Burrowowl

I picked up my 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons books the day they came out. I couldn’t help it; it’s a weakness of mine. I read through the rules, formed a few opinions, and got a hankering to run a game. Problem was that my playgroup is already hip-deep in a 3rd edition Forgotten Realms game, and I didn’t want to rock the boat by taking the reins from our current DM. So I waited. And jotted down some notes here and there about some adventure ideas.

Then, for reasons I would just as soon not go into on a blog, our campaign hit a bump and our DM isn’t really available at the moment. So we cracked open the books and four of us sat down for our first actual 4e game together. Jimbo put together a tough-guy hammer-and-shield Fighter, Daniel brewed up a halfling Warlock (Infernal Pact), and Jasper finally settled on a Warlord after strongly considering making a Cleric.

The new rules were foreign enough to these three that making characters required a bit of explanation, quite a few questions, and more than a little guesswork. When all was said and done, we were able to create three characters hailing from a desperate little foothills town with a Goblin problem. It had taken us about half a game session to make the characters, so I wanted to get straight to the action: they were on their way into Goblin territory to scout out a temporary logging operation. Times are so rough in town that gathering firewood for the season amounts to a military operation. Two skirmishes followed, which gave us a chance to flex our muscles and throw around some dice. A few observations:

• I would have had a really hard time making Goblin Tactics and Tide of Iron make sense to everybody at the table if I weren’t using a battle mat. Miniatures weren’t necessary; I just used some scraps of paper and used the grid to keep track of where everything was.
• Assuring that the party worked well together was a no-brainer. I encouraged them to each have a different party role (defender, striker, and leader, respectively) and the core rules character abilities took care of the rest.
• The Warlord ability Commander’s Strike works wonders along with the Fighter’s Combat Challenge against a badguy that’s trying to disengage from the fight: Fighter takes a double-move to get into position, Warlord goads the Fighter into a free basic attack, and now the fleeing ranged baddie is stuck.
• The Fighter works differently than he used to. Lots more reasonable options in the heat of the moment. Jimbo has been playing Fighters since I was in preschool, and after a little initial hesitation was right on top of his newly-refined party role, using Cleave and Tide of Iron to mop up minions and break up wolfpack flanking maneuvers like nothing. The Fighter rules have changed a lot, but Fighters haven’t really changed at all from what we really think of them as.
• The Warlock worked a lot like I used to wish Magic Users would, back when I thought Evocation spells were really cool. A Warlock can blast away all day, every day, with his curses and Hellish Rebuke really doing the heavy lifting when it came to parting the bad guys from their hit points. That’s the whole point of a “striker” character class, but it seemed to work out better than just reading the books had implied.
• The Warlord suffered from bad die rolls. Really bad die rolls all night. This made his Commander’s Strike and Inspiring Word abilities all the more important; he could be useful when he was rolling twos and threes.
• Whipping up appropriately-challenging encounters was a breeze. About 100xp worth of bad-guys per first-level character made for a pretty easy scrap. Throwing in an encounter of 125xp critters (two gray wolves and a Goblin Sharpshooter) challenged the party enough to blow a handful of healing surges and dropped the Warlock into negative hit points (largely due to some very good die rolls on my part).

Overall, though I’m dismayed by the cause of the interruption in our 3rd edition game, I’m pleased with how this seriously-reworked new edition of Dungeons & Dragons worked out. I am highly interested in seeing what Privateer Press does with the system, if anything. The creation of new character classes strikes me as superficially labor-intensive, but there are a number of design features built into the new system that I think really help keep things on an even keel, particularly in the area of keeping characters of diverse themes useful.

Next time we have a 4e game session, I’ll have to try out the Skill Challenge system a bit. It is intended to make non-combat encounters a bit more playable within the rules framework (as opposed to a bunch of jibber-jabber finally resolved by a single die-roll by a single character), but the math just doesn’t look right to me. We’ll see what happens when we start throwing dice for determining the location of their logging camp. It’ll almost certainly be interesting, but statistically I’m betting that following the DMG’s guidance will lead to a failed encounter.

The above is a fragment of Senator Dodd‘s argument against retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that colluded with the U.S. Government in illegal, unwarranted surveillance in obvious contradiction of both the FISA act and the 4th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He puts it far better than I could. It’s a shame this man won’t be on the ballot for president this November. At least, unlike the presumptive Democratic candidate, he’s still fighting the good fight.

Had a little fun with the Side View Generator today. I wasn’t exactly flattered by some of the transformations (Fitzgerald turns into Deep Throat), but was greatly amused by others. I ran a couple for some frequent commenters. Are you “vulgar?” Or “sprain?” How about “est rus” or “lard” or “porno?”

A personal favorite was the transformation of “Jimbo” into “ninja.” Right on.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons just doesn’t have as many options for spellcasters as previous editions. This isn’t a complaint, just an observation. There will almost certainly be acres of splatbooks available within a year, but for the moment all we’ve got are the core rulebooks, and I think that’s plenty. With the schools of magic gone (no more Fireball-slinging Evokers; that’s a once-per-day spell now), a familiar old character-creation crutch is gone. Let’s limp along on our own and make an themed Wizard, shall we?
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So I was poking around on Prairie Flounder‘s site, and ran into a comment by the Progressive Conservative. Being somewhat libertarian-minded and socially progressive, as well as loving a good oxymoron, this piqued my interest. I followed him back to The Big Stick, a blog espousing a back-to-Teddy-Roosevelt variety of Republicanism that seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts these days.

Did you know that to be a proper conservative these days you’re expected to hold four separate, contradictory opinions on the value of human life? You are to be pro life in the womb, pro death penalty, anti assisted-suicide, and pro war. The precise opposite holds true for progressives. You are expected to be pro abortion (pro choice is a euphemism, let’s face it) , anti death penalty, pro assisted-suicide, and anti-war. This is why when Bill Bennett brings up the abortion issue as something that needs to be talked about in the Obama vs. McCain choice coming up in November, I cannot help but chuckle. It’s a wedge issue, something career politicians dust off every couple of years to drag the rubes into the polls. The Republicans won’t get rid of Roe vs. Wade. It’s against their interest, because the existence of that precedent keeps a lot of people punching that “R” on their ballots.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Democrats would have you think they’re against global warming, particularly with their former front-man and recent Nobel laureate Al Gore leading the charge. Do you know who was in charge of nixing every new nuclear power plant for eight years while vice president? Same guy. Thank him for all the brand-spanking-new coal-burning power plants belching greenhouse gasses into the sky. I think we are currently living in a golden age of political absurdity, where the environmental conservationists rape the land and those religiously convinced that every life has an immeasurable sacred value promote slaughter. Maybe we just need more progressive conservatives. Or maybe some conservative progressives.