CharlieRock's page

Patience. More or less depending on the players. But the capacity for great patience.

Just use 3.0 pricing since it was easier. I actually used the Mongoose book (mostly for automatons). Sorry if that didn't help.

Over on EN World Clark Peterson from Necromancer Games made an interesting comment:

"And I hate the idea of our player base being fragmented, because that means the game gets fragmented and who is kidding who table top roleplaying--while it will always be my favorite--runs the risk of going the way of the dodo bird. As goes the industry leader, so goes the industry. I dont even want to imagine what would happen to table top roleplaying if 4E fails to dig in and get traction. "

If 4E is unsuccessful, to what extent do you think it will hurt the 'industry'? How will it impact your FLGS? Your favorite game publishers? Your table?

It would effect my FLGS. But not fatally. CCGs and minis actually bring in more money. I know at mine the minis get the lion's share of floor space.

I would call it a stumbler, but not a toppler.
And that is Necro Games wishful thinking that tabletop will flop if D&D does. Did video games die when Atari dropped the ball in the early 80s? Their top dudes bailed and made another company, their divisions (home console, arcade, and computer) didn't cooperate and sales fell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Are you a Hasbro/WotC stockholder? If D&D4 drops would it hurt your personal finances? Then how would that stop you from gaming? How would that stop you from buying more games? Somebody will make money if we still want to buy things. And D&D4 dropping isn't going to plug my want for new books.

Didn't Mongoose make their own version of a 3E PHB? Just renamed the spells and whatnot.
Anyway, I wouldn't mind something like that. Just a "Paizo Players Handbook". Rename some spells, add a pantheon, maybe a 'toolbox' section for creating races. I'd be pretty happy with that.
BTW, I only have the softcover PHB and am looking for the Mongoose version. However, if Paizo makes noise about putting out a PHB I'd hold out for that one.

Old issues get a lot of use in our C&C game. =)

This year we did a Silver Age Sentinels for a bit (less than a month).
Heroes Unlimited lasted some weeks longer. Both campaigns fizzled due to time crunch as they were not the main game for all the players. Seems like soon we will be doing a "second" game again. I'm going to vote for GURPS (probably Supers).

Only eight? This is not so hard to do since I have less then eight by WotC. If I include other-than-WotC D&D3 books ... well,
*Miniatures Handbook (WotC)
*Spell Compendium (WotC)
*Ultimate NPCs (MGP)
*Slayer's Guide Compendium (MGP)
*Aerial Adventure Guide (GG)
*Kingdoms of Kalamar (K&Co)
*Cityworks (FFG)
*Goods&Gear (K&Co)

I would put Dragon Compendium. But I havn't used it much (yet). However, other issues of Dragon I probably have used almost as much as any three books combined.

Whether anyone likes fourth edition or not, we're still going to be geeks, nerds, satanists and losers.

I call this the "Gary Gygax was a Great DM" adage:

Whether you agree that G.Gygax was a great DM or not, the fact that you know who he is makes you a geek to everyone else.

And before that, from 1e to 2e, with still other concerns.

What were the concerns of AD&D gamers going into AD&D2? I wasn't into AD&D, just BECMI D&D which didn't change until D&D3 came out. Actually if you really want to get to it I was into GURPS and didn't pay any attention to AD&D.

Fine, let me play devil's advocate:

Does anyone seriously believe that this particular suggestion is so lacking in merit that it /shouldn't/ be in the book? Will it not in any way be helpful to enough new and old DMs that it's just a waste of print?

I think it is a wasted effort. If the players are that bad at remembering would the DM be necessarily better? Shouldn't the DM keep a copy to remember to place the target item in the dungeon?

"Ok, DM. We have been to every room and took 20 on all our searches while wearing a robe of eyes. Where is the item we need for our quest?"
"What quest?"
"This one."
"Oh, I gave you guys the wrong card. Here you go."
"Aw, man! We're in the wrong dungeon ... again!"
I suppose we need little colored game pieces to represent hit points since people will forget those and not write down the damage they take doing their quests.
"How many hit points do you have?"
"I havn't hit anything yet, but the DM gave me a card for ten points to hit the goblin dudes."
"Oops, wrong card again. You need the kobold one in this dungeon."

Story xp isn't a new concept. Writing down notes for your game isn't new. And getting xp for character driven goals is used conceptually as well. (Look at Chronicles of Ramlar. It was mandatory to make personal goals and fill them to "level up".)

For AD&D?
Try here:
http://forums.rpghost.com/showthread.php?t=51730

The D&D Companion Rules box set had the mass combat rules I used until D&D3 came along. They are reprinted in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. I havn't done 100+ combat yet.
War by AEG has mass combat rules, too. Available from this website here:
http://paizo.com/store/byCompany/a/alderac/featuredBrands/d20System/v5748bt py73su

Just don't show the players the picture. Keep them all to yourself.

I know. It's not really a solution. =/

John Pertwee will always be the standard I will measure other doctors up to. At first I didn't like Tom Baker. He looked too goofy to be the Doctor. But he was just so darn good at it. Same with David Tenet. (especially because Tenet had such a hard act to follow coming right after Christopher Eccleston like that).
Anthony Ainley was my favorite guy to play the Master. Roger Delgado was a hard act to follow with that character, but he did it quite well.

I was the only one that liked Corporal Benton? (yeah, he gets promoted but he was corporal when I first seen him and how I remember him most.)

I especially liked when the Doctor asked him if he was going to comment on the fact that the TARDIS was bigger inside then out (which everyone else has to do, it's like mandatory or something) and he just goes "That's obvious, isn't it?" Cool as a cucumber.

I kept expecting to see him but after awhile I guess he just got out of UNIT. I guess I would, too. Once your enlistments up it's time to go. =)

'Maths' is what we call it in the UK, as opposed to 'Math'.

Well, now I know. Thanks =)

When does math become plural?
Like, I'm seeing "maths" all the time. Isn't math just one big method of using numbers or has that changed?
Honest question. They've changed the vowels since I've been to school too, so anything is possible.

I know why they are getting rid of power attack. Because people hated having to wait around with it until they could pick something really neat, like Sunder!!!
sunder ...
Sunder ...
SUNDERCATS!
Hooo ...

I don't care if i'm in the cool group or not... in fact i'll be over there in that corner reading "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

(Which decidedly puts me in the non-cool category i think).

Darn tootin'! The cool kids all got Lone Wolf: A Kai Disciple books. :P

That was NOT what bogged me down. 0.o

That would be B and D for me.
I'm DMing a 3.5 campaign that is not going to change for quite a few years.
I'm playing in a C&C game.

The team for both campaigns is mostly the same, just one is without girlfriends or wives (guys' game) and the other is all together (family game).

and i think agressive marketing and sticking with the vision that paizo has for dnd will keep the slow death of dnd at bay. we'll see for sure after 4.0, and if it isn't dnd anymore, then version 3.p will send all of that money paizo's way.

Call me blind but I don't see the tabletopRPG dying as a hobby. On D&D-Day down at the local gamestore I say quite a few younger gamers. Ones that just could not have been gaming since the eighties. A few were looking at a AD&D2 PHB on the used bookshelf like it was an antique. My old DM from the eighties team I was on regularly games with a team of five players now whose median age is less then twenty. There are two players in my team too young to buy alcohol.

Actual booksales may be down. That, imo, is more due to some scabs copying books on pdf and giving them out to their buddies. I don't know how many times I have wanted to slap some dude for telling me that paying for my books was dumb because I could've just downloaded them for free from www.freeloadingscamp.com.
The industry may be in trouble. But the hobby itself is rather healthy.

crosswiredmind wrote:

As far as aggro goes - when I GM you can get a monster's attention by hitting real hard or hitting it frequently. If the critter has natural racial, class, or religious foes and they are present in the party then that is where they head.

I have played under GMs that ignore this common sense approach and either make it random (thinking that is fair) or they make it personal by tracking down the player they dislike the most.

That´s what it comes down to - common sense. I don´t need no rule for this, it is just - logical, common-sensical or however you want to put it.

Stefan

And no amount of rules-lawyer fuel and explicite wording will help a team with a commonly senseless DM. Not until they realize what's up and change out the DM.

While a great setting would not get me to pick up D&D4, it would get me to pick up the setting book. If it was that good I would just copy it over to D&D3 or C&C.

For those who object to the idea of zones because it's too video-gamy, bear also in mind that video games got it from early D&D--the level of the dungeon was equal to the challenge level, so the deeper you got, the tougher the monsters were.

That's a bit of a stretch for me. Pac-Man had harder levels the higher you got by increasing the ghosts' speed and decreasing times for powerdots. Even Ping-Pong sped up if you beat the computer and got to the "advanced" stage. That was to test more for reflexes than endurance.

I'll buy that the perception of increased difficulty as the game progresses is a natural and intuitive design. I'm not thinking that it was so original an idea that it can get ripped off of somewhere.

Hey maybe you can get XP when you enter a new area, wouldn't that be great?

While you get XP for defeating monsters you won't get any "quest XP" until you return to talk to the Innkeeper.

Fake Healer wrote:

Everyone buying this book should recieve a free shirt with "BAA" printed on it, but I have no doubt that it will sell well.

FH

Fakey, is it okay if I use your quote to sum up my opinion on a lot of 4E stuff?

Wait! Lemme sell off my junkmail that I scribbled the letters w o t c on the back of, first.

I played the heck out of GURPS Autoduel and GURPS Conan. Unfortunately those didn't carry over to 3rd edition (much less 4th). If you can find them used they are way cool books even just to read.
GURPS Horror and Atomic Horror are pretty gnarly, too.
The core mechanics don't change too much from edition to edition that conversion is very hard.

although I am in favor of 4th edition, sometimes I cannot understand how they think.

Instead of making it downloadable and promote the new edition, they think we are stupid enough to go and buy it.

Their marketing department truly sucks!

This is all starting to remind me of TSR's final days(years) when they were headed by someone who disrespected their fans enough to say something to the effect of "they'll buy anything we put out."

I used to play a lot of RIFTS. I quit when my cousin (our GM) died. Mark, my brother, and I played almost every Palladium game there was throughout the early nineties.
Even non-Megaversed Recon.

Makes me a little sad, because lets face it " Makeing monsters attack based on criteria" is something that happens anyway. I really think a little bit more attention to this would be conducive to quick fun games.

Yeah. But rulerizing it is just lame. New DMs won't learn to think like a monster. Old DMs are going to forget at some point causing a game-interupting rules-lawyering harangue. This is not something that'll streamline a game or make it play quicker.

You could play solo though. Like those old LoneWolf books.
/magna kai mindbolt

You guys can use a setting for any edition. For the most part I had used Mystara a.k.a. the Known World as the setting for our 3.x campaign here. It was the one we used for our first D&D campaign way back before there were "editions". It was the one we felt most "at home" with while playing the "new" third edition (totally skipped AD&D2Ed.)
I could take Pathfinder and run it as an AD&D setting. You could even run it as a d6 Fantasy setting if you wanted to.

Basically what WotC is trying to say is if D&D4 doesn't resemble WoW it won't be from lack of trying.
Is that fair?

Since Goodman supports multiple systems, I bet they will still produce some 3.5 stuff, even if their main focus becomes 4E.

Goodman Games has said they will still be doing 1e and C&C modules. =)

What is your source for this information? Did Goodman games issue a statement that they will no longer be producing DCC material?

Game Trade Magazine describes DCC#52 (due in december) as the last 3.5 DCC to be published.

DM Jeff wrote:

By the way, when it all comes down to it, I sure hope a lot of you put your money where your mouth is and ante up when the time comes to reallly support any 3.5 material. I certainly WILL, and CAN. But I can only imagine Paizo's fearing a "Serenity" backlash:

Browncoats convinced Joss Whedon that Serenity would make more money than Star Wars and he begged them to please get others to watch it to make it #1 and to STAY there. And they utterly, utterly failed him. They spoke big for 2-3 YEARS then went and sat in a corner when they were needed most.

My game groups are all of the 3.5 variety and I have folks who are serious. We haven't even had the chance to use 75% of our current material which is still exciting and fresh and more importantly FUN to us. In fact we can't WAIT to see all the cool stuff we have in play!

So if you're gonna stick, make sure you're not blowing smoke to give Paizo an uninformed decision. Oh, and for whoever may remind me "we don't know anything about 4E yet", I've ALREADY heared ENOUGH! :-)

-DM Jeff

In all fairness to your example, Serenity (when all was said and done) was in the black. So much so that Universal released a special edition of the movie and is investigating if a sequal is worth the investment.

I liked Serenity. I got my copy sitting right on top of my Firefly Box set right now. And I just bought U1 last week. Seems DCC is not going to be put out by Goodman Games any longer so GameMastery doesn't have to compete with them for my gaming dollars now, either.

KnightErrantJR wrote:

crosswiredmind wrote:

If the rules are just OK then people will switch when their favorite campaign setting switches.

Or for the first time in 20 years they won't be picking up "current" sourcebooks for their favorite setting.

Just saying.

I know very few gamers who can resist new material on their favorite setting. I think very few can actually resist the lure of new facts, stats, and tidbits that will keep them in the know.

Yeah. But very little I find in setting books are actual rules. I've got gazeteers from all three editions of D&D, and for games totally unrelated to the d20 system. Usually I buy at a gamestore so I can flip through it. And so far a few pages or sections of rules didn't stop me from buying the book that 90% was descriptive text. I bought quite a few MechWarrior books and didn't have the RPG. Still don't ,really.

Does anyone play this game and if so what experiences have you had with playing?

FH

I played it. It's kind of fun. Not the best card game I've tried but certainly not the worst.

If you want "points of light" in 3e, just buy the Wilderlands box set from Necromancer Games.

Great stuff!

Yup. Somebody went looking around at stuff already out and thought "Gee, I bet I can resell this to rubes."

Enthusiasm for not switching will be high at first. Then more and more 4E products will come out and draw people in. Enthusiasm will diminish as the numbers diminish.

That very well depends on D&DI. All the whizzbang gollygoshgee things for 4e seem to be happening for, at, or on D&DI. Will third party publishers be able to bring their products through this medium? If not I don't see it integrating with the 'main line' stuff WotC will be putting out. Non-integratable to me means ,'it's for another game'.

And if it's for another game ...
=/

On that thought,.....

hypothetical here: what if the SRD component of 4.0 never exists? What happens then?

I think that would be crazy, but I also thought once upon a time that they'd never cancel Dungeon or Dragon, because that would be crazy.

One reason why there would be no SRD for 4e:

No compatibility with D&DI. It just doesn't seem possible to write a program that will allow for all the various things a third party publisher would create. That means whoever makes 4e stuff is either not going to be in D&DI or WotC. You can tell WotC is banking on this D&DI thing to take off.

I just went down to my LGS and picked up U1 yesterday. It was a tough choice between it and D2 (eventually I will be able to collect them all).
All GameMastery mods are beautiful in layout and artwork. Along with well concieved stories. Keep up the great work!

My favorite two player game is CarWars.

Dark Conspiracy - GDW

I found this game book in my attic stash. I bought it, made up some characters (I've always liked GDW's character generation - Traveller, Twilight 2000) but never played it.

Anyone else ever play this one? Did it turn out to be as good as it seems?

Tom

I really liked the character generation process, too. Same with T:2000.

Dark Conspiracy played decent enough. It's problem was that I bought it around the time of my CyberPunk2020 days. I was curious and we played a few games but ultimately we wanted to play Killer Cyborgs with Missles (i.e. CyberPunk) because Dark Conspiracy ... didn't have enough guns.

The last WotC D&D3.x book I got was Rules Compendium.
However, the books I plan on getting will be DCCs, the GamesMastery modules and flipmaps, KenzerCo's KoK, and a few of Mongoose's Slayer's Guides.
I had thought that Necromancer Games' The Wurst of Grimtooth's Traps would be my last book for D&D3.x. I was wrong. So wrong.

Welcome to the 'boards, Rock!

** spoiler omitted **

Thank you, Cosmo.

Twenty-five hardcover books.
Fourteen softcover sourcebooks.
Two boxes full of Dragon magazines.
Over five feet tall stacked total (including adventure modules). And the rest of my team can add another four or five feet.

Why would I start over?

Finally, the Rock is here at Paizo!
Heh, always wanted to say something like that.
If Paizo decides to keep publishing stuff for D&D3.x, especially GamesMastery adventure modules, they can count on my business.
My teammates and I are going to be playing using third edition rules for quite some time (read; many, many years).