Monthly Archives: March 2009

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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It’s been a while since I posted anything. I blame the flu that’s still hanging on nearly two weeks later.

This past session of Storm Point, I wanted to try something a little different with the group. I wanted to give them a session where the optimal solution to their problems was not combat. Now, this can be a bit of a risk, because this group likes fighting. And bullying. And intimidation. And just generally being jerks.

But sometimes it shades a bit too close to them being an evil party, with the underlying assumption that they can do whatever they want because they’re tougher than anyone else around them*. So, I wanted to capitalize on one of their suggestions in the previous session, which was that they wanted to turn the captive eladrin who had attacked them over to the town watch and press charges of brigandry. For that to be effective, though, they would have to behave, at least for one session, less like brigands than the people they had accused.

The catch is that there still had to be interesting things for them to do, and challenges for them to overcome. I thought about setting things up as a skill challenge, but I wanted things to revolve more around their choices than around dice rolls. And yet I still wanted to give them an experience award for handling things in a non-violent manner.

So, I did what any GM worth his salt does when the rules don’t quite do what we need them to. I made stuff up.

Basically, what I did was set an experience point value for the various challenges based on the party level and the importance of the scene to the ongoing story. Then I planted a few moments in each scene where the party got to make decisions about how to react to something, how to proceed, etc. Combat was an option at pretty much every one of these moments of choice, so I built encounters based on the experience point value of the scene to spring on the characters if they chose to go for their swords. I also worked out the probable consequences of starting a fight in terms of the broader story and the situation in town.

So, for example, they got a letter from the head of the halfling clans in Rivertown, asking for a meeting to arrange a cessation of hostilities. The meet was set at a halfling tavern near the waterfront, and they were warned in advance that Granny Magda, the head of the clans, was going to have a number of guards with her, and that the party was welcome to come armed, as well. The discussion determined that the heroes had no plans to continue their vendetta against the halflings now that Jemmy Fish and his goblin connection were out of business, and that they had no interest in involving themselves in any of the “untaxed businesses” that the clans ran. They parted on relatively good terms, and earned a nice experience reward. There were a couple of moments where they could have reacted badly and started a fight with Granny and her boys, but they managed to control their tempers and not be complete dinks, so I didn’t have to trot out the stats for the fight, along with all the little surprises that were hidden under the floor of the tavern.

Using set-ups like that, we ran through settling the halfling feud, the trial and escape of the eladrin, and some arms-length dealing with the ambassador of the Empire Reborn, all without combat. But the ambassador is an even bigger jerk than the party**, and decided to make one last attempt to take them out using some summoned firebats and hellhounds. After the first round of the fight, I was worried that I had made things too tough*** – the auras of the hellhounds and the fiery swoop ability of the firebats dropped the dragonborn rogue on the first round, and bloodied both the sword mage and the fighter. But the group pulled things together, and won, though it was a tougher fight than I had anticipated, thanks to the stacking of the auras and the ongoing fire damage from the bats.

N0w they’ve got a real mad on for the ambassador, but don’t know what to do about it, because he’s got extralegal status in Storm Point, and has also hired a few local dragonborn mercenaries for personal protection.

I’m interested in seeing what they come up with.

*This is not actually the case, but they haven’t gone up against anyone tougher yet.

**Hard to imagine, but there it is.

***Three firebats and two hellhounds, 1200 xp, a level 5 encounter for 6 PCs. My group is level 4, but were fresh, so I expected the fight to be pretty easy for them.

Hunter: The Vigil Campaign Frameworks

By | | Hunter - Shadow Wars, What's he playing?
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Well, my players were fairly quick to respond to my questions about a new Hunter: The Vigil campaign. I got all their answers in, and looked them over.

Here’s a little secret about asking these sorts of questions before starting a new campaign: you gotta be ready to listen to the answers. The very act of asking the question tells the players that they’re going to get to call the shots on at least some of the campaign elements. If they aren’t – and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing for a GM to do all the work in designing a campaign – then don’t ask the questions.

However, if you do ask the questions, don’t expect any sort of unified voice to speak through them to map out the game for you. That’s the pr0blem with open-ended questions that have little context. You’ll get answers all over the map, and many of them will only tell you what the player doesn’t want, rather than what he or she does.

What it does give you is a look at the acceptable ranges for the parameters you questioned, and a very solid idea about what matters to the players.

So, what did I get from the responses?

  1. Everyone wants in, though there are scheduling concerns.
  2. Everyone’s okay with me ditching a lot of the World of Darkness canon about the various types of monsters (vampires, werewolves, faeries, etc.) and making stuff up.
  3. Everyone wants action in the game, though not necessarily a lot of combat.
  4. On a light-dark scale, the players tend toward a range near the middle, shading slightly to light. So, not a grim, gritty game, but not silly either. Some difficult moral and ethical choices, but those aren’t necessarily central to the game. A little bit of humour is good, but shouldn’t dominate the mood. And the characters should be heroic, though perhaps flawed.
  5. On a lethality scale, fairly lethal, with some qualifiers. The players tend to want normal humans to go down pretty easily, but the heroes and the supernatural threats should be tougher.
  6. On the supernatural scale, we got responses all over the board, with the compromise idea seeming to be that anything goes for the bad guys, but fairly limited supernatural resources for the player characters. This question is the one that gave the widest spread of answers, though, so I’m sort of postponing it.
  7. Campaign structure-wise, there were strong votes both for road trip style and stay put style. Pretty even split (as even as you can get with five answers), so I’m hoping we can work out a compromise.

Based on the responses, I came up with four rough frameworks of games that I would be willing to run, and sent them out to the players for their votes. Here’s how I envision the process to go:

  1. Everyone votes on the attached campaigns, giving me your first, second, and third choices. I will compile the responses, giving a first choice three points, a second choice two points, and a third choice one point. The choice with the most points becomes our campaign structure.
  2. Everyone gets one black ball vote. I would rather you didn’t use it, but I want to have the option there. If there is an option that you absolutely will not play in, black ball it. It gets taken out of the running. Again, I would rather that it didn’t get used, because of the way it can let one player scrap a campaign framework that everyone else loves before it’s fully fleshed out. On the other hand, I need to know if there’s something that is completely out of the question for one of the players. So, you have the black ball if you need it.
  3. Once we have determined the campaign framework, I would like to have two sessions to flesh out the campaign and create the characters. The first session will be a sort of round-robin Q&A to fill in the basics of campaign world, where we will take turns asking and answering questions to collaboratively add details and structure to the framework. The second session will be a group character creation session.
  4. When those two sessions are done, I will build the first story, looking to run 1-3 sessions. I will also set up a campaign wiki on Obsidian Portal and invite everyone to join it.
  5. When the adventure is done, I will schedule a game session.

Which begs the question of what the four campaign frameworks are, right? Well, here’s what I came up with.

MoJoWeb.com

There’s weirdness out there, and that’s what MoJoWeb.com is all about. A popular website with the conspiracy and neopagan crowd, MoJoWeb.com makes enough from memberships and advertising to finance a small cadre of investigators.

That’s you.

Maybe you’ve believed in this stuff all along, or maybe something happened to make
you believe. Or maybe you didn’t believe, and just needed the job.

Doesn’t matter. You’re all believers now.

Your job? Finding the truth about the weird things that get overlooked by the more conservative journalists and officials – the weird murders, the monster sightings, the alien abductions, the Elvis appearances, whatever. You check it out. And you bring the story back to post for the elite members of your site.

Setting: One city as home base, frequent travel to the sites of interest.

Mood: Moderately light, though the supernatural is a real threat, so not silly. Big on the creepy. Remember Freakylinks? That’s my inspiration.

Theme: Curiosity, discovery, horror. Seeing the things ignored by the mundane, and trying not to be eaten by them.

Supernatural Level: The supernatural is rare, but powerful. And very strange. You may have the opportunity to gain some supernatural abilities, but they will not be big-league stuff.

Conspiracy Level: Low to non-existent. Some people know stuff, and know other people who know stuff. As far as you can tell, you are the most cohesive and organized group out there. But you might be wrong.

Neighbourhood Watch

This used to be a good neighbourhood. People cared. Made their homes here, raised their kids here, built their lives here. Sure, it was never a rich neighbourhood, and it never got gentrified like some of the places around here, but it was a good place.

Not so much, anymore.

You’re not sure when things changed, but they’ve crossed the line some time in the past few years. The working-class families are still here, but there are more crack houses, more gangs, more crime. It just isn’t safe anymore.

But there’s more to it than just urban decay. At some point in the past few years, you’ve had a glimpse of the darkness that’s gathering, the monsters and secrets hidden behind the familiar façade. You’ve seen something evil lurking in the heart of your home.

And you are not, by God, going to let it go on.

Setting: One neighbourhood in a city. This is a very location-based framework, with little taking place outside the neighbourhood, and nothing taking place outside the city.

Mood: Grim but resolute. Moderately dark. About X-Files level. Big on the unknown and seething malevolence.

Theme: Redemption and reclamation. Steadfast heroism, the defense of the home, the salvaging of hope.

Supernatural Level: The supernatural is dark and threatening, even at low power levels. Any supernatural abilities you pick up – and opportunities to do so will be very rare – will require great sacrifice and mark you as suspect.

Conspiracy Level: At most, the compact level. Realistically, you might know two or three other people in the city that know about this kind of thing, and maybe one or two outside the city.

The Shadow Wars

Maybe it’s in your blood, or maybe it’s something that happened to you. Maybe it’s the result of long study, or strange pacts with mysterious beings. Whatever the source, you have the… let’s call it a gift… that makes you aware of the big picture, the secrets of the world.

You might call it magic, or enlightenment, or the tao. You might see it as strange luck or just really being in touch with your own body or soul. You may not even know if you’re still human at all. However you interpret it, you’ve found out that there are others like you.

And others that will do anything to destroy you.

Because, whether you knew it or not at the beginning, there’s a war going on between those who would destroy humanity and those who would save it. By virtue of your awareness, you’re drawn into this secret conflict, and you need to pick a side.

You’ve chosen humanity’s side.

Because, no matter how strange you may find your abilities, they’re positively mundane next to the creatures that hide in the darkness and seek to steal the light. Once you’ve seen them – and you have – there can be no question as to which side you’re on.

And the war needs you.

Setting: The battle can take you anywhere, from the great cities of Europe to the frozen Antarctic research station, from the caves of the Grand Canyon to the neon- lit alleys of Tokyo. Or you may take up residence in a place of importance, as defenders. Or in one of the Free Cities, home to intrigue and deceit. You get to call it.

Mood: Suspicion, fear, dedication to a cause, secrecy, paranoia. The stakes are high, and the matter is serious. If you fail, people die. Or worse. Think Casablanca or Sandbaggers or Ronin with supernatural elements.

Theme: The burden of power, the lure of the dark, questions of trust and honour. The price of victory. What will you sacrifice?

Supernatural Level: Moderately high. I have an idea for a system of narratively based supernatural powers for the PCs that can be as blatant or subtle as people want. Everyone will have the potential, and those who spend experience on it will get better at it, but I don’t think it will unbalance things if you decide not to focus on it for your character.

Conspiracy Level: Moderate to high. There are several different power groups on both sides of the war, and they can act as mentors, allies, enemies, or something in between.

Agents of Aegis

You are the grim wall between the creatures of the night and the unwitting mortals. As members of Aegis, you are an elite force of agents sent into hot spots to root out the evil. And burn it down. Then salt the earth. Then burn the earth some more.

Aegis does not fuck around.

On the upside, you get to travel the world, see exotic places, meet new people. On the downside, you mostly see the worst parts of it, and then cause an explosion.

On the upside, you get a bunch of neat toys: high tech tools, mystical rites, magical relics, ancient Egyptian potions, the works. On the downside, they’re often not enough.

On the upside, you have the backing of a powerful, wealthy, mysterious organization. On the downside, they’re likely to kill you if you step out of line.

Welcome to Aegis. Welcome to the last job you’ll ever have.

Setting: Globe-hopping adventure, baby!

Mood: Exciting and cinematic. Think James Bond vs. the things that go bump in the night. Hellboy, but less silly.

Theme: Good vs. Evil, the price of victory, the tough decisions about collateral damage.

Supernatural Level: Pretty high. Lots of big, scary monsters, lots of toys for the PCs.

Conspiracy Level: High. You’re working for the big boys, but you’re not the only big boys on the block.

So, there you have it. Four options, one of which will be further expanded and defined until it’s a playable game. I’ve only had two votes back, so far, so I don’t want to talk about which framework is the frontrunner for fear of skewing the responses from my players.

I’ll let you know which one they pick, and then what we do with it.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Not a lot happened in yesterday’s game – it dealt with the trip from the last adventure site back to Storm Point. Still, I got to apply some real pressure to the group, and I think they’re starting to realize that they aren’t invulnerable.

After the previous session, they had decided that they wanted to follow up on the whole “shadar-kai forming an alliance with the local goblins” angle. Unfortunately, they don’t have much of a clue as to how to do that – they haven’t found any real loose ends to start pulling at. So, Erik suggests that they go and see if the ambassador from the Empire Reborn has any information.

Now, the ambassador is a bit of a throw-away NPC that’s taking on a new significance in the game. He entered the game world by way of a little cut scene* I wrote, and then got used in a piece of player fiction**, which sort of established his character and role – a rather incompetent coward who is trying to use the adventurers to advance the plans of the Empire Reborn. He’s not good at it, but his clerk seems to be…

Anyway, after dropping a hint that they thought the Empire Reborn was in league with the shadar-kai, the heroes are hoping that the Empire Reborn will have done some digging into the situation, the results of which they can now intimidate out of the ambassador.

A plan so cunning it deserves its own Blackadder quote.

Despite their planning, they didn’t get to try anything. Still battered and worn down by cleaning out the goblin lair, they decided to make the three-hour journey back to Storm Point so they could sleep in beds. And, of course, predictable bastard that I am, I attacked them.

I used two griffons and two eladrin fey knights****, with the idea of one or two round attacks, in a hit-and-run pattern, harrying the heroes back to town.

First of all, the charging griffons and their riders hit like a ton of bricks. Man. Massive damage on the first round. And then they fight for a couple of rounds, and take off again. Good plan.

And, of course, the party decided they didn’t like the idea of running back to town, fighting off the griffon attacks as they ran low of healing surges. And Thrun, the dwarven fighter who is the primary defender, was right out of healing surges. Given that, they decided to find a place to hole up for a long rest before continuing back to town. Some pretty amazing Nature, Perception, and Stealth rolls got them a cave with a spring in it, under an overhang, with the cave mouth screened by bushes.

They set watches and took a long rest. During that time, the fey knights managed to find where their prey had gone to ground, and set up in ambush just outside.

This fight went a little more in favour of the party, mainly because they were at full strength, with all their dailies and healing surges. And they used most of them. Four 7th level creatures are a tough fight for six 3rd level characters. Still, in the end, they managed to put the griffons down and render the eladrin unconscious. A couple of judicious History rolls have turned up a tie to the Empire Reborn – the fallen Empire of Nerath used to have a unit of griffon-mounted eladrin air cavalry, called the 2nd Imperial Airborne, also known as The Immortals.

With their captives and the new information, they think they have enough to bring the law to bear on the ambassador. So, they’ve returned to town, turned the eladrin over to the local Watch, and went to get a good meal and some rest.

I’ve got some interesting ideas about where things go next.

*From time to time, about once an adventure, I post to our game forum a short piece of fiction that I call a cut scene. This is usually from the point of view of outsiders, commenting on what the adventurers are doing, and how it relates to them. It’s a way of providing a little more context and throughline for the game narrative.

**This bit of fiction was a sort of response to my cut scene and the events in the game. In it, the party confronted the (rather cowardly and incompetent) ambassador in his office, and threatened him*** for his part in the squad of Empire Reborn armsmen that tried to steal the goblin map from them. They also mentioned the shadar-kai, implying that they thought the ambassador was involved in that, too.

***Y’know, these heroes are kinda dicks.

****1200 xp, a level 5 encounter for 6 characters.

Hunter Redux: One Year Later

By | | Hunter - Shadow Wars, What's he playing?
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Last Friday, I ran my second of two playtests for Hunter: The Vigil. You can read about the previous playtest here.

We used the One Year Later quickstart adventure available for free at DriveThruRPG.com. This used the same characters as the previous playtest we did (The Hunt), with some experience applied. We all liked this, because it meant that the players were able to grab the same character as last time and have a great deal of familiarity with it.

As for the adventure itself, it was about as good as the previous one. Looking at my original post, it seems I was quite hard on that adventure, and that wasn’t my real intention. Both The Hunt and One Year Later are written for very specific purposes, and they fulfill these admirably. They are good introductions to the kinds of things that you do in the game, they provide interesting and challenging scenes with a range of activities, and they show you how the rules work. And they are designed to run in a limited time.

The main problem we had with the scenarios was that we weren’t under the time constraints assumed in the writing. We had a whole evening to play, rather than just two or three hours. That made the adventures seem sparse and linear, lacking in opportunity to follow player choices in unusual directions. They are very much designed as demo scenarios, or convention scenarios, pulling in a bunch of people with minimal preparation and completing an adventure in a very tight time-frame.

One Year Later continued this trend, and it worked just as well. Sure, I had to tapdance a little bit when my players asked how they got the information that led them to the guy they’re following at the start of the adventure, or when they killed the only vector in the adventure for a critical piece of information, or when they decided to completely break away from the way the final encounter was scripted, but that’s fine. I was able to adapt and deal with that.

On the whole, my players liked the adventures, liked the pregenerated characters, liked the game. After the game, I asked them what they thought, and they were all pretty positive about the experience. Then I asked them if they would be interested in starting a new campaign.

They gave me a qualified yes.

See, we’ve already got a large number of campaigns running. Pretty much any given weekend, I’m either running or playing in one or two games. But they’re all Dungeons & Dragons. Nothing wrong with D&D, but nothing wrong with mixing it up, either. A little variety, like a modern horror game, is just the thing.

But scheduling is tough. We’re all adults, with family and work commitments. We’re already scheduled pretty tight.

So the suggestion (from Sandy) was to make it an episodic thing, more a series of mini-campaigns. Each episode would be three or four sessions, then we take a break while I build a new one and run that one in a couple of months.

That seemed a popular choice.

I sent out an e-mail message to the five players containing a number of questions I want them to answer, the first question being, “Are you in for the game?” Other questions cover things like setting of the campaign, level of lethality, level of supernatural, level of conspiracy, how much combat, etc. This should give me a solid basis to start constructing a campaign.

On my end, on the advice of one of the folks who commented on the last post*, I picked up some non-free .pdfs for Hunter. I got pretty much everything on this page, and I’ve been working through it, mining it for ideas. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself until I get the responses back from the questions I sent to the prospective players, but I’ve got some ideas percolating.

Oh, yeah. And I bought these dice, because I’m a great big geek.

I’ll let you know how things go.

*Named, suspiciously, Chuck. Could it be…?

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the second of our Post Tenebras Lux sessions, the continuation of the campaign that started as a Scales of War adventure path. In it, our heroes arrived at Witchcross, met a few of the locals, took in some of the sights, and headed off into the Witchwood in order to find the barrow they’ve come in search of.

And promptly ran into trouble.

In designing this adventure, I did my best to depart from the standard dungeon crawls that this particular group has been playing through for the most part. I wanted different feeling adventure areas, more chances for interaction with NPCs and the environment, more choices that mattered, and so on. To that end, I designed a number of establishments in Witchcross, created a few local sites that might be of interest, and put together a more detailed backstory for the barrow and the ancient druidic folk that used to live in the area.

A lot of that got pretty much ignored in this session; the group is very mission-focused. This really came to mind when I explained that the engraving on the menhir in the middle of the village, marking it as the site where Terriath Ahmond first formed his pact with the Folk of the Stone, and then told them they knew nothing about those names or the incident it may describe*. Instead of interpreting it as local colour or an interesting detail, they said, “Red herring,” and went about trying to find the barrow.

I brought them into town on the afternoon before the full moon, so they have a day and a half to find the spot where the barrow appears. I also decided to do the cinematic full moon thing – giving each month three nights when the moon is considered to be full. That takes some of the time pressure off the party, and gives them the leisure time to explore and interact with the world without feeling they need to rush and push with no time for anything else.

I’ve set the hunt for the barrow up as a sort of modified skill challenge, with a number of nodes laid out in a matrix representing the woods around Witchcross. Every hour, the party makes a roll, choosing a skill from a list of about five, to find their way closer to the barrow. If everyone succeeds, I move them directly towards the barrow on the matrix. If most of them succeed, they get to choose a direction, and I move them that way on the matrix. If most of them fail, I move them away from the barrow, and preferably into something dangerous. If they all fail, I move them away from the barrow, and they each lose a healing surge from the hazards and exertions of their search.

Each node of the matrix has a scene tied to it. This may be a combat encounter, an NPC, an interesting site in the woods, or anything else I’ve thought of, but it’s some point where they can interact with the world and may get a benefit or a penalty for their search. When they make it through the matrix, they’ll arrive at the site of the barrow.

I felt this was a good compromise between mapping the woods out as a dungeon and just having a list of encounters that they have to fight their way through to get to the barrow. It puts choices back into their hands, and gives more of a feeling of decision, while still keeping the actual movement from site to site abstract and easily managed. It also allows the outdoorsy skills of the ranger to have some impact on the group and their quest.

Sor far, it seems to be working fairly well, though the group has walked into two combat encounters, and have started asking how the villagers manage to survive when they go looking for firewood**.

The first combat was an owlbear and two fey panthers***. The owlbear is another monster, like the carrion crawler, that I’ve always wanted to use, but never seem to get the chance. As I recall from previous editions, they’re pretty nasty. Well, the 4e owlbear takes the cake, in my opinion. It dropped the dragonborn paladin on the first turn****, which caused everyone to pause and take a breath. This is what I wanted: I never try to kill the characters, but I love the moment in the game when the players realize that they may lose a character in a fight. With the fey panthers harrassing the party from different angles, they couldn’t gang up on the owlbear at first, and that meant that it got to bat PCs around with impunity. The healing abilities of the party made sure they never lost anyone, but it scared them.

The next combat was a group of gnomes: 2 skulks, 2 arcanists, 2 iron defenders, and a pseudodragon*****. This fight was a blast to run, with the gnomes up in the trees sniping and messing with the party, the iron defenders chewing on legs, and the pseudodragon doing fly-bys with its tail sting. In the end, one of the arcanists and the pseudodragon escaped, and the party was beat up enough that they just let them go and hobbled back to town, planning to start again in the morning.

All in all, a pretty good session. I’m anxious for the next one, because some of the things they did in the last one will have got around town. I’m planning on updating the Witchcross entry in the wiki, but I’m going to hold off until the players discover more of the information in game, so as not to spoil anything.

Should be fun.

 

 

*I want a lot of the history of the ancient druidic folk to be a closed book, with just a jumble of confusing monuments and oral traditions remaining. I like the idea of the mystery in the past.

**The answer to this question is different for each of the two encounters. For the first one, the villagers know better than to go into the owlbear’s hunting ground. For the second, the Keepers of Eth in the village have a relationship with the gnomes, and don’t get attacked from hiding.

***1050 xp total, a level 4 encounter for 6 PCs.

****I had to use the owlbear’s action point to get in the bite attack, but it was worth it.

*****1000 xp total, a level 4 encounter for 6 PCs.

I Watched the Watchmen

By | | What's he watching?
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Just got back from seeing the movie. I’m a huge fan of the graphic novel, and had some real trepidation going in. Overall, I liked the movie. I’ve got some detailed thoughts outlined below, but first I want to put up a

Spoiler Alert!

Yeah, I’m gonna be talking about stuff that happens in the movie or the graphic novel. If you don’t want to know, don’t read any farther.

We good?

Good.

  • The cast is pretty much perfect. Not only does each actor really look a lot like the character from the comic book, they get most of the character traits down wonderfully. I can’t be happier. They are fantastic. Of special note are Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian, but there really isn’t a bad word to be said about any of them, in my opinion.
  • Zack Snyder sticks very, very close to the comic book, both story-wise and visually. Whether this is being faithful or slavish is going to vary by viewer. For me, I like it most of the time, but it does make his departures from the source material, in those few instances when it happens, somewhat jarring for those of us who are really familiar with the comic book. Yeah, it’s a geek thing.
  • I heard a lot about gratuitous sex and violence before I saw the movie, and I dismissed it. There are a lot of that in the comic book, and it’s not entirely gratuitous; instead, it makes a sort of meta-statement about the use of gratuitous sex and violence in the medium. Having seen the movie, I gotta say, a lot of the sex and violence, while not necessarily gratuitous, is exaggerated and emphasized rather gratuitously. The rape scene is pretty over-the-top violent, as is the mugging scene, and the sex scene in Archimedes is about as graphic as you can get without being labeled porn. And I’m not sure it carries the impact in the same way the gratuitous stuff in the comic book does.
  • The ending, as most have probably heard, is not the same as in the comic book. They don’t do the alien creature manifestation/mock-up, but opt for framing Dr. Manhattan as the villain. This makes for a much tighter story, not having to run the whole kidnapped artist subplot, and speeds up the exposition at the climax, but I really wanted to see the giant alien thing, so I was a little disappointed.
  • They’ve only got three hours to tell their story, so a lot of the layers and depth gets compressed into easy explanations or dismissed entirely. I think that, for people who are not familiar with the comic book and its deep and intricate backstory, sections of this movie may feel rushed or confusing. In addition, certain bits were included that may have been better cut for time or continuity, but were great geek-joy moments that we geeks certainly wanted to see.
  • Time to complain about a specific storytelling choice. There is a scene, in both the comic and the movie, where Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Jupiter get mugged, and kick the crap out of the muggers. In the movie, they kill several of their attackers, deliberately, and in ways more violent than even Rorschach’s murders are portrayed in the film. I found this very jarring; in the comic book, Dan and Laurie are the most “normal” of the masked heroes; they’re the ones we can most easily identify with. To show them cold-bloodedly slaughtering thugs breaks that empathetic connection, undermining the link we’ve established with the humanity of the characters. It distances us emotionally from the only two characters presented in a human, sympathetic light, and I think that was a mistake.
  • Time to compliment a specific beautiful acting moment. Throughout the movie, I found I was missing the dynamic tension between the ideals represented by Ozymandias and Rorschach. In the comic book, they balance each other: one who will never compromise, and one who will do whatever it takes to do good. This didn’t come across very well in the movie, for several reasons that I’ll have to think about more before I can identify them beyond saying that it was led by the visual emphasis over story. Anyway. In Rorschach’s final scene, where he pulls off his mask and forces Dr. Manhattan to kill him, that entire dynamic tension, the pull between the man who will not compromise and the man who wants to do good, is made manifest completely within the character of Rorschach. He begs Dr. Manhattan to kill him, knowing that it must happen to preserve the peace Ozymandias has created. It was a beautiful, perfect moment that captured something vital and important to the work that Alan Moore introduced in the comic book. It captured the idea of monsters on both ends of the spectrum, and the torment of where they meet. That moment was almost worth the price of admission all by itself.
  • The opening historical montage sequence is worth the price of admission. My god, that was wonderful, filling in so much necessary backstory in such a beautiful, moving, and effective way.
  • One last complaint: having Dan and Laurie go back to crimefighting at the end of the movie really, drastically undermines the idea behind the comic book. It changes the meaning and nature of the entire work, and I don’t much like it.

So, in closing, I liked the movie, but not unreservedly, and not completely. The comic book, as an ironic, insightful look at the superhero phenomenon is so intricate and layered in subtext and superhero reference that it is pretty much impossible to do it complete justice in a movie. Having said that, Zack Snyder gave it a really good try, and made a movie I enjoyed. He came about as close as I can envision someone coming. The source material is just too dense and nuanced to translate with complete faithfulness in three hours.

It’s not the comic book, no matter how much it might look like it.

But it’s not bad, either.

Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day – Player’s Handbook 2

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Just got word from Pedro and Wendy over at Imagine Games that we’re a go for March 21st for the next Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day – Player’s Handbook 2. I’ll be there running sessions in the demo at 12:30, 3:00, and 5:30, as long as people show up to play. For the curious, here’s the text from the Wizards of the Coast promo:

Ready an Action to Play on March 21st!

Prepare yourself (and your friends) to join D&D fans all around the world on March 21st for Worldwide D&D Game Day: Player’s Handbook 2. Everything you need to play will be on-hand, so it’s a great chance for new players, as well as veterans, to band together and find some adventure.

Come try out the new races (such as the gnome) and the new classes (like the invoker and barbarian) while you battle wicked fiends and thwart dark plots. No matter if you’re new to the game or a 4th Edition veteran; we’ll have everything you need to embark on an all-new adventure.

One Dark Night in Weeping Briar – A stormy night, an empty town, and a small girl that holds the key to thestrange disappearances. An adventure for 5 pregenerated 11th-level characters. The characters are:

  • Ilvarra, drow avenger
  • Markaria, tiefling invoker
  • Roswyn, gnome bard
  • Squeaks, warforged barbarian
  • Balasar, dragonborn paladin (uses material from the upcoming Divine Power product)

 

So, if you’re in Winnipeg and interested in trying out the new material from the PHB2, or you’re curious about 4th Edition or roleplaying games in general, come on down and play.

It’ll be fun.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Well, last night finished off the current adventure for the party in Storm Point. They made their way down to the last two big set-piece fights, and killed the baddies.

I stole the last two encounters from H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, changing a few details of the monsters to make them fit the current storyline of the game. This is remarkably easy, as I was able to keep most of the cool mechanics of the main characters’ powers, but changed the jazz a little to reflect a dedication to Vecna instead of Orcus. I also swapped out some of the monsters, trading the pair of human berserkers for a pair of bugbear warriors and the Orcus priest for a Shadar-Kai witch. That meant I had to drop one of the vampire spawn to keep the encounter in the right xp range I wanted, but still very easy to do.

I used the first encounter to deal with a concern I sometimes have with the heroes going to fight a tribe of humanoids: when they get to the lair/village/stronghold, what do they do with the non-combatants? What do they do with the goblin women and children in this case? Do they let them live, or do they slaughter them all like genocidal lunatics? Sell them into slavery?

Now, in some games, this can be very interesting roleplaying ground to explore – what are the heroes willing to do? Where do they draw the lines? How do the handle the aftermath of whatever choice they make?

This group, not so much. We play, in this game, pretty much a beer-and-pretzels game, focusing on the fun, cinematic aspects of the game, not on the introspective soul-searching. And I’m fine with that. I’ve got other games where I can explore questions like that.

But I dislike just ignoring inconvenient practicalities. So, I decided that the best thing was to take the choice out of their hand, and have the Shadar-Kai witch and the scion of Vecna sacrifice all the non-combatants in the ritual to open the portal in the temple. This did two things: one, it eliminated the non-combatants without forcing the heroes to make a choice that I don’t think was warranted in the game, and two, it showed that the bad guys were really bad.

Everyone was running short on healing surges by this time, and several had already used their daily powers, so these two big boss fights were pretty challenging. The Shadar-Kai witch’s aura power turned out to be pretty useful for me and frustrating for the party, and the toughness of the bugbears made them very good meat-shields*. The deathlock wight on the lower level didn’t even get a shot off, because everyone decided it was the best initial target. The scion of Vecna and the thing in the portal that he was summoning gave everyone a run for their money, what with the 3-square threatening reach of the thing and its ability to drag people toward the portal and heal the scion. And the skeletons were surprisingly resilient and hit pretty hard.

It was a good couple of fights, and everyone got to do something cool, which made me happy.

It also got a couple of the players trying to figure out what the connection was between the Shadar-Kai, the halflings, the goblins, and the black dragon from the first adventure. It looks like there’s a bit of a direction manifesting in the campaign**.

Nice.

*One got lightning-lured into the open pit down to the next level in the first round of combat, and everyone grinned at how clever they were. Until he climbed back up a couple of rounds later and ganged up on the rogue with his buddy, putting him down in a single round.

**In most campaigns, I plot out an overarching story. In this one, I didn’t because the players wanted somethng a little more episodic, with more freedom of choice. So, I’ve built a number of different threads and starting points into the game, and I elaborate on the ones that the players pick up and pursue. This allows them to have more control over their choices and options in the game, while still building in some ongoing mystery and narrative direction. But it’s player directed instead of GM directed, which I think is important.