Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

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 many years, TSR tried to come up with ways to bring new players into the D&D game. Their own research had shown that there was a steep learning curve to the rules set (something that I think has persisted to this day). To that end, TSR created various versions of D&D lite, usually in the form of a board game, sometimes with cards and plastic pieces, and always with a full set of polyhedral dice. One such game was Dragonstrike . One of the things that made this game different was the inclusion of a video. Only a small part of the video casette (remember those!) is actually instructional, most of it is a live action/computer graphics short film depicting one adventure. Be warned that the CG is pretty bad, the acting not too much better, and the plot straight out of a basic adventure... on the other hand, it does have it's moments, illustrates some basic concepts and has a disembodied floating head DM (where else are you going to see that!) So grab a soda, and a small popc...