Thursday, July 17, 2014

Revisiting 12 Things I Want For D&D Next

Back in January I made a list of a dozen things I was hoping to see in the new edition of D&D. With the Starter Set and Basic Rules already out I am doing a quick revisit to see which ones appear to be coming true.



1. That it won't be called D&D Next.
There still are some official sources referring to it as D&D Next, but in most places it is simply being called "Dungeons and Dragons". If there is no official name for this edition I guarantee that the de facto name amoung fans will be "5th edition"



2. That it won't be released until it is ready.
There has been nothing that has come out so far that looks remotely rushed, although the lack of fan fare on the Wizards website makes me think that they have been pulling staff from all over to get everything done on time. (both their online magazines stopped production for just this reason)



3. That there will be a return of the two version strategy.
This isn't happening in the way that I had hoped, but they are addressing the problem I was pointing to (the high cost for a group of total newbies). Between the Starter Set going for $19.99 and the Basic Rules being free, a group can play for an extended period of time with only having spent $19.99.






4. That there will be a return of the Monstrous Compendium. 
The monsters will be in a Monster Manual again, though I am still hoping for the high level of detail that made the Monstrous Compendium so great.



5. That there will be a return to mathematical elegance. 
There does seem to be slightly more elegance than 4th Edition, though it still falls short of 3rd. I will wait to see the core rulebooks before passing judgment on this.



6. That there will be a full suite of apps ready for launch day.
With the launch being spread out over five months,  it would be hard for me to judge this a failure if the apps come in before November; still, there haven't been any announcements about what apps are coming or when they will go live.



7.  Sort out the huge mess of legal rights surrounding Living Greyhawk.
There is no reason to think any progress has been made on this.



8. Make sure D&D Next can play well as low fantasy.
Everything that has come out so far screams low fantasy.



9. Put the dragons back in Dungeons and Dragons.
We probably won't know if this is true till the Monster Manual come out.



10. Make the game more dangerous.
Just looking at the rules it is easy to see the danger level has reverted to something more akin to 3E.



11. Make the PHB more than just a rule book.
In reality it is too soon to give this a pass, but based on what is contained in the Basic Rules and the Starter Set I am supremely hopeful. Especially the novel quotes sprinkled throughout the Basic Rules gives me a lot of hope that Wizards understands exactly what I was getting at.



12. Have a good index.
I am going to have to see the core rulebooks and actually use them for a while before I can call this one.





Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Unboxing D&D

So today was the official launch day of the D&D Starter Set and since I'm not well equipped to make an unboxing video, I thought I would make an unboxing picture gallery.




This is the front of the box.
The artwork looks great, and the logos look familiar despite
being new. Nice to see no sign of "D&D Next". Unfortunately
mine had a slight dent in the box, but it was the last one, and
I didn't want to go driving all around town.


This is the back of the box.
The text is clearly written for someone who has no idea
what D&D is, as it should be. The price of $23.99 is decent
for everything it contains, made possible in part by making
the Basic Rulebook a free download.



The lid is off.
The dice resting on top are of decent quality.




This is the rulebook.
It is 32 glossy pages.




This is the inside of the rulebook.
The artwork in it is beautiful, though there are many pages with none.


Under the rulebook is an adventure, it is 64 pages long.


Under the adventure are 5 pregenerated characters.
The clean layout seems to be representative of the edition as a whole.


An ad for Encouters on one side, a blank character sheet
on the other.


A spacer takes up the bottom half of the box.


The contents outside the box.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

A Private Little War

About a month ago a blog post made its way onto my Facebook feed wherein a LARPer (Live Action Role Player) was explaining his thoughts on why his hobby wasn't more popular and what he thought other LARPers should do to rectify this.

The whole post was dripping in the kind of ignorance that can only come from loving something too much to understand how anyone could not love it. The author was clearly drowning in the feeling we all have sometimes when we can't get other people to appreciate a hobby or a book or a movie that is dear to us.

Originally I had thought to reply to him, and explain why I, as someone who has spent a fair bit of time LARPing but has no love for it, saw his ideas as a little naive, and perhaps perhaps suggest some better ones. But the discussion surrounding the post was a very positive one, and I thought my comments would be out of place, so I decided to write a blog post instead.

Then I had intended to just write a post about what I thought the LARPing community could change to draw in a far greater number of people. But even though it had been my intention to completely avoid discussing the huge open wounds that I still have twenty years later, I couldn't. Before long the post was far less a post of potentially helpful advice to people still participating in a hobby I left long ago, and much more a seething pile of hatred.

I honestly had no idea that I was still so angry about it. I had buried those feeling so deep for so long that I really thought I could talk about LARPing for a thousand words without mentioning them, but I couldn't. This post isn't about the ideas I tried to voice a month ago, its about the pain I couldn't restrain, and where it came from; maybe by writing about it, I can find some relief.

When I was in high school I was the founder and president of the school's role playing games club. Early in my last year of high school one of the members of said club, Eric Finley, talked a group of us into going to a LARPing event.

I did not have fun at said event, but I felt like I should have. The event was a fantasy themed event (as all the events run by the Live Role Playing Society were at that time) and I loved fantasy. The rules system was well designed and I love well designed rules. And yet I did not leave satisfied.

I can't get no . . . satisfaction

For the next three years I went to every event put on by the LRPS, and I left every event with that same feeling that I should have had fun, but didn't. Finally, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and become an event organizer; I figured that if things were done just a little differently I could have a better time. The event I organized was a complete failure at everything I had wanted it to be; rather than being a radically different event that showed what LARPing should be, it was at best mediocre. This was very disheartening.

Still, it was the first event I could ever walk away from saying that I had fun. Which was disheartening in its own way, because I knew it would be somewhere between years later and never before I would be allowed to organize again. And while being a referee at every event probably would have been enough to keep me going, I knew I was unlikely to be a ref again for a long time.

But as down as I was about all this, I was fully expecting to keep going to events; by this time my whole life revolved around the LRPS. I had no friends that weren't part it. Even when I was taking part in my other hobbies, or just going out drinking, I only did so in the company of LRPS friends and had long ago lost contact with any friends that had no interest in live role playing.

The first domino to fall in my eventual departure from LRPS was when I was expelled from the University of Alberta. I was raised to believe that if you didn't have a university degree then you were a worthless human being. My expulsion from the U of A was and is the greatest shame of my life. I came to hate going on campus because of all the horrid feelings it brought forth. This made it difficult to participate in LRPS in the way I had been because all of the official (as well as many unofficial) meetings were held at the U of A.

The next thing to happen was that I had a falling out with two of my friends, both of whom were active LRPS members; in both cases because they owed me money which they did not pay. Rob had bought a computer off me a year earlier, when it was nearly new, and after a year of not paying the money he had promised returned it decidedly used (plus a year older). Tony had asked to borrowed money from me to fix his car, supposedly to be paid back before the end of the week, but never repaid it.

The final thing, the straw that broke the camel's back, was when I was accused of stealing from LRPS. The guy who did the accusing, Bryant, was a known ass. Him making the completely unfounded accusation, while infuriating, is something I could have lived with. No, what I could not accept was that a baseless accusation was leveled at me (his grounds for suspecting me of stealing were that he thought it was suspicious that I didn't ask LRPS for a loan as most organizers did), and no one stood up for me. Instead it was decided that I needed to prove my innocence. I provided proof of my innocence, and then never again had anything to do with LRPS.


I also ditched that awful haircut.


I knew from the moment I decided to leave that I would be effectively ending every friendship I had. Oh sure, I was still on good terms with most of the members of LRPS, but by removing myself from regular contact with them, I ensured that in time all of those friendships would die. And they did die, some died the day I left, others a few months later, while three of them lasted a few years after my departure.

The last friend I had from LRPS was Todd, who had also been my roommate in university. My most vivid memory of the pain I lived with in the late 90s was when I went to visit Todd shortly after I got out from hospital from a failed suicide attempt. Since I had never told anyone why I had left LRPS, nor was I telling anyone about my suicide attempt, Todd gleefully told me about the incredible time he and others had at the wedding of Laura and James.

It was painful hearing about that wedding. I gave up more than I could ever have imagined when I left LRPS. Many of the friends I had back then, are still very good friends with each other; I have no such continuity with my past. During the years I was in LRPS I made some real progress towards being less of an introvert than I had been in my childhood, but leaving snapped me back and I have ever since been even more quiet than I was as a child. And I have never been able to think as clearly nor focus as well since the aforementioned suicide attempt.

And that is why, for me at least, "LARPing sucks monkey balls".