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Post by Jona on Jun 9, 2008 12:38:27 GMT -5
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vchan
Thespian
Making gravy without the lumps!
Posts: 176
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Post by vchan on Jun 9, 2008 14:38:16 GMT -5
Well, I got my books today and as works a bit slow I spent the last five or so hours reading the players and dmg.
My thoughts;
I don't like the power layouts as if each were printed on the back of a card.
I'm going to need reference material and cross indexing to figure out who's supposed to be able to do what how many times a day.
Any game I run in this, I'm rewriting the commerce section. The whole 'incredibly convenient travelling merchant' irks me to no end. I'll likely use the tweaked 3.5 edition economy/commerce rules from my current game.
I find I really like the way they have rituals set up, and can see using and creating ritual rewards for certain adventures.
The enchant magic items ritual (make your own thingy) will get a little more complicated than it is currently. Thinking of adding some extra material components on top of their flat rate listed cash, ie, to make Dragonbane armor, you need something draconic to build into the ritual.
May spend a bit of time in excel and see what I can do about putting together a character sheet generator for this. The creation process is complicated enough I'm not looking forward to trying to do it on paper.
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Post by Matt Droz on Jun 9, 2008 16:49:22 GMT -5
May spend a bit of time in excel and see what I can do about putting together a character sheet generator for this. The creation process is complicated enough I'm not looking forward to trying to do it on paper. Speaking of which, I am working on getting all the 3.5 material into a character generator/spellbook excel sheet. Hopefully another month maybe?
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Post by Matt Droz on Jun 9, 2008 20:38:47 GMT -5
One other thing. I wanted to sign up and check out D&D Insider. Run through the mini builder, check out the character generation and the virtual tabeltop.
The books have been on the market for 3 days now. And still, you can only see "previews" of the Insider software. To a computer programmer like myself, that speaks VOLUMES. Like, they aren't ready to launch it. And, if they can't be ready to launch by the time the books come out, then will they ever be ready to launch it?
Methinks they bit off WAY more then they can chew with the promises they've made regarding insider. Think about it. They say that not only can you create your character's mini and customize it in great detail, but you can save your character information, have a virtual copy of all the books you purchase AND play a virtual game with all your online friends. Let's do the math. Last year at GenCon, there were 26,000 attendees. Being the cheap bastards we (gamers) are, let's assume that that is a 5% representation of our population. That puts our numbers at about a half million. That's VERY conservative since WoW alone boasts about 10 million subscribers. But, does Wizards actually have the resources/servers to really launch something like they promised? I'm thinking that they developed a nice looking piece of software and said "That's just what we need to bring D&D digital!" and then the number crunchers gave them the tally on what they'd need to set up so their customers would actually GET what the promised with minimum headaches.
I'm thinking D&D Insider's not going to be ready until Christmas. Maybe.
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Post by Matt Droz on Jun 9, 2008 21:05:41 GMT -5
And to back up my bitching... Official Wizards thread on D&D InsiderThey'll have the electronic library running in maybe a few weeks, but the other stuff in "... at least a few months from now, probably longer." Yep, nice to see that they never rushed the new edition just to make some money.
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Post by Matt Droz on Jun 19, 2008 9:21:43 GMT -5
Just watched the video podcast from D&D episode 23. Basically, it shows a group of 15th level characters against a mind flayer, 2 rakshasai and a minotaur. The impression I got from watching them play reminded me a LOT of playing Advanced D&D 2nd Edition. The character sheets are multiple pages, everyone has to explain what they are doing and the DM (Dave Noonan, D&D podcaster and designer) spends a lot of time asking people about numbers. The other thing it reminds me of is Final Fantasy, since AC/Saves were all over 20 (with a LOT over 30) they increased HP totals/Damage done. i.e. "I did 120 damage!" "That's great, the villain looks annoyed at losing 1/10th of his HP."
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Post by Matt Droz on Jun 19, 2008 9:53:25 GMT -5
Oh, and I don't think I'm going to purchase D&D Insider at all. One of the selling points was that you could create you're own 3d character to play with. Turns out, not so much:
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Post by Matt Droz on Jun 26, 2008 7:18:52 GMT -5
The REAL problem with 4th Edition:
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Post by Matt Droz on Jul 23, 2008 10:50:59 GMT -5
For you Eberron fans out there, I was taking a look at the Monster Manual and discovered the following:
Shifters and Warforged are in the book, Shifters are down to Longtooths and Razorclaws. As for Changelings, they've been upgraded and are now the new Doppelgangers.
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Post by Keikan300 on Jul 23, 2008 14:45:22 GMT -5
4th Edition continues to march on and I haven't really heard of anybody that is 100% thrilled.
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