRAFT TABLETOP RPG” that I had feared. I was confused by a lot of things, but I have a hunch that it will likely turn out that I, rather than the game, am obtuse. Only time will tell!

As previously mentioned, Sunday was our intrepid group’s first experience with the fourth edition of D&D. We decided to do character generation as its own session, namely because we were sure there was going to be a lot of questions.

There were.

Learning is a two way street!

I asked that we get a buffet style look at the character generation options that existed within the new edition. Each of our three players took the three rolling methods described by the PHB: point buy, random rolling, and the standard array.

I believe that all three ended up with satisfactory stats, however there was a great deal of nostalgia for actually rolling the dice. Yeah, you were pretty much guaranteed a better average to high set of stats for the point buy system, but unsurprisingly…. people want to roll dice!

There was a considerable learning curve involved with negotiating the books themselves… some aspects of the Player’s Handbook seemed confusingly laid out and it took some considerable effort to fully understand where all the rules fell together.

Our group got into some interesting philosophical discussions about the class changes that went into place with 4e. It seems that many of the changes make logical sense, and they are intended to make the game more digestible for new gamers. The trouble is that many of us are not new gamers, and we see opportunities for extension, expansion, and growth in the system that excites us. Having such a stripped down core system has left me wanting more to work with.

Do not misunderstand… I think the gameplay of 4e will be fast, fun, and very classic D&D. I’m just afraid that we’ll be subjected to scads and scads of expansion books just to get us back to “normal” and essentially the sound of my wallet emptying is the only motivator in the end.

Time will tell and so will gameplay. Hopefully Vanir and SR will come along in the next few days and provide their insights!