Rick Jones' Journal

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Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered
Jack and I watched Labyrinth last night, and some of the DVD "making of" extras this morning. I'd forgotten that the movie was made by the combined hands of Jim Henson, George Lucas and Terry Jones (of Monty Python) with music by David Bowie. No wonder I love this film so much.

my week in geek
Watched:

On tv: Middleman, Dr Horrible & the last episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I talked about Middleman already and the whole net's commented on Dr Horrible. That leaves ATLA. I was impressed with the scale of events, and it was nice that the two non-super-people were just as crucial to Saving The World as the Avatar and the other Benders. When my games get to the epic scale of power, I totally want that kind of BIG BOOM ending.

Movies: Hellboy 2. I liked it. It was incredibly awesome visually, and the story was okay. My only real problem was that The Good Guys repeatedly would stop and let the Evil Thing (on at least 2 occasions I can think of) power up. I don't mind letting the villain get their monologue, but when you give them time for a big FX sequence to start, then you're just letting the FX take over. I kept thinking "Gamers would have squashed that thing before it was knee high."

Books:

Finished the Darkwood Mask. They did pull some surprises twists at the end, and I'm usually hard to surprise. (I'm nigh-psychic with TV & Movie plots, but books have more room to pull fast ones.) I started another Eberron book (Voyage of the Mourning Dawn) which is pretty good so far. Lastly, amazon finally got another copy of Brave Men Run and it's finally on the way to my doorstep.

Gaming: We did Greg's 3.5 FR game again. We turned a CR 12 critter into a wet smear in 2 rounds thanks to our Damage Machine doing two crits against something in his sweet spot of "stuff I'm extra good at killin'" and the paladin throwing all his buffs into one hypercharged attack that also critted. Next week, we're clearing this level and then I'm back in the saddle for Keep on the Shadowfell, part deux. I also started work on an adventure all my own.

Other Stuff Not realy geeky in the traditional sense: Kat, Jack and I went to the Houston Dog Show. Jack liked flyball and agility games, and getting to pet all sorts of very good looking dogs.

Middleman
I've heard some good things about Middleman (Monday nights on ABC Family). So I programmed it into the DVR, and finally got around to watching it.

OMG, this show rocks. It's very tongue in cheek and occasionally quite silly. But it is made of fun.

The Premise: Mix Men in Black with Buffy (in that the protagonist is a young woman with a cast of interesting pals) and dial the silly-factor and pop culture references up a few notches. The budget is low, but it's just so darn endearing and fun you should enjoy it.

Horrible Prediction
My prediction for the conclusion of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

( with my freeze ray I will stop (beat beat) the world )

the geek week
Gaming: Last night was Greg's D&D 3.5 Forgotten Realms game. We leveled up, spent the loot from the past few sessions and went back down into the dungeon. After spending a metric ton of gold and leveling up enough so I don't need the magic item crutches that I'd made to compensate for not having certain feats yet, I think my bard can now not just stand in the back as a buff-bot. Yes, I will always blow my first round firing up the Inspirationally Boosted Bardsong, but after that I can do more fun stuff and get into the middle of things without being really worried that he'll be a bloody smear on the ground.

For my game, I finished the last of the prep for Keep on the Shadowfell. That means I have to get off my butt and get to work on my actual game. A bunch of cheap Eberron sourcebooks found at Half Price Books has me thinking about running in that world instead of my pretty generic D&D land.

(Also, is anyone else having problems with dndinsider? I'm having wierd account issues.)

Watching: Starting Season 4 of Battlestar. Yikes. Introduced Kat to Hellboy so we can see Hellboy 2. We also watched Jumper, which, if they'd just changed the main character's name and the first thing he does when he gets to New York, could have been named something completely different and the author of the book couldn't have sued. It's just that different, which is a total shame because the book is just so damn good.

Reading: Still reading that Eberron mystery. I ordered Brave Men Run on Sunday, but amazon ran out of copies, so who knows when I'll be able to read it. (Of course, I'll probably just give my copy to Kat for her to read since I've already heard it as a podiobook.)

Joss is my master now
Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is live. It's a story about a man with a dream. The world is a mess and he needs to rule it. It's made of Joss-y win. And it's got Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris singing.

Run, Don't Walk
One of the first podiobooks I listened to was Matthew Wayne Selznick's Brave Men Run: A Novel of the Sovreign. One of the more frequent descriptions of the book is "The X-Men meets the Breakfast Club." That's kind of a good description, though it's not about a bunch of teenage supers bonding. It's mostly about one guy, Nate Charters, who's an outcast in his school because he looks wierd. (Not full on mutant freak wierd - just enough oddness for him to be the target of all the kinds of crap that makes high school, well, high school.) It's a story about life, love, high school, parents and super-powers.

This Sunday (July 13), Brave Men Run will be available for order on amazon.com. As Scott Sigler did so successfully for Ancestor, Matt wants everyone to buy his book on Sunday so that he rocks their bestseller charts and gets the notice that he deserves. If you're not sure about the book, you can give it a listen at www.bravemenrun.com. He's also doing a live webcast on Sunday, reading other podbook authors' work set in his "Sovreign Universe."

iphone question
So, if I have an iPhone and google docs, can I edit text and spreadsheets through safari on the phone?

my week
Living: Jack had a birthday (lucky 7). He got a Wii (which will stay at his mom's house most of the time because I've already got 5,376 computer games that he plays) and some Transformers. We also took him to Schlitterbahn Galveston. (It's a gigantic water slide o-rama.) I got mildly sunburned and he had the Best Birthday Evar.

Reading: I finished the latest Glen Cook Garret PI book. It was pretty good, and keeps all the subplots rolling. Just started The Darkwood Mask, a fantasy/mystery novel set in the Eberron settting for D&D. It's okay so far, but I'm only about 1/4 in. I like both of the main characters and I'm really interested in the setting. I'm probably going to pick up more of these books.

Watching: Finished season 3 of Battlestar. I can't imagine how painful it was to leave on that cliffhanger with the extra long break between seasons. Fortunately, I have all of season 4 waiting for me on the DVR, and I plan on started that as soon as Kat and I get some TV time. After that, I have to get her caught up on Season 3 of Lost so we can watch Season 4 of that together.

Gaming: Missed this week's game because of the trip to Schlitterbahn. Reading the Eberron novel (and having picked up a couple of the sourcebooks at the half price bookstore) has me thinking of moving the game to Eberron once we're out of Keep on the Shadowfell. The drawback is that the 4e sourcebooks don't come out until next year, dammit.

Listening: There probably isn't anything more nerdy than listening to Actual Play Podcasts. I mean, it's listening to other people play RPGs.

Because that's how I roll....
So, we were playing our 3.5 Forgotten Realms game (heck no, we're not converting this far into the campaign) last night and my aasimar bard (two great tastes that don't exist in 4th Ed) was stuck in the back of a bottleneck, waiting for the front ranks to push forward enough for the rest of us to get into the fight.

Now, earlier that night, I had been talking with the other guy in our gaming cadre who wants to take a swing at 4th ed that I was going to do something different this time around. Instead of being the first one to come up with a character (because I come up with characters at the drop of a hat - any hat), I was going to let the others go first and then plug what's missing. I'd already, as an intellectual exercise while waiting on someone else at work, come up with 8 character ideas that used all 8 classes and all 8 races. So I said that to the future DM and he asked "you came up with 64 characters"? I clarified that I had only the 8.

So I'm sitting at the back ranks, wishing I could fire around corners, when I remembered that conversation. So I took out a blank sheet of paper and started writing. By the time the night was over, I had humans, dwarves, eladrin and some of the elves filled in (along with a smattering across the board). As of early this afternoon, I've finished the grid, and even wrote down a couple of concepts that had hit me after finishing.

Next I'm going to take the scribbles and fill them in a bit. I may post them, depending on how crazy I feel later.

weekend update
I have been wracking my brain to come up with other things for the "list 3 things that you've done that nobody on your friendslist has done." All I've got is "shook the hand of a Harlem Globetrotter." I suspect that "seeing a live Gallagher show" might be unique, but I wouldn't bet on it (hey, I was a kid, I liked the Sledge-O-Matic). All of the other cool stuff I've done (writing for RPGs, meeting various cool authors and such), can probably be spread over most of my friendslist.

Watching: Finished Season One of Carnivale with Kat, yoiks, that was depressing. Went to see Wall-E with Kat and Jack. (Certainly the most ambitious thing Pixar's done, though I think my reaction to the Incredibles was stronger, but I'm a dad and a comic book fan, so Incredibles was aimed at my sweet spot.) We also watched the latest episode aired of Doctor Who (aired in the US, that is), and not the new one on the BBC that has broke the internet.

Reading: Cruel Zinc Melodies, the latest Garret book by Glen Cook. I am liking it quite a lot, and enjoy the almost blase way everyone's reacting to the Thing in the Basement. Also reading more in depth of the 4th Ed D&D books, so I can use their formulas for encounter creation and treasure distribution. I have a plot and some scribbles, but the Monster Manual really doesn't have stuff I can just cut and paste to be the villains, so I'll be making them up myself.

Old School, ctd
Because I'm stuck waiting on a dev, I have now outlined the story beats of "The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh." I have to say that one of the things I am liking about 4E is the "just do it" philosophy to monster building. I don't know how I'd combine monsters, templates and classes to get what I want, but I suspect I'd just end up ignoring the Monster Creation Rules and make what I wanted to make in the first place. (Because I'm lazy that way.)

No School Like the Old School
So, I'm running the demo adventure of 4th Edition D&D, and I'm just about done with all the prep I wanted to do for it. (Just a couple more stat blocks to put in Excel so I can print them on note cards.) And I'm thinking that I want to make the next adventure myself, just to see how easy it is to make 'em in 4E, and to see how easy it is to make a new monster of appropriate levels. So I was flipping through the Monster Manual, trying to find something that was both cool and appropriate for 3rd to 4th level characters, which is where they should be by the end of "Keep on the Shadowfell." But nothing was really sparking my idea generator. But then I remembered my old idea of taking the old Basic D&D adventure (either B1 or B2 - whichever one was the one where the object of the quest was to loot this dungeon that, long ago, had been the home of this fighter and wizard who adventured together.) and adapting it as a 4E adventure. But that didn't really sound
interesting either.

And then it hit me: D&D adventures, especially the really old ones, had awesome names. "Descent into the Depths of the Earth", "White Plume Mountain", "the Lost Caverns of Tsojacanth." Those are some kick-ass names. So that gave me the idea to just grab a random 1st ed adventure name, work out an adventure that fits the name, and repeat until the group gets tired of me.

Gentlemen, we have our heading.

overdue catchup
Last week, my folks came to town for a few days to see me and Jack (but mostly Jack). I got them a digital frame for their birthdays and loaded it up with lots of pictures of Jack, so they were in grandparent heaven. They even survived a trip with His Nibs to the Children's Museum.

Speaking of The Boy - we got him a Wii for his birthday (ssh, don't tell him). It should be pretty fun. We also got the Wii Play games and Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. If you've got suggestions for other games, let me know.

Kat has been really awesome for me lately. Just needed to be said.

A lot.

Ran more D&D 4th Ed last night. Still a couple of bumps to nail down (like how does firing from cover work exactly). The big fight was pretty tough, especially since we were down the Warlock and the Rogue (leaving us with a Wizard, Cleric, Warlord and Paladin). The extra healing was definitely needed as the Warlord and the Paladin took a beating (especially the Paladin, who the Big Bad used as an axe-sharpener). I found it very easy to manage the 17 bad guys, and am officially in love with minions.

Playing the 5th Level Newbie
I've seen in a couple of places comments to the effect that it's a mistake for D&D 4th Ed not to have a "newbie" class. In previous editions, you could generally hand a new player a fighter character sheet, point out a couple of things, and they could have their character hitting monsters with a sword pretty quickly. Now, even a first level fighter has 2 kinds of attacks they can use every round, 1 attack they can use once a fight and 1 attack they can use once a day. And higher level characters have even more options, so it's a little harder for the DM to hand the newb who joins a high level group a character sheet and say "just say 'I hit it with my axe'."

Firstly, I think that while they have made fighters more complex, the payoff is that the other classes are less complex, so that a newbie who has their heart set on playing a wizard can do so without being told "you should just play a fighter until you know what you're doing."

Secondly, the problem with a newbie class is that experienced players might want to play that class, but feel straitjacketed by the lack of options. Most fantasy literature & movies has the heroic dude swinging a sword around and doing cool things. If the guy swinging the sword around can't bring as much awesome to the table as the experienced gamer with an optimized character with lots of options, then I'd consider it more of a handicap to the game in the long run. Especially since fantasy books and movies are FULL of guys with swords bringing all kinds of awesome.

On Running 4th Edition
So I got to run Keep on the Shadowfell for the usual suspects of the gaming group. We had a good mix of races and classes (dwarf fighter, elf cleric, dragonborn paladin, eladrin warlord, human wizard, halfling rogue -

drangelo that leaves you with a half elf ranger or warlock). We finalized characters, a mission briefing, a "gather clues in town" round robin and two fights, all in about 3 hours.

Thoughts:

I like the adventure layout. Because I'm that kind of DM, I printed out stat blocks for the monsters on index cards, but because all of the stat blocks for an encounter were on the same page as the maps and such for the fight, I pretty much just referred to the book (and the initiative chart / monster condition tracker that I wrote up before the game). I also appreciated the tactics sections to help me figure out how they'd fight.

I also like the adventure itself - there's a very nonlinear quality to it, with multiple quests to pick up as you go.

The combats went well. The bits on monster tactics and the way monsters are designed made them easier to run. I suspect that once folks get used to their characters' abilities that things will run even more smoothly.

Players are more powerful out of the box, but so are the monsters. Who knew that kobolds could be so tough?

I really like the change to hit points - they're much more cinematic now, and there's not the limited resource of healing spells & potions to slow them down. Everyone can self heal so you aren't forced to have a cleric in the party anymore. (Though it certainly would be a lot harder without a warlord or cleric in the party.) You do lack a system for big wounds that take some time to heal, but I'm willing to pay that price.

I'm anxious to see how the Skill Challenges play out - there aren't any in the actual module, but I can probably throw one or two in there.

I am so old....
So I keep checking amazon to see the status of my 4th Edition D&D amazon order. (latest check - it's in Louisville, I'll probably get it tomorrow)

I've been thinking lately about how long it's been since I've run D&D. Near as I can figure it, I haven't RUN D&D since 1982-ish. I played with a group of my friends from school, but schoolyard politics split the group. Later, I fell in with a different gaming circle that focused on superhero games over fantasy, and while I almost always played in a D&D group, I never had the urge to run it.

Now, for whatever reasons, be it a combo of nostalgia, the shiny new sheen of a new edition or an effort to avoid old age (1), but I'm going to be behind a DM's screen next week for the first time since around 1982 or so.

(1) It is sobering to know that two of the players in our group weren't even ALIVE when I last ran D&D.

Geek Thoughts
One of the things I love about having a Hot Geek Girlfriend (TM) is that I can get her a Sonic Screwdriver for her birthday and she squees with delight.

Keep on the Shadowfell is out in stores. My copy is on a UPS truck somewhere in Texas, but it's not expected to arrive until late next week. Thankfully, I've got a loaner from someone who just bought a copy to help me get ready for running in once the core rulebooks hit the shelves. (And you better believe that I upgraded the shipping on those bad boys.) There's a little bit of "Holy Crap, I haven't been a Dungeon Master since Reagan was president." But I have been a GM of about 20 other game systems since then, so I guess I'll be fine.

Last night was another Eberron game, which I have to say was loads of teh fun. We're starting to gell better and understand our characters. I am having far too much fun playing my warforged fighter.

My Life With Master, The Movie
check it out

Fun in Eberron
Last night was the first session of a 3.5 game (with heavy house rules) set in Sharn. We were a bunch of adventurer types who didn't know each other going to the bank to withdraw money we needed to pay a loan shark. Just then, supervillains, um, I mean evil folks attacked, trapping us in the vault with them. They were going to snuff us and steal something, and it seems that there's more to this than just a bank robbery. It ended on two cliffhangers, with each half of the party (because we split up in our investigations) in dire peril.

I played House Cannith Systems Warforged Model 1-D-20, aka "Tank." I spoke like Ahnold and chewed a lot of scenery.