tylerthehobo's page

attributed to management earlier in this threadWere the magazines losing money?

Absolutely not. As far as I know, the sales of the magazines were not a factor in this decision. We're actually very pleased with the sales of the magazines, and in particular with our growing subscriber lists.

B.S. No one junks a magazine because its performance improves. Yes, the corporate folks are being classy about this and not selling each other up the river as the party at fault, but we're not children and deserve to be treated with respect for our dedication to this hobby. Many of us have been playing D&D and supporting these magazines for 30 years and to give us a saccharine-infused press release as a farewell is pathetic, wrong, and unprofessional. Best of luck - I'll buy my gaming gear elsewhere, as now the playing ground has been leveled so that Paizo is just like Goodman Games or anyone else making accessories, instead of providing a valuable service to the communty. I hope WotC stops getting spooked by World of Warcraft and trying to turn everything into web-content...

As an aside: How interested would people be in seeing some affiliations tailor made for an Adventure Path?

This would be great! I, too, was extraordinarily interested in the Affiliations section of PHB2. I'm in the midst of running Age of Worms for a party online, right now, and side quests are certainly of interest now that they're becoming more powerful. Something like Affiliations to serve as a dovetail for these quests would be great stuff...

G'day fellow DM's and PC's everywhere. The thing that I would like to ask is how would you convert Age of worms to the 1st edition rules. This may come as a shock to some people, but there are some of us who think that it is more challenging to play the old, almost original version from way back in the 80's. Is a conversion possible, Seeing that 43HD or what ever monsters with all those "standard abilities" are usually not the norm. What do you guys think of this fossil question?

Age of Worms has a very "old school" feel to it (I say old school cautiously, as I started playing with the pre-yellow-spine AD&D books and early basic sets, as a kid). I think that a lot of it would align well with 1st edition flavor and mechanics. That said, rampant substitution of monsters to achieve HD balance, as you noticed, might be necessary.

Bumping this one from almost a year ago. Went to set up an RPGA sanctioning for a current Dungeon mod, and it's not on the RPGA list... Any news on this? They seem to only have stuff from issue 130 in the system now...

...and now there aren't *any* Dungeon adventures in the RPGA event-setup menu... I emailed the RPGA but did not hear back. Can anybody at Paizo lend a hand here?

So, I ask again: What do you want to see done?

I'd like to see more fluff about campaign varieties. These are covered well in the back of the ECS book, and to an extent in other books, but more guidance for DM's of how all of the Eberron stuff, and it is pretty divergent, can be packaged together is nice. It took me well over a year before I hit upon a jackpot that worked with my party - mimicking the setup of Futurama to have the party essentially be a messenger service/delivery service used by the Dragonmarked houses. They work as men/women-without-a-house mercenary guards on seemingly mundane missions (e.g. deliver this wand to this wizard), and end up falling into adventure after adventure. Yes, it's corny and a ripoff, but it's working well.

An article that gives a few campaign ideas of how to put the campaign source material to good use would be hip. Eberron doesn't lend itself to the dungeon-crawling high fantasy stuff of other settings, and it shouldn't have to. Seeing where everyone takes it is pretty interesting to me.

Bumping this one from almost a year ago. Went to set up an RPGA sanctioning for a current Dungeon mod, and it's not on the RPGA list... Any news on this? They seem to only have stuff from issue 130 in the system now...

tylerthehobo wrote:

1) Preparation -

So, do you think it's just a good idea in general to just take some external notes? Use notecards, make rule notes, familiarize yourself with everything you're going to need and have a good set of notes to run from? What's funny is that in some ways it sounds like more work than my other games. But it makes sense..

Well, yeah, using pre-fab mods, if you prep with them, can take just as much time as creating one on the fly. BUT, chances are good that someone else's elbow grease has created balanced encounteres, applied a good plot, etc. The major actual practice that I apply to prep of pre-fabs is to make notes in the margins regarding rules. E.g. the effects of spells, some basic notes about monsters... If the monsters are in the MM or another book I have, I usually stick a post-it note on the edge of the page and write the name of the monster on the part of the note that hangs out of the book - that lets me get to it quickly when combat comes. Likewise, if I'm using minis, I always pick the minis for creatures out of my minis boxes and put them in a tupperware container for transit to the game. That way, I have only the figures I'll be using handy, and don't need to dig through hundreds to find the hippogriff or elemental.

tylerthehobo wrote:

2) Know your audience

Actually, that worries me. I'm going to be running this on GhostOrb, so I have NO idea who I'm dealing with. I'm sure it's all well and good, 'cause they're all gaming enthusiasts like me (says he who hasn't played a D&D game in 3 years), but the fact is, part of being a good DM is feeling out the group. And if you don't know your players.. that's not so easy.

Well, if you play with the same players over and over again, even online, you'll learn their interests. I'm running Age of Worms via PbP now, and have found what makes many of my players (although not all) tick, so that I can gear the game towards them. Fr'instance, I was massively abbreviating descriptions to begin, because I thought that's what they want, but I've found many of the players actually really dug the longer passages I wrote - now I spend more time on exposition.

Just due to the amount of effort you've placed on discussing this online, it sounds like you're already well ahead of the game. Have fun with it.

How does one go about making a published adventure seem like it's ones own? Give me some help here. I worry that I won't be able to do the Age of Worms justice if I don't put some serious thought into how I'm going to run them successfully.

I've found two key steps to make a published adventure work.

1) Preparation - It sounds stupid, but reading through a mod a few times before you run it is key. Especially passages you'll need to read aloud, and of secondary importance the stat blocks of monsters and NPCs. Even in the finest quality pre-fab mods there are typoes or stylistic errors in passages that make them hard to read aloud. Familiarity and an editing pencil will help quite a lot, here. The secondary part of preparation is to focus on the stat blocks - do you know the effects of all special abilities and spells your opponents have? Make notations in the borders of the module.

2) Know your audience - If your players will be bored to tears by a passage, or if something is inappropriate for your group (E.g. if you run games for your kids and they're young, you might want to remove really grisly or adult details from a description), modify the adventure. Nobody says you have to stick to the script. I've been running Age of Worms for a few months, and I took some liberties with the first module to make it fit my players more.

Both of the above sound elementary, but they're worth brushing up on. Green Ronin Games' "Advanced Gamemasters' Guide" gives lots of other great tips for adapting pre-fab adventures. (In full disclosure, I was a playtester for that book.)

I just checked out the D&D homepage and noticed in their overview of Dragon #339 no mention is made of a Wormfood article. I guess this means its 'kapootz' for the Wormfood section eh?

I wouldn't make that assumption - didn't one of the recent issues of Dragon not carry a wormfood article? The most recent did, however. I think from the get go it was going to be an occasional Dragon piece, when appropriate.

wait...WotC books used to have indices? ;)

I have a good friend who works at a big-mega-book-shop, and based on the security that they apply to their employees, I'd gander a guess that the open packs have nothing to do with dishonest employees - the staff are policed quite a great deal at the big box shops.

I am new (kinda) to Greyhawk. I used play D&D back in middle school and he play a mix of Dragonlance and Greyhawk, we where just out to kill things. Know I starting the AoW campain, and I am curious where in greyhawk the town is? I have the 4 part poster from the recent dungeon mags, but if you dont mind tell me in conical directions like NE map section on the left middle, becasue I don't know any land marks on the maps, and I am not sure which map came with which issue.

Thanks,
Jon

It's kind of East-Northeast of the City of Greyhawk.

Anyone played Castles and Crusades, yet? I'm hearing lots of buzz - apparently Gary Gygax had a hand in designing a rules lite version of d20, is the general consensus. Sounds neat, but how does it play? Anybody digging it? hating it?