John Zeitler

Essay Week 2010 runs from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Every year I take a week and write about some topics of interest to me that run slightly more serious than the usual fare on the blog. That’s not to say that games and anime won’t enter into it, but the predominant theme is that this week skews a bit more literary than epistolary. Today we take a look back at the very first Essay Week topic three years ago, and see if I was rolling 20′s that day.

It’s not that Dungeons and Dragons has become less nerdy in the two years since its fourth edition was released. Quite the contrary, in point of fact, as the game now has an emphasis on miniature modeling in addition to die-based roleplaying. The books are more numerous, the gameplay more dogmatically defined, and the characters hewn more closely to standard fantasy and gaming archetypes. But, even within that strictly nerdy framework, the players involved are becoming ever so more diverse.

( In retrospect, I think maybe Wizards of the Coast made a bad call in describing 4th edition as ‘evolutionary, not revolutionary’… » )

The average age at which children learn how to read is, for English-speakers, anywhere between four and six. By age seven, kids are supposed to be able to know how to read “for comprehension”, that is, to understand the words on the page rather than merely sounding them out without connecting them to the concepts. I started at three.

And now, twenty-seven years later, I had to take a very close look at the title of one of my Dungeons and Dragons manuals, because at first glance I thought it said Marital Power.

Well, folks… this is it, today starts the D&D campaign. Wish me luck.

Really, it’s been another very quiet set of days, folks. Despite my best efforts, I haven’t even been able to sit down long enough to do any gaming… which is a shame, as I really wanted to keep going with SRT: OG2 before I forgot where I was in it. Ah well, tomorrow’s a busy night– I have to sit down and finalize the D&D campaign for Saturday after incorporating some of the feedback I got from Pez and Adam last weekend, preferably before the hockey game starts… and then Sunday will be filled with laundry, grocery shopping, and cooking up a batch of seafood curry. That last bit I’m very excited about, as quite frankly it never occurred to me that combining two things I love that way would work, so it’s an interesting experiment.

Anyway. Later, folks.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been doing some pretty intensive reading and writing for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that’ll be starting up in a week or so. The first mission is about halfway finished, but what’s got me thinking is just how much easier getting everything together is under 4th Edition than it was in 3rd.

One of the things that I balked at initially was the concept of character and monster roles; it seemed like an arbitrary and silly way to enforce an intention on the DM and the players. The more I read through and pick out creatures– to say nothing of defining them– I realize it makes things easier in terms of strategizing creature placement and encounter size. In the planning phase, having the roles ensures that you don’t create encounters that are easily dominated by one particular style. For example, a cluster of identical kobolds (Brutes) can be boring to fight through, but give half of them crossbows and have them hang back behind cover (Artillery) and the encounter changes dramatically.

What’s also worth noting is that I’m not being as rigid in defining my encounters and rooms. I have a general idea of what I want to do when the PCs arrive in each new room, but it’s been a point here to stress that the environment is sometimes as much of a danger to the party as the monsters. Dungeons aren’t designed with OSHA compliance– they’re old, decrepit ruins which could collapse entirely at any given moment if a particularly foolhardy halfling were to, say, lunge at a handful of gems tucked away in an innocuous corner. When they’re not, they’re fortresses specifically designed to be hostile to the folks who come barging in. I learned a lot from watching other campaigns, where elaborate set-pieces make sweeping changes to the flow of a battle.

Finally, one of my goals with the campaign is to prove that a good encounter is one that can be solved in different ways. Violence is not always the most successful option, or even the one with the largest chance of survival. Players should be encouraged to hunt out ways to get out of fighting, because constant fighting can get tedious. And trust me, I have ways of making sure my players know the better part of valor.

We’ll know in a couple of days if my studies bear fruit or not– I’m doing a playtesting session this coming weekend. Till then, I want to leave you with this thought: I had to scale back my damage estimates less often than I had to increase them.

So the Dungeons and Dragons thing went really well yesterday. I kind of thought it would, but then again there were a lot of firsts, and the biggest problem was that the players didn’t take the bait that I had set up for a couple of encounters. Still, lots of fun.

In terms of single-player stuff, I am really falling in love with Tales of Vesperia… it’s a great game, challenging, and more than anything else it’s hilarious at times. I always seem to start the year off with a big RPG and this is a great one to lead off 2009 with.

Not much else to say… some smaller projects are in the works for later, but nothing I can talk about right now. Catch you all tomorrow.

Wish me lots of luck and patience, folks– today I start a career as a Dungeon Master. Well, maybe not a career, but at the very least I’m running a one-shot session at GASP, after weather that was projected to be inclement caused the original DM to cancel. I think maybe I’ve done a pretty good job with the setting (and no, I’m not going to spoil it yet), making it somewhat different from your traditional “hole in the ground with monsters” locales that one-shots invariably land in. The reason for this is that this one-shot is basically a rushed version of where I wanted a campaign to start.

Hey, the worst-case scenario is we all give up and play Blokus.