Notes all over the place.

[alexandraerin]

Hey, if you're looking for a good cause to give to this holiday season, there are a couple of them linked to in this article about the problems facing women returning home from combat duty overseas. Highlighting this is not meant to diminish the reality that all our armed forces personnel and veterans need support, but so much of the existing infrastructure and good will is directed towards "our boys in uniform". Our boys are not alone, and in the midst of insurgency and guerrilla warfare, there is no "front line" to keep women away from.

I'm tempted to say something about the ETA of me having a working desktop computer again, but I don't want to jinx anything. I've run out of how many times bitten and how many times shy I am at this point. If I don't have a working computer on hand at the end of the week, I'll come up with alternative arrangements for some of the things I've been putting off.

Random note: now is a great time to get into 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons... they're offering a limited release holiday bundle of the first two players' handbooks at $34.95. One of the more common laments from people who thought the new edition looked cool was that several classes that were core under 3rd Edition weren't present at launch. With PHB 1 and 2, you get all the 3E core classes except Monk, plus several nifty original ones.

The next PHB that comes out (I think in March?) is going to be a major game-changer. The test version of the rules it includes for making hybrid character classes are already accessible online and through the character creator. I love the game as it is, but I think this upcoming release is going to really cement its place and bring its full potential into fruition. Buying the bundle now could save you money in the long run if you think you might get into the game eventually... you can avoid having to buy every splatbook that comes out and still get all the various foo for your characters through the character generator, but having the core PHBs actually on hand adds a lot to the experience of learning the game and making characters, in my opinion.

The Q&A is more work than I expected... I didn't expect as many responses, and I didn't realize how many I had when I started compiling them. Don't be fooled by the fact that the first two updates both spanned about three letters... the characters' names and the number of questions per character are far from evenly distributed across the alphabet. The whole thing is actually a little under half done. In case people are curious about why I included the "Dear Amaranth, why do you suck so much?" questions, it's because I felt the character deserved a chance to answer them in her own words. I also had a feeling that posting them would bring her supporters... who often get drowned out in the comments... out of the woodwork.

My day started off very nicely today, despite a lack of sleep the night before: I got a confirmation/reminder email from Priceline.com about my flight to Maryland, which leaves two weeks from today.

Comments

Re: D&D

[lystania.livejournal.com]

Alright, alright! You've convinced me that I need to give it more of a chance - the next time I have $34.95 lying around - assuming the deal is still going on - I'll drop it on some 4E books. Maybe I can still make enough of a slugger that it won't be *too* big a deal.

Moving on to the OGL issues - apparently Wizards received enough complaints that they announced in Aug 2008 (according to Wikipedia) that they were revising the 4E OGL (called GSL). This was significantly after I'd read the old one, so my info is a bit out of date. I'll need to read the new one I guess =\ Hopefully it resolved some of the stifling issues.

PS - I don't see a 3rd-party developer with bad content actually damaging 4E. If you buy a bad remote for the Wii from a 3rd-party developer, do you think, "Man, Wii sucks" or "Man, should've bought from Nintendo - oh well"?

GSL excerpt

[lystania.livejournal.com]

[no graphical or textual depictions of:](b) sexual situations, sexual abuse, pornography, gratuitous nudity of human or humanoid
forms, genitalia, or sexual activity;

*grumble, grumble,* no more manual of erotic fantasy *grumble, grumble*

Re: D&D

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I don't see it damaging 4E now, because they've had a couple of years to build up their own library of player content. Back when it was just the eight classes in the original PHB with only their original two builds, I feel that a truly open license would have encouraged developers to try to fill in the gaps with the 3E core classes that hadn't been put in the first PHB and equivalents to popular prestige classes and such and of course some players would have jumped on the opportunity to play their favorite classes... if the results were bad, some players might go "Oh, well, I guess we'll have to wait until we get an official Sorcerer or Bard"... but if the class looks cool on paper but breaks the game, I think some people would suspect the game is at fault especially if they don't have a lot of experience with the new version.

Re: D&D

[lystania.livejournal.com]

So what you're saying here is that, because the 4E was released before it had a "full" listing of core classes, that 3E could have damaged it? Doesn't that just mean Wizards should have waited to release 4E until they had a "full" listing? =p But yes, I realllly get this point, too. Oh well, guess I get to wait for student loans, and see if I can sway the wife to consider letting go of our shelf-full of 3.5...

Re: D&D

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I realize this comment is almost a month old, but I'm re-reading old entries and I must not have seen this comment the first time around.

No, what I was saying is that because the core classes at launch did not include all the same classes as were core in 3E, then 3rd party developers could have rushed to market with poorly thought out versions of those classes and damaged peoples' impression of the game.

(And to me, there are only four core classes that are mandatory. If you've got a Fighter, you've got a Rogue, you've got a Wizard, and you've got a Cleric, that's all you need to call it D&D.)

Re: D&D

[lystania.livejournal.com]

Whoops, that "3E" I wrote was supposed to be "3rd-party developers"

Re: D&D

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I'd say that half of how you play a slugger in the new game is how you make the character and the other half is... well, how you play them. When you pick your two at-will powers, pick one that's straightforward and focused on damage and think of that as your default attack. Any time you'd go "I attack the owlbear", you're going to be using that. For your encounter and daily powers, look for the ones that boil down to "hit hard" and then expend them against the toughest opponents to help take them out of the fight early on.

The Fighter is slightly less of a slugger as you define them because the formalization of the "meat shield" role into Defender adds tactical considerations, but compared to other Defenders their marking mechanic (the means by which they keep enemies engaged with them) is very simple. The Paladin is, in my opinion, slightly simpler than it was, due to the fact that it's no longer a Fighter/Cleric class but more of a pure warrior type. You can make a Paladin that does nothing but smite evil with a sword.

Strikers tend to be simplest because their role is "do a lot of damage quickly and bring the big guys down". Most of them have a mechanic that lets them do extra damage to one opponent, often tied to being the closest one to the target or the target being closest enemy to you, but since you generally attack the enemy you're closest to when you're on autopilot it's a pretty easy adjustment.

While they are Strikers, Barbarians are probably the class that underwent the biggest change in complexity. They're still very HULK SMASH in flavor, but the fact that they have so many different abilities that can trigger a charge or a second attack encourages you to think tactically from turn to turn, and the way Rage works gives them resource management concerns that most classes don't.

But they're great fun, especially as they (along with Druids in beast form) are one of the few classes that have a lot of powers that can be used with a charge. It was a Barbarian that caused us to observe that the division between ranged Strikers and melee Strikers is a false one: there are ranged Strikers and ranged Strikers who forgot to let go of the weapon.

Re: D&D

[lystania.livejournal.com]

So in other words, the Fighter is like the too-little, too-late Knight class was supposed to be in late 3.5 (PHB2)? I say too-little, because his crowd-control abilites were once agan based on the failure of a saving throw system >.>

That's certainly something that's needed doing in a play environment that regularly involves small dungeon rooms where the "mobs" can hit the wizardly types from round one, and could KILL them in the first round if it weren't for death-shy DMs. A mechanic of some type to prevent that is certainly needed so that DMs don't have to come up with reasons why the shiny warriors look tastier.

Lol @ the ranged striker stuff.