time for a stupid quiz

a tale of two 4e's

Every snippet of info I hear about the new edition of D&D makes me cringe just a bit. Don't get me wrong. I'm pretty confident that the folks at Wizards, especially Mike Mearls, can produce one heck of a sweet game. But I'm losing faith that they are producing a game that I want to play. The more I look at the chinese water torture that is the 4e PR machine the more I feel like ditching mainstream D&D and going this way:

Yeah, HackMaster. It's Retro Stupid. It's got all the Gygaxian Building Blocks (as brilliantly identified by Settembrini) preserved in their original form. It's overly complicated and possibly broken in some places, just like AD&D when I was a kid. See, I'm not sure I want a slick, fine-tuned, laser-precise D&D. If I want something that is slick and fine-tuned, I already have Risus. What I really want out of D&D is arguments over rules, PCs behaving badly, grotesquely absurd violence, filthy nonsensical dungeons, and lots and lots of really stupid dice charts. I want the players to try to finesse some retarded rule to weasel out of a tight spot. I even want the Monty Python jokes. Is Wizards going to give me these things? I don't know. But I'm getting the vibe that most of what I like about the game is on the chopping block as possible casualties in the name of progress.

Remember a while back when Mike Mearls "fixed" the Rust Monster? Keep in mind that of all the 3.x designers out there, Mearls is clearly my favorite. So understand that I'm not taking a swipe at the guy personally when I say that I thought Mike was fixing something that wasn't broken. The Rust Monster is supposed to ruin the fun, in just the same way that poison or level draining or failing an item save is supposed to kill your buzz.

I remember the first time a Rust Monster happened to me. I was running a fighter named Arius Claudius who ran around in uber-expensive Unearthed Arcana style Full Plate armor. Not only did I suddenly have no armor class, but thousands of GPs I had invested had just gone down the tube. I ended up beating the Rust Monster to death with the wooden haft of my trident, the three pointy bits have been rusted away as well. For the rest of his career (until that Deck of Many Things incident) ol' Arius carried a spare set of bronze platemail in a bag of holding. And a club. That's an adventure, my friends. Not "Oh noes! I almost lost my armor!" Meanwhile, HackMaster offers a world where the default assumption is that the GM is a dick and his campaign setting is actively hostile towards the players. The players are supposed to use their wits to get by and possibly prosper. Every XP and GP has to be pried from the GM's cold, dead hand. I don't usually run that kind of game, but I like that attitude as the baseline.

Maybe something will come along that will make me actively look forward to 4e. Until then, everything else is pushing me towards HackMaster as the big, crunchy system that best fits my needs. Right now, about the only things I like are that Mike Mearls is on the project and that one of the classes in named "Warlord". But I'm a sucker for anything with "War" in the title: Warforged, Warlock, Warrior, Gwar, etc. That's not a whole lot to hang one's hopes on, especially in light of the fact that every other bit of 4e material I've come across has either left me apathetic or annoyed.

Maybe my problem is that I'm not in the target demographic for 4e. At this point I actually kinda hope that's the case. The alternative is that Wizards is so missing the mark that they are driving a D&D fan of 25+ years to a competitor. A competitor, I might remind you, with a core monster "book" that runs eight volumes at $20 apiece. For them to screw up so badly as to make me look at a significantly more expensive and less popular option speaks volumes about their PR efforts.

How Traveller Helped My Career

I took a civil service test today to get a job in the university library system. The last 5 questions on the test came with a handout explaining a 5-digit system for classifying materials in the u's library system. At first it looked kinda crazy to me, but after a moment it clicked: Hot damn, this is just like a UWP!

For those of you not in the know, every world in Trav has a seven digit number that packs all the key data into a small package. This number is called the Universal World Profile. For example, if I were to say that the planet Restubuss IX has a UWP of C5558F9-9 you'd know that you were dealing with a medium-sized world that's home to a billion people living under the thumb of middling-tech space nazis.

This library classification was the same deal. So while other folks taking the test might have been scrambling to wrap their brain around the concept, I already had a working knowledge of the basic scheme. I was the first guy done with the test and out the door. I usually hate that guy, but this time I got to be that guy.

Concept Album meme

From coeli

01. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
02. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
03. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
04. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result as a comment in this post. Also, pass it along in your own journal because it's more amusing that way.

Quote of the Day

Although the rules have been thoroughly play-tested over a period of many months, it is likely that you will eventually find some part that seems ambiguous, unanswered, or unsatisfactory. When such situation arises settle it among yourselves, record the decision in the rules book, and abide by it from then on. These rules may be treated as guide lines around which you form a game that suits you. It is always a good idea to amend the rules to allow for historical precedence or common sense -- follow the spirit of the rules rather than the letter.

-Chainmail, 3rd edition, page 8, by Gary Gygax & Jeff Perren

I love this passage because the reader is not directed to the authority of the designer nor that of any referee. The text assumes that the players are adults capable of arriving on a consensus on their own and achieving at least as useful rulings as the authors of the game.

Cinder OD&D charsheet, draft 1

A big shiny No-Prize to the first Gameblog reader who spots an unintentional omission.

Elves is weird.

I've spent the last week in a strange mixture of job hunting, taking care of my daughter, and being sick as heck. But I'm feeling better, Elizabeth should be back to school tomorrow, and I've located at least a temporary gig that started today and seems to be going well. But that's not what I want to talk about now. I want to talk about elves. I'm one of those guys that's had a love/hate relationship with D&D elves over the years. Combining fightery and magic-usification into one character has always been fun, but sometimes the pointy-eared immortals just get on my nerves. But with my present OD&D project I decided to embrace the elvitude. After all, I only have 4 PC races to choose from under my self-imposed "three original books only" rules. I feel like creatively I can't afford to give elves anything less than a fair shake. So I went on a long mental journey trying to figure out elves. And I came to the conclusion that all the greatest elves in history have one thing in common:

HATS

I'm totally serious here. Elves in my campaign are The People Who Wear Hats. That's their deal. Sure, I can tell you other details, like how the elves consider marriage to be a profession or the fact that they are the postapocalyptic descendants of a Transhuman Space style post-singularity society. But the key to understanding the elves of Cinder is that they all wear hats.

Bonus elf cheesecake: