Shout-Out #2: Nerds the Gathering

All images in this post are under the copyright of Ryu S Stemp.

I've been meaning to do a shout-out for something one of my friends, Ryu S Stemp, has been working on. It's a visual novel call Forever Alone: Nerds the Gathering. In Nerds the Gathering, you experience an engrossing story about high school nerd angst, mostly to due with the fate of the Anime and Gaming Club. The story is told through the eyes of an intelligent, witty, yet socially inept girl named Michelle, or Mike for short. What's wrong with the Anime and Gaming Club? Well, all its members have wandered off, leaving Mike short a social life outside posting on random internet forums. The goal of the game? Rebuild the club!!!

Alternative 5th edition character: The Bow Fighter

Note: This is very out of date with the current version of the D&D Next (5th Edition) rules.

I talked to my group last night and the guy running our current game is going to be unable to run it for a couple weeks either starting the week after next or the week after that. As a result, we will be playing my 5th edition D&D game during the interim. That should lead to some interesting posts but in the meantime there is a problem: I now have six players and there are only five premade characters. Now someone could run a clone character of someone else but we decided to try an idea that came out of last session: the bow fighter.

Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons: Play Testing, Night One

Last Friday night, we finally got around to test playing 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. The following are my impressions of the system. To be clear, these reflect my initial opinions on 5th edition, not necessarily those of my group.

Candid Conversation on 5th Edition and Fighters vs Wizards

The following is a candid conversation between two of my friends on facebook. Figured it was relevant and an interesting read beside.

---Lewis F

Alastair Yee
Gave the playtest material a look over. Truly have mixed feelings. I do like clerics and the wizard. The fact that their spells are pre chosen for the purpose of the playtest is nice. The fighter looks decently tough and damaging, but I feel like its highly lacking. It just looks so sad at 1 page compared to every one elses 2. Rogue was decent but the need for advantage means either you need a defender dwarf or attack every other turn.

Kent Carmine
Well, the info we have on the system is very limited, so there's a lot we don't know. There will probably be more ways for rogues to gain the advantage for sneak attack, for example (and remember that in 3.5e there

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 2: How to Assault Your Players' Stronghold

One criticism I received about my last “How to Be a Good Game Master” post was that it was too focused on combat and not enough on role-playing. This is true and I will attempt to do better in this post. Like most game masters, I tend to be a little heavy on the combat side, but also I would like to have more role-playing in my games. I think the reason why we tend to drift over to the combat side is that it’s easier for us to run. Most pen and paper RPG systems are written with plenty of support for combat. Mean while, the rules for a social engagement often boil down to “make some sort of skill roll.” This isn't much help for game master’s trying to come up with interesting social encounters for our players. Fortunately, much of the advice I’m giving in this blog for combat can be adapted for social encounters. The reason is that in social encounters the players have some goal they have to obtain and various obstacles, often including people who try to stop them, just as in physical encounters. I will attempt to make these correlations explicit later on.

In a lot of RPGs, the PCs' (Player Characters') are essentially nomads; they move from one location to another, over come whatever challenges you’ve prepared, and collect the loot. Other times, whether through your design, or because an enterprising player decides to stake a claim to some dungeon the PCs' just cleared of monsters (assuming they can get the blood out of the carpets…), the players have a strong hold to call their own. In either case, it is entirely logical for one of the PCs' enemies to try to take it away from them. This is a substantially different scenario than what game masters are use to running and, since the players have so much at stake, one that you have to make sure you do a good job with. In this post I will look at best practices when designing assaults against a stronghold belonging to the PCs.

Haven't Gotten D&D 5.0 Together Yet

So, unfortunately, I have not been able to get a 5th edition game running. I’ve set up my notes for an interesting take on the Caves of Chaos adventure that is provided with the test playing materials, but neither I nor the group I was going to play with have had the time to run it yet.

This is in a large part because I’m studying for a second round interview for a job (yay!!!). Of course, if I do get the job, I don’t know how much time I’ll have for running games (boo…).

Still, I am hopeful that I will be able to get in my test playing sometime in the next several weeks. By the way, if you would like to join me, let me know. Good chance I might be looking for players and I have no objection to running this thing multiple times, time permitting. If you're looking for players, also let me know, because playing is fun too.

I'll probably have another "How to Be a Good Game Master" post up in the next couple days...

How to Be a Good Game Master, Lesson 1: Make Things Hard

This is something I wrote for a friend a couple weeks ago. While I'm planning on doing further posts on "being a good game master," I thought this one should come first since some of the things I'm thinking about build from it. Note: I don't always do all these things, though I should. In fact, I thought of some of them as I wrote. But hey, trying to give good advice makes you think about these things:

One part of running an RPG that a lot of people have trouble with is getting the level of difficulty right.