{"id":677,"date":"2008-07-05T23:06:03","date_gmt":"2008-07-06T06:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/?p=677"},"modified":"2008-07-05T23:06:32","modified_gmt":"2008-07-06T06:06:32","slug":"dungeons-dragons-4th-edition-or-these-aint-yer-daddys-kobolds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/05\/dungeons-dragons-4th-edition-or-these-aint-yer-daddys-kobolds\/","title":{"rendered":"Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition -or-<\/em>“These ain’t yer daddy’s Kobolds”"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Da Boys and I scrounged up and plunked down some electronic cash at Amazon a few weeks back and pre-ordered the new DnD release along with the first module, The Keep on the Shadowfell<\/em>, and The Physicist and I decided that I would be the one to run the gang through the DnD stuff, while he would GM some Sci-Fi stuff. I’ve read through all the books, and last weekend I ran the party through the first part of KoTS.<\/p>\n

These are definitely NOT your daddy’s kobolds. We’ll get more into that in a minute. First, I want to talk about the new system.<\/p>\n

DnD, or more accurately ADnD, got me started in the whole RPG genre many years ago – roughly the third grade. I can remember in the 5th grade, a friend and I sat down with my Player’s handbook and commenced to code a character generator in BASIC that actually did everything you needed it to do – with the small exception that we didn’t code in the entire equipment list. This was on an original TRS-80. Had I actually owned a computer back then, I would probably have taken that program and added to it to get some of the tools available today.<\/p>\n

While Wizards of the Coast have been promising us the “DnD insider”, a website with a virtual game table, character creator and various other things, they have stated that “it will launch when it is ready” – which of course bugs the hell out of me, because I hate waiting! You want to drive a Gemini nuts? Tell him you have something really important to talk about and then say “oops! gotta run! I’ll call you tomorrow!” Head splodey.<\/p>\n

So, not wanting to wait until probably NOVEMBER to get the WotC versions, I went trawling the ‘Net for alternatives and discovered RPTools<\/a>, a site with a number of RPG-related tools built in Java. The good news: it’s all open-source and free to use and modify. The bad news: 4thEdition isn’t fully supported yet, but the gang is hacking it as I type. In the meantime, the tools as they exist are still useful, just not custom-tweaked for 4E. So, for those of us who can’t seem to do anything without involving a computer, there are some very useful bits of code for you, even when you RPG.<\/p>\n

Now, about those Kobolds…<\/p>\n

The party consisted of a Paladin, 2 Rangers (one archer, one twin-weapon), a Wizard and a Warlord. They made it through the first encounter intact, but the second one was not so well fought. Kobolds are no longer ALL cannon-fodder; some of them have grown up and turned dangerous. Back in the old ADnD days, the only effective way to use Kobolds was en masse<\/em> – by the hundreds, at least. Not so much these days – a mere 5 were able to take out the above party. That’s right – we got 5 characters killed by 5 kobolds.<\/p>\n

The SHAME!<\/p>\n

Honestly, the biggest problem the party had was bad rolls – the dice hated them, and I was rolling pretty good. Example: I rolled a critical hit against the Warlord. The Paladin says “I’ve got an encounter power that lets me turn that into a regular hit” – cool, no problem. I didn’t want to hit the Warlord that hard anyway. So what happens next? You guessed it: I rolled maximum damage anyway, in full view of the players, so I couldn’t fudge the numbers.<\/p>\n

The players took it well, and I think they’ve got their second set of characters ready to go. This time, we have a Cleric, a slightly different Paladin, a Wizard and a Fighter – and that archer-variant Ranger is back – he’s my NPC, and he just barely managed to escape into the bushes while those nasty kobolds were burning the wizard… ;)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Da Boys and I scrounged up and plunked down some electronic cash at Amazon a few weeks back and pre-ordered the new DnD release along with the first module, Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}