While I’ve never really penned these thoughts, there are a few things in the world that I have thought about creating. One day, maybe, I’ll get ambitious and actually develop these. Or have a character create them. But in the meantime, here are a few thoughts for some miscellanea.

Pocket Cloaks – These plain-looking cloaks would come as a pair; they share the same astral pocket, so that an item placed in the pocket of one cloak could be retrieve from the second cloak.

Twisted-Bead Necklaces – These necklaces are simple in appearance, just strings of simple beads, all of the same color. The real power of these necklaces is revealed when two strings are combined; two strings twisted together unlock the power of each string. Most common among these strings of beads are those that improve abilities.

Brush of Vanity – This hairbrush is much sought after among performers; if a performer uses this brush before taking the stage s/he will experience a temporary charisma bonus.

Over the weekend, I finally bowed to recent social pressures within our gaming group and purchased an Xbox 360 (My Gamertag: Dante8309). I have been without a console that could perform well for such heady endeavors as first person shooters, a genre that I enjoyed quite a bit in my high school and early college years. I even dabbled professionally with a game company you’ve probably heard of, but that’s a story best left for another time.

The Oh-So-Verbose Setup

After firing up my new console and slapping in the Halo 3 disk, I was amazed how in a few short minutes several elements that I knew were on the fringes of technical possibility sprang to life in fully polished, amazingly high fidelity (pseudo) reality. It was as if I was frozen in one of those Walt Disney’s head tubes and was revived hundreds of years in the future to play the games only dreamt about!

When I would wax nostalgic about these features being amazing and incredible some of my friends who had been gaming all throughout my “off years” would just pat me on the head and assure me that they’ve had that feature two games ago and its pretty commonplace now… and I’d be off to the next cool thing to enjoy, like a kid on Christmas.

Does this even relate to roleplaying?

You bet it does! I know there are many of you out there that used to play a certain campaign setting, system, or even entire genre that you’ve let get old and crusty just like I did for my first person shooters.

You can approach the solution to this in several ways. First off, if you’re not into a lot of research or a lot of extra cash outlay just remember a few of the elements of those long-past games that you used to enjoy and weave them into your plotlines as you prepare your gaming session for this upcoming week. It doesn’t take a lot to evoke the feeling of certain environment or setting (or even game type) and the natural reverence that you hold for the source material will probably come out in a satisfying way when you actually run your session.

If you are feeling a little more ambitious, pop open Google and see if that old setting or game system that you used to love has been updated to new versions or a newer rule system. If you’re lucky, the new rule system may be the same one that you’re running in today which can ease the argument to support a one-off nostalgia session for the rest of your adventuring companions.

It is fun to get back in the saddle!

Take it from me… getting back in the saddle and experiencing something you once loved through the new shiny lens of revisions and improvements can be a pretty wonderful thing. In fact, I think I have done myself a disservice by staying away from something that I once loved for so long.

There are those of you in the world (trust me, I’m thinking of one person specifically when I write this) that will argue that not all revisions to a gaming system are good. That’s true, however you won’t know what good or bad became of your old favorite until you check it out with your own eyes and roll some dice and kill some players… I mean… reward some experience points.

From The Evil DM, by way of Musings of the Chatty DM:

It seems that many fans have dubbed this weekend GaryCon, and will be gaming in Gary’s honor. I am happy to report that our crew will not only be participating, but it just so happens that our intrepid bunch of adventurers are heading right into the last known lair of a dracolich, which as many of you know was first mentioned in Gygax’s original World of Greyhawk setting. I can’t think of too many other things that satisfy the adventuring genes in all of us than that!

I think that the whole GaryCon notion is an excellent way to remember Gary’s contributions to our hobby. I will fall in with my other digital brethren… get out there and roll some dice, flop some cards, and have some fun to honor Gary!

We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week!

After the traumatic news of Gary Gygax’s death this week, I know many of us are remembering fondly back to our early days of roleplaying and realizing that we have seen the end of an era. Jeff Reints posted a great article reminding us to celebrate Gygax’s life, and he has some great idea on this list.

However, if you’re still looking for a fitting memorial, I encourage you to play something new and expand your roleplaying repertoire; after all, if he hadn’t tried something new, we wouldn’t be the people we are today.

Break Your Stereotype

I’ve noticed that players tend to stick to a certain type of character; I’m guilty of it myself, just ask anyone! But instead of playing the same old character, try playing someone new.

• Play a different class – and I don’t mean playing a wizard instead of a sorcerer. Try something drastically different. There are plenty of options to explore.
• Play a different race – Many of us stick to the same race; personally, I’m very comfortable playing an elf. I think we all tend to gravitate toward races that suit our own personalities. However, there is something to be said for shedding your preferred race in favor of a new race. If you really are having a hard time picking a new race to try, pick one at random!
• Play a different personality – this can be closely tied to the race you pick, but try a new personality for your characters… especially for you quiet-types out there. Break out of your comfort zone and change your participation level in the group.

It may be tough, but trying something new will definitely build your character as a player. Challenge yourself to break away from your stereotype and be someone different for awhile. And when you do, remember Gygax, who gave us the tools to let our imaginations run wild.

P.S. If you haven’t see it yet, Phil has collected a list of several of the tributes. Thanks, Phil, I hadn’t seen some of these.

This homage to Gary Gygax was penned by my co-DM, our good friend Kanati.

I have to say that despite my only brief opportunity to meet Gary last year at GenCon, I am still very sad that Gary is no longer with us. The whole roleplaying genre has suffered a great loss this week and you need look no further than the list that Stupid Ranger mentions in the above post. Gary’s kind, humble nature and his amazing creativity endeared him to all of us.

All we can do now is keep gaming and know that Gary’s looking down on us and his legacy continues on in every critical hit that we roll.

I didn’t grow up in a particularly religious household, but I did grow up believing in God. But, being a little nerdy kid who wanted all the answers, I was never really big on the whole idea of faith. I wanted to know (among many things) where God was, where Heaven was, how exactly to get there, and how not to burn in Hell.

I suppose it was a little worse for me not going to church because at least people who do have scripture to try to answer a few of these questions, but by and large pretty much anybody who believes in a higher power just has to take it on faith that what they believe and the power they believe in are up there and they don’t get a whole lot of proof to back it up. Unless, of course, you’re a pantheist, in which case the air you breathe and the electricity powering your computer are proof enough. Having to take the existence of such a being on faith can lead a person to doubt that faith under the right circumstances. Even Mother Teresa wasn’t immune to such things.

Your average D&D cleric, on the other hand, doesn’t have this problem. Ever. They wake up in the morning, and pray, and then their deity grants them superpowers. A crisis of faith for a cleric doesn’t typically consist of “does my god exist” (well, unless the spells stop coming some morning). It would be much more of a question of “do I believe in the values this deity stands for, and am I an appropriate champion for this person”. A cleric basically embodies this deity’s power and they are this god’s physical presence in the mortal world. Sure, you hear about the gods visiting in person now and then. And you also hear about giant cataclysmic battles and gods dying and their bodies turning into mountain ranges and magic leaving the world for a time — typically it royally sucks for mortals when the gods visit so they don’t do it much. At any rate, an interesting roleplaying opportunity (if you are bored with your do-gooder standard cleric, for instance) would be to have him realize he’s not on the right path. He could go several other directions including to a different class, or to a different god who suits him better. Not to say that this would be without consequences. In addition to disillusionment with life and general despair, loss of faith is loss of powers (and a haunted cemetery is a hell of a time to realize you and Corellon aren’t getting along very well). Depending on the cleric’s deity, there might even be a little divine retribution on the way. Which could be grandiose and mystical but more likely it’s just some members of the cleric’s former order coming by to play “dogpile on the blasphemer”. All of this would make for fantastic roleplaying fodder (conflict is the mother of interesting characters, after all), but I would highly recommend working with one’s DM beforehand if you plan to do this to avoid suddenly finding yourself in the aforementioned “haunted cemetery without the ability to turn undead” scenario and subsequent death from PHB trauma to your skull.

One thing I never did understand about gods (in D&D and real life) is why they desire (or require?) mortals to believe in them and worship. Especially for people in a fantasy realm who get superpowers, it seems like the gods are getting the raw end of the deal. But since they’re gods, we mere mortals cannot comprehend their desires, and we just don’t understand the rules. So when your god asks for macaroni pictures, just give them to him. This is not to say, of course, that the other all-powerful being in your D&D campaign (that’s you, DMs!) cannot come up with a reason why the gods might want something, and consequently why the PCs need to do it for them.

One interesting thing to consider is that a non-cleric person in a fantasy realm might have a much easier time believing in their god because they’ve seen divine magic in action. Maybe their local cleric healed them or something. Watching the wound I got from a rabid opossum suddenly stop hurting and close up before my eyes would make me believe in something higher than myself. However, I don’t imagine most peasants have any ranks in Knowledge(Arcana) and arcane magic is going to look like the work of the gods to them as well. (I suppose it is the work of the gods in the Forgotten Realms, in a way, but that’s beside the point.) The PC’s might be able to easily tell a mage from a priest, but even a low level wizard could fool the natives into following “the will of the gods” to his own ends. How many of us here have ever cast Light on something to fool a mob of rubes? You know, the more I think about it, the more I’m glad I’m not a peasant in the Forgotten Realms. I might see one gp my entire life, which some crooked illusionist will trick me out of, and then when I go out into the forest to chop wood I can get eaten by a manticore. I don’t need to worry about manticores! I have way too much to worry about already!

One last thing lest I rant any further about my irrational fear of manticores: Katherine, who plays D&D regularly with the SR crew, recently played a character who was a cleric of the sun god Horus-Re. About halfway through the campaign, she had an extremely spectacular (and complicated) crisis of faith in our current campaign when her friend (a paladin of Horus-Re) got killed — so much so that she spent the next several months after his death being generally disillusioned and hard to deal with. In the end, her character refused to be brought back from the dead due to her religious beliefs that the afterlife was a better place and a natural part of having lived and her role on the Prime Material was finished. (Think Buffy season 6 except without all the angst or coming back.) Now that’s dedication to roleplaying, people! (Although it did rob us of our precious healing bitch.)

This particular incident was interesting to me both because it was well roleplayed and because of the player who did it. You see, Katherine is an ordained minister. When we first met her, we’d invited her husband to play with us and he mentioned his wife wanted to play as well. About three nights before they show up he mentions her job — so we were initially somewhat hesitant when she wanted to play with us, because most of us were used to minsters thinking of D&D in rather negative terms. To be honest, I had visions of this new player demanding we play a modified version of D&D in which nobody casts spells lest our souls be damned and I wasn’t about to have some newbie performing an exorcism in my dining room. Thankfully, Katherine turned out not only to be not like that at all, but to be a very deep and excellent roleplayer. Not only that, but she also writes a fantastic series on her blog called DMing the Bible in which she is, in her words “looking at Biblical texts with the eyes of a Biblical Scholar and as a Dungeon Master”. I’ve never read anything like it before and even if you’re not a Christian or religious, you’re going to find what amounts to a gatling gun loaded with new and interesting ways to look at our chosen method of fun shooting you directly in the face and brain. It’s really great stuff, and I wholeheartedly encourage you to read it. (And I’m not just saying that because she knows where I live!)

I just read that Gary Gygax died.

I met him a couple times, he was always very nice. He helped make something that shaped the person I turned out to be, and we’ll all miss him.

When I was at lunch, I bought a Mountain Dew and poured one out on the curb for our dear departed Dungeon Master. It seemed kinda silly, but I didn’t really know what else to do.

Aim for the higher planes, old friend. 🙁

We are quickly approaching the endgame of our first venture into an epic campaign. My co-DM, Kanati, and I have both agreed that this has been quite an educational experience for us and I thought I would share some high level thoughts if you are considering such a foray on your own.

Encounter Balance is HARD

One of the toughest things about getting into epics for me was figuring out encounter balance. The player characters have so many weapons at their disposal in the form of feats, skills, weapons/items, and class skills that the combination of our particular group is nigh on unstoppable.

There is a fall off point, however, which I’ve been unfortunately falling off of ever since we got back into the campaign in earnest: battles with enough firepower to threaten an epic party takes a LONG TIME. We spent an entire session this weekend on a single battle encounter.

Granted, a lot of very dramatic and interesting moments took place (my favorite was SR’s character surviving a Disintegrate) but still… it took a long time. I have a certain difficulty with just waving my hands at some point and determining that these followers of an evil goddess would just give up, run away, or disjunct at their goddesses will. I hate having to play obvious cards like that, but it is sometimes necessary.

The PC’s probably have too many tools.

If you are a DM like I am, I tend to like to add some pizazz to the gear that I give to the players, or at very least handwave downtime and allow them to travel and purchase whatever they desire with their treasure. That pizazz can backfire in a glorious way at epic levels, especially when you need to either add drama by endangering a player character (or even a highly thought of NPC).

One of our players, Sir Geekelot, used all of his treasure during our years of in-game downtime to procure a Staff of Life. I didn’t quite realize this until he quite humorously produced said staff and deigned that he would bludgeon the life back into two fallen NPC cohorts that had fallen to the aforementioned baddies.

Now was this a mistake for me to make such powerful items available? Yes and no. I should’ve kept tabs better on what they were purchasing, but if you release an 18th level character to the world with a pile of well-earned treasure and give him years to do whatever he feels like it stands to pretty good reason if he dedicated himself to getting that item then he should be able to do it. That run-on sentence makes a good deal of sense to me, but yet it adds extra complexity when trying to add suspense, drama, or simply just speed up the group by blowing out a few cohorts for good.

More Comin’

Well, I’ve taken only two lessons learned from dipping our toes into the epic waters and written a novelette, so I will leave it here for now. Expect to see more on this topic as weeks pass, doing some analysis to grow my skills in public will be interesting at the least!

As I was watching TV this evening, I decided I need a little dungeon-crawl fix, so I brought out Neverwinter Nights. And it got me to thinking about how to develop a quick-start character for those times when you need to roll-up a character fast, especially for one-time events.

Don’t Overthink It

For those one-time short campaigns, don’t overthink your character. These campaigns are usually less about backstories and long-term career goals; they’re more about generating a character quickly that will be fun to play. I prefer to stick to classes with which I am already familiar; familiarity with a class can reduce the amount of prep time, during both character creation and game time.

Now, I know some people like to play classes they haven’t had the chance to play; they try out something new on the short campaigns to see if it’s a class they might enjoy. Personally, every time I’ve tried this, I ended up frustrated at trying to learn new rules in a short amount of time. So if you’re looking for something quick that you will enjoy without a lot of effort, don’t overthink it; go with something you know.

Quick-Start Option #1

One of my favorite quick-start character options is a human fighter/cleric. Fighter L1 is a great L1 class to cherry-pick; combined with cleric levels, you will have a the fighting power and healing power to keep everyone alive early in the game. This is an easy option if you’re not sure what you’ll be facing or if the party is trying to fill the position of healer.

Quick-Start Option #2

Again, if you’re not sure what you might be facing in a short campaign (or if you expect there might be dungeon-crawling involved), try a quick-start with L1 as a rogue. Rogues have all those great skill points to give you an early boost. You can put a couple of those skill points to use to give you a passing familiarity with locks and traps; you never know when that kind of skill might come in handy! Then, depending on your preference, you can combine your level of rogue with some spellcasting levels or some fighter-y levels.

These are just a couple of options; of course, you can just pick a class and go, without the multiclassing options. Either way you choose to go, have fun!

Being a nerd, I am constantly on the lookout for nerdy things to enhance the roleplaying experience. Or any other nerdly pursuit, for that matter.

I submit for your approval – three fun things to enhance your games or further nerd out.

Energy Drinks

Until I gave up caffeine for Lent this year, I preferred the high jolt energy drinks. I found a few that require mention. One, a personal favorite, is Bawls. It is often referenced among the first person shooter genre of nerds, however it made the leap into our gaming session about a year ago to some pretty spectacular results.

And then there’s these – mana potions! Somehow I fear that those weird LARP people are going to love these for their ability to blend in to the costumes they constructed from high-quality Wal-Mart fibers.

Fun With Weapons

I tend to enjoy the aesthetic of weaponry. I will save the reveal for another time, but suffice it to say my den is well-armed versus orcs, goblins, and wargs.

Several months ago, someone turned me on to the neat foam weaponry available from ThinkGeek.com. I never did end up purchasing any, but let me tell you do they ever look cool… and my Weapon of Choice would be the sword and it seems like it would be effective at arbitrating rules “discussions”.

Music

Now, I have long gotten away from playing music during my campaigns, but it used to be a mainstay during our college years. I am not an extreme fan of this particular genre, but there is a certain heady goodness that comes from the combination of repelling hippies and rocking out with Slayer or Godsmack while adventuring.

Now, some tend to go for period music or classical music while gaming, however I tend to fall in with Vanir and recommend throwing up the horns and going for a metal gaming session every once in awhile.

This was fun, plan on seeing a few more posts like this in the future!