JourneyQuest Episode 5

One of the best episodes to date!  Spell mishaps, unconventional wizard duals, a new clever solutions to classic riddles, funny tattoos, corporeal intelligent undead, and ninjas all await you!

JourneyQuest Episode 4

Episode 4 "Ancient Magicks" is out.  Prepare for foul orcs, unquenchable flame, powerful swords, wizard's duels, and milk!

Fal-Con Less than a Week Away

Middletown CT will soon play host to Fal-Con.  I'll be running a` Hackmaster Basic game at the convention based on the 1985 film, The Goonies.  It may seem a bit odd, but as we pointed out on one of our top 10 lists, this movie is teeming with with great gaming ideas!

If you are in the area you should come check out Fal-Con, and maybe ever stop by the table and say hello.  For those who want to give HMB a try and/or love the Goonies make sure you sign up.  There will be tricks, traps, treasure maps, and a good time had by all! 

Speaking of treasure maps, here is a look at Black Rob's Treasure Map that takes center stage early in the adventure.  There are two version I am deciding on before having it printed.  One has fold lines while the other just has curling and aging effects.  Let me know which you like better.

First up is the version with the agged folding lines.



And Here is the one without.  I think I'm leaning toward this one.


Update:


Notable improvement by overlaying a parchment texture.  Gives the map a more worn and aged feel. 

Red Box, Mike Mearls & the Direction of 4th Edition

I found myself over at Geek Related recently reading the new that Pathfinder had pulled even with 4th edition sales according to a recent sales report by ICV2.com.  Generally happy with Paizo's success I purused some back articles on the site to see what else they had written lately.  I came across an interesting piece from the middle of September entittled, "Mike Mearls Admits D&D 4e Blows."  Finding this somewhat hard to believe as Mearls in basically in charge of 4th edition, I have it a read.  The article was short and mainly made reference to a recent interview that The Escapist had conducted with Mearls himself on the direction of 4th edition D&D.

As our regular readers here know, no one here at The Labyrinth plays 4th edition, and as a result we can fall a bit behind the most current news regarding the most recent edition of D&D.  That having been said, I'm a little embarassed that I am only reading that interview now.  I like to keep up on the comings and goings of the hobby and I think that the interview really has some important info about where D&D 4e is heading.  Whether you love WotC and 4e or not you have to admit that whatever they do has effects on the whole industry for good or ill so when Mearls speaks I feel like we should all listen. 

I generally like the Escapist, it has good info on thing from time to time, is a well put together site, and covers a wide variety of things I feel are interesting.  But I will say that this is, without a doubt, the best article I've ever read on that site.  It is informative, well written, and links to other great resources throughout.  It is beyond one of the best things I have read in a while on the Escapist, it is one of the best I've read on any site. 

There has been a lot written about Red Box on the RPG Bloggers Network in recent weeks.  I haven't read much of it since, as I said, I don't play 4th edition.  Yet it seems like, according to the interview, that Red Box is an attempt to reach out to those gamers who felt disenfranchised by 4th edition, people like our own Professor Obscure.  I can only assume that Wizards is attempting to generate extra revenue by tapping into the large market share that opted out of 4th edition.  This seems like a sound strategy to me, they are a business afterall.  But the question is, will it work?

Well Mearls says some very compelling things, speaking directly to those who felt slighted by 4th edition:

“If you are a disgruntled D&D fan, there’s nothing I can say to you that undoes whatever happened two years ago or a year ago that made you disgruntled – but what I can do, what’s within my power, is that going forward, I can make products, I can design game material, I can listen to what you’re saying, and I can do what I can do with design to make you happy again; to get back to that core of what makes D&D, D&D; to what made people fall in love with it the first time, whether it was the Red Box in ’83, the original three booklets back in ’74 or ’75 or even 3rd Edition in 2004, whenever that happened, to get back to what drew you into D&D in the first place and give that back to you.”

Personally I like what I'm hearing, but think it might be too little and too late.  To turn D&D 4e into the kind of game I would want to play would require a massive overhaul of the system, making it unreconizable as D&D 4e.  This would almost certainly disenfranchise those who love 4th edition and have invested hundreds of dollars in it.  Many already feel that is what is happening.  The irony here is that 4e players are poised to feel slighted in almost the same exact way that players of other edition have felt only to be told by those same 4e players to pretty much, "Get over it."  At least that was my experience when I voiced my concerns around the launch of 4e.  "Get over it" isn't the advice I would give 4th edition fans, instead I would say to speak up for what you want.  The loudest a customer can speak to a business is with their wallet.  If you don't like what they are selling then don't buy it.  WotC will hear you loud and clear very shortly. 

Do I think Red Box will work?  No.  I think that this tight rope walk that Mearls is trying to do, attempting to please everyone, might just end up alienating more people.  I like what he is saying, but 4e is like Windows Vista to me, the only thing to do is sweep it under the rug fast and come out with Windows 7, or in this case 5th edition.  I don't see that happening any time soon.  WotC seems to be executing their business model of a "living edition" well enough to please the hard core 4th edition fans.  Those DDI subscriptions bring in regular monthly revenue which cannot be discounted.   Whether rules inflation (Did you know there are currently 2638 feats in 4th edition?!?!) will become an issue remains unclear but I don't think we'll see 5e for some time.

Then again, I said that about 4th edition. 

JourneyQuest Episode Three!

The Journey continues with lessons in Orcish grammer and what not to do when reaching the end of a dungeon!

Journeyquest Episodes 1&2

The wait is over, JourneyQuest episodes 1 AND 2 have been released!

Episode 1: Onward



Episode 2: Sod the Quest



Episode 3 will be released October 5th with a new episode coming every week until the end of Season 1. At that point they are hoping to have a season 2, but it all depends on the popularity of the show so get the word out, people!

Understanding Fantasy Classes: The Cleric

On my group's recent camping trip, after we had stopped gaming for the night the Professor and I were up just talking about gaming.    I recently read some really eye opening articles on the Ranger posted on other sites that really challenged my notions of what the class really is.  We discussed the issue for a minute and then he posed a very interesting thought, "If the Ranger is bugging you then stop and consider the cleric.  That will really blow your mind."  

I found that a confusing thing to say, the Cleric had always seemed one of the most straightforward classes to me, so I asked him what he meant.  He replied, "Well, he isn't a priest, that's for sure."  I opened my mouth to reply, but then got what he was saying.  A normal priest, even in medieval times, was not a soldier trained extensively in warfare including the use of any number of weapons and all different types of armor and shields.  Why would a run of the mill priest train in the use of plate armor when chances are he could never afford it, and would have little or no use for it?  

So if I accepted that the Cleric wasn't a priest, then what was he?  Well clearly he was more.  He has the piety and devotedness of a priest with much of the same martial training that the Fighter receives.  Knowing that Gygax and Arneson must have drawn their inspiration from somewhere, we discussed possible sources both from history and from the various works of fiction that inspired Dungeons and Dragons.  We had a strong belief that Crusade era catholic priests were the strongest influence on the class, but we had no way of confirming our suspcions. 

As it turns out all we needed was our trusty 2nd edition AD&D Player's Handbooks.  There it specifically states, "The Cleric is similar to certain religious orders of knighthood in the middle ages: the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Templar, and the Hospitalers."  So this confirmed our suspicion that the Crusade era was the the period of time that really defined the Cleric.  Further confirmation of this can be found in the following paragraph where it says, "...Clerics, being reluctant to shed blood...are allowed to use only blunt, bludgeoning weapons."  This is in line with the Catholic church's policy at the time that discouraged the shedding of blood (something of an irony given the time period).

The confirmation that the main inspiration for the Cleric were knightly orders of the middle ages creates another problem the Professor and I had discussed, The Cleric vs. The Paladin.  Because the Cleric is clearly so martial, he is essentially a divine warrior, but then so is the Paladin.  I've always been a proponent of each class having their own Shtick, their own thing that makes them special from all the other classes.  When classes start getting too close together they start stepping on each other toes.  That is what seems to be the case here as both the Cleric and the Paladin are based on Christian Knights.

Obviously I'm not saying that the Cleric and the Paladin are the same.  Even though they are based on Christian Knights, they are not based on the same Knightly order.  Paladins are based on a religious Knight archetype like Galahad and Percival while Clerics are based on the three above mentioned Crusading Orders whose primary job it was to protect and care for pilgrims making their way to the holy land.     Yet still these are Knightly Orders that held similar values and similar motivations.

To compound the problem Clerics and Paladins are given very similar powers.  Now obviously each edition of the game is different but Paladins typically get two of the Clerics principal abilities, albeit in diminished form, Turn Undead, and Divine Spells.  Healing wounds, something of a specialty of the Cleric, is another ability that overlaps into the Paladin's list of skills.  To give a recent example, Pathfinder gives Clerics the ability to use turn undead attempts to burst heal in a radius around him.  The Paladin can use his lay on hands attempts to do the same thing and because his Charisma is far more valuable to him than to a cleric he will likely have a higher score often allowing the Paladin to have more of these "burst heals" than a cleric.

These overlaps in mechanics are as big a problem as the overlap in overall character concepts described above.  So the question is how does one resolve these issues and give each class a its own clear character concept and it's own mechanical advantages.  It seems to me that the key lies in making the Cleric a Priest rather than Warrior Priest.  That isn't to say that the Cleric need to have no warrior skills whatsoever, but certainly they should be scaled back.  Eliminating heavy armor is one step that Pathfinder has already taken to scale back the Cleric's martial power, and though I was somewhat shocked at the same time, I am beginning to think the move was perhaps a good idea.  Clerics in most games have spellpower that rivals arcane spellcasters so even though it may seem unbalancing in many games to scale the Cleric back into a more traditional priestly role, the fact is that in many games the Cleric is an overpowered class.

Certainly we see this is the case in 3rd edition D&D (3.0, 3.5 and even to a lesser extent Pathfinder).  Game developers have said that they went out of their way to make clerics great because few players have traditionally wanted to play them.  Give the fact that their healing magic makes them almost vital, game designers wanted to make sure that players would want to play them.  In other incarnations of D&D, and other games like it such as Hackmaster, the Cleric is always among the best classes that a player has to choose from, and no less vital than in 3rd edition. Hackmaster posses a unique ability among fantasy games that I have played in that it can deliver the changes to the Cleric that I want without a single house rule.  In the new edition of the game Clerics of different gods are almost a different class onto themselves.  Each religious order has its own specific information like armor allowed, weapons allowed, special powers, etc.  Even if one needed house rules to get some separation between the Cleric and the Paladin I think it would be worth it. 

 The pious priest is a classic fantasy paradigm, and one that deserves to stand on its own.  By making small alterations in both the flavor of the class and in its mechanics I believe one could create a Cleric that is far less martial and far more priestly.  This would give the Cleric his own niche separate from the holy warrior Paladin and allow each class to have very different moments in which to shine.