This was a slower week of gaming; after food we got a late start with lots of yawns. We had a lot of fun despite the tiredness in the room.
We started with a game of Alhambra and finished with a couple of games of Apples to Apples.
Tonight we played two games of Union Pacific. This was the first night any of us had played; prior to everyone’s arrival, I started reading the rules. I was about two-thirds complete when people started arriving.
Tonight’s players: Scott, Jim, Jared, Emily. Note: This time, the write-up is almost a week later than the session; I’ll try to keep better notes and update sooner in the future.
I’ve updated the session log (though it is very sketchy & could use some help this week).
We’re on for Friday– if that doesn’t work for you, let us know right away.
From the WotC site– a few recent articles that are interesting or adaptable.
Secrets of Xendrik maps Lots of maps you can use for different ideas.
Templates and character types The concluding article in the series, walks you step by step through adding a template.
Kibbitzing on monster variation— advantages and disadvantages of variation in foes; why fighting one thing gets boring, but a return to a foe can show what you’ve learned.
Dragons of Faerun Table of Contents (for Dad, since he expressed an interest)
Adding a few more:
Iron Kingdoms Firearms (pdf) Black Powder rules for D20.
Pathguy’s Character Generator is thorough– one long page that assembles your character w/ JavaScript. Uses the Completes and other advanced sources.
Intrepid Heroes is a great local website, devoted to D20 Modern, with cool [free] pdf magazine. They introduced me to RPG Objects, an interesting D20 Modern resource site.
Spirit of the Century is nearing readiness (pdfs):
Character Creation preview and Spirit’s iconic characters
Great fantasy art: Todd Lockwood and Wayne Reynolds
Iron Soap, a fun, semi-local blog. Some roleplaying, but more computer gaming.
Country Sizing considerations, a great D&D world building thread.
It has been a while since we last had a game, but I’m ready to go. If you want to refresh yourself on the game to date, the New Republic Log has what you need.
Let us know if you’ll have any trouble making the next game, this Friday. Also, hit the calendar button to the right to view an upcoming calendar– I’ll try to indicate canceled games there quickly and consistantly.
Yesterday, Kev’s sickness led us to cancel the game. (I hope you’re feeling better today.)
This upcoming weekend, David and Chris are coming to visit us from out of town, so we’re not going to be available. The following weekend also looks bad– we’re due to celebrate Cheryl’s birthday in Reno (and stay over for a weekend of gaming.) So, at the moment, Friday August 4th looks like the next session.
An issue with Magic Items is the way creating them costs a feat, time, gold and XP. They do need to be restricted– if you allowed unlimited production without a cost, spell casters would be turning them out by the truckload at tremendous profit.
The standard system doesn’t work very well though, especially for our group, since we’re eager to keep everyone the same level, with the same XP rewards and the like. Here are a few options I’ve seen or dreamed up.
a) Do nothing; enforce the rules in the books. The rules setup some assumptions and it’s good to carry them through if you don’t have a good replacement. Unfortunately, the way the XP affects levelling and group cohesion is a drawback. *A common variant is to allow the person the item’s being enchanted for to pay the XP, instead of making the caster do it.
a1) Do almost nothing. Use the standard rules, but make each person in the group contribute XP equally. That keeps PC levels together, and remedies the situation where a caster pays XP for someone else. It succeeds completely on keeping everyone level, but may anger people who are having XP drained for someone else’s benefit.
a2) Use a WOTC XP transference system– evidently, they came to the same conclusion I did.
b) Altered costs. In the Living Ebberon games, they’ve altered the cost of items for their environment. Instead of costing 50% Book GP + XP equal to 4% of Book GP, they instead have it cost 66% Book GP.
c) Level limits. Allow casters to create magic items = 1% of their current XP each level. (So a first level character has a 10XP budget, a fifth level character has 100 XP budget, etc. You could combine this with an “overdraft”– say, if you use more than 1% (and less than a 5% hard limit), then you’re drained by the experience. (The game effect would be a negative level, which as usual effects you until you level again.)
d) Limit the total XP available for items to what’s found. Allow casters to “disenchant” items to free up the XP locked in them… and perhaps 1/2 the cost of the item sacrificed (the same amount as selling it, or the cost to enchant it.) This also allows for special treasure; balls of material for storing XP, just waiting for a disenchant.
e) A good thought you have? Leave ideas in comments.
f) From Jonathan Drain’s D20 source: Rare Components for Spells and Magic items. There’s a similar idea for using Item components to power metamagic.
Let everyone know if you’ll have a problem with gaming this Friday. As far as I know, we’re all still OK.
As ever, I’ll try to update the log— if you get there first, that’s great.
OOC: Do we have a plan we can implement? If not, let’s brainstorm, so we don’t waste the whole session figuring out what we’ll do.