As a follow-up to my previous post of getting back into D&D, I thought I would look back at the logistics of playing D&D as an adult. When you’re young you have all the time in the world and no real responsibilities. As adults my friends and I had a much smaller window of time to waste on D&D. Whether my friends and I used that sliver of time as wisely as we could have remains to be seen, but we certainly had a lot of fun.
Getting six adults together to play D&D proved more than a little difficult. Initially we were playing about twice a month. That pace slowed down after half a year of gaming, presumably after some of the novelty wore off. Eventually we started playing once every month or so. The time between games slowly crept up and up till the campaign came to a halt, about a year ago. Our D&D campaign ran from about November 2009 through to August 2012. During that time there were a couple of longer breaks due to weddings and babies.
We used Doodle almost exclusively to schedule games. People would fill out when they were free for the coming month or two and we’d try and find a few days that worked each month. Doodle is fantastic. I don’t think we’d have played anywhere near he number of games we played without it. If you are still trading emails like a chump to organize any event you are doing it wrong.
Meeting up in person got trickier when Dave and Sarah moved out to suburbs. (Dave and I both don’t drive, for starters.) We switched to playing online via video chats almost exclusively for the last few sessions we ran, meeting up occasionally when someone had access to a car and we could car pool. We used Roll20 as a virtual table-top, which works quite well for 4th Edition D&D. Playing D&D online is a pretty good substitute for meeting up in person.
We also used Google Wave (seriously) to takes notes about what had happened during a session in case someone couldn’t make it out, and just so we could keep track of things as the game progressed. It actually worked fairly well for that purpose. If it wasn’t insanely slow and confusing Wave might have fared better. We switched to using Google Docs once Wave shut down. Google+ also has lots of cool services that lend themselves to running a campaign: hangouts, communities, and events being the most notable. I am going to assume there are a bunch of D&D nerds at Google working on tools to help them play D&D using their computers.
The inability of my friends and I to settle on a regular time to meet up and play is what ultimately led to our campaign coming to an end. The amount of effort it would take to schedule a game eventually proved too great. I’ve probably played more sessions of the Vaults of Pahvelorn game I play online over the last year than my friends and I managed to play over three years. Having a consistent schedule for the games has meant we rarely miss a session.
I think a big part of the fun we had playing D&D was probably just getting together to eat greasy take-out food. Our DM Dave lived next to one of the best fish and chips shops in the city for a good chunk of the time we were playing together. That was both fantastic and dangerous.
Kim Mohan was interviewed on the D&D podcast. He was a figure involved in Dungeons and Dragons I had never heard of, but there is apparently no one out there who has worked on Dungeons and Dragons longer than the man. He was a managing editor at TSR and then Wizards of the Coast. There are lots of great quotes. On Ed Greenwood: “For every word that he gives you, you feel like he’s holding fifty in reserve. And for every ten that he gives you he probably could have kept three or four.”
It’s been a few months since I last wrote about Kickstarter: I thought I should check back in. A few projects I backed have indeed shipped since that mostly gloomy report. I got my Weird West Miniatures a month or two after posting my original article. The Crawler Companion was released. I am hoping to pick up a copy of the LotFP 2013 Free RPG Day Adventure this weekend, and I’ve already received two modules as PDFs as part of that project.
I’m still waiting for quite a few projects. The two other LotFP projects I backed are still outstanding. It sounds like the Rules and Magic book is on the cusp of being shipped. Updates aren’t as frequent as I like, but it sounds like there is good progress being made on most of the projects. Some of the modules I backed sound like they are shaping up to be quite great. The Seclusium of Orphone went from being a 32 page booklet to a 160 page hard cover book! Dwimmermount looks like it might actually be finished before the year is out. The goal is to get the version I backed out by Gencon. The recent updates on the project sound both interesting and promising.
I have so much stuff outstanding from Brave Halfling Publishing in addition to the Appendix N Adventure Toolkits. The man behind the project has had a very hard year, so I find it hard to get worked up about, but i’m not sure I’d have backed this project or bought anything in hindsight. Champions of Zed continues to be the most lacking of all the projects I’ve backed, though Machinations of the Space Princess has also had some pretty lackluster communication about what’s been going on. (Update 2013-06-19 A few days after posting this I got a PDF in the mail for Machinations of the Space Princess, so that’s that.)
I have backed one new project since my last post, Domains at War, which are rules for running a war game. Learning from their past mistakes with Kickstarter projects, it looks like Autarch went into this Kickstarter with the manuscript for their book almost complete and play tested. They are estimating the book will ship in October, and I almost believe them.
In October of 2009 my friends and I exchanged a few emails.
Dave: I’ve been listening to the Penny Arcade/PVP/Wil Wheaton DnD podcast and it’s made me really want to try playing a game for the first time since high school. Does anyone else want to give it a shot?
Me: I am totally up for playing Dungeons and Dragons. I have been waiting for this day for AGES.
Me: I still have a shit load of second edition books, though I heard that 4th edition is a bit easier to play. (Though, they apparently got rid of THAC0 and other things at some point in time.)
Dave: Yeah, I’m definitely interested in playing. I just got my GST tax rebate back and could totally splurge on the required manuals. Pretty sure I still have HeroQuest back at my parents’ place, so I have a bunch of generic miniatures and dungeon-board pieces that could be used.
Sarah: I have no idea what any of these acronyms mean. I think I’m in trouble.
Dave: It’s just like Munchkin, only with more numbers and acronyms and complicated rules you constantly need to be cross-referencing in a large appendix.
Me: My cousin Jana might be interested. I can check with him and see if he’d want to play. He’s a serious ass D&D dude. He used to come downtown back in the day to play Vampire with goths. Hah.
Dave: One of the guys at work, Andrew, wants to play. He also has a friend who’s interested. That’d be six of us.
And so it came to pass that my friends and I started playing D&D again.
My friend Dave received his GST rebate cheque in the mail and decided to spend his new found wealth on the then new Dungeon and Dragons 4th edition rule books. I had thought about buying the books myself when they were first announced because I too enjoy nerdy things. In the end I couldn’t justify spending money on books I probably wouldn’t use. When Dave said he would run a game that changed and I decided to grab the Players Handbook, the only book players need to play.
I was apprehensive about buying new D&D books because I already owned a metric ton of 2nd edition D&D books. This is the edition that was available when I was much younger. Beyond the core books, I owned a slew of books about Dark Sun, one of the 2nd Edition campaign worlds, and a Forgotten Realms expansion called the Ruins of Undermountain. Considering I was completely broke-ass at the time this outlay in cash for RPG books was ridiculous. I wouldn’t say I wasted my money on AD&D books, but I certainly didn’t put them to much use. I suppose I liked reading about D&D more than I liked actually playing the game. (I suspect this isn’t that uncommon.) I was all set up to run a kick-ass Dark Sun campaign I never got around to running. My new Players Handbook, unlike my 2nd edition books, has seen plenty of use over the last few years.
Playing D&D is arguably the nerdiest thing a person can do. My friends and I are all full-on adults. I had thought that these two things taken together would have meant that finding a group to play with would be hard. This was not the case at all. It was shockingly easy to find people to play a game of D&D. It’s quite possible I just know other particularly nerdy people, but we ended up with 5 players fairly quickly. When other people found out about our game they wanted to join as well. I think we could have probably grabbed 4 more players if we had wanted.
My friends and I would meet at Dave’s place whenever we could coordinate our schedules. Actually getting everyone together was by far the most difficult aspect of playing the game. We would have scheduling Doodle’s that covered huge spans of time, and would find days that worked for everyone once in a blue moon. We’d almost always meet on weeknights because weekends were usually busy, and we often played longer than we probably should. When I broke my leg we shifted the venue to my condo. We still managed to play reasonably often. Then Patrick got married, Dave got married, Andrew started dating a girl, we had a baby, Dave had a baby, etc.
Our 4th Edition game is more or less on hold at the moment, but I think most of us are interested in starting it up again. A lot of people gripe online about how 4th Edition ruined D&D, but it got my friends and I back into a game we hadn’t played in over a decade. I suspect this is true for a lot of people. For that it deserves more praise than I can give it.
I was off in England when this blog had its one year anniversary. The first post on this site was May 29th of last year. My original goal was to have a space I could talk about D&D that wouldn’t bore the people who read my other website, A Funkaoshi Production. I have tried to avoid forcing myself to write on a regular schedule. D&D has become a much bigger hobby in my life recently, so it’s still often been the case I have something nerdy to discuss over here.
A lot of the more interesting things on this site weren’t actually produced by me, really. The biggest hits to this site are now people looking for the Hexenbracken, the Kraal and the Colossal Wastes of Zhaar. Those community hex crawl projects were a lot of fun to work on.
I suppose my bigger contribution to the online gaming community is actually my random character generator. It’s probably one of the most used side projects I’ve worked on. I’m hoping to do more interesting things with it this year. The other two tools I wrote this year, Random Carcosa and The LotFP Summon Spell, are probably much more niche, though I am quite happy with both.
This last year actually went quite fast. I’ve got to play much more D&D than I thought I would. Hopefully that keeps up this year.
I bought a new printer a few months ago that lets me print double sided. Shortly after I started printing my own little booklets. A lot of RPG material is available online, formatted to be made into digest sized books. I find making booklets relaxing.
Lacking a long-arm stapler made the process tricky. Normally I would fold all the pages in the booklet and then bind them together. For thicker books I would saddle stitch them with some waxed thread. For thinner booklets I would punch holes for staples and then push the staples down by hand. That worked reasonably well.
A couple weeks ago I stumbled on the MAX HD-10V Swivel Booklet Stapler. It’s a fancy stapler from Japan whose shaft swivels 90 degrees. This lets you staple the spine of the booklet from above and below the book, rather than the side, using what amount to a pretty small stapler. It works incredibly well. What’s more, the stapler is much cheaper than your typical long-arm stapler. If you print your own D&D booklets there is no reason not to own this stapler.
Tickets for OSRCon are on sale starting today. The event takes place here in Toronto in August, on the weekend of the 3rd and 4th. I had a great time last year. Besides getting to play a bunch of retro D&D, something I hadn’t done in a long time, I got to meet James M from Grognardia, Brendan from Necropaxis, and a host of other people. Ed Greenwood signed my Ruins of Undermountain box set and I got to see him run a game which was pretty zany. This year OSRCon is taking place in a smaller venue, so the number of attendees is capped at 50 odd people. If you’re interested in attending you should grab a ticket early. It’s well worth checking out.
I wrote this several months ago, but for reasons I don’t recall never posted it. I suppose I thought another play report would be boring. Now its an annotated play report.
My friends and I have been a bit disorganized with our 4th edition home game, so it looks like my participation in Brenden’s OD&D game will be more consistent. I’ve played in three games now and they have all been a lot of fun. Our group is a good mix of impulsive and cautious.1
My second session began with a much more startling start than the first. The very first room we encountered when venturing into Pahvelorn was full of beastmen and body bags.2 We got the jump on them, commanding them to drop their weapons. Sadly, they decided shooting us with crossbows was the way to proceed. After a short fight we discovered we had saved some bandits from certain doom. We returned them to the city and planned to venture back to the dungeon the next day.
We made it a little bit further into Pahvelorn before being attacked once more. Well, we thought we were being attacked. We had actually stumbled on some missing villagers. They too were safely returned to the city. No one spoke of an unfortunate and accidental death.3
It was on our third trip to Pahvelorn that we made it back to the mansion we were exploring in our previous session. Not much looked to have changed. We managed to convince the clerics to hold off messing around with the frozen demon clearly held in place by a magic sword, and so proceeded to explore the rest of the mansion. The first unexplored room we entered looked empty save for a tantalizing jade statue–and then some sort of crystal elemental materialized and killed one of our henchmen. We fled and there was no pursuit: always a good thing.
Moving on we stumbled upon a library in much disarray. The magic-users took the bait and stared rooting through the soiled books in hopes of treasure. My character Satyavati discovered a giant centipede. A failed Save vs. Poison later and I though I’d need to roll up a new character.4 Luckily for me the rest of my party was well prepared for this expedition. Benni, our thief and rat catcher, had some anti-venom he administered posthaste and all was well in the world.
Further exploration led to the discovery of a dissected demon. We found his well preserved body parts throughout the rest of the mansion. We tied up the clearly dead body, and then started replacing its missing body parts. Of course the demon promptly headed itself and woke up. We had a short discussion to determine whether it would kill us or not. The demon decided Benni was our leader, and was now its leader as well. We learned the demon arrived from some other realm to fight the previous occupant of the house and quite likely the rest of the lands of man. As demons go it was quite friendly. We named it Tangle.5
We discovered a trapdoor leading down to a cavern below the mansion. The passage was was next to some incredibly expensive looking fountains we will need to figure out how to steal at some point. We ventured through the cavern, finding and killing a giant white snake hiding in a pool in the process. With that we decided to call it a night.
I now have a much better sense of the layout of the dungeon we are visiting, which greatly helped with my initial confusion during the first session.6 We now have a demon butler and a cavern to explore, which we did in our next session.
I believe Brendan’s original plan when he started his Pahvelorn campaign was to have players drop in and out, so that if one person was busy another person could take their spot. This is apparently how the very first D&D campaigns were run, with a huge pool of players. This is also how a lot of G+ games are run: it’s often not too hard to find someone ready to jump into a game. We play on Monday, which is probably a quiet night for most people. We went a very long time before having to cancel a session, and that was because Brendan was traveling through Europe. My friends and I tried and failed to keep our 4th Edition game going in this manner. I think the trick is to get people to pencil something into their calendars. I know I’m busy Monday nights–and I suppose more importantly my wife knows too. ↩
We ended up killing the Wizard that was creating these beast men several sessions later. One of the current characters in the party was that wizard’s apprentice. ↩
Brendan doesn’t award XP for killing monsters, so every fight is often more risk than reward. We often start every fight with a meagre attempt at negotiation, unless it’s clear the monsters we are fighting aren’t intelligent. It’s actually kind of funny we ended up killing a villager: that might be one of the few times we shot first, so to speak. ↩
Satyavati died a tiny bit after his 10th session: I tempted fate and lost. Brendan discussed this at length in a blog post about character death. He was definitely one of my favourite D&D characters. I’d never play Magic-Users normally, so it was a big change of pace. (This is one advantage of totally random character generation: it pushes people into playing characters they might not normally.) ↩
Brendan created this evil demon army that’s clearly attempting to take over the game world. Because we met this friendly and confused demon early in the campaign, all members of this race have henceforth been referred to as Tangles: hardly a name that strikes fear in the hearts of men. We have encountered these creatures several times, and those experiences has never been pleasant. Nevertheless they are Tangles: harbingers of the apocalypse. ↩
After a few sessions full of character death and little gold our party left Pahvelorn and has yet to return. I miss all the dungeon delving. We need to get back there. Our characters are beasts now, to boot. ↩
A Green Man cyborg (AC 18, MV 60’, HD 6, Lawful) leads a battalion of 3-12 soldiers armed with an assortment of Alien weaponry. The cyborg will repair any Alien technology Lawful PCs may possess, and will attack any PCs who make their allegiance to the forces of Chaos known. He is searching for his adopted daughter.
2
Citadel of 98 Red Men led by “The Ram”, a Lawful 4th-level Fighter. “The Ram” is a behemoth of a man, never seen without his indestructible helmet.
3
Spawn of Shub-Niggurath (AC 14, MV 120, HD 6, Multiple Alignments [intelligent]): An Orange humanoid with a smooth hide and 3 heads. One head is humanoid (and Lawful), one head is robotic (and Neutral) and the last head is bestial (and Chaotic). When first encountered, or whenever the creature is under stress, roll a d6 to see which head is currently in control of the beast: 1-2 - the humanoid; 3-4 - the robot; 5-6 the monster.
4
A Jale Man Sorcerer (AC 16, MV 120’, HD 8, Neutral) wearing a Red breast plate sits on a giant Cthulhu shaped throne, alone at the lowest levels of the Cavern of the Time Lords. He may share his knowledge of Carcosa with those who seek him out.
5
Spawn of Shub-Niggurath (AC 14, MV 120’ / 160’ [Flying], HD 6, Neutral [intelligent]): A Brown avioid with a feathered hide and a toothed mouth. There is a 4 in 6 chance that when encountered the beast will be in flight.
6
A squat Purple Man Sorcerer (AC 12, MV 90’ / 120’ [Flying], HD 2, Lawful) in flowing robes and an over sized hat is in the process of botching the ritual The Glyphs of the Ebon Lake.
7
1 Sabertooth Tiger (intelligent).
8
A Blue Man (AC 16, MV 120’, HD 2, Lawful) with a cybernetic augmentation that allows him to extend his head several meters above his body is surveying the wilderness. He is armed with a bright yellow mace and can not be surprised.
9
A damaged Alien vehicle, with 4 tank treads instead of wheels. Characters with an intelligence of 16 or more may attempt to repair the machine, with a cumulative chance of 10% per week of succeeding. (i.e after ten weeks the tank will be repaired.) It is large enough to comfortably transport 12 men.
10
Village of 366 Brown Men ruled by “the Silver Fist,” a Lawful 6th-level Fighter. The Silver Fist rides into battle on cybernetic horses and wields a mysterious purple sword.
11
A foreboding grey castle sits empty save for its custodian, an Orange Woman 18th-level Sorcerer. The castle is circumscribed by a bottomless chasm. A single bridge leads to its imposing doors shaped in the visage of a skull. The sorcerer will not leave the castle, and is immortal and invulnerable while within its walls. She will aid all those who actively seek to defend Carcosa from the forces of Chaos.
12
What appears to be a simple rock is in fact The Starseed, a source of unlimited power. At any given time there are at least 1-6 high level sorcerers actively searching for the artifact.
13
A White Woman (AC 14, MV 120’, HD 4, Lawful) is locked in battle with a Deep One. She fights with a large wooden staff and is searching for her mother.
14
1 Orange Mastodon. The beast may shoot acid from its trunk 3 times a day.
15
A beautiful young woman, an astronaut from Earth, lays wounded in a recently crashed spacecraft. The ship is damaged beyond repair.
16
Village of 130 Dolm Men ruled by “The Master of the Universe,” a 1st Level Fighter. He wields a magic sword in battle: on command the sword grants +20 HD, and the saving throws of a 20th level Fighter. Only those chosen by the powers of the Grey Castle may hold aloft the magic sword.
