As I’m using Twitter more these days, I decided that the multiple tweets per day were probably making the front page here overly noisy. With that, I’ve temporarily removed it from the feed, updates will appear there no longer. If it turns out that you really did like them being there (or are pleased that they’re now gone), please, tell me and I’ll act accordingly.

Two things I miss of La Crosse: the drives (as I have talked about a couple times) and the interesting topology of the area (again, experienced while driving). Madison, while great, is pretty boringly flat, and I don’t have a whole lot of reason to do excitingly long drives (especially ones with different, exploratory routes). I kind of want to do some sort of Wisconsin road trip.

Or maybe I should stop feeding my nostalgia with Wikipedia surfing.

After putting it off for a while, I’ve decided to start merging the emptymatter.org and incorporeal.org domains, so that they all share the same services. (This has mostly been working for a while now.) I think I’ve always preferred the incorporeal.org domain name, so this will let me start advertising that again, hopefully without breaking what people are used to.

It may be a rocky ride for a bit.

I’d been thinking about how I don’t write enough about one of my favorite hobbies, roleplaying (and, specifically, Dungeons & Dragons), and as such I decided to try to get in the habit of documenting my experiences in running a campaign again. Like many of my website projects, this journal will live or die by how much I periodically update.

A number of years ago, my first D&D DMing experience was, after picking up the 3.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting at Gen Con, spontaneously starting a game with no direction following a couple hours of disarray at one of my group’s gaming sessions. It was definitely rocky, for me, and not without stressful times, but I think, ultimately, it was pretty well received, and there are some fond memories that we still speak of. Unfortunately, I fell a bit too in love with the campaign, and it died when I tried to hand it off so that I could be a player.

Since then, I’ve tried to start new games, including rebooting a Realms game at least twice, but they never really took. Maybe it was group-game saturation, or maybe I’d just gotten really lucky the first time, or (most likely) maybe my interests quickly wandered elsewhere, but the attempts faded into obscurity soon after the start. I moved on, to other systems and themes. But, deep within me, I’ve always had an itch to run D&D again.

Similarly, attempts to introduce gaming to a gang of friends on IRC had been well-received but died off with similar whimpers — too much disorganization among all of us, too little time on my plate, and not as much of the social aspect is probably what killed those games. The enthusiasm was there, but not the means to cultivate it. Again, maybe simply, the time was not right.

In one of these bouts of stagnancy trying to get a game of CthulhuTech going with the IRC group, I decided to pull the plug and instead present a more accessible (for all of us, in my opinion) alternative: D&D. I could scratch my itch with 4e and the new Forgotten Realms, and give the easiest path to my players, one with plenty of exciting books and options, and a very strong roleplaying line (incidentally, previous attempts at the Realms with that group, in 3.5, probably did the best of my gaming cultivation efforts).

For now, however, enough history. The decision was made roughly two weeks ago, and we played on Sunday for the first time, after spending around a week making characters.

Things went pretty well. The Character Builder (even the demo) is a great tool, and I think some of the moderate success so far belongs to how presentable the Builder makes character creation. People are thinking about backstories, and their character’s place in the world (the pair of Realms sourcebooks obviously helps that), and overall crafting some interesting characters to play — very cool. As I usually end up doing, we’re taking a liberty or two with the Realms, but mostly adhering to the setting and letting it help fill in the gaps — we’re all busy people, after all, and we can’t be creative all the time.

Unsurprisingly, those of us who were used to d20/True20 are having some issues getting used to the 4e world, or disassociating rules and quirks we’d picked up from previous games. The new 4e elements I think the players are doing pretty good on, but game concepts common to multiple editions (such as opportunity attacks, and what it means to be at negative hit points) catch us up on occasion.

The three combat encounters (and my fumbly skill challenge) have been a bit bumpy, but nothing critical has gone wrong, and we’ve all been learning things. For instance, this is my first time actually building 4e encounters, which is refreshingly simple once acquainted with the concepts and creature classifications. The players have the harder job right now, learning a new system and, for the most part, getting into the roleplaying mentality.

That’s been a bit bumpy too, I think the joking/sarcastic comment ratio is a bit too high for IRC; while those comments are always present at the gaming table, typing on IRC is time-consuming, and a lot of time is spent on chatter and quasi-in-person comments that aren’t acted upon (or meant to be). There is a fair amount of distraction factor as well, but as long as my players keep relatively up to speed (which isn’t always the case :\), it doesn’t bother me as much as it has in the past.

Ultimately, though, combining the above with the normal difficulty of identifying fake hostility and joking quips over the Internet has made a couple moments a bit tense for the players. I think some of it them being stressed — there is a lot to digest, and I need to keep the pace somewhat reasonable, or we’ll never get anywhere.

Nevertheless, I’m very pleased with how things are going. We spent most of Sunday playing, and there was immediately demand for playing again soon, so we snuck in a quick session on Wednesday. Combats are slow, but improving as people get a feel for their characters, their powers, and the system concepts in general. The improvement there is fun to see, but what pleases me the most is the enthusiasm in playing again.

I also hope to get some real experience in enhancing the game via the wiki, encouraging people to write whatever comes to their mind about the PCs and NPCs of the campaign, and even people and places of the official Realms setting, as they pertain to the campaign. I’ve tried one idea in particular with the quest “cards", and I have a couple more tricks up my sleeve that I hope will pan out.

This became much longer than I intended it to. In short (now that I’m done talking anyway), I’m pleased to be scratching my DM/Realms itch again, and I’m doubly pleased that my players are doing well and enjoying what I have offered them so far. If it keeps on going, this could end up being a hell of a lot of fun.

So, increasing my all-consuming interest in Dungeons & Dragons 4e, I picked up the Player’s Handbook 2 today, and spent a good part of the evening paging through it. Despite my renewed enthusiasm for the game (now that I have some playtime on both sides of the screen), I still came at the book with a bit of skepticism — let it be known now, it was mostly unwarranted. What is great, what is good, and what remains, you ask?

Pre-content Thoughts

Normal D&D4e production values in printing and layout. Inside the book, it’s indistinguishable from the relevant sections of the PH1 — same style for races, classes and their powers, paragon paths, so on.

The art is hit and miss. The primary art (chapter opens, races, and the like) are all pretty good to very good, but some of the incidental art and paragon path illustrations could have used another look. Nothing ridiculously wrong like some of the Complete Divine art (which my group liked poking fun at), but occasionally underwhelming. I guess not all of the illustrations can be knockouts.

On the nitpicking anal-retentive side, I’m wondering if every book is going to have a slightly different colored spine — the blue of the book is slightly lighter than that of the Player’s Handbook, and while trying to color code the books is no fun either, I’m wondering if my bookshelf is going to look like a shuffled Crayola box by the end.

Those highly concerned with dollars and cents may feel a bit stiffed in terms of volume — the book runs at the same price as the first Player’s Handbook but comes in at almost 100 pages less, putting it alongside the Dungeon Master’s Guide (a useful book, don’t get me wrong) in page-to-dollar ratio. While the page disparity can be easily explained given the content in PH2, maybe knocking $5 off the retail price would have been in order.

Introduction

The obligatory introduction opens with the standard introduction section, laying out what is to come, and includes a cookie-cutter sidebar prodding players to describe their powers less systematically, and using backgrounds (introduced later) to help facilitate the character’s backstory.

More interestingly, the introduction concludes (thankfully, already) with a page on the primal power source (the new source in PH2. It’s a pretty good write-up, with an honest approach to characters of the wild, essentially stating “while primal characters may not care much about that divine hooey or the growth of civilization, they’re not diametrically opposed — all three sides have common enemies and bigger fish to fry". It doesn’t wax poetic or anything, of course, but it’s a nice framing of the power, and I wish they’d done the same for the powers in the Player’s Handbook.

Character Races

Five races are introduced: devas, servants of the gods being reborn in the common world; gnomes, trickster fey (no surprise there); goliaths, tough, rugged mountain nomads; half-orcs, orc/human hybrids presented as a unique line rather than halfbreeds (interesting); and shifters, bestial humanoids with trace amounts of lycanthrope blood (hence the shifting).

The latter three races tend to bleed together a bit in their focus on the wilderness (but hey, that is to be expected with the introduction of the new power source), but each has its defining qualities. None of the five seem like they were tacked-on, or an afterthought, and the description of each makes them more than caricatures (with the exception of the shifters, maybe). I was pleasantly surprised by the half-orc, which finally sheds its stereotype as a dumb thicky, constantly on the fringes of (both human and orc) civilization.

The second of the chapter presents some racial paragon paths, one for each PH1/PH2 race (with the exception of the half-elf, who gets improved multiclassing via a feat instead). The racial paragon paths take the traits of each race to their obvious pinnacle: shifters become moonstalkers and get hunting-themed abilities, gnomes become fey beguilers and get sneaking and illusion abilities, eladrin ascend to shiere knights and represent the pinnacle of the Feywild, and so on. Nothing appears wrong with the racial paragon paths, but they’re not quite my cup of tea, and they do appear to have slight difficulty in differentiating themselves from class-based paragon paths. But, for those looking to have their character become the adventurer by which all of their race are judged (heh, or stereotyped), these do exactly that. The powers stand out well without going too much one way or the other on the balance scale.

Again, I can see plenty of people being pleased with these, I just personally find the class-based paragon paths more interesting.

Character Classes

The meat and potatoes of the book. Eight new classes:

• the avenger (striker), a divine agent of battle, predisposed to neutrality, dishing out their god’s will, and a pretty interesting class all told;
• the barbarian (striker), the classic “I’m going to rip that one guy to shreds and damn the defenses” warrior;
• the bard (leader), which I’m excited about for some strange reason — a fun-looking party support leader who buffs with a little bit of controller mixed in;
• the druid (controller), the classic nature-based shapeshifter that is all about flexibility, with a litany of powers in and out of their beast form;
• the invoker (controller), an impressive but somewhat derivative conduit for divine will, either protective or wrathful;
• the shaman (leader), a battle guide with a companion spirit to act as another ally (setting up flanks, acting as a healing focal point, etc.);
• the sorcerer (striker), a channeler of raw arcane energy that mixes the striker’s focus with burst and blast attacks;
• and the warden (defender), a primal protector of nature (and of course your party) with a controller-like mass-mark ability and beast or tree forms.

All of the classes have their primary role clearly indicated, and the support text also points out common secondary roles, which is a nice addition, showing the diversity of the classes. Naturally, each class has their entire power list laid out as in the PH1, along with a number of paragon paths. System balance is solid here too; none of the classes or powers appear to be broken, with the exception of a rare higher-level power which will seem to have one too many dice or the like. Definitely not a deal-breaker, though.

What impressed me the most was that, just like with the races, none of the classes feel tacked on or doing something totally antithesis to the standard set by the first book — all of the classes stand up alongside their PH1 kin, acting as part of the overall design while still offering their unique qualities.

The chapter ends with epic destinies, which follow the tradition of being a storytelling mechanism along the lines of “I want my character to be remembered for…". The Harbinger of Doom stands out to me as a great example of that — as interesting features as the other destinies, of course, but framed with a certain foreboding that keeps the destiny mechanic on a whole interesting.

Character Options

An assortment of less significant mechanics fill this chapter. It begins with backgrounds, which serve the immediate purpose of describing your character before level 1 while adding some minor benefits to the character. These, in my experience, work pretty well — I used the regional benefits in the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide for my game, and the backgrounds section of PH2 claims those as a subset of the overall background concept. A DM who is not interested in the mechanical benefits of the backgrounds may still be interested in presenting them, just to get the gears turning in players’ heads.

Of course, there is the normal collection of feats, feats, and feats (for each tier). At a glance, half of the list is focused on the new classes, with around half of the remaining feats related to new races. The feats, naturally, vary in theme based on the focus of the class or desired action, but, again, everything appears to have been balanced well. One feat of note is the replacement for the half-elf’s missing racial paragon path, a feat that allows the Dilettante racial trait to be used as an at-will power, with essentially limitless multiclassing options for those choosing the paragon multiclassing option. It sounds like a nice feat, and it gives some more love to the oft-disregarded half-elf race.

As would be expected, multiclass feats are included for the book’s new classes.

A more than modest selection of magic items is included, again mostly focused on the wants and needs of the new classes, but a number of the options are definitely useful for the PH1’s classes, including new forms of masterwork armor. The new implements (totems, and weapons as implements) are introduced, as well as musical instrument wondrous items, acting as implements for bards but usable by anyone.

A couple dozen new rituals are added, filling some utility needs introduced by the primal power (standbys such as speak with nature, control weather), introducing utility bardsongs, and throwing in the wildcard or two (reverse portal, for instance).

Appendix: Rule Updates

Seeing this section scared the hell out of me at first. If anything made d20 (3.0 or 3.5) unpalatable, it was its constant revising of the rules, adding new action types based on the miniatures games, or introducing new uses of skills, and the like. The issue, ultimately, with these changes was that no attempt was made to make the established order fit with the additions, leading to a hodge podge of exception cases and, ultimately, imbalance.

That was 3.x, however, and so far 4e has avoided that problem. The appendix serves mainly to rewrite the “how to read a power” section of the PH1, including both new keywords and expanding/re-explaining the terminology introduced in the first book. While this sounds like it could be abysmal, nothing I saw contradicts or breaks the established order, instead items are just clarified. For example, the appendix states that the sequence of “effect” texts in a power is not accidental, and indentations are indeed intended to create conditional hierarchies ("secondary attack” is indented under “hit” because it is only relevant if you hit).

A number of other minor power clarifications show up: a character does not need to have an implement to use implement-keyword powers, they just need the ability to use the relevant implement (the difference between carrying a wand and being able to use a wand), reliable powers go unspent if every target is missed. Nothing here seems earth-shattering to me (some of it, in my opinion, is and always was obvious), but it looks like Wizards sought to answer what must be common questions with this superseding text.

There are “new” stealth rules as well, but they focus on more clarifications: creating a diversion to hide (a usage of Bluff) and Stealth are contested with passive Insight and Perception. How Stealth works in combat is explained and presented a bit better as well. Perception is a bit cheaper now, becoming a minor action (hooray). Finally, a couple terms are added to the glossary.

All in all, these are best described as clarifications and minor bugfixes — if Wizards reprints the Player’s Handbook, I wouldn’t be surprised to see these included along with more standard errata fixes (the text of PH2 even presents them that way, saying what snippets of the book are replaced with the new text).

Conclusion

I’m pretty pleased with this book. I think its success is evident in the feeling I get upon having read much and skimmed the rest — that it is not “the new book for players", but a legitimate expansion of scope. It does nothing to ruin, shatter, or unbalance the year of D&D4e we’ve had so far, and it is not even fair to call it another layer of content; its new content is neither above nor below the Player’s Handbook in value, it simply makes the core player content larger, adding without obsoleting. Which is exactly the point of the book.

Apparently, a week ago I updated b2evolution and then promptly forgot about it, leaving the config at its default. Instead of loading my journal, an error page appeared.

No one noticed.

In album Stephan's Album o' Randomness

In album Stephan's Album o' Randomness

Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫): spring and summer of 2001; warm days of my freshman year at MSOE spent waking up at 10 or 11, driving down to Milwaukee for a couple compressed hours of classes, driving back home and staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning (definitely, those were the days before week-long labs and projects).

I include the Japanese name for the film as this period was the height of my independent study of the language, and I remember teaching myself as best I knew how, learning hiragana and katakana, picking up what I could… listening to audio, letting the madness of watching Neon Genesis Evangelion at 3 AM take me. These events were the catalyst for becoming alienated from a group, which I reeled from for a bit, but in another sense, it was a self-defining moment, and worth the bizarre overimportance of how I’d been shunned.

Regardless, the songs from the album (and what I’m actually listening to now, Symphonic Suite Princess Mononoke) bring about memories of what I’m experiencing this very moment — dark nights alone in my bedroom, technology my implement of interest and my own curiosity my guide. The motif in song and memory is a kind of reserved contemplation; surely, I was at my most isolated and aloof then, but I believe it was therapeutic, and in the end it played no small part in crafting my personality as an aspiring intellectual (and maybe a bit of a misanthrope as well :).

At the end of the summer, I would dislocate my knee for a third time, and then things soon took an odd turn.

Just purged a bunch of people from my Facebook profile. I hadn’t talked to them in years and/or have no expectation of talking to them years from now. I did a smaller purge along the same lines on last.fm a couple months ago. If social networks only matter as much as the links that constitute them do, then said networks need pruning from time to time — the network needs to be able to correct its bad routes.

That said, if by chance you are a purgee and are reading this, it is nothing personal. We hadn’t talked and I didn’t see that changing. If you have a problem with that, your options are to deal with it, or begin the slow path to proving me wrong.

… the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure has given us invaluable information … It has shown [that] every new structure which projects into new fields of magnitude involves new problems for the solution of which neither theory nor practical experience furnish an adequate guide. It is then that we must rely largely on judgement and if, as a result, errors or failures occur, we must accept them as a price for human progress.

— Othmar Ammann, leading bridge designer and member of the Federal Works Agency Commission

Sorry, nothing else to post. I just thought that was a very insightful quote, and I’d rather not lose it, or at least enjoy it a bit.

Total aside, I have incorporeal.org still, and I have no idea what to do with it. I need a project…

So, after having completed the Item Compendium as mentioned as the last accomplishment remaining in my last Etrian Odyssey lovefest, I fired up Etrian Odyssey II and began anew adventures into the unknown.

After spending roughly an hour weighing my party options, deciding on what kind of party I wanted and where to focus my guild members’ attention (and then changing my mind at least three times), I stepped foot into the labyrinth with a War Magus, Ronin, Gunner, Medic, and Alchemist. I was then reminded what pain felt like, needing to take the shortest path possible from the start to the stairs returning me to Lagaard’s safety.

It was comfortable.

In the past couple hours, I’ve mapped the first floor and have been soundly beaten by a FOE whose warnings from the game I gleefully ignored, not at all surprised by the resounding rhythm of my party dropping one by one. I’ve determined where to send my farmers on my next pass, and I’ve come across a couple of EO’s classic “your curiosity will hurt, but the payoff is good” events (including one designed to remind you of your early days in EO). And I’ve run to town with a shattered party and very little money more than once.

Thoughts on the game (in the scarce couple hours I’ve played it) include a couple expediencies in the interface and gameplay pacing (always welcome), a more consistent (by my memory, anyway) difficulty, a tuning of almost every class with more customization options and, in some cases, removal or revision of the überskills. Another welcome element is the game’s enjoyment in reminding you of the past — the event mentioned above, the presentation of the password import feature, and the reaction from the townspeople when it’s soon known that, yes, you are that guild from that place called Etria. It’s a nice little touch.

I’ve decided that I’ll make these little journal entries semi-frequent (so you may see one or two more before I forget and stop updating the site again), and in adding an Etrian Odyssey category to the hierarchy of my nonsense, I noticed that it has been roughly a year since I started EO. Hopefully it will not take me that long to complete the sequel, but even if it does, it’s looking to be just as enjoyable.

I finally beat the ultimate boss of Etrian Odyssey today, meaning I’ve finished the Monstrous Codex and just have the Item Compendium remaining… but, that’s not the point of this post.

I’ve been slowly working more people down and getting them to play the game, and in doing so I’m reminded of what makes it such a great game. I think that some time in the past, I’d said that “the game hates you", and time has led me to reconsider that statement.

The game respects you.

Sure, maybe an aspect of it (primarily the narration, for me) is a bit steeped in nostalgia, but the game knows what you want (or what it thinks you deserve) and presents it to you as clearly and easily as it can — it leaves you with a dungeon and a myriad of options for tackling it. But, practically every step of the way, you’re in control of the progression — how fast you advance, how gut-wrenching you make the FOE battles, how much focus you put on your favorite party members and how rounded your guild becomes. It sets the stage and lets you be the players, without latching itself onto your experience by burdening you with high fantasy plot and saving the world for love. Other RPGs can and do provide you that; Etrian Odyssey is around to relieve you of it. It is pure, as only RPG-fundamental water can be.

For its respect, it demands the same in kind. Having spent countless hours on the game, I’ve come to see my guild as a living thing — something I have grown and nurtured from its nascent stage to its present near-god state, the characters’ skills and names (my retired characters were replaced with those of the same class and name, with a “II” suffix) acting as personalizing scars and records, a sort of living history of thirty levels of dungeon exploration. It’s fun for me to watch other people start their journey.

And how it encourages exploration. The first task, even, is to map the first floor to an acceptable degree, and it sets you up for what the game expects of you — to make something with the blank slate it has presented you. Learn the way that is right for you to map, to equip your party, to set your expectations for the venture into the Labyrinth. There are completion benchmarks, of course, but Etrian Odyssey is wonderfully content to refuse to rope you along in plot or in archetype, to the point that the former is bare and the latter is entirely up to you. Create a traveling party of Medics (a challenge I would expect is only slightly less hardcore than the Final Fantasy four white mage challenge — but primarily so because Etrian Odyssey gives its Medics more options) if you so choose. Ignore the sidequests for a while? Fine. Arm yourself to the teeth by creating a party of farmers to compliment your adventurers? Great!

As my time in Etrian Odyssey comes to close with the last dozen or so items left to discover, I’m looking forward to the sequel. Not because there are unanswered plot points in the first, or a new earth-shattering game mechanic or killer class, but because, absent being able to bottle the experience of progressing through Etrian Odyssey for the first time unaided, I want to relive those first timid steps into a dungeon adventure that, if nothing else, became mine as I was given the freedom to write its story by my actions.

I really believe this is a singular experience, and that console or computer, eastern or western, this is one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played.

So, I’ve been thinking about that whole multimedia experience thing, and for the CthulhuTech game I’ve been running (which is to say, I’ve run it more than once, in a somewhat timely fashion) I want to try having some music playing in the background. This is kind of uncharted territory, so I’m open to suggestions.

I have some ground rules:

• It should not be “busy” — lyrics are almost definitely right out, as is metal and probably anything that you can’t just let sit in the background. Letting it be part of the game, good. Eclipsing the game, not so good.
  • No camp, either. The game may have horror threads woven into it, but I don’t want nonsense like howling wolves and creaking doors and so on.
• It should at least vaguely fit the theme of the game. No happy romance anime music during investigating unspeakable horrors on the fringe of civilization.
• There should be a lot of it within a theme, so I’m not managing the playlist more than I am the game. My initial thoughts are a looping “general play” playlist, a “conflict” playlist, maybe a “touching moment” playlist, and a “resolution” playlist.
• This is more of a personal preference, but contemporary music is preferable, because it’s a modern game. Also, there’s a lot of bland background music, I’m not interested in that; not to restrict myself that is only known and appreciated by the masses, but I’m interested in “popular” music.

So, like I said, I’m open to suggestions. Mark suggested the Vitamin String Quartet for his hypothetical game, which is interesting, and a pretty good suggestion. And, they have a lot to play with, what with their covering basically every artist known to man. Other ideas of my own include Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV, Dale North’s Silent Horror, and a couple video games with a modern/future/post-apocalyptic bent to them. Flirting with sprinkling in Nightwish’s instrumental half of Dark Passion Play into the appropriate theme playlists.

If you have other suggestions, or stories of what worked for you, let me know by leaving a comment or something.