This morning I find myself in the office at an unusually ungodly hour. I fully expect to achieve miraculous feats of productivity that include sitting quietly and breathing in-and-out to the tune of our white noise machine.

Because of this horrible situation, I blearily found myself wandering downstairs this morning and I tripped on the dog. This forced me to wheel out of the way of the end table and love seat, resulting in a vaguely marionettish finish in the middle of my living room. I was satisfied to have avoided all major obstacles, but it got me thinking about something related to the newly released fourth edition of D&D: movement.

I have only made it through what little I could glean from the new PHB, but it seems that many of the battle-oriented skills (the at will/encounter/daily ones) have to do with manipulating squares on the battle grid. I have seen that standard movement is done as a function of squares now as well.

This doesn’t implicitly bother me that much (those skills are COOL, by and large), using a standard measure is bound to make things less complicated in the long run. What I don’t like about this situation is that it does push a little more planning time onto the DM, or at least a little more “board prep” time during the game. I fully suspect that I would be able to squeeze out an impromptu drawing on the battle grid to relay the scene to my gaming group, however the cleanup and drawing process does take a little time when you use a vinyl battle mat like we do.

This might force me into doing the whole “plexi-glass overlay” thing that I have been thinking about for quite some time, but that involves more work than I’m willing to undertake in my currently sleep deprived state.

I’m sure this development is going to increase the sales of battle grid accouterments and what-not, so that might be interesting to behold. In the past, my reasons for not buying in to the many tools designed to make battle grids more interesting, easy to generate, or the like is that it seems to be a fairly large amount of outlay for only a few minutes of enjoyment during most of our gaming sessions. To fully leverage some of the really cool stuff you are forced to plan in advance or else face the annoyed groans of your campaign-members as you pull out set pieces, landscape tiles, and the like… and I’m not very good at knowing when to plan for that type of thing yet.

I’m sure in time, my skills in such matters will improve but for now I’m going to keep enjoying the fun descriptions on skills and not sweat the details so much.

Well, I’m back from the mountains, trying desperately to get caught back up at the office. During my normal email checking regiment, I noticed that my order containing my 4e core rules set shipped so it is speeding its way to me as we speak.

I have gotten a chance to check out SR’s Players Handbook, which looks downright phenominal. I’ve had the opportunity to review some of the other books courtesy of a few friends, but there is no better measure than getting the books in your own hands and reading them with your own eyes.

I might end up doing a summarization of my thoughts about the new rule set, but you will likely not see an extensive review of each book. The reasons for this are many, but the greatest of these is that I would rather *play* the system before reviewing it fully. Just reading through the book and determining which “alarm states” that occur in the DM’s brain are real and which are just needless worrying isn’t enough. I want to live, eat, and breathe 4e for awhile before I render my final verdict.

For that, I will need Vanir, E.L Fudge cookies, an old priest, a young priest, and four to seven willing associates. Once I gather these components I will be ready to talk shop!

This is a day or so late, but unfortunately I just heard that we lost another legend in gaming. Eric Wujcik, who some of you may recognize as one of the founding fathers of Palladium Books.

I myself spent a great deal of time playing Robotech and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back in high school, and their games were my first exposure to non-D&D roleplaying games. Thanks for bringing a little joy to me in my godawful teenage years, Eric. We’ll miss you.

I’ve been occupied as of late reading through the new 4E PHB, so I realize that I haven’t been posting much, but it’s for a good reason!

While I’m still in the process of reading, check out these other fine 4E posts:

DungeonMastering’s 4E Celebration in Haiku

Chatty’s Initial Thoughts & Game Day Recap

Gnome Stew’s Martin Ralya’s First Impressions

D&D Nerd’s List of Reviews

I’m sure there are more, but I haven’t spent a lot of time reading the blogs lately, as that would have detracted from my reading of the PHB. So if I missed your post, please feel free to add a comment and include a link.

I’ll be happy to share my thoughts from a player perspective soon!

I have lived in generally one area, the midwest United States, for my entire life and as a result I have gained a very sheltered world-view. Until this year, I had never flown on an airplane or even seen a mountain, let alone actually go up to the top of one.

I had the good fortune of being selected for travel to Colorado earlier this year on business, unfortunately it was a very short trip and I didn’t get a chance to actually visit the mountains. That all changed for me this week. As I write this I am near Denver once again, and Sunday I had the good fortune to get a guided tour up Mount Evans.

Being a “flatlander” from the Midwest, I was told that I would need lots of water and to be prepared for the thin mountain air. No problem, I thought, I exercise regularly and won’t have much of a problem.

WRONG! As we approached the summit (which is 14,264 feet above sea level), I noticed that I had a pretty decent headache going and that walking 20 feet to the observation area made me feel like I had just gone on a pretty difficult run. I drank my water and felt better, however it took me until today to shake the headache completely.

So how’s this relate to roleplaying? Easy. As we headed up the mountain, I got some pretty distinct (and somewhat frightening) views of drop-offs and loose gravel. I thought to myself all of the times that I’ve eschewed the D20 movement rules for difficult terrain… let’s just say I won’t be doing that from here on out. There’s no way you can run full boar in that elevation if you’re not used to it, and there’s even less of a chance that you don’t slip and fall on gravel, snow, or ice.

I might entertain arguments that a Toughness feat, a high constitution, or something similar might make it less difficult, but let me tell you… it was rough up there.

I will be back at SR Central late Wednesday night, so until then I will leave you to the cool jazz stylings of Stupid Ranger and Vanir!

Yax’s Sunday morning quiz was a fabulous query involving monsters! I’m proud to say that I managed to pass this one with an 84% (I usually fail spectatuarly!), mostly by guessing on the Devil/Demon portion.

I love the Sunday morning quizzes, even when I fail spectactulary, because they are fun and there’s a lot of good Red Dragon in there. This one was especially fun as there’s a little aside to one of our favorite creatures. I won’t tell you which one, that would give it away!

Take a peak at the Sunday Morning Quiz – Mystery Monsters and see how you well you can do the Monster Mash!

In the absence created by the lack of Internet last night, Dante & I continued our quest for junk that can be sold at our upcoming garage sale. As we are cleaning the hall closet (a meca for junk!), we came across the fire safe we received as a wedding present.

Dante looked at me and asked if there was anything in there. I told him that since it was locked, the more important question was, where is the key.

Fortunately, I rolled really high on my Remember Where Random Item Is Located roll and found the key in a basket on top of the kitchen shelves. Upon opening the safe, it was, in fact, empty.

Dante got a gleam in his eye and headed over to the hutch in which we keep Important Documents. I briefly wondered what he decided was important enough to go in the safe that has been empty for four years, but my contemplations were short-lived as he quickly returned in plopped something right in the safe.

I asked what he put in there, and he lifted from the safe one of the D&D books signed by Gary Gygax. Because, of course, what document could be more important to save during a fire?

A giant, spectacular lightning storm has knocked out the internet connection here at SR Central until Friday evening. If time permits, we may post from work but don’t hold thine breath.

In the meantime, please entertain yourselves with Cuddle Monsters, courtesy of Yax over at Dungeon Mastering. He’s so crazy!

It may come as a big surprise to all our regular readers that we ended our big campaign this weekend. Nah, just kidding. By now you’ve probably read Dante’s posts regarding the spectacular end of the campaign.

We had a great finish, defeated the horrible goddess of pain and suffering to anointed one of our own to that position. We all went our own ways and lived happily ever after.

Now, I’m stuck in limbo, the “In-Between” from one campaign to the next.

It’s that bitter-sweet time when you celebrate the successful end of the campaign, you go on to live happily ever after, and you retire your beloved character sheet to the Great Beyond. You wipe a tear from your eye and tell yourself it’s time to roll up a new character.

The problem of being “In Between” is that you’re briefly stuck “In Between.”

It’s that difficult time when you are trying to make decisions about your next character. Do you replicate your recently retired character because you’re sure you could do better this time? Do you try something completely different because you want to avoid the “character contamination” that would result from having too similar a character? Or do you just see what everyone else is planning, and fill in whatever gap would result?

It’s a tough time, this time spent in the “In Between,” but the good news is that soon you will be creating your back story and embarking on the joyful journey that is roleplaying.

Just in case you’ve not been reading carefully the last few posts, we finished our campaign this past weekend. After the session had wrapped, we immediately started considering options for the following campaign.

What’s Next For Us

The other couple in our group has the torch to run the next campaign, and we’re all eagerly anticipating that, however we all elected to take a several week break to deal with The Real World (booooo) before getting underway with a new campaign.

As a whole, the group is eagerly anticipating the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, however Kanati and I were quick to point out that we’d both be more comfortable delaying until we can fully absorb the new system rules. Our next campaign will likely be 3.5 edition Ravenloft, which will be my first time in that campaign setting.

A lament for things left behind

Thanks to this lull in our gaming activities, we’re getting ready for a garage sale here at SR Central to cull some of our extra stuff and regain some shelf space for our new acquisitions. I was going through some old boxes when I happened across my third edition D&D books, complete with my (nearly) full-body character sketch of my ropehandling wizard, Medric the Great.

I drew it while our GM was in a heated rules “discussion” with another of our college D&D crew, and I liked it so much that I held on to it. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that far through the campaign before school got in the way so I never quite got to flesh that character the way I wanted.

I often grapple with the urge to revisit past characters or campaign settings, and I always get talked out of it by the rest of our gaming group. This pull usually gets stronger without the immediate presentation of roleplaying opportunities, in fact I keep several Google Docs with “Return to…” campaign threads that sit, waiting for their time to come.

If anyone has any suggestions for how to slake this thirst for reliving “the good times” I would appreciate hearing it!