Anyone else think those play-by-mail ads are getting more annoying by the issue? Yeesh. It's embarassing to see them in there... I sure hope that the contract doesn't go for much longer.
Or am I the only one who absolutely hates them?
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Did you guys upgrade the servers or something? It seems a lot faster today.
Yes, I know, we already have two active threads about Wil Save. But they're all about how people love or hate the article. I'd like a slightly different focus here. :-) With Wil Save gone, there's an extra page available in Dungeon. What would you like to see in that space? Personally, I've got two ideas. First, I'd like to see a Wil Save-type column, either with a regular writer like Wil or with a rotating list of guest writers. We'd get the same kinds of complaints, but if it were well done it'd keep a lot of the Wil Save fans happy. Alternatively, and perhaps less controversially ;-) I'd *love* to see a monthly article by Rich Burlew. He's a pretty hard-core gamer, he's got the design chops to be acceptable to the audience, he's well-known enough to be a reasonable bookend, and he's an excellent writer. It doesn't even have to be a Wil Save-type article... I'd love to see a recurring article where he talks about creating villains, NPCs, a campaign world, etc. A lot of the material on his website, basically, but reworked a bit for the new format, and expanded on a bit hopefully. :-)
OK, we've already got two threads about Wil Save, but I thought we needed another. ;-) Specifically, let's put in our suggestions for what we'd like to see *replace* Wil Save. No arguments about whether Wil Save was good or not, just give your ideas on what that page should be used for now that Wil's stopped writing it. Personally... Hmm. Honestly, I'd like to see an article along the lines of what Wil Save was supposed to be, which is just someone writing about his life and experiences in gaming. Preferably someone at least moderately famous, for the simple reason that it'd help pull in readers. (Even if you don't like the idea, "sacrificing" one page to increase readership by, say, 5% would make a *major* difference in the amount of money Dungeon has to pay for all the other cool stuff that we all enjoy.) But more importantly, someone who can *write*, and who actually does game on a regular basis. I don't even care if they play D&D regularly, as long as they have a basic understanding of the rules and have played every so often. Gaming is gaming, and while there are differences between the flavours, for the most part, the meta-game activities that Wil Save was supposed to be about the same no matter what the game is. Failing that, I'd love to see articles from Rick Burlew on creating and running a campaign. I've read through most of the material on his website, and it's fantastic. (Seriously. Go read it. http://www.giantitp.com/ ) I'd love to see those articles updated and put into Dungeon. They're *exactly* what I'd love to see more of in Dungeon... Concrete examples, yes, but more importantly, the thought process behind the creation of those examples. Awesome stuff. Plus, Rick's a pretty good writer. :-)
I'm thinking of starting a new D&D campaign based on some ideas I've got. I usually create my own campaign setting, with its own unique villains, storyline, etc, but overall the world is pretty generic. The classes are the same, the spells are the same, the races are the same, the monsters are the same, etc, etc. So it's pretty typical stuff as far as gaming is concerned. This time, the world is going to end up being pretty different... Differences on the scale of Eberron, in fact. The basic rules are still there, as are the basic classes, but a lot of the world concept is going to be different, and there are a lot of new classes (mostly prestige classes) and new monsters. Maybe even a new PC race, although I'm not sure about that. I haven't seen a compelling reason for that yet. Anyway, what I want to know is, who's gone through this kind of process? Obviously Keith Baker has, and considering how inventive D&D folks typically are, I doubt he's particularly unique in that respect. (He's just better at it than the rest of us, I guess. ;-) ) So for those who have done it, what kinds of things are different from normal? What I'm looking for is advice more on the out-of-game stuff... Things like, is it reasonable to ask specific players to take specific classes, in order to see how they work in game? If so, how do you reward the player for letting you do that to them? Is it reasonable to increase the rate at which players gain XP, so that you can see some of the later things sooner than normal? Or much scarier, what if you have to reduce the benefit of something because it's unbalancing? Increasing something's effectiveness is pretty easy to handle -- I've never met a player who objected to having their character suddenly made better! -- but is it a major problem to have to weaken an overpowered feature or spell? Or is it easier to get away with if the players know that they're playtesting something new? Any other considerations that I haven't thought of?
Anyone else having problems with Canadian subscriptions? :-( My latest issue of Dungeon just arrived yesterday, only about a week late. The previous one just plain vanished... The replacement copy only took about a week and a half. My latest Dungeon is still missing in transit, although admittedly it won't actually be late until it doesn't show up today. The weird thing is that sometimes it's here in like 2 weeks or less, and sometimes it's really late or just missing, so I never know when I'm actually going to get them. :-( It's a darn good thing they're good magazines or i wouldn't be putting up with all this... ;-)
OK, this is getting silly. By the time I finish writing a 2-paragraph response, the website has timed out and I have to wander around for a bit before it remembers who I am. Normally it boots me to the store and loses my post. I've gotten into the habit of selecting the full text of anything I'm about to post before I hit "submit" so that once I get back to the "reply" or "post new topic" page, I can just paste the text back in and hopefully beat the timeout. In case it helps: Win2K Pro, Firefox.
Guys, please fix your email system. I sent you an email on Friday and haven't heard anything back yet. :-( At the very least get something that'll send an auto-response so we know if you've received our emails? Anyway, my Dungeon 121 has vanished into the ether somewhere between your printers and my house. Could you please ship me a replacement?
Some people really like Wil's article (I'm among them, although I haven't seen 118 yet so who knows) and others really don't like it. ASEO on here came up with a great way of dealing with it: after reading Wil's article, he writes his own counter-article. Keeping in mind that I like Wil's article... I think ASEO's is ten times better. The first-level campaign thing was inspirational, and who could possibly deny that the image of playing D&D with grenade rings and spent casings marking players' actions is moving and almost surreal? So here's my suggestion: Get Wil and ASEO to work together or against each other, however you want to describe it. Instead of giving Wil a full page, give him half the page and give ASEO the other half. After Wil writes his article, give it to ASEO so he can write his counter-article, or whatever sort of arrangement you guys come up with. Anyway, it was just an idea. :-)
Hey guys, It's come up a couple times that people have mentioned that email sent to Customer Service goes missing. Since there's no automated reply or anything, no-one knows if you've received their email or not, or if it's gone missing, or if you're ignoring it, or what. (*I* know you don't ignore them, but some people obviously do feel that way -- I've seen posts about it.) I have a suggestion for you to help clear that problem up a little... Well, first would be to get a functional mail server, but I'm sure you're working on that anyway. :) I'd also suggest getting a ticket-handling system that'll send an automatic response to any incoming email. It'll also help you track customer service incidents a little better. The one we've been using at work is OTRS, available from http://otrs.org . It was built by a very friendly group in Germany. It's a web application, so you can set it up pretty easily to be accessible from anywhere in the world, which is handy if you need to check things from home. You can also set it up so that customers can log in to view their own tickets, but that's not as nicely set up. The nice thing about OTRS is that, in addition to being very well-designed, it's also open source, which means it's free to set up -- all it takes is a spare computer to run it on. We ran a technical support department with 7 agents and 40 or 50 customers using an old P3 733MHz. If you guys do decide to go that route and need help, feel free to contact me. I've set up at least ten different OTRS machines (for various upgrades and tests) so I've gotten pretty good at it. :)
ASEO mentioned this in the Failed Wil Save thread, but I thought it was cool enough to deserve its own thead. The idea was that characters gain all the normal benefits of levelling up, except that their HP stay at the first-level maximum. Skills, particularly sneaky skills like Move Silently or Hide, become much more important. Even a simple fight with a couple orcs could be deadly. Tensions always run high. Sounds like an awful lot of fun to me. :-) So, how would this kind of campaign be balanced? Leaving the higher-CR creatures intact would make them almost unkillable for PCs, dooming the players to constant fights against kobolds and goblins and the like. But if you restrict everything to one HD, that's equally unrealistic -- can you imagine an ancient dragon having the same hit dice as an orc? Maybe you could add hit dice based on CR, so monsters from CR6-10 for example would have up to 2 hit dice, monsters from CR11-15 would have three, and so on. You could also do it by creature size -- Large creatures can have up to 2 HD, Huge up to 3 HD, Gargantuan up to 4 etc, or possibly on an exponential scale so Huge has up to 4, Gargantuan up to 8, etc. (I forget the actual order of sizes). Or combine the two, so a Huge CR6 creature would have 4HD. What about spell damage? If left unchecked, a well-placed Fireball spells instant death for anyone it hits. Admittedly that's a lot of fun for the players when they're the ones tossing the fireballs, but it's not so great when the entire party's annihilated in a single firey burst. Higher-level spells can be expected to annihilate entire groups at once -- meteor swarm is your friend ;-) -- but some of the lower-level spells suddenly become horribly overpowered. Here's an idea of my own... Give the characters an extra hit point every fourth or fifth level, or alternatively give them the choice to spend their bonus ability score point on an extra hit point instead. That second choice might be better, because it means the player has to give up the ability point bonus to get the extra hit point. In either event, it does give the characters a slow increase in their ability to take damage. Then again, Toughness gives three extra hit points, so the players still have the chance to make their characters tougher. Maybe put a limit on Toughness so you can only take it once or twice? Anyway. Like I said, it was a cool idea that really caught my interest. What does everyone else think?
OK, something that's come up a couple times in a couple threads is the sheer complexity of some of the characters we use. By this point, how many of us haven't seen a half-orc paladin, or a vampire half-dragon kobold fighter/wizard, or other crazy combination of things, right? So what I'm wondering is... are we overusing these kinds of characters? Obviously PCs are going to be bizarre, and most players have more fun playing something really bizarre rather than "level 3 human cleric" or whatever. But what about our villains? As DMs, we're always trying to come up with interesting and memorable villains, that's the whole point of the thing. But do any of you overdo it? Or can it even be overdone? My thinking here (sorry, I'm prolly not very coherent at the moment, I'm typing between other things and I'm a bit distracted) is that if all of our villains are really super-memorable because of the number of templates or the juxtaposition of race/class or whatever, perhaps none of the villains are really all that memorable? If every bad guy is really bizarre and unique, then no-one really stands out. At least that's what I'm wondering about. :-) Would it maybe be better to have most villains (particularly the main villain's minions, unless you have big plans for them in the future) be a little more vanilla in flavour? So instead of having the big baddie's trusted lieutenant be a Paladin/Blackguard half-dragon or some goofiness like that, perhaps it's enough to have the guy simply be a high-level evil human fighter, perhaps with a distinctive scar or something to give him a little character. That way, the big baddie really stands out as being truly exceptional. The PCs also stand out -- instead of being yet another unusual person, they're true wonders. Yeah, sorry, this is less coherent than it should be. So for anyone who understands what I've been trying to say... ;-) Do you try to make all of your characters really unique and special, or do you reserve that level of interest and detail for the main characters and let the less important characters be more straight-forward?
Are you guys getting hit harder than you expected? :) I'm just asking because sometimes the site slows to a crawl, and I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed it or if I'm the only crazy one. :) |