Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

As I start getting ready for GenCon 2013 , I find myself thinking about last year's event, and since I didn't write a blog post about it at the time, here's... My Woefully Past Due Gen Con 2012 Report GenCon 2012 was probably my tenth GenCon overall, and my third in a row. While there's no point touching on any of the announcements or products available at the show, I do want to highlight a few things that really helped make this one of the most memorable visits ever. Trying New Things Every convention I typically sign up for a few D&D games, and 2012 was no different, playing in a few 4e events as well some D&D Next. In addition to this staple of the RPG field, I always try to sign up for something outside my comfort zone. In the past, it was trying new card games like 7th Sea or Death Angel, RPGs like Brave New World or Star Wars (back in the West End days), or board games like City of Thieves. In 2012, I was hoping to try out the new Marvel RPG game, bu...

In case you missed it, WoTC confirmed Monday one of it's worst kept secrets, that they are hard at work on a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Read about it here from CNN, or here from Forbes. The announcement was also carried by the New York Times and EN World. This new edition, cleverly referred to at the moment as just "D&D Next", seems to have a very daunting mandate, to re-unite the various splinters of the D&D community that have grown out of a dissatisfaction with the 4e rule set. We now have not only groups that still cling to old rule sets (like Basic, 1e, 2e, etc), but also active supporters on emerging edition variants, including Pathfinder and the OSRIC branch of D&D. I've tried to take some time to distill my thoughts on what I think would be needed for a successful next edition of D&D, beyond things like Vancian magic and Digital Support - WoTC needs a digital publishing plan, and they've needed it for the last few years. P...

If you haven't already heard, the Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity blog is in the middle of running a blog festival called "Winter is Coming". The idea is that several different folks wrote up anything game related (from adventures, classes, creatures, etc), for any gaming system, with the common theme of winter. So, grab your favorite warm beverage and check out the submissions here , or click on the image above. And be sure to check out my submission, my first ever collection of D&D 4e items here .

This year, for the second year in a row, I got to attend the Mac Daddy of gaming conventions, Gen Con . If you're not familiar with this legendary convention, you certainly owe it to yourself to do some research, and then, hopefully, plan to attend next year's gathering. This year, due to some real life issues, I wasn't able to head out early for the con. It's typical for folks to start arriving Wed afternoon (or earlier in some cases) even though the convention doesn't start till Thursday. In my case, I didn't arrive until Thur night, having missed most of the first day. I was lucky enough to get over to the convention with plenty of time to get my badge and walk around the con. The Dealer's Room was closed at that time, but everything else was in full gear. That first night I even ended up playing one of the Dungeon Delve scenarios in the Dungeons and Dragons area of the con. Personally, I think the Dungeon Delve is a great way to sample 4e at a ...

AKA: Creating My First Skill Challenge Recently, I was working on an original adventure for my gaming group. My goal was to try and apply the principles from Wolfgang Baur's excellent Adventure Builder article series from the WotC archives but something unexpected occurred as I was reviewing my work. As I looked over the adventure, and the party's goals, it started to occur to me that I had unwittingly left myself open to incorporating a skill challenge into my adventure. Needless to say I was quite shocked... especially since I'm running a 3.5 edition D&D game! When I first heard about the Skill Challenges concept, my initial thought was this was the death of "Role" Playing; that the new edition was trying to codify and distill some of the most exciting, spontaneous, and free-form moments from my games into a series of dice rolls. The more I thought and read about Skill Challenges, as well as listening to several different podcasts from the communi...

One of the things I like about 4e is reading the "why"s, why one rule was changed, created, or abandoned. Even though I'm still running a 3.5 game, as a DM, I get a lot of mileage out of knowing the thoughts of the game designers, folks who focus on this game much more than I have the chance to do (case in point, my new Second Wind rule for my game). Recently I've been thinking about the critical hits. In 4e, there is no critical threat/confirm critical for the simple reason that if you threat and fail to confirm, you go from being a hero to a loser in 2 seconds, and that certainly isn't as much fun as being the hero. Now, I'm not ready to adapt the 4e style for crits (especially since the threat range is kept much smaller than it can be min/max'ed in 3.5). But I do think something should be in order. Going forward, I'm going to try the following: On a Nat 20 (not necessarily a crit), if the player fails to confirm the crit, they still get +2 damage. ...

My current D&D campaign uses the 3.5 rules. At the same time, I'm interested in the new 4.0 rules, but don't have a lot of experience playing it (other than a few D&D Encounters sessions at my FLGS). While reading up on the new system thanks to the Rules Compendium for 4.0/Essentials. When I came across the detailed description for Second Wind, I realized that this was something I could easily incorporate into my 3.5 game. One of the things that makes it easy to use a Second Wind-type mechanic is that my game already uses the Reserve Points optional rule (from Unearthed Arcana). I use this option since for most of the campaigns, I didn't have a full party, and even now, the group doesn't have a healing cleric. Since there isn't a steady pool of healing magic available, I think Reserve Points nicely fills that gap (and allows players to play what they want, instead of someone feeling like they must play the walking band-aid). Since players have this Reserve ...

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...

This summer one of the new D&D products coming out will be a new Starter Set, another in a long line of attempts to help bring in new blood to our favorite hobby. But this time I wonder if the goal is to bring in new players to the D&D fold, or bring BACK old players. Cover art for the new starter set doesn't have any of the art treatment we've seen for 4E products and instead, features a cover that doesn't just hearken back to a previous edition, but in fact is a direct swipe of an earlier product. Compare below, the art for the new starter set and the art for a 1e set. New Starter Set Previous Basic Rules Cover Other than the product title and the company logo, it's exactly the same. I'll be interested to hear how this product does and how many old school players just might pick up the dice once again.