We’re down to playing once every couple of weeks in our group, but the Tomb of Horrors is so darned satisfying I hardly even notice.  To be frank, I have shied away from skill challenges in my game up to this point because I haven’t felt too inspired to create them on my own.

Luckily, there were a few great ones available in the first section of the Tomb of Horrors to try.  Despite my group’s penchant toward not getting started early, I found that the addition of the skill challenges really helped to make them feel accomplished.

My only complaint is one of my own creation… if I would have read up on the challenges ahead of time I would have been able to come up with some additional flavor text so it wasn’t so repetitious and didn’t devolve into blatent statements of success or failure.  Despite the repetition, I found them fun to run and the players found the challenges at the very least interesting.

Maybe a bit of additional preparation next time will make them even better!

Over the weekend, Stupid Ranger and I secreted ourselves in a mountain cabin outside of Colorado Springs and we brought along with us the D&D Red Box.  We were accompanied by another couple who had never played D&D before.  This was a recipe for distilled awesome, so on Sunday we introduced D&D to two new people.

The Solo Adventure and Character Creation

Stupid Ranger took them through the solo adventure, to help with character creation.  She reports that the character creation was very well done for beginners, but there were aspects of it that she was missing as a more advanced character.  I did notice that a few times that one of our new players (Paul) was asking a lot of questions about things that were physically next to each other on the character sheet and the solo adventure did a fair amount of “jumping around” that was somewhat confusing.

I liked that the solo adventure helped to set up the rest of the adventure, and the way it presented the decisions that controlled class and alignment were exciting for brand-new players.  Paul was already fairly “in-character” by the time the solo adventure was complete, embracing his elven rogue on a deeper level than I would have expected from more standard character generation.

The Adventure Begins

While Stupid Ranger was helping with character creation, I was busy reading the Dungeon Master’s Book in preparation for the adventure.  It was very easy to pick up, the layout of the book made a lot of sense.  In my best attempt to follow the rules, I started the group with the first encounter at the crossroads.  Combat mechanics were explained very clearly, and before the end of the first encounter Paul was already using “flanking” and “that combat thingie” (advantage) as part of his lexicon.  It was interesting to see positive reinforcement at work… the first time he got to roll extra Sneak Attack damage he was trying to invent ways to use it all the time.

Paul was quick to ask about whether or not he could use any of his skills to help out in the early part of the dungeon and aside from an active perception check and the discovery of a trap there really wasn’t much to use the skills on.  The group unfortunately traversed the dungeon in such a fashion to avoid the major skill challenge (the one thing I wanted them to do, rats!) but they had a lot of fun.  Since we only had one night, we stopped short of completing the entire adventure but it was enough to give the two new players a sense of what D&D is all about.

Running the game was very easy.  Some convenience things that I enjoyed: the Dungeon Master’s Book had nice full pages dedicated to each of the creatures in the adventure.  This made it very easy to show new players what a goblin or a drake looked like, by simply folding the page back and letting them see the artwork.  As previously predicted, the tokens were great in lieu of miniatures and I still hope they figure prominently in future D&D modules.

My criticisms: the adventure is combat heavy and a small group of three first level player characters got exhausted quickly.  The baddies do a considerable amount of damage for a group of that size and it was difficult progress.  The power cards, while attractive, are a little more flimsy than I expected them to be at first and I almost tore a few of them while punching them out.  Also, our new players wanted power cards for all of their skills, and certain class skills (like Sneak Attack) didn’t have an associated card.

As I mentioned before, running the game was pretty easy.  I was tripped up at one point by the Dire Rats, which had “Hit: 1d10 +5 damage, and the target is exposed to filth fever.”  Some quick looking around did not yield any information on what Filth Fever was or how to progress it, so I skipped it.  I accidentally found the information I needed later while leafing through the monsters section looking for a photo of another bad guy, separated 27 pages from where I needed it with no annotation to indicate that it was even there.  Frustrating.

Final Thoughts

The Red Box provides a solid starter set that is attainable to new players.  Character creation is straightforward, dare I say even interesting when presented via the Solo Adventure.  The DM’s Book does a decent job of presenting the tools that a new DM needs, providing a great primer on how to run a game.  The included adventure is easy to run for a veteran Dungeon Master and provides a significant challenge, even though more could have been done with skills.  A bit of additional roleplaying would’ve been nice as well, but that might have been more prevalent in the skill challenge that our group skipped.

Paul did a great job on his first adventure, playing a skillful and witty elven rogue.  His wife, Kara, wasn’t as “into” the D&D game and opted to bow out after a few encounters but it wasn’t from a lack of understanding how the game was played.  Stupid Ranger and I had a good time introducing the game to new players, and I had a good time finally exploring the contents of a D&D Box Set.

In this lovely informal Facebook poll, our good buddy Shelly Mazzanoble asked her friends to identify themselves into one of three categories: “DM”, “Player”, or “Both”.  I, of course, selected “Both”.  Shelly went on to ask those of us that replied in this way whether or not we had trouble transitioning, and whether or not we were more critical or supportive of other DMs.

You can read the poll to see my official reply, but I did realize something as a result of these questions.  Yes, I am more critical of other DMs because I perform that role myself.  I utterly detest railroading and can see it a mile away, even though I have been known to do so from time to time.  I fancy myself supportive but constructively critical of my fellow DMs.  I have been asked for some constructive criticism over the years by a few guys, however I quickly realized that most times even if you provide your honest opinion it rarely affects the behavior of the DM requesting this feedback.  I have found that I quickly become unsupportive of someone that asks my opinion and then fails to use any of it.

I have decided that this is because of a mutated form of Powdered Butt Syndrome.  For those unfamiliar with the term, Powdered Butt Syndrome is the inability of your parents to listen to you entirely because you are their children.  Nobody wants your opinion about anything if they’ve powdered your butt.  The same thing goes for DMing, only on rare occasion do any of your direct Dungeon Masters want your opinion as a player on how they are running the game.  Most times even if they do ask for it, any corrective actions they take are short lived.  Many times it isn’t a function of the person being unwilling to change, often the inertia of the game in progress can prevent any actual corrections from being permanent.  During the GM’s Jam at GenCon this year, I heard several stories that ended with the “I’ll never do that again, but I had to run out the rest of that campaign with the decisions that had already been made.”

That’s part of the reason I turned to providing my opinion on such matters right here at StupidRanger.com, I have found that providing your opinion in a public forum is just about the only way that people will openly seek and use new ideas without some sort of ulterior motive in doing so (at least, based on the feedback we’ve received from readers and commenters!)

Anyway, that was quite an inspiring discussion over on Facebook.  Thanks Shelly and all the other poll participants that got the creative juices a-flowin’.

WARNING: The linked video contains bad language, bad behavior, and is generally NSFW.

At long last, our 2010 edition of Roleplaying Therapy for the Severely Disturbed (formerly Out of the Box Roleplaying) is available for your online viewing pleasure.

The premise is that the characters are all adventurers with various mental disorders or strange personality flaws and that they arrive at an institution for help from Dr. Dante (me).  The panel did not disappoint, they dutifully ignored my plot (so badly that I clumsily had to wrap things up at the end of the session) and hijinks ensued.  I enjoy getting the opportunity to bring this particular brand of crazy to GenCon each year.

Our intrepid panel this year consisted of: Dave The Game, Bartoneus, Chris Sims, and Phil The Chatty DM from Critical Hits, Graham from Critical Ankle Bites, Micah from Obsidian Portal, e from Geek’s Dream Girl, and everybody’s favorite switch-hitter Vanir from StupidRanger / Critical Hits.

Everyone was throwing the heat this year… there was an amnesiac that swore she was married to someone on the panel, severe multiple personality disorder, a minotaur supremacist, a patient dead set against authority, a shardmind that went to pieces collecting different phobias, a puppetmaster, and a maniac that needed to be in the spotlight and climb the walls.  Literally.  Vanir rounded out our motley crew by reprising his role as Black Rainbow, a dangerously insane overweight druid that hates plants.  He ended up anger-humping melons.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I think we’re going to go with less character sheets and less plot and more semi-structured craziness, that seems to be where it ends up anyway!

Thanks to the panel, and thanks to the great crowd for putting up with our filthy brand of insanity.  Also thanks to Carson from Role-Playing Discussions, who annually presents the Carson F. Ball Worst Pun of the Year award.  He’s a force of nature when it comes to terrible puns, so he knows his stuff.

Anyway, the event was great fun and we’re looking forward to it next year!!

It has been a big week here at Stupid Ranger, and it even got capped off in epic fashion.  I was taking my traditional nap before karate, and as I headed downstairs I spied something on the living room table.  Some benevolent force (Santa Claus, perhaps) had deposited a D&D Red Box in my house!

Now you may be wondering why I am excited about such a thing as this, being a starter set and I am clearly not a D&D beginner.  You see, when I was growing up the box sets were available but I lacked friends that were interested in such things so I never got one.  When I saw that they were using the same box art by Larry Elmore as they did Way Back In The Day, they critted me.  Right in the face.

Let me say it again: the box is beautiful.  As I write this, I am shaking it in my hands hearing the contents rattle happily within.  My inner 8-year-old wants to adventure badly.

The Contents

Of course, there’s a Dungeon Master’s Book that contains the basic rule set for first and second level characters.  Along with that you get maps, character sheets, player and monster tokens, power cards, and yes, you get a set of dice.  They’re very pedestrian black dice with white numbers, which immediately made me wonder why they didn’t just partner with Chessex and get some decent dice for these sets.  Anyway, we’ll save that particular rant for later.

There’s also a Player’s Book that contains player generation rules.  You can pick from Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, or Cleric, and the races include Human, Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling.  The most interesting part for me is that they include a solo adventure, which is something I’ve not experienced from D&D in the past.  Having never owned any of the other D&D box sets, I am going to now pretend that there were not any solo adventures in them for fear of a wasted youth.

Power Cards and Tokens

I’m not sure who designed the new power cards for this box set, but they deserve some sort of an award for concise, cool presentation compared to the other official power cards.  They still maintain the same information as the standard issue power cards, but the layout of the card itself is less overwhelming.  Clearly, they were striving for easy attainability with this box set and at first glance it appears they have succeeded.

This doesn’t stop with the tokens, either.  Stupid Ranger exclaimed “Wow, look at all those bad guys!” upon first laying her eyes on the token cards.  She is correct, without perusing the books I can easily detect orcs, goblins, kobolds, and even a few dragons (naturally!)  And what D&D adventure would be complete without a gelatinous cube?  These tokens appear to be very well executed and I’d love to see them included in additional D&D modules.  It sure beats using dice or unmatched, inaccurate miniatures to indicate the baddies.

The Adventure Continues This Week

Stupid Ranger and I are going to further review the Red Box this week.  I intend on taking the solo adventure for a whirl in the next couple of days, and schedule permitting we are going to attempt the 1st – 2nd level adventure that they include in the Dungeon Master’s Book, so expect to see more soon!

If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out The New D&D Starter Red Box review that was put together by our good friend The Chatty DM and his son Nico over at Critical Hits.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that Stupid Ranger and I are expecting our first child!  We’re 9 1/2 weeks along and everything is going just great.  Stupid Ranger is dealing with the wiles of the first trimester quite well, exhibiting normal levels of nausea and fatigue but she continues to be in very good spirits all the same.

For awhile today, I was envisioning writing up a fantasy story where a truly great and powerful wizard got severely level-drained and reduced to an embryonic state, but I kept getting too distracted while looking at the sonogram picture to write anything of real entertainment value.

Instead, to commemorate the occasion I have done my duty as Dungeon Master and created a character sheet for our progeny.  I hope you all enjoy it, back to the regularly scheduled programming!

It is my custom to leave an “Out of Office” note on my whiteboard before leaving on vacation.  This time, I left a message indicating my out of office dates and a drawing of a d20 (on crit, naturally).  I also implored my office to “feel free to write something nerdy up here in my absence” expecting to get a random Star Wars quote or something to chuckle about upon my return.  Instead, my initial request was erased and replaced by… well… THIS.

As you can see, I work with a bunch of hyper-nerds.  My favorite: “For Sale: Unicorn, 5000 GP or Trade for Pictures of J. Alba”.

How I love my coworkers!

I was asked to again join the GM’s Jam panel at GenCon. This annual event is put on by Zack at RPG Blog 2 and is one of my favorite things to do each year. It seems that the opportunity to have Q&A with some seasoned Dungeon Masters is an interesting thing, Zack has a pretty full room each time.

This is my second year participating and I found it interesting that there were common trends from last year. It seems that the social aspect of the game still perplexes many, and we fielded more questions that fell on the “people skills” side of the equation than anything else about how to run the game.

Speaking generally, nerds have been stereotyped as socially awkward and unable to manage normal social relationships. I think this is not explicitly true, but it is close. The thing that most people don’t latch on to is how loyal your average roleplaying group is to both gaming group and game itself. This seems to cause many to suffer “problem players” just because they are currently in your group, or even worse just because they have been a friend for a long time.

Ultimately, one has to ask what it is that one wants from their game. If it is purely a reason to get together and socialize, maybe you need to engineer some time for that before or after the game. If a “problem player” takes too much enjoyment away from the group (or from running the game) then you may need to have some unpleasant discussions with that person about how you expect folks to behave when playing the game. If no corrective action is taken by that person, you may have to ask them to leave the group. In our gaming groups, we work hard to ensure that others are brought into the group based on consensus, and the same goes for ejecting a player.

These topics are tough, but ultimately just as our characters can level up and learn new skills, so can we as players. Just work with your group to put a few more ranks in diplomacy! If this comes difficultly to you, don’t worry. Dealing with people is a tough.

Just as always, you can ask anything you want us to answer in the comments, and you may find your topic featured in a post soon! If public comments aren’t your thing, you can always contact us via email and we can give you some personal attention.

Today marks the third blogoversary for stupidranger.com.  And to celebrate, I decided to share the photos from this year’s Gencon.   The years have been fun, and we’re looking forward to more fun to come.

Enjoy the pictures, and we’ll have more fun to share soon!

GenCon Day 4 dawned in similar fashion to the previous two days: with another round of RPGA D&D. Stupid Ranger and I were lucky enough to get into the MINI2-2 session, which allowed us to complete the story arc for the convention on Sunday. I am glad we did this much D&D at the convention, because I learned a lot more about the mechanics of RPGA play.

Among the other GenCon highlights was the GM’s Jam, where I joined Zack from RPG Blog 2, Jeff from Bonescroll, Mark (neglected to get his link, sadly), and DNAPhil from Gnome Stew for a Q&A style panel. We covered a myriad of topics, that seemed to focus much more on the social aspects of running a game moreso than game/plot design or DM mechanics. I will explore some interesting bits on this in an article next week.

We also attended Video Games Live, which I now consider compulsary for anyone that claims to love video games, grew up in the 80′s, or fancies themselves a nerd and enjoys orchestral music. I though Vanir was going to vibrate out of his chair when they did Lament of the Highborn from World of Warcraft and a medley involving Mega Man music from across the ages.

Last but certainly not least, was getting most of my old gaming group from home together for a reunion game. It was great adventuring with the old group together and to see Lumbar and Skythorn back in action. Unfortunately, that game ran quite late and we were all ready to crash immediately after it.

Another GenCon is past, but I am glad to report that thanks to some great friends and fellow bloggers I am fired up again! I have a ton of gaming material reviews to get through, so you will likely see one of those a week for awhile. We also have plenty of gaming opportunities in coming months, so that will afford us a plethora of new stuff to talk about.

Stupid Ranger will take the helm over the next week as I am out of town with my day job, but I will be back the following week.