Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

Sadly, since I had to cut my Gen Con trip short, I wasn't around for the Saturday seminar where the folks from WotC announced a bunch of new products for 2011. But I did eagerly follow every Twitter link and blog post I could find. I had some initial reactions to the announcements, but decided to sit on them for a while before writing down my thoughts, and I'm glad I did, since some of my initial reactions changed the more I thought about it. One thing that didn't change was my sub headline for this blog post: 2011 - The Year Everything Changes Technically you could say that things are changing right now with regards to D&D 4e, but it wasn't until I saw the product list for 2011 that I realized that what we'll be seeing in the upcoming months from WotC for 4e sets the stage for the "new normal". What I'm specifically referring to are the game changes that will be part of the new D&D Essentials line. We've known about the Essentials line for...

Besides Castle Ravenloft , one of the other games I played this year at Gen Con was the Dungeon Delve. This was a short event, where a party of pre-gen characters goes through about two encounters in a one hour time limit. This year the pre-gens were all built using the upcoming D&D Essentials ruleset. For this very reason, I was greatly interested in trying this out to get a taste of how these characters would behave. For the one game I played (due to other commitments, I didn't have time to play the delve more than once), I chose to play the slayer (fighter). If you haven't already read about the slayer, check out the preview article posted on the official site. The one thing I really liked was the new Stance ability. This allowed me to modify my basic attack with either a stance that gave me +1 to hit, or one that granted +2 to damage. I think this is much better than the previous at-will powers, which effectively negated the need to ever use a basic attack. Also, the l...

Having been home from Gen now for two days (I had to cut my visit short as I had family obligations on Saturday), I thought I should jot down some of my experiences, and thoughts. Originally I planned to draft a long post covering all the things I saw, played, and thought during the three days I was there (from early Wednesday through late Friday), but rather than one catch all post, I've decided to write up a number of short posts, all under the "Gen Con Aftermath" title, on various topics related to the convention. Up first was the first game I played at the con... the new Castle Ravenloft board game. The first thing to note is that many of the game mechanics are based on the D&D 4th Edition game. Heroes are based on the races and classes from D&D--for the game, I played a Dragonborn Fighter, while the other players had similarly familiar races and classes. Each character had a stat card (on very thick card stock--the same as the dungeon tiles sets). On one side...

For the first time in a few years, I'm heading out to Gen Con. Thinking back, I realize that the last time I was there, was the release of 3e. But more than that, I realize that this is the first time I'm going to Gen Con in the social media era. Last time I went, there were plenty of email threads and web pages for this and that, but as I get ready this time, I realized that I'm looking at a variety of sources, from blog posts, and Twitter feeds, to YouTube videos and finding a wealth of ideas and suggestions that I hadn't thought. And not just the variety of info, but the ease with which I can go from a tweet, to a blog, to a podcast or video really made planning and prepping this year much easier than in the past. I don't know if other people are leveraging all the great info out there, but I certainly am, and I for one thank everyone who's posted a suggestion, or link, or video... see you in Indianapolis!