Digital Alterity

While on a recent vacation, I bought the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook. I immediately launched into reading it during a marathon Starbucks session. After finishing up the PHB, I went down to the bookstore and immediately bought the other two core rulebooks. I’ve made my way almost halfway through the Dungeon Masters Guide, and I finally couldn’t bear not sharing my thoughts here on the site.

Save versus Wall of Text…

Things I Like About 4e

Rudimentary tanking is built into the core game mechanics. As readers of this blog and followers of my life likely already know, I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately. One of my favorite parts of any MMORPG is the specialization of roles that PVE combat provides. Generally speaking you have a heavily armored tank up front taking hits and generally keeping monsters interested in / hating him, so that your damage dealers can kill off the monster with relative safety. Add in a dedicated healer to keep the tank from dying, and you’ve got the holy trinity of online RPG combat. The first time I experienced this style of combat, it felt like an absolute revelation.

The problem is that this style of combat has never really worked in D&D. Generally speaking, as a DM, you tried to target the healers and the mages since they were the biggest threat. This inadvertently shifted fighters into more of a damage-dealing role. In other words, rather than attempting to hold the line and take the hits, D&D fighters typically have had to just attempt to kill the monsters before they start chewing out your wizard’s spine.

In 4e, fighters and paladins can “mark” or “challenge” individual monsters. This doesn’t explicitly force the monster to attack him, but the enemy is at a rolling disadvantage (-2) when attempting to attack anyone other than the figher or paladin that marked him. In addition, fighters get to take a swing if this happens, and paladins get to deal radiant (holy) damage. This strikes me as kind of a “free market” approach to tanking. The invisible hand of the game system guides monsters to attack your defenders.

Skill challenges provide non-combat encounters with the drama of D&D combat. I have a habit of playing characters that are somewhat gimped with respect to combat. Some of my favorite 3e characters have been purely designed for roleplaying and therefore supporting roles in their party. My rogue/wizard/cleric might not be able to singlehandedly down a dragon, but he can probably con the local duke into sending a garrison of troops to do the dirty work for him. There’s not a lot of drama in this though, and it also has a very real tendency to become a one-man show. While one character is making skill checks against various esoteric DCs, the other people at the table are tuning out.

Enter the skill challenge. Everyone at the table rolls initiative — just as they would for a combat. The catch? They take turns rolling skill checks applicable to the situation in an attempt to meet a threshold of successes before they accrue too many failures.

An example is probably in order. Your party is trying to convince the local church of Lathander that a murder cult of Cyric has infiltrated the city.

DM: Okay. This is going to be a skill challenge to convince the bishop of Lathander that the cult is here in the Dalelands. Your key skills for this one are going to be Religion, Diplomacy, and History. You need to get eight successes before you get four failures. Everyone roll initiative.
PC1: Okay, I got an 18, so I go first. I’m going to use my Religion skill to remind the duke of the dark tenets of Cyric’s faith and how serious this matter is. I rolled a 21.
DM: (Checking against a DC of 20) The bishop nods his head. “You’re right on that one, lad. Cyric worshippers are not to be trifled with.”
PC2: Okay, my initiative was 14, so I’m up next. I’m going to use History to speak about past incursions from the Cyric worshippers. I got a 25!
DM: (Checking against a DC of 18) You remember that Cyric himself was active during the Dalelands during the time of troubles. When you tell the bishop this, he gets a pained look on his face. You can now use the insight skill once in the course of this challenge.
PC3: I’m up next, and I have Insight trained. I’m going to use my Insight check to see what’s wrong. I got a 16.
DM: (Checking against a DC of 15) It seems to you that the bishop might have lost someone important during the time of troubles. You remind him of those dark times.
PC4: I’m not really trained in anything relevant to this sort of thing, but I’ll try a Diplomacy check try and convince him that we can help with this problem. Aw crap! I rolled an 8!
DM: (Checking against a DC of 18) The bishop seems a little darker. “I see how this is…you come butter me up with honeyed words so that you can get paid to solve a non-existent problem.”
PC5: No no no! I’ll attempt a Diplomacy check to convince him that we’re not con men. Whew…Natural 20, so…28.
DM: (Checking against a DC of 18) “Okay, lad. I believe you’re being honest with me, and we all agree that Cyric is a serious threat. But how are you so sure that we’re dealing with a Cyric cult?”

This is the end of the round. The players currently have four successes and 1 failure. See what I mean about exciting non-combat encounters? Can’t you feel the drama? Skill challenges engage everyone at the table, and they turn dry skill check rolls into something memorable.

The DMG includes tons of actual general-case DM advice that I wish I had years ago. The first few chapters in the DMG have almost no 4e-specific information. Instead, they seem intent on helping novice DMs understand player types, group dynamic, and game management. The breakdown of player types is fair, helpful, and non-judgmental. The concrete advice on how to track initiative is the sort of thing you always wished some other DM would share with you. Moving all the magical items out of here and into the PHB opened up space for more DMG-appropriate information.

Building encounters seems a bit easier and more formulaic. I really like charts. I’m less of a fan of calculation. Yes, I could and did calculate out encounter levels for monster groups in 3e, but 4e really seems to take almost all of the work out of it. The DMG even provides handy charts of different (relative) levels of monsters that you can throw together to build just the encounter you want. Everything is broken down by monster roles, and they even include some rudimentary tactics for the squad. I honestly feel like I could throw together an impromptu night of gaming with just an hour to prepare.

At-will powers make all characters feel exciting to play every round of every game. If you’ve ever played a low-level wizard in previous editions of D&D, then you know what it’s like to feel useless. When you’re all out of magic missiles for the day, you get the joy of sitting back and rolling to hit with your crossbow against monsters designed to challenge the fighters and paladins. 4e take a novel approach to fixing this. Every single class becomes something like the sorcerer.

Every class gets daily powers that they can only use once per day, encounter powers that can only be used once per encounter, and at will powers that can be used without worry about running out of uses. Wizards and clerics don’t have to pre-memorize spells. You just choose a power off your list and use it. Wizards can use magic missile every single round of combat. Indefinitely. Likewise fighters rarely have a reason just make a basic melee attack. While just swing for damage when you can swing for damage and do damage to an adjacent enemy at the same time for free? Even when your encounter and daily powers are gone, you’re not reduced to doing things your class simply isn’t good at. No one chooses to play a wizard because they love standing in the back and having a 25% chance to hit with a crossbow every turn.

Combat seems like it would really fly. Early levels in 3e fly. You have limited choices for actions, and you only get one or two things to do each round. As you begin to near epic levels, however, full attack actions start taking a bit of rolling to resolve. In addition, you have so many spellcasting choices that it can take some time to decide your best course of action. Of course, our characters need to become more powerful and more useful as they gain experience, but what’s the best way to do this without drastically increasing the time spent resolving combat? 4e seems to approach this game requirement through the use of powers. Powers allow for a game that scales up as you go up in level without having to give each character 6-7 attacks. Rather than making multiple swings, 4e scales up the damage of your powers as you level. In addition, powers seem to just target one defense rather than requiring a to-hit roll, a spell resistance roll, and then a will save roll. And for those times when you really do need an extra action to finish off a dangerous enemy, you can always just spend your action point and take that extra action.

Things I’m Not Thrilled About in 4e

The lack of certain classes/races in the PHB makes me fear an avalanche of supplemental books. The number one thing I hated about 2e was the sheer amount of books full of kits and strange races and optional rules. When 3e came out, I was thrilled as could be. The game was enjoyable with just the core rulebooks. Nearly any character you could dream of could be created with some weird alchemy of multiclassing. Shaman? Sounds like a druid/sorcerer/barbarian to me. A samurai? I think you mean a monk/paladin. I’m not really a fan of supplements. The economic side doesn’t really bother me since there’s no real requirement to buy them. No, the part that bugs me about them is that they’re generally not as playtested for balance. This is especially true of third-party supplements. Yeah, there are some awesome gems out there, but there’s also some totally imbalanced stinkers. As a DM, you have to keep a very watchful eye on which supplements you allow. With no druids, bards, or monks, I fear what people are going to whip up in the interim while we wait for the PHB2.

Converting 3e characters is a practical impossibility. I think it’s quite fair to say that 3e D&D had more flexible character building options. You could multiclass all to hell. You could take cross-class skills. You could spread your skill points all over to build just the character you dreamed. Now, it’s not at all a negative thing to have less flexibility in the character design of 4e; frankly, it’s a design decision. Heck, even if you’re trying to convert a single class character, moving that character into 4e will seem like an out-of-body experience. If my gaming group converted to 4e and we wanted to have our favorite PCs available for high-level 4e play, we would really have to resign ourselves to treating our characters as completely new entities that coincidentally have the same life experiences as our old 3e PCs. I’m reluctant to even put this on the negative list because I actually respect the clean break aspect. Unfortunately it adds a bit of inertia when it comes to considering the switch.

Technorati Tags: Dungeons and Dragons, 4e, D&D

I finally got exalted reputation with Orgrimmar in World of Warcraft this morning on my day off. I promptly zoomed off to the orc capital city and got my spiffy new timber wolf mount.

I have spent so much of my gaming time working for this mount that I actually feel like I’ve accomplished something. I understand that I just increased an integer in Blizzard’s database(s) above a required threshold, but that tiny little SQL update feels like I just earned something.

And, yes, people I don’t know, this in my main character in WoW. I’m the last person alive who doesn’t have a level 70 character.

So, I’ve spent most of the afternoon drinking Diet Coke. This is hardly unusual for me, and it’s really not the crux of my post but rather the subtle event that leads toward rising narrative action and an eventual literary climax. In any event, because biology works, all this beverage necessitated a trip to the restroom. Again, hardly newsworthy stuff here.

Upon arriving in the second floor bathroom, I discovered a scene of pure Lovecraftian horror. Someone, in an apparent fear of pestilence, had unleashed some sort of unholy bathroom ritual involving yards of toilet paper draped across the toilet set in a roughly circular fashion and a conspicuously unflushed toilet. I’m pretty sure they were trying to summon dark elder gods or some such. The horror took ten years off my life.

I’ve never understood people who live in this terrible, debilitating fear of catching diseases. This admission is not a request for attempted explanations for such behavior because, frankly, I’ve already thrown all those who worry about such things squarely into the “summarily worthless” bin. Nonetheless, I can’t help but ponder the strange dementia that leads to such behavior. I mean, if you’re that concerned about the horrible germs on the toilet seat, maybe using a public toilet just isn’t for you. If you’re too terrified to actually sit down on a toilet sit and then pull the lever to flush when you’re finished, either go home to poo or go buy some adult diapers.

The truly sad thing is that someone is going to have to clean up the results of this mental malfunction.

1. Masters of the Universe
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
3. Voltron
4. Thundercats
5. GoBots

1. “Happy Birthday” by The Crüxshadows
2. “Big A, Little A” by Crass
3. “Shine” by Rollins Band

If you’re not sufficiently motivated after listening to all three of those songs in a row, check your effing pulse. You’re probably already dead.

I’m in a game-playing cycle right now.

My interests/obsessions tend to move in rapidly shifting cycles. For weeks, I’ll want to do nothing except read manga, and then I’ll suddenly shift to playing Battle For Middle Earth 2 on my Xbox 360. People not used to the enthusiasm with which geeks tend to devour our current interests are often confused and frightened by the level of single-minded dedication we can display. But honestly, if you watch us over a long enough period of time, you’ll see that we’re actually pretty well-rounded; you just have to change your scope.

I continue to be obsessed with comics (especially super hero comics), but beyond my comics (which only show up at my office every other week), I want to just fill all of my free time up with playing games on the computer. When I’m not playing World of Warcraft, I want to be playing Warcraft 3. I’m enjoying the hell out of interactive entertainment basically.

The dilemma of the day comes in when I think about what I brought to do on my lunch break. I’m reading through Lies My Teacher Told Me, a book about the teaching of American history, and while the book continues to be pretty interesting, I find myself thinking only about how much more fun I could be having if I had brought my laptop or my PSP with me. I’m sure my book will be a fine way to occupy my lunch break, but I’m halfway tempted to just listen to comics podcasts instead.

Basically, I feel just like this.

Because I clearly don’t have enough widgets in my life, I’ve set up an account on Twitter. Want more details on the minutia of my life (until I get bored with it)? Follow me on Twitter.

Blame the whole thing on Penny Arcade.

me: is it sexist that i’m tempted to re-roll my orc shaman as a male?
when there’s no difference whatsoever between the sexes?
Allyson: are you sure you don’t want to rick-roll her?
that might be sexist.
no boobies
me: i can’t rickroll her because there’s a very real chance that i will “run around and desert [her]” for another toon.
Allyson: Hah

Iron Man is the best comic book movie to come out since Spider-Man. I’ll admit my bias right up front; Iron Man was one-third of my holy trinity of favorite comic characters as a kid, so I’m naturally predisposed toward absolute cinematic adoration. Nonetheless, both of the folks I watched the movie with (including my wife Allyson, who thinks that “Tony Stark is a penis.”) were raving about the film just as much as I was when we left the theatre.

Tony Stark is not an insecure teenager. He’s not a haunted knight out to avenge the phantoms of his loved ones. He’s not an idealist out to recreate a new better world. Tony is a genius who gets caught up in the military industrial complex and then tries to climb back out of the rabbit hole. Unlike Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark doesn’t have to play at being a billionaire playboy because he actually is an over-the-top billionaire playboy. This film is the perfect gateway into an Ultimates-style take on the Avengers — a possibility strongly hinted at in the post-credit epilogue with Nick Fury.

Robert Downey, Jr. is the perfect Tony Stark. I have been saying this ever since the initial casting announcement, and the film fully bears out my faith. If you were one of the doubters, prepare to be proven wrong.

I don’t really like special effects as done in most Hollywood films. Too often, they seem like strange additions to the narrative of the film just to amaze the people who are fans of said special effects. The effects in this movie, however, seemed like natural and integral pieces of the plot. Every one of Stark’s gadgets and aerial feats as Iron Man served to help paint a picture of the character without getting bogged down with a drawn out origin the way that nearly every superhero movie of this decade seems intent on.

Iron Man is an excellent movie. It’s sci-fi enough that even non-superhero fans will find something to love. And if you don’t love it, then you will break my heart. Because this movie made me squeal with unmitigated delight like a nine-year-old girl.

Just in case anyone reads the blog and wants to visit me in World of Warcraft, I figured I would include some character information. Introverted I may be, but I promise you I won’t bite if you want to send me a tell or an in-game message.

All characters are listed in order of the amount of time I usually play them. In additiona they’re all the US Garona server because that’s the server my friend Richard was on when I started the game.

1. Hemlock, Tauren Hunter. Hemlock is Beast Master spec for ease of leveling and pure pwnage. At this moment he’s around level 24, and I play him far more than any other character. Moo.
2. Barga, Orc Shaman. I started up this toon primarily because I had never been one of the hybrid classes and because I had been reading some of the Warcraft novels focusing on the orcs. Barga seems to be fun, but I’m not a big fan of running out of mana. I need to work on my skill rotation for questing, but that’s a level of committment I haven’t reached with this alt. I’m almost level 12 with this character after completing my fire totem shaman quest.
3. Hrok, Orc Rogue. When I get frustrated with my other characters, I log onto this character to kill things very quickly with lots of big numbers. He’s still hanging out in Razor Hill at level 10.
4. Marilyn, Human Priest. Marilyn used to be a holy-spec priest. I used to level her that way. It hurt. Now she’s full shadow and able to level pretty easily. I’m sure I’ll go back to Marilyn a bit eventually, but right now I’m enjoying the horde side so much that she’s likely to stay at 36 for a while.
5. Mugwort, Dwarf Warrior. I like Mugwort fair enough, but he’s not as fun as my other characters. I’m sure he’ll guilt me into taking him out of Wesfall eventually.

I’ve included links over to the Armory so that you can all look at my gear / talent builds and laugh.