Science's Blog - 2old2play

Hasbro Lays the Smack Down on Goldfarb

For those of you who don't know - Michael Goldfarb, a staff blogger for John McCain said some pretty nasty things about gamers last week on McCains offical blog.

" It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others."

After sending nerds into a frenzy all over the inter-web. Hasbro execs. are responding to the slam and they ain't happy.

August 28th, 2008

Michael Goldfarb
1235 S. Clark St, Suite M
Arlington, VA 22202

Dear Mr. Goldfarb,

I was disappointed to read the disparaging intent of your comments regarding Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fans, both in your response to New York Times editors, and on the John McCain campaign website.

Dungeons & Dragons is a global game with millions of consumers in the U.S. and abroad. The brand is owned by Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc.

For fans, the game is essentially about heroism and therefore it is not surprising to us that thousands of military personnel play and enjoy the game. Hasbro, in turn, supports the U.S. Armed Forces by sending multiple crates of game products, including Dungeons & Dragons, to our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Recently a soldier who saw your comments online said, “Wizards of the Coast (the makers of D&D) has sent care packages to the troops on many occasions, providing free gaming supplies in support of our men and women serving the country overseas to help them decompress after hours. McCain's people should really check their facts before they spout off. Does John McCain have no idea how many GIs play D&D?”

We would very much appreciate you not making any more condescending comments about D&D -- as it is a great game enjoyed by millions of people around the world. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Wayne Charness
Senior Vice President
Hasbro, Inc.

Supposedly, Golfarb has appologized. But the only place I can find these apologies are in other peoples blogs. Nothing on the site the orignal slam came from.

Way to alienate gamers douche. When will people wake up and realize that gamer does not equal loser. We are hard working americans who enjoy a hobby. We work, we pay taxes we get married and have childeren. Did you think we didn't vote?

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Game aid for D&D 4e

For those of you who are playing 4e - I have found this game aid to be quite helpful. Go here and download the Magic Set Editor (it's free) and download this template. I use the Rules Compendium to cut and past the exact text (updated with erratta) of my charecters powers on to cards. When my powers are expended in game - just flip the card over. It makes keeping track of encounter and daily powers super simple. If you want to go a small step further get sleves for the cards in two diffent designs - one for encounter powers and one for dailies. This way when you take a short rest you'll be able to quickly identify the powers that you regain use of (your encounter powers) and flip them back over.

If you are DMing. I have found this template to be of use. I make one for each player with Defences and passive perception, insight, arcana, nature, dungeoneering and religion checks. Then I make one for each monster they are going to encounter (you can fit the entire stat block on the card more often than not). If you are usiing an adventure from Dungeon Magazine (or any other pdf.) you can use the select tool to copy and paste and make these in no time.

In game the cards serve a dual purpose. 1 - I use them to track initiative. 2 - I don't have to ask for defences, AC or perception scores. This keeps the game moving much faster and gives me the added bonus of being able to fudge die rolls more easily if the situation calls for it. I use the knowledge skills in advance to make little note cards for the players. If they have a high enough passive knowledge - I give them some information (that their charecter would know) about the monsters they are faceing as expounded in the description of the knowleged skills in the PHB.

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Quick Update: D&D Insider Bonus Tools

Wizards of the Coast have created 2 bonus tools for the D&D Insider. An encounter builder - that helps DMs create encounters for a specific sized party at a specific level without having to do all the math and an ability generator that helps one use the point buy system for generating ability scores (described in the players handbook) without having to do any math. Both of these tools were not working yesterday. Today they are working but clearly still have some bugs. I for one hope that the shoddiness of these tools is not a foreshadow of the upcoming suite of tools currently in development.

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Shadows over Camelot review.

I thought I’d take a break from D&D for a post to talk about a board game. This week at my local board game night we played “Shadows Over Camelot”. Shadows, produced by Days of Wonder, won a Spiel Das Jahre (German game of the year) in 2006. And with good reason.

The game is a co-operative game where the players (4-7) work together against the game. On each turn you must first choose to draw a black card (which speed the failure of quests), place a siege engine outside Camelot, or lose one life point. When we play we call this part of the turn “choosing a bad thing”. Then, you get to perform one heroic action – traveling to different quests, moving toward completing those quests , battling siege engines, or drawing white cards. You may also use your knights special ability on your turn. Each knight has a different special ability that can contribute to the group achieving its goals. You can also lose one life point to perform a different heroic action from the one you did already this turn.

The goal of the game is to complete quests and gain white swords to place around the round table. Each completed quest earns a number of swords. Each failed quest earns black swords. The players win if they can fill the round table with more white than black swords. The players lose if Camelot is besieged by 12 siege engines, or if there are more black swords than white when the round table is filled. Here is the catch – one player may be a traitor. The traitor works against the rest of the group while trying to remain unnoticed.

The game is really fun to play because of it’s co-operative mechanic, but the possibility of a traitor in the midst keeps you guessing and provides a good amount of dramatic tension. It usually isn’t long (at least with my group) before the accusations start flying. Wrongly accusing someone of being a traitor earns the group a black sword, so players need to exercise some caution. The traitor can do some serious damage by accusing people he knows not to be traitor (remember, it only takes 6 black swords for the players to lose). Every time I’ve played this game it is won or lost by only a sword. It always feels desperately close at the end – which is great.

The components are pretty good too. Each knight has his own unique figure (unpainted) and a card with basic rules, his special ability, a picture of him and a space for your secret role card(loyal or traitor). Each knight also gets a color coded 6 sided die to keep track of life points with (you start with 4 and can gain some for defeating quests or from a few special white cards). There are also pieces depicting the holy grail, Excalibur and Lancelot’s armor (which you can quest for). The board is pretty cool looking.

I give this game a high recommendation. But you don’t just have to take my word for it. It’s been reviewed on boardgamegeek.com nearly 5000 times with an average score of 7.35 of 10 (and the people over there are pretty harsh critics) and it has a 4.5 of 5 star rating at boardgameratings.com. If you’ve got $40 and a good group of board gaming friends, pick this one up.

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DMs and 4e (part 1)

I’ve held off writing this post until I’ve had a chance to run an adventure in 4e. But know that I’ve had a chance to act as DM let me tell you about 4e from a DMs perspective.

First of all the DMG(Dungeon Masters Guide) is considerably thinner than in previous editions. This is because magic items and prestige classes (in the guise of paragon paths) are now found in the Players Handbook. What the DMG does have is plenty of advice on how to run a game. It’s almost like a thicker version of Robin’s Laws that is specific to D&D. This is great for new DMs. When I first started DMing I could have used some of this advice and as an experienced DM it’s good to be reminded.

As for the mechanics of the game, the monster stat blocks are much improved. There aren’t a bunch of low level , flavorful (but not useful in combat) powers listed. The only things you see are the things you need. This makes running monsters much easier.

Furthermore, there are only 3 possible durations – until the end of your next turn, until the beginning of your next turn and save ends. Powers recharge based on a d6 roll at the end of every turn. What does this mean for DMs? Very little of your mental energy is spent tracking effects or counting rounds until recharge. You can concentrate on role-playing and tactics instead of bookkeeping during a combat scene.

Minions are also pretty cool. They allow you to throw a whole bunch of fodder at the PCs to slow them down (and hopefully damage them a bit) before they get to the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy). Minions are easy to keep track of too. Just 1 hp so they die if they are hit – and standard damage (no rolling) keeps combat moving fast. The players will feel awesome because they killed a lot of baddies and you will have a couple of rounds to let your BBEG loose all of his cool powers.

Designing encounters is also pretty easy. One basically has a “budget” of xp to spend on a battle of a certain level. Throw in monsters and traps until the xp for the encounter approximately equals your budget. Since the monsters have different roles and are listed by level and role in a handy index at the back of the MM(Monster Manual) it takes no time at all to build an interesting encounter. Moreover, you can easily design your own monsters by taking the ones they’ve given you and reflavoring them, and maybe swapping out a damage type or a power to make them fit your theme.

There is more to like for DMs, but I’m nearing five hundred words so I’ll save it for another post.

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to leave a comment or PM me.

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D - the boy, the myth, the gamer

I know it's been a while since I've posted, and I assure you, more thoughts on 4e are on their way evnetually. RL has had me pretty busy lately.

That aside, I stumbled upon this thread tody and it might be the best actual play post I've ever seen. Tony and his 7 year old son (known as D) are playing through the 1st 4e module "Keep on the Shadowfell" using the quick start rules, legos and D's boundless imagination. This kid is a genius and I want to play with him.

You have to read the thread. It will make you want to be a kid again (and play D&D in a whole new way).

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See D&D 4th edition in action

Hello again everyone. I'm still working on my next article, but in the meantime I thought some of you might like to see the 4th edition in action. In the latest D&D podcast (episode 23 special video episode) the R&D department at Wizards plays out a Paragon Tier (that is level 10-20) battle. It's a good opportunity to see the mechanics in action. Check it out here.

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Who will like 4e?

I’ve played every edition of D&D. Each one offers some things to like and some things that can get on your nerves. For the next few posts I'm going to share some of the things there are to like about 4th edition. I'm going to focus of a few different types of players and explain what I think 4e offers to each. In today’s post I'm talking about the newbie.

If you are new to D&D or role-playing games, you will probably like 4e. There are five things I think make 4e a newb friendly game. First, the rules system is exception based. This means that there are only a few simple rules that one must learn to know how to play the game. In most situations these few rules will tell you what to do. However, the game achieves complexity, because all of your powers let you break these rules. So you don’t have to read the whole rule book. If you know the basic rules, and how your powers let you break those rules, you can play the game. All told this will add up to about 30 (at most) pages of the 315 page player hand book that you’ll need to familiarize yourself with. Really you can probably play with much less. The Keep on the Shadowfell game module comes with a 3 page set of quick start rules and 5 character sheets and that was more than enough for my gaming group to start playing with.

Secondly, the character roles are a great help. They let you know what your character should be doing, and they help you choose a character that will be fun for you to play. Really character roles have always been a part of D&D but in older editions they were implied from the handbooks. If you weren’t familiar with the D&D world, you learned your role the hard way – dying a lot. WotC has taken the chance with the new books to tell you explicitly the role they’ve designed a character class for. If you’re playing with experienced players they won’t be annoyed when you send your ranger into the fray in front of the fighter, because your character role tells you that you should focus on mobility and quick strikes from an advantageous position. You could still play your character against it’s role, but if you do it’s more likely that you’ll be doing it on purpose, not because you didn’t know what you were “supposed” to be doing.

The third thing that newbies will like about 4e is the relative ease of the bookkeeping. Previous editions had some enigmatic rules involving tables and cumbersome mechanics that had you counting rounds of play. Trying to keep track of everything was sometimes more work than filing your taxes. 4e has cut a lot of that down. Most effects last only one turn (a few last until the end of the encounter), so they are easy to track. And old pros will notice that there are far fewer skills on the character sheets. That’s because they’ve rolled similar skills together (for example pick locks, pick pockets, disarm traps, and slight of hand are all covered by thievery).

Another advantage to 4e if you’re new to D&D is that, right now, 4e is new for everyone. You won’t have to feel so clueless, because even the old vets will be learning the new system. Everyone will have questions. Everyone will have to look up some rules during the game. You won’t stand out as a newbie as much.

The final thing I’d like to comment on is the amount of advice the new books give to new players. There are sections on how to give your character personality and make her more three dimensional. There are little tidbits like “if you want to be otherworldly and mysterious, graceful and intelligent, able to teleport around the battlefield, or a member of a race that favors wizard, rogue or warlock classes” play an eladrin. Or “Experts trackers and scouts, rangers are wilderness warriors who excel at hit-and-run tactics. If you want to master both bow and blade, vanish into the woods like a ghost, and bring down your foes before they know you’re there, play a ranger.” The books do a very good job at helping you find ways to maximize your fun while you play.

Well those are my reasons why a newbie will have fun with 4e. Look for my upcoming posts where I’ll tell you why I think DMs, tacticians, players who like being super cool, and gaming groups who have dispersed across the country will like 4e.

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My very first gaming blog

So I’ve decided to try out this whole blogging thing and I figure I need to set it up with some kind of theme or I’m never going to do it regularly enough. So I’m going to talk about games. But here’s the catch – not video games. As a gamer, I enjoy all kinds of games – video games, board games, card games, role-playing games, really just about anything that is designed well or has a cool theme. So, I’ve decided to let Tank, J-Cat and the rest cover the video game beat. I’ll put my $0.02 in on other types of games.

For those of you who don’t know, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) released a new version of the classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons last Saturday. I’m going to start out my blog with a series on D&D and the fourth edition. Check back in the coming days and weeks for articles cover topics like: Reviews of the Core Rule books, Is 4e really a WoW rip-off? What makes 4e fun (or not so fun)? A primer on my 4e campaign, A n00b’s guide to character creation, and more. When the D&D well starts to run dry, look for my reviews on various board and card games. I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts and hearing your feedback.

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