Great table for when a player misses a session

I'm putting this here, so I never ever lose it again.  (Zack's site is generally not safe for work, but this direct link SHOULD be okay... no blaming me if you just can't wait to get home and open it at the office and get fired... although, if you do, can I have your job?)

Er, sorry, anywhere, here it is:   Where the Hell have you been Flake Table, at DnD with Porn Stars

Review of Shelob Attacks

Eurobrick has a great breakdown of the build, so I"m going to skip it, and jump right into talking about it as a DnD mini's set.

So, first off.  Hobbits.  Well, Halflings, since we're playing Pathfinder or DnD, but let's not quibble.  The important thing here is that we have short little guys with curly hair.  That makes me happy.  I don't have anyone playing a halfling in my current campaign (sadly), but now that I have a dozen of these little guys, they may meet some.  

The set comes with 3 minis.  2 halflings, and Golum.  Golum is pretty... I dunno, strange.  Kind of harmless looking and withered and strangely adorable.  I'm sure I can find some purpose for him (for some reason he reminds me of the treasure goblins from Diablo 3, so maybe I'll make my players chase him around a map for ages?)  

The Hobbits are hobbits.  The new curly hair is great, and I'm always up for some new capes and short legs. They each have a sword, although Frodo's is curvier.  I'm pretty sure "sting" isn't a unique model, but I'm always happy to have more stabby bits.

There is also a little "cave" thing.  Yay map flavor bits.  Nothing to write home about, but it won't go unused either.

The real joy here is the spider.  Shelob is awesome.  I almost passed on this set, because I have two of the spiders from the Harry Potter series, and why have another big spider?  Giant spiders are a little "meh" in my mind to begin with, so I wasn't sure I wanted to invest in another one.

But check it out... it's HUGE.  And scary looking.  It could eat the Harry Potter spider (whose name escapes me) for lunch.  I'm going to have to save this bad boy for a truly epic encounter somewhere down the line, because it's just too awesome to waste.  

Shelob towers over Sam and Frodo, and the ruins of our last game.

Shelob is making a light snack of the Harry Potter spider.

DND 4E Tonight

I gotta say my buddy Andrew does the best role-play voices ever.  Fat Marlon Brando as a disturbingly sexy 600 lb fishmonger?  Yes please!

On the DND Starter Box

I'm playing DnD 4E with some friends on Sunday, and using the starter box to roll up a new character...

The "Choose your own Adventure" thing is cute, but can also be a little confusing, and I think it would be easy for new gamers to miss important stuff...

For instance, my rogue apparently gets "Bump and Run" which does normal damage and moves my opponent 5 feet away from me... so far so good... but then it also tells me I can move half my normal distance away from my opponent... is that part of my regular move action?  or part of Bump and Run?  It's unclear in the book... maybe it's clearer on the little cards?  Would a new gamer think to look there?

Hmm... okay, healing surges, fine...

Alignment... man... if Alignment and I were on a long drive, and she (alignment) was bitching about her boyfriend (Wizards), and showed me this, I'd tell her to break up, move on, he's just not that into you... For the record, I'm of mixed feelings on alignment myself.  I see it as a role-playing aid.  That is, if noting down on your character sheet that you're "evil" reminds you to stretch yourself and "be evil," then more power to you.  But as a DM and player, I'm not going to enforce (or even set up) your evilness.   Which brings up something else... check this out (I scanned it, because I want to make sure you believe me...)

Okay, I understand that, for new players (and new DMs) Good characters are (a lot) easier than Evil ones.  And I understand that some players read "evil" as "I get to be an asshole at the table and nobody can call me on it," but that's got nothing to do with evil pcs, that has to do with assholes at the table.  If you have asshole at the table, ask them to leave.  Evil PCs can work way more often than rarely.  Poor, poor alignment.  You just aren't loved anymore.

Okay, fewer skills than Pathfinder, but they make sense, the book explains them well enough I guess... no problems there... the little skill check in the book is cute enough (poor dying goblin...)


Hmmm... my rogue gets 12 Reflex save + my dex modifier... but the character sheet says the base is 10... I assume the other 2 is a class bonus?  No way for me to know for sure... 


Hey, I get 2D6 added to my attack rolls when I have combat advantage!  I wonder what that is...


I guess I'll figure it out when I play...


Okay, so the Choose your own adventure thing is cute, but it took me an hour to wander through, and I did it ALONE.  The Pathfinder starter is less cute, and sometimes a little more confusing, but at least it wasn't designed to isolate you from your friends.  It just seems odd to me, to make something that's designed to be done alone, to kick off such a social activity as DnD.  That said, it works, I have my rogue ready to go for Sunday night! 

Never bring an Ostrich to a Druid fight...

We managed to play for a few hours on Friday night.

Our intrepid adventurers were standing in a dark hallway, with a large door at one end... from behind the door came scratching sounds... like the scratching a cat would make... like the scratching a cat the size of a small elephant would make... but that's where they left...

If I were a mean DM it would have crashed it's way through the door before Friday nights game, but that'd be mean, and I'm categorically against mean DM'ing, so it was still scratching away when we started.

They made the wise decision to leave, and when they ran into a group of Deep Gnome guards they gave themselves up, which, in true Return of the Jedi style, brought them right to a crazy old king, who made them participate in an underground ostrich race for his own amusement.  

The rules were pretty simple, but I think if I do another race I'll change it a lot...

So, first off, the rules as I ran it:

Everyone starts with a D6

For every 5 points of Ride or Handle Animal you get +1 to your dice rolls

Heavy armor drops you 1 dice (so from a D6 to a D4, etc)

Being small let's you move up one dice.

At any time you can move up one dice, but have a chance of falling off

At any time you can move up 2 dice, but have a bigger chance of falling off

You can move down one dice for a 2 ac bonus and +10 to perception.

Combat works as normal, the Ostriches, however, are well trained racing mounts and won't attack.

There were 4 riders on the players side, and 2 riders on the gnomes.  If the players win they get to ask the king for a boon.

And this worked well, everyone had fun, although it went completely differently than I expected.  Primarily because only one PC had to finish the race, and there were only 2 gnomes competing against them.  So 2 pcs raced, and 2 pc's stayed behind and locked the gnomish competition down.  (Fighter killed one, druid did a sexy Ostrich dance to distract the other's mount.)

So the other 2 had no problem waltzing through the traps and other minor encounters of the race track.

If I were going to do it again, I'd make everything bigger.

Every starts with 3D6.  For every 5 ranks in Ride or Handle Animal you get another D6.

You lose a D6 (or 2) for heavy armor.

You get a D6 (or 2) for being small.

Etc... so instead of moving up 1 or 2 squares, you'd move up... a lot... or down, a lot... 

I'd also have changed it so if one player wins, that player gets a boon, but anyone who beats the gnomes gets a prize... and I'd have more gnomes... at least 4, maybe 6 or 8... 

Our rogue and Barbarian running the gauntlet... we ended up setting the starting line off to the side with the druid and fighter boring the gnomish competition to death... 

They also fought a slightly leveled up Bulette... and rolled 4 20s in a row, and completely destroyed him.  

The "Bulette" is actually a Megablocks Dragon... I won't tell if you won't.

And now for something completely different...

I swear I'm going to review the DND 4e box, but I've decided I want to DM the starter mission from it, before I review it.  So I'll have to dig up some victims, actually put the starter box through it's paces as it's meant to be used, then review it.  I think that's fairer.

I'm also working on reviews of the Lego Lord of the Ring sets (tl;dr: They are awesome).  I've managed to acquire all but two of the currently released sets, so you'll probably get a big rush of reviews.

In the mean time, check out my friend Jamie's podcast.  It's all about British History, and it's brilliant, and it's highly inspiring, particularly in keeping my medieval campaign medieval.

The British History Podcast

On the Pathfinder Starter Box

Both Paizo and Wizards of the Coast make it really easy and inexpensive to get started playing their respective RPGs.  When we were trying to decide which game we wanted to play, it quickly narrowed to DnD 4e or Pathfinder for this very reason, but then we were stumped... which one did we want to play?  What was included in the box?  How good is the stuff in the box?  Is it really all we need to play?  Luckily for us, our local game store (Guardian Games, if you happen to be in Portland, Oregon) had open boxes, and let us paw through them.  I know that's not an option everyone has, so I wanted to do some quick reviews.

So I'm going to look at the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box today, and sometime this weekend I'll do another post about  Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game: An Essential D&D Starter (4th Edition D&D).

The Pathfinder Beginner Box is really impressive.  It's regular price is 34.99 (You can buy it here, direct from Paizo), but you can usually find it cheaper on Amazon (linked above), so it's a little more expensive than the DnD box, but the contents, in my opinion, are completely worth it.

The (slightly abused) contents of my Beginner Box

 A quick run down of the contents:  4 pre-filled character sheets (Warrior, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard), and a few blank sheets.  A full color GM guide.  A full color player guide.  A two-sided plastic battle map (one side has a cavern for the starter adventure, the other side is blank).  A set of dice.  Paper monster cut outs with plastic stands.

The GM guide and player guide have all the information you need to play to level 5.  There's a truly impressive amount of information here, from a healthy variety of monsters (with the corresponding paper tokens), to a robust feat list, item list, even adventure seeds and tips on writing your own adventures.

Two things really jumped out at me from the moment we opened this box:  The first was that this set is really meant to get you excited about the game, and playing.  It's really a complete game unto itself.  If you run high lethality adventures (you know, the kind where you don't make it to level 6...), then you never have to buy anything other than this box.  Yet, it's all very accessible.  I'd played a grand total of one gaming session before opening this box (A game of Call of Cthulu which we completely derailed and killed a god, was awesome), and yet I felt right at home when we opened this up.  It doesn't present itself as anything more complicated or intimidating than monopoly.  It's appears to be just another game with all the normal accouterments.  I'm tempted to send a box to my mother, without telling her it has anything to do with DnD, and see what she does with it.

The other thing that really stands out, is that it is a quality product.  Everything is full color.  The books are solid construction and heavy paper.  The plastic mat is, well, a plastic mat... I expect it to live more or less forever.  The paper monsters and player tokens are full color, and printed on a heavy stock.  Barring being stepped on or drowning in soda, there's no reason to expect them not to survive regular use.

It all just adds up to a really solid opening salvo.

To be completely honest, I love this beginner box.  In fact, I love it so much that I was slightly disappointed to see that the box's clean designs and style aren't carried over into the GM guide and Player Guide.  I assume the box was done after the big books, so I have hope that future revisions of the books will be more similar to the box, because I think the box is hugely accessible, in a way that the books aren't (although, by the time you invest in the books, maybe they don't need to be.)

About the only thing I think could be added, maybe (I'm of two minds about this) is something along the lines of the "power cards" that come with the DnD Box.  (I'll do some more comparing of the two boxes later this week.)  On one hand, I can see the advantage of having simple reminders for new players.  My group is pretty mellow and helpful, so we helped each other remember what powers and feats we had, but simple reminders are nice.  As a GM, I've began writing down monsters abilities on 3x5 cards, so I have something simple to refer to when I need a quick reminder.  On the other hand, I can see how cards could cause players to get into the "video game" mindset, of "these are my options" and lock them out of the creative cheating, er, thinking, that makes pen and paper RPGs special and fun.

Have you used the Beginner Box?  Any thoughts?  Feel free to tell me in the comments, particularly if you disagree.  I'm so in love with this thing, I'd love to hear from people who hate it.

Paper monster tokens, on their plastic clips.  I was too lazy to count all the monster tokens, but there are a lot... 

The selection of monsters is really impressive.  

Pretty Character sheets.  I was a little sad when we printed out some of the official character sheets from Paizo, and they aren't the same.  I really like these.