May 2

30 Day D&D Challenge – Day 9

Favourite character you haven’t played.

This is a pretty tricky question as when it comes to D&D I have played all the characters I have ever created, the closest I could think of would be a cat-like creature for a friends Red Steel campaign.

I can’t really recall much about him apart from the fact he was incinerated by a fireball lobbed by an enemy wizard while he was levitated and picking off the enemy with a bow.

 

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May 1

RPGBA – End of an era

Today marks the end of an era in gaming blogs, the RPGBA has ceased operations.

It wasn’t long ago that I joined and I posted this article last year about it.  I shall certainly miss the benefits it offered which was the traffic it generated for the blog, the rss feed and the sense of a wider community.

Scot Newbury of of Dice and Dragons has picked up the mantle with the rss feed and a Google+ group so see you at Google+ .

 

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May 1

30 Day D&D Challenge – Day 8

Favourite Character You Have Played.

Of the handful of characters I played my all time favourite was an AD&D 2nd edition Chronomancer called Garvine of Shadowdale.  The class came from the TSR supplement about a specialist wizard that could manipulate time and was probably the only sort of specialist I ever played.

He was human and hailed from Shadowdale in the Forgotten Realms and always had his quartz crystal in the shape of an hourglass.

There was something special about him, I enjoyed the fact that the spells I had may not directly injure people but could do other fantastic effects; like push an opponent a few minutes into the future which would temporarily remove them from combat.

Early on in his career he obtained a wand of lighting bolts which proved to be very useful to the group and he wasn’t shy of entering hand to hand combat either with his staff and battle cry of “swingy-swingy-clonk”.

The funny thing was that if I was to say the battle cry before I rolled the die to hit, I was nearly always successful in my endeavours to strike my target.

We stopped playing when Garvine got to 8th level, which was the highest level I had ever reached as a player.  Somewhere in a folder I still have the character but I guess it would need updating to the latest rules to play him.

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April 30

Kickstarter – Fifth Edition Fantasy Adventure Modules

New adventures for the 5th edition of the world’s first fantasy RPG! World-neutral, stand-alone, and ready to drop into your campaign!

Goodman Games is once again launching another Kickstarter and this time it’s a collection of adventures for D&D5.  I shall be backing this project as Goodman Games have always come through with the goods.

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April 30

RPG Blog Carnival April 2015 – The Combat Experience

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This month the subject of the carnival is The Combat Experience and it is being hosted by RPG Alchemy.

Love it or leave it combat is one of those parts of the system that has more than it’s fair share of table time so finding a system that the players engage with is something that is always something I look for.

At school I studied fencing and attended an after school fencing club, the romantic ideal of swinging a blade was what attracted me to the idea. Since then I’ve always checked to see how a combat system models something as simple as feints, parries and riposte.

When I started gaming combat was something I enjoyed, as it gave me an outlet to swing swords or blast away with rayguns.  I remember finding Pheonix Command and relished looking up on the various tables to see where someone had been shot.  While this appealed to me as a games master it was very time consuming for the players as I had to perform a few calculations and look up the result.

While Phoenix Command handles gunfights and the aftermath of being shot I was very disappointed by the hand to hand side of things; even with the hand to hand supplement things never got any better.  Millenniums End also had a novel way of doing things, align a template over a silhouette of a person and then you could work out where you hit.  This also worked for hand to hand and I remember an afternoon of two players consistently kicking each other in the groin for what seemed like ages; the happy spree was broken up when one of the combatants switched locations and axe-kicked his opponent in the head.

I even tried playing Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) but I was confused more by the game mechanics than the combat system, add percentage this to skills etc.

Warhammer 1st edition had a pretty solid combat system that was only slightly wonky but did cater for hit locations.

In the end I decided that I preferred a system that gave me the detail if I was after it, something the narrative games like FATE cater for and the system is a lot more cinematic and pulpy which is something I always enjoy playing with.

 

 

 

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April 30

30 Day D&D Challenge – Day 7

Favourite Edition.

I’ve been gaming since the 1st edition of AD&D, even though I had the red box edition of D&D I never really got around to playing it.

Taking into account all the editions of the game with the exception of D&D4 or D&D5, I would probably say that my favourite edition would have to be either 3.5 or Pathfinder; both these editions expanded upon a game I loved and made it better in a number of ways.

 

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April 26

Kickstarter – Epyllion, a Dragon Epic RPG

Play as a clutch of young drakes who must use the power of friendship to protect their homeland from an ever-growing Darkness.

This is something I haven’t seen since the old Council of Wyrms setting, a game where you can play a dragon.

The game has funded by quite a large margin so it could well be worth backing it.

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