I've been contemplating the idea of writing up some gamerules for a team survival online turnbased browser game.
Things like, stuffing 10 players in an area, where each have a certain amount of action points each day and at the end of the day their actions are tallied and their survival calculated.
Imagine a zombie setting, where you have to collect materials to build up a city's defenses.
Or collect food.
And you'd have to work together to survive. Then you compete with other towns on a scoreboard to see who can survive the longest.
Hmm, maybe this isn't the right place to discuss this. :P
@William'MindWorX'Mariager die2nite.com is exactly that. From my limited experience with it, it's... peculiar. It would take a few playthroughs to understand what not to do, and mistakes are terminal. Given that you need a significant proportion of players not making mistakes to survive past a couple of days, and that individual player's abilities are extremely limited, it's been a peculiar exercise in rare moments of cooperation drowned out by watching idiots doom everyone, over days of realtime.
Perhaps it gets better at higher skill bracket, I gave up after 3 or so games. Also their freemium pricing was terrible.
@BESW Do you know where can I get a Character Builder update, I have the program on my PC, but it does not have the stuff of Heroes of Fallen Lands, etc...
@Azrael To the best of my knowledge, the offline character builder is no longer supported. The D&D Insider subscription service includes an online browser-based character builder (and a separate monster builder) which are regularly updated with the most recent content and errata.
4e expects you to not only have the financial wherewithal to buy their books AND their online subscription (and other goodies), but a level of comfort with technology (and access to it) that is really very presumptive.
People who preferred older editions of any RPG system frequently declare that a game system doesn't need to be actively supported to play: "I still have the books, I'm going to play OWoD/AD&D/DWRPG and ignore NWoD/3.5/DWATSRPG."
4e doesn't support being played in its obsolescence even if a player currently has the resources, access, and interfaces necessary to play it now. Sure, you can play it if you have the books... and printed out the errata... but it's a massive stew without the online resources like the searchable Compendium and Character Builder, and a number of the mechanics are only released digitally.
I anticipate future RPGs distancing themselves from the mechanics and philosophies of 4e on the grounds that "Nobody plays it anymore, so it must be bad," when it's actually "Nobody plays it anymore because its electronic components are no longer supported."
And certainly I know for a fact that people who would be enjoying it now aren't purely because of the electronic components--either they dislike the principle, or lack the funds, or lack the means to leverage the funds, or lack comfort with or access to the technologies.
Yes.
You get exactly the same benefits as if you were wielding two one-handed weapons.
Wielding a double weapon is like wielding a weapon in each hand. [Adventurer's Vault 10, identical in online Compendium entry]
There are a couple of weirdnesses with regard to Small characters, the stout...
I do suggest that you edit your question to reflect the names of the feats and items as they're written in the books.
@Magician Yeah, that game is actually my inspiration. But like you, I felt it lacked something. I was thinking I could perhaps find that something and that way improve it.
it will be interesting to see how they choose to do legacy support for 4e. A lot of us have spent quite a bit of money on D&D insider and intend to continue playing 4e for years to come, but if they take the builder offline, then that's severely problematic. Compounded by the fact that they've built it on tech thats now deprecated
or if they stash it on some long forgotten server...
@waxeagle they're both very important. honestly, if i had to guess, i'd bet that the subscriptions bring in more revenue for wizards than book sales do
in the age of digital, not a lot of people want to lug around 50+ pounds of books every week
@DForck42 I don't know about that. But it's possible. I'm guessing digital distribution and subscription services are a huge part of the revenue model for Next.
@BESW yep. It's not perfect. and the fact that they've never implemented a decent adventure database means that it's not as useful as it could be, but it's way better than trying to find print stuff.
@DForck42 My current group spent... about three years? in D&D 3.5, until its vast power imbalances, schizophrenic design philosophies, and Blatant Lies about what it could and could not accomplish chafed us enough that we could no longer justify staying in the system for what we liked.
This led to a year and a half in 4e, where we rejoiced that At Least It Wasn't 3.5.
But as we immersed ourselves in the new system (the first time we'd spent more than a couple sessions in any system outside 3.5), it became clear that while 4e fixed many of 3.5's symptoms, D&D itself was --perhaps unavoidably-- rooted in gameplay assumptions and philosophies that we were tired of trying to ignore, houserule, and/or rip out.
In particular, we ultimately found that we have no use for a system focused so heavily on combat --combat which was structured to encourage strange and disturbing moral paradigms-- to the exclusion of even being capable of modeling non-combat scenarios with any depth or finesse.
Goblin dice, a design philosophy that tended to portray opposing forces as literal opposites, the sanity-challenging expectation that we slavishly follow developer choices except when such choices were made while Snowflame was on duty (at which point the cries of "GMs can fix it" resounded from the mountaintops)...
None of these underlying flaws changed between 3.5 and 4e.
I don't mean to say that D&D is entirely pants, nor that people who play it are deluded, insane, or masochists.
We played a D&D-like substitute with a precious house-of-cards structure of common assumptions and loose houserules that bent the D&D system into a shape closer to the RPG we wanted to play.
@DForck42 We're still learning exactly why, ourselves. We've been very un-self-aware. I could blame D&D for that, but I think a group that plays any single game to the exclusion of all others will find itself failing to understand the vast number of implicit assumptions that are building up.
@BESW here's an interesting thing. my group, that's been so ingrained in dnd, still don't quite understand social conflicts in DFRPG. Hell, I still don't.
@waxeagle did they? well then i think one should fit
An exclusively FATE group could easily fail to recognize that their frustrations could be alleviated in a crunchier system with more simulation mechanics and goblin dice.
In my community-building service programs, there's a strong emphasis on the cycle of action, reflection, study, and planning.
I think it can be applied to many things in life, and GMing works well.
After we do something (a JYEP session or an RPG session), we reflect --preferably with someone else, but you can do it alone.
Ask questions like "What went well?" "What could have gone better?" "What will I change next time?"
Based on your reflection, study (the DMG, GM blogs, ask questions on SE) reliable and insightful sources and consider how they might apply in your specific situation.
Plan your next course of action based on the reflection and study you've done, and then do it.
After enacting the plan, reflect on how it went and start the process over again.
Example: After a D&D session, I reflect that spending a total of half an hour pulling dice from under the furniture mid-combat might not have been the best use of our time.
I decide this is something I'd like to change next time, so I study dice-corralling techniques. Felt-lined wooden dice boxes sound cool, but I don't have a FLGS that sells them and I don't have the time or materials to make them.
I'm an inventive but cheap guy, so I decide to use a cake pan instead. Next session, I bring out the cake pan and have everyone roll inside it.
Afterwards, I reflect that while it was nice the dice stayed out from under the couch, cake pans are noisy. I should change that... back to the studying.
@DForck42 Works for whatever you're doing, but the study part is really crucial: part of what makes it work in my community service is that we've got very good materials to go back to.
Metal bookend + small whiteboard + two magnets = portable initiative board and stand (use one magnet on the base of the bookend to prop up the board, use the other to track whose turn it is right now).
I do lug around a cloth shopping bag of masonite boards cut and sanded down to about 9''x12''.
(The PC binder and the whiteboard go in the bag too.)
The boards are great for writing on your character sheet when the table's got a plush tablecloth. We use 'em to roll dice on, too. (I don't actually have a major problem with runaway dice, since I instituted an "If it rolls off the board, it's a 1" policy.)
(I was able to rescind the policy later without losing the training on how to roll dice.)
A more gentle version is "Roll on the PHB. If it rolls off, re-roll. If it rolls off the table, it's a 1 and get another d20, we'll get that one later."
(I had players who were superstitious enough to refuse to roll on the DMG or MM.)
I rolled on the DMG, of course. You have to model the behavior you expect.
But rituals are important in molding behavior. By making "Rolling on the PHB" a player-specific ritual, it reduces the "This is rule imposed by the GM"ness.
i wish mike and his song would get their act together and get their basement cleaned up so we could play down there. we'd have so much more room, both table and personal
Specifying to roll within a certain area like "on the book" defines "don't roll so hard" in a way more people are going to be able to process: it gives a visual, spatial reference.
"Don't roll it off the table" is a much broader reference.
I always wanted to have a ceiling-hung projector instead of a TV, pointed at a blank wall for watching films but on a swivel so it can point straight down on a table too.
Projector pointed at a table, map setup in an art program with layers. Map on bottom layer, fog of war on top layer. Use eraser tool to reveal as they go.
You get an upright whiteboard that everybody can see, and it sits right there on the table next to whichever sucker you managed to talk into writing on it that session.
No, I've never had the opportunity to get my hands on a whiteboard big enough to make it worth gridding.
I use the 3.5 DMG tear-out map, which I had laminated eight years ago, in combination with Crayola window markers.
(Wet-erase markers are actually pretty lousy; they smear but don't wipe off easily. Crayola window markers come in more colors, don't smear, and wipe off really nicely.)
I had tried to build a cardstock kit for foamcore and velcro on 1.5 inch squares. 'Chunky Dungeons'. It was a neat idea, but ultimately had to be thrown out after 3 years of not finishing it.
i think the best implementation i saw was a grid sandwiched between two sheets fo plastic. only major problem was cleaning the board took a couple of minutes
I'm very low-tech in my approach; partly because of funds, partly because of having to be so portable, and partly just because I don't believe in using a complicated tool if a simple one will suffice.
I bought a 3 pack of pre-gridded posterboard, drew over the gridlines at 1" with a sharpie and covered them with contact paper. They are kind of bent up a couple years later, but they serve the purpose still
between not feeling comfortable drawing on the wizards tiles (I think they are eraseable but not sure and they aren't mine), the fact that I can't stick them down in any way...
Because really, where am I going to find the tile for "A wood and ivory cannon lined brass gears, levers, and flywheels, with a chair fitted out with various straps, restraints, and torture implements attached in the back where the fuse would normally be"?
But yes, I found that especially for 4e, it was better to use the map to indicate the mechanical nature of the terrain, and use oral narration with the occasional visual aid cribbed from DeviantArt to give it the appropriate atmosphere.
slash = difficult, x = blocking, etc.
Used the different colors of marker to differentiate between the different types of terrain flavor-wise.
The green Xs are trees; the brown ones are rocks; the grey ones are walls.
You need to be able to justify attacking someone in a zone you're not in (gun, throwing something, shouting, etc.).
Moving from one zone to an adjacent zone can be done as a "supplemental" action without rolling, which in DFRPG imposes a -1 penalty to your next roll.
If you want to move more than that, or not take a penalty, then you use your regular action (forego attacking) to roll Athletics and move a number of zones equal to your roll.
Zones that are hard to move into have barriers with ratings.
A regular fence would cost you an extra point of movement, a big wall with barbed wire might cost you three or four.
A bottomless pit into which falling would be boring might be modeled as a barrier: if you don't have a high enough Athletics roll to cross the barrier, it just stops you.
Yes.
You get exactly the same benefits as if you were wielding two one-handed weapons.
Wielding a double weapon is like wielding a weapon in each hand. [Adventurer's Vault 10, identical in online Compendium entry]
There are a couple of weirdnesses with regard to Small characters, the stout...
