Remembering 3rd Edition: the Bad & the Ugly

A couple months ago I had the occasion to run some D&D adventures for my regular Tuesday-night group. While I played some 3rd Edition when it first came out, and have been playing weekly for the past two or three years, this was my first time as Dungeon Master.

Holy cow, DMing this game is difficult. The amount of minutiae of which to keep track, the responsibility for creating the story and the adventure, the responsibility for adjudicating the rules, is a lot to put on the shoulders of a single person. Even stuff that should have been straightforward, like adding Ranger levels to some lizardfolk, was way more difficult than it should have been.

Now, I'm sure them more time I spent with the game, the easier all this preparation would become, but it also reminded me why I always preferred running modules for my game groups: someone else has taken care of all that prep work, thought out those eventualities, built the monsters, characterized the NPCs. It's the D&D dynamic of putting all that on one person at the table that was most exhausting for me.

Running the game also made me realize how integral little parts of the rules that my group (and I am sure many others) were glossing over were to balancing gameplay. My favorite example is timekeeping. 3rd Edition necessitates precise tracking of seconds minutes, hours, and days to keep the PCs in check, and yet this much timekeeping would heavily burden play.

This is all supposed to change with 4th Edition. Monsters are to be easier to run, PC motivations for going on the adventure are to be clearly laid out. A lot of the bookkeeping will be by encounter, which should help all the players.

There's other stuff, on the other side of the screen (aside: I hate DM screens) that 3rd Edition kept from previous editions and doesn't seem to be changing with 4th. The over-reliance on gear has never been part of my view of heroic fantasy, but it seems 4th Edition characters will be just as laden with magical trinkets as their table-top and videogame predecessors. Magic spells (now ritualistic if outside of the per round/per encounter/per day powers) are finally moving off the Jack Vance model, which while awkward, was at least nostalgically D&D. There's still no mechanical support for my character's background or agenda. Social-conflict mechanics are rumored to be included in the upcoming Dungeon Master's Guide, hardly a place of prominence.

--HEACOX

White Wolf wants your D&D books

I just came across this, but apparently White Wolf was offering people to trade in their 3.5 Player's Handbooks for copies of the Exalted Second Edition rulebook. Full promotion here:

Graduate Your Game

It would have been nice to have an additional rulebook on hand if I ever found other sane people interested in regularly playing Exalted. I wonder if White Wolf successfully gave away all 2500 copies.

Keep on the Shadowfell on its Way

I should have the first fourth edition book tomorrow. Granted, it's just a gimmick and hardly worth mentioning before the real release in June, but I'm still *kind* of excited, if only because I'm so poor and hardly ever buy anything I can't eat. Except for veuve and potting soil, of course.

Iriaebor Progress

Anyone who has been following this blog for a while has probably been seeing screenshots from Iriaebor for a long time. That's because Iriaebor, the city where BD is going to take place, has proven to be an incredibly demanding area to build, and I'm still not even halfway done with it. It is 32 x 32; the city is big and demands a bunch of buildings; it is also, like Drawn Swords, built on a high point, so creating the illusion of distance is once again important here. The good thing is that the city only occupies one area (as opposed to Neverwinter or Athkatla), so once I'm done with it, I'm done with the game's only urban area (excluding interiors, of course).

Now, I haven't been working on Iriaebor consistently--I've broken away to work on other areas, particularly the High Tower and Harrowfax--and then there was also my lengthy vacation. But I've done a good deal of city work this weekend. Here's a pic to let you know how far I have to go.

Will Once Was Mine

Eventually I'll use my new music widget to feature something a little more relevant to Bron's Daughter, but I wrote and recorded the song that's up right now over the course of the weekend and thought I might as well share it. It doesn't have much to do with BD or DnD, although the whole lack-of-will conceit easily addresses an important issue in the arduous modding lifestyle. For those of you who are interested, the lyrics are:

Will once was mine,
A faithful will,
A drunken will—
But will it was.

And I’ve tried,
But there’s no will
Like the will
That once there was.

Will gave me love--
Or was it will?
That which it was
Was good enough.

Went away:
A silly will,
A foolish will—
But will it was.

Oh it’s dead, oh it's dead.
I live instead.

Will, I’ve your eyes
But will, you’ve taken
Their old gleam
From me.

I still have your lies—
But will, you have
All the dreams.

Sunrise in Iriaebor

The building that is the focus of this screenshot is an inn called the Wandering Wyvern. The very little bit of stone wall you see on the right side of the picture is part of the High Tower of Iriaebor, whose interiors you may remember.

Poll Results: How Do You Feel About the Forgotten Realms?

The best! May Oghma keep you. 22%

It's good. No big drawbacks. 33%

It has its problems, but it works. 20%

Not without merit but pretty overrated. 18%

I *loathe* the Realms. 4%

Of the 92 people who responded to the poll, about half seemed to few the Realms positively, and about a quarter seemed to view it negatively. The remaining folks said, "It has its problems, but it works." While this means that a majority like the Realms well enough, only 22% were downright enthusiastic about the setting--interestingly, the same percentage of people who said it was either "pretty overrated" or *loathe*-worthy.