Today is Worldwide D&D Gameday. I thought it would be good to share our experiences.
I'm prepared to run the standard adventure at one venue. I'm also prepared to run the battle between the colossal red dragon vs. the 4 20th level characters that was recently posted on the WotC site at two venues.
Today is Worldwide D&D Gameday. I thought it would be good to share our experiences.
I'm prepared to run the standard adventure at one venue. I'm also prepared to run the battle between the colossal red dragon vs. the 4 20th level characters that was recently posted on the WotC site at two venues.
Well, we're slogging through the Age of Worms for our game day, just starting Chapter 2 (I believe) with anywhere from 1 to 3 new faces at the table to act as proper meat shields for the cleric ... I hope ... then it's on to my GURPS campaign - wherein the group makes like Damnation Alley across the Rocky Mountains, loses the drivetrain on thier RV and THEN finds out that the Unquiet Dead are large and in charge west of the mountains ... or worse, that the reality warp that happened almost 3 years ago game time had ... unpredictable effects in Hollywood ...
I'm conveniently doing nothing because my DM is currently trying to run a Hero System game instead of our regular D&D game. It really pisses me off, because there are a couple of people that like the system, but the rest of us (myself included) hate it.
I don't even feel like going to the game on National D&D Gaming Day if we're not even playing D&D!
or worse, that the reality warp that happened almost 3 years ago game time had ... unpredictable effects in Hollywood ...
Oh, do tell. Please?
Drinking some coffee before getting on the local train in 30 minutes to head out to the Suburbs and my friend's FLGS to run the WotC adventures. I got requested by the group of kids I ran last year at the shop. Those kids totally rocked and they said they had a present for me.... better be good...
Drinking some coffee before getting on the local train in 30 minutes to head out to the Suburbs and my friend's FLGS to run the WotC adventures. I got requested by the group of kids I ran last year at the shop. Those kids totally rocked and they said they had a present for me.... better be good...
Good luck, Carnivore! Hopefully it all goes well for you, the FLGS here didn't even bother with the Game Day. :(
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Hi everyone,
my flgst sports a general roleplaying day - D&D is just one of several games available for playing, but two tables are quite a chunk of it - especially considering the fact that "Das Schwarze Auge"/ "The Dark Eye" is the single most popular fantasy rpg here in Germany and two of its authours will GM:
- Arcane Codex - Dark Magic and Epic Battles with authour Alex Jung (6 seats)
- Das Schwarze Auge [The Dark Eye]- with DSA authour Jörg Raddatz (3 free seats left)
- Das Schwarze Auge [The Dark Eye]- with DSA authour Heike Kamaris (6 seats)
- Dungeons & Dragons (6 seats) - many goodies: floor plans, miniatures, dice, and overlays
- Dungeons & Dragons (3 free seats left) - many goodies: floor plans, miniatures, dice, and overlays
- Degenesis - Primal Punk RPG (6 seats)
- Space Gothic - action filled SF RPG (5 seats)
- Unknown Armies - a rpg about powers and consequences (6 seats)
Good thing is that I spend this weekend with my gf about 1,000 km away from Cologne, the sad thing being that I am not able to test some of the other games or witness others DM'ing. ;-(
Greetings,
Günther
We had a short session of our regular Age of Worms game (man, those kenkus did a number on the PCs) and then took part in Gameday activities.
I played the halfling rogue, who threw some darts at a flaming skull, drank some ale, got knocked around by a gargoyle and ran away from every undead thing lurking in the abbey's crypts.
Halfway through I turned my PC over to someone on the sidelines so they could play (and I could make a date with my daughter to take her to a performance of Cinderella).
I guess the thing that really impressed me -- besides the good turnout -- was how well Wizards supported the adventure. There was a battlemap, dungeon tiles, minis for all the players and minis for all the monsters -- plus some swag.
Well...my group cancelled! And I warned those yellow belly bastards(same two players cancelled last week also) that I would incur some harsh penalties on their behinds should this happen again since they seem to be avoiding the end of the siege they gotten themselves into. Person that comes up with the most OC/IC correct penalty gets a cookie from me…
Mind you, I don't like being told 25 minutes before I leave home that they 'suddenly' have to go visit their dead grandma.(or whatever excuse) Spent the rest of the day eating chocolate, moping and drawing out a keep for my PC in another campaign.
*grumble*
or worse, that the reality warp that happened almost 3 years ago game time had ... unpredictable effects in Hollywood ...Oh, do tell. Please?
Jade,
The main effect will be on the actors/actresses who survived the first few hours. Those who survived - and are thought of as "kewl" (basically, GM's favorites) embody one or more of the capabilities of thier more famous/notorious on-screen characters. Hollywood proper - or that area of LA (?) that is deliniated more or less as Hollywood is going to be very, very strange, as the studio lots have wars between each other, embodied by thier: serialized productions (mooks and grunt soldiers), TV movies of the week (cavalry), B-rated silver screen movies (catapults and artillery), and A list movies (embodying themselves on the field as either an entire detachment of troops appropriate to the film; a special forces type of unit or actual tank or strike aircraft or similar; or as one or more of the actors who've survived requisitioned certain traits for himself/herself - which will take a disturbingly large chunk of the good stuff into those who portrayed them on screen). The Studio Wars (much like the on going Ratings Wars IRL) are literal sporadic outbursts of martial violence between the Studios. (I'll be sure to find out when the "sweeps weeks" run and have the big build ups between the studios occurring accordingly. If the PCs are very unfortunate, they could well walk into the area smack in the middle of sweeps week ...) The key thing for the PCs to figure could very well be 'WTF are the Studios ?!'
My intent is to have half a dozen to a dozen actors/actresses that survived embodying thier on screen roles (depending on which one, it may well be several roles smooshed into the actor/actress) holed up in the Guvinator's mansion somewhere in CA. Depending on where that is as to just how hairy a situation the celebs are in when the PCs arrive ... indeed, IF the celebs are not large and in charge or are in deep kimshee.
James Earl Jones is going to be a blast to put in ...
Today is Worldwide D&D Gameday. I thought it would be good to share our experiences.
I'm prepared to run the standard adventure at one venue. I'm also prepared to run the battle between the colossal red dragon vs. the 4 20th level characters that was recently posted on the WotC site at two venues.
I went to the nearest FLGS hosting this, carpooling with one of my groups newbies for the event. The rest of my group declined. I hated to some of the early college football games, but just really wanted to play (as my groups primary DM for nearly this whole year).
The turnout was huge. Much bigger than I or the FLGS guys expected. Despite being early, i was booted to the second game, (but the first game went to newbies who are all regulars to the shop), so that was ok. But the second table filled up to 12 people (with a first time DM, long time player).
Rather than have a waiting list, I ended up running half that group at a second table (with no preparation). While I skimmed the adventure and villains, I let the experienced players teach the newbies, as well as tweak those pregen characters (my gosh, a Paladin with 10 Charisma, no no, swap Wisdom with Charisma).
The adventure was impressively simple and fun. I found myself spreading out the damage and trying to make sure all the newbies got to shine. The experienced gamers (my newbie, and a living greyhawk player named Doug, who rocked) made my job so much easier and were sooo helpful at the table.
The guys at the FLGS let me keep all the miniatures and battle map and adventure packet. That was a nice bonus.
I found the adventure just right until the BBEG. My group trounced everything, until the Hellcat. They only prevailed when the enlarged axe fighter crit with her good aligned weapon. We all chipped in with that Action Point card to make her confirmation roll hit (yes, even me). (Of course they shouldn't have stacked, but what the hell, it let the good guys win.) Of course, it was a little much combat to squeeze into a suggested 3 hour game (more like 4 1/2)
And of course, should I ever get to play, I can't wait to use the Dragon PC rules from the 30th anniversary issue to get to use my Copper Dragon mini. =^)
I also told the guy from my table top to hang on to his (Eberron) Action Point Card to use in my SCAP game.
As Blizzard wrote, had I known about having to run ahead of time, I would have liked to do the Gencon 20th levelers vs. the dragon thing as well. How did that go??? I love the simple set up of that!
Overall, a great game day. And I still got to watch college football that night with my fiance.
Good Gaming Everyone,
Clint
Today is Worldwide D&D Gameday. I thought it would be good to share our experiences.
I'm prepared to run the standard adventure at one venue. I'm also prepared to run the battle between the colossal red dragon vs. the 4 20th level characters that was recently posted on the WotC site at two venues.
I ran the prepared adventure, "Curse at <something> Abbey" (forget the name of it already).
The party had a pretty easy time of it until the Hellcat as well. It Pounced on the Paladin who went in just ahead of the rest of the party, taking him from max hp down to negatives, but he used his Second Wind card to bring him back to 0 hp. The fighter and rogue came in next to take on the beast, both hitting fairly well since the wizard Glitterdusted the kitty. Paladin puts himself back into negatives with a last ditch attack, and the Hellcat takes the fighter down to negs, and all was looking like the rest of the party was going to be kitty food, when the rogue grabs the paladin's fallen bless weaponed mace and bashes the thing down for the win! A fun end, and none of the PC's perished.
I ran the event over at my local store. With a bit of help from another GM. We both ran the Curse of Gethin Abbey, I ran it from the provided map, and the other GM ran it from his very swish Dwarven Forge Tiles.
I learned afew things. Like 1 - I don't know the rules as well as I think I do.
2 - An elemental's vision is movement based. Which is to say when fighting the Magma Hurler while everyone was piling through the doorway I did nothing and waited until the last minute to Magic Missile the thing. Qwabam!
My plan for dealing with the Hellcat when the other PCs died? Run outside and shut the door behind me. Its lack of opposable thumbs would surely thwart it better than any sword.
I went to my FLGS to pick up some discounted mercandise, and they weren't offering a discount. w00t.
As Blizzard wrote, had I known about having to run ahead of time, I would have liked to do the Gencon 20th levelers vs. the dragon thing as well. How did that go??? I love the simple set up of that!
It hurt that I wasn't very familiar with that level of combat (I've never played in a 3E campaign past 7th level or so). The first round I had inexperienced players and probably would have trashed them, but I went very easy when I saw how suboptimally they were playing. After 2 PCs bit the dust they started taking it more seriously, and I didn't catch up in time.
The second time I had a player that kept complaining about the design of his/their characters. Comments like "How would a wizard have lived to this level?" and "Where are the mindlink spells so we can communicate without the dragon hearing?"
We also had a rules argument (that I didn't let get far) that the dragon would fail a grapple check with a natural 1, arguing that it was an attack roll. I explained it wasn't an attack roll, but he didn't believe it.
Even after that, I think they had fun. There were just a few min-max oriented players that were set in their ways of running high level tweaked characters.
Hi all, first off, sorry for the hiatus (school and work have had me pretty busy as of late) My experience with game day was pretty good. Our local game store closed about a year ago, however a comic shop in town is picking up the reins and starting to host gaming events, the first of which was world game day. Honestly, considering it was kindofa first for the store owners, I'd say things went very well. While I didn't get a chance to play the module due to the amount of players there, I did get the chance to play in some side games that other GMs were running. All in all, a good experience.
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Oh yeah, sure, rub it in why don't you! Some of us couldn't attend Game Day. Some of us had to go to a stupid, all-fraggin-day Pre-Cana class with their significant other, just so that we can get married in a Catholic church and keep our parents from being bitterly disappointed and disowning us before turning on each other for "ruining the kids" and tearing each other apart like a dragon in a village full of 1st level commoners.
Hmm...maybe I should put this on the rant thread.
We showed up for a run through the Abbey, then played a GM's Mark Xen'drik. The Abbey looked like an OK adventure, but we overloaded the table (to 7 players) to fit in more people. The first battle was badly bottlenecked, so there was a lot of waiting for other people to move, and some thumb twiddling. We were playing with 4 pre-teens; three who did well and one who was impatient. Horribly, annoyingly, impatient-- plus he kept nudging my girlfriend in the ribs through the whole session. I guess he was enthusiastic...
Because the graveyard battle took so long, we wound up skipping several encounters and fast forwarding to the end. Because we know Glitterdust well at home, we encouraged our table's wizard to Glitterdust the lion. That made it a tough but do-able fight-- several front liners went down, but it fell to the scroll of holy smite before anyone died.
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Yeah! I had a great time at worldwide gameday. There were three tables playing at my FLGS, and I met a lot of great people. Frankly, I was a little nervous, since I had never gamed with anyone besides my own little group of newbies, but I had a lot of fun and didn't make too many tactical errors (my regular DM kept things REALLY simple for us, so I was still learning AoO rules and such).
We actually had a fantastic team of characters put together (we didn't use the pre-gens)...Cecil the mobile armored healing station (who was still afraid to enter combat even though his AC was outrageous), "Soiled" the tripping net-thrower, Ezekial the sorcerer who spent ALL of his money on a wand of magic missile (7th), Suli the perpetually enlarged monk, and Gwenllian the druid (played by yours truly) with her snow leopard Scatha (affectionately known as "cat-dog" as she was represented by a wolf mini). Between the extensive use of shillelagh, faerie fire, nets, and magic missile (and I mean EXTENSIVE use of magic missile), we came through quite nicely. Throwing in a little protection from energy:fire, and a cleverly used silence spell, and the later encounters weren't bad at all. That poor acolyte didn't have a chance... The toughest encounter was actually the flameskull. The annoying thing kept smiling even after I put two arrows through its eye sockets...grr! The monk was the only one to go down to the kitty, and she was able to crawl away on her own. And it turned out the hellcat was a bit tougher than my poor cat-dog, who very nearly got burnt to a crisp.
Oh, and I got my FIRST mini! Which ended any restraints I had in letting out my inner geek - I HAD to show off the copper dragon to everyone at a party later that night. ;-)