5500xp-A-Plate Charity D&D Event Journal

Why can't I break this parking meter by shoving a toothpick into the slot?

Why can't I break this parking meter by shoving 2 toothpicks into the slot?

"Umm, is it ok if Connie parks her car behind that guy?"

Hey, you, I know you. Oh, and you.

Oh look it's Keith Baker and he got a haircut. Or, his hair grew out...

The back room of Meltdown Comics is like Hollywood Geek Underground's version of Max's Kansas City...

Where's Kimberly?

Ok, now it's like a wedding, there are a bunch of tables and place cards. Where am I where am I....

Swag. Free T-shirt. Free...whatever that is. Free...I think the Escapist sent us one of those already...

Hey, how ya doin'? You were really funny last night! Hey, thanks!

Now, free stuff...ok, Zak, yes this stuff is free but none of it will help me play D&D.

Keith has a list of characters and the Robot Chicken guy is looking at it. No time to read through this and no time to introduce myself to the other pseudocelebs, if I don't grab a PC as fast as I can I'll totally be stuck with the Feytouched Sleevedancer or some shit...

"Is there a wizard?"
"There's The Deathless Ambassador."
"That's the wizard?"
"Yep."
"Alright, I am the Deathless Ambassador."

By default I'm a 5th-level undead elf female. I have a mini for that.

"Need a mini, Connie?"
"I'm a warforged, what's a warforged?"

Where's Kimberly?

Wait, the DM is now saying my character is a guy. Ok, I have a mini for that.

Ah, now a new and subtle challenge. Try not to confuse the player with the character. This is Jay he is an archer named Archer and he runs the store next door (actually)(I think), this is Dan from Robot Chicken and he's a dwarf cleric, this is Travis he DMed for Wil Wheaton and someone else famous who I think is a girl and is a voice actor (Travis, not the girl)(I don't think) and the DM and this is Matt he's a voice actor and podcaster and your bodyguard and an elf and according to his character's thing your character is a chick.

Ok, back to the first miniature. My character is like 159 years old and nobody can tell whether it's male or female. Ok, I'm Joan Rivers.

Connie's at that table, Satine's at that table, I am at this table. I am alone.

It's not often that you have to do your Joan Rivers in front of three professional voice actors, one of whom is supposed to try to kill you...

Where the fuck is Kimberly?

"Alright people, thank you all for participating in the..."

Kimberly will have to be replaced, due to a scheduling conflict she is oh fuck just now texting me about, she's busy having sex for money. This is Vesper, she is the Colonel.

"...so Keith wrote this adventure* you'll all be doing and..."

Oh excellent, Keith's easy. Excuse me, cinematic.

I make a little nametag for Vesper since the rest of us all have nametags.

Ok, now it is an adventure.

"You arrive off the skyway into a lush..."

Ah the exquisite comfort of Eberron...Not just Eberron, A diplomatic party in Eberron...checking my equipment list....Apparently Joan here managed to get to 5th level with no rope, no lamp oil, no caltrops, no G.P....playing Eberron is like staying at the W hotel after years of couch-crashing and hostels. "What're you setting a stick on fire? You want light? We got worms for that." And I'm a fucking ambassador. And I have a bodyguard. And he's a charming dapper young fellow and a professional voice actor. Let me now henceforth wallow in this unearned luxury...

DM: "And for you, sir?"
"One white and one red, please!"
"White and red what?"
"Wine!"

Rock, they do have grapes in Eberron.

(several hundred movie-reference jokes which were all taped and which will be available to peruse for a small donation to the noble cause of Youth Literacy at some time in the future so I will not ruin them now later--we are all starting our first encounter and Joan is pretending to be drunconscious)

...according to all those Type 4 D&D tips a power that moves a guy 6 squares is not a thing at which to sneeze. Especially when on a (spoilers)roof. I use it on the biggest target.

Look at this, we are spontaneously well-oiled right from the get-go: Matt's getting out there and getting punched just like a bodyguard should (and has--it should be noted--a keen eye for stylish tactics), Dan Robot Chicken Milano is a very buff-conscious cleric, Archer the Archer remembered about Readied Actions, Vesper is managing to convince the DM that an empty glass growler counts as a two-handed weapon and my wizardess can just get WWD&DWPSReadersDo? tattooed on her wrist and be done with it. This game is easy.

The volunteers do inform me, however, that the sandwiches have mayonnaise.

The last baddie is running away--oh he got 20'd by an attack of opportunity...poor bastard...still running...toward Archer the archer....aaaaand he's 20'd again. Combat over.

Nothing left to interrogate.

I take the only damage I take all night until the boss by failing a climbing check and being attacked by the eternal nemesis of diplomats everywhere--the floor.

"I say, it was a very fast moving floor. A Lurker Below, perhaps?"
"Yes, ambassador," this is Matt, rolling his eyes, "I'm sure, ambassador."

Yawn, healing surge. NEKST...

I worry I am not taking as much advantage of the volunteers who are supposed to bring us snacks as I could be.

The DM interprets Vesper the Colonel failing her stealth checks as the Colonel loudly and spontaneously commenting on the decor. Guards...

Oh but then lunch...in-real-life lunch.

What's this...rip rip...it's like a chinese dim sum bun on the outside but then...hmm like pink cream cheese and cheesecake. Oh, that's some quality there.

Now, right, we make our way down pretty much the only likely-looking path down to Encounter Area Two.

Fearsome are they--and many. Well, many anyway. 3 rounds. Fuck, forgot to leave people to interrogate again. I am glad I'm not a minion.

There appears to be no point to taking anything normal from anyone, it will only do less damage than your weapons.

We identify potions by saying "What are they?" and the DM tells us. They're healing potions. Nobody gets accidentally turned into a worm.

A pulsing and ethereal light appears to be coming from over there...arcana check at some obscene bonus...I roll like a 34...

"It's magic. It's also bad."

Well then by all means let's go over there...

"I strongly suggest we ignore this phenomenon and leave, ambassador."
"Oh, where's you sense of fun? No-one of your generation has an ounce of gumption..."

I cannot help but notice there are no further battlemats under this battlemat. I am guessing this is the Fearsome Final Encounter.

Now--who first?--Minions or Spooky Things Which You Don't Know What They Do? This is a clear breach of protocol, I know, but I'm going for the Spooky Things Which We Don't Know What They Do on account of they seem to be melting people.

Also my thing tells me I'm lawful good, so it's, like, roleplaying.

Destruction of the spooky thing unleashes a spooky chain reaction resulting in monsters. The Colonel told us there was beer in this room but I think he was lying.

The major ticking clock here is the biggest monster gets worse when the DM rolls a 6. Actually the major ticking clock is Meltdown Comics closes at 9 and all the other kind-of famous people already finished killing all their monsters. We were ahead of everybody until we decided to go for the spooky things.

8:43 pm Hitting it does seem to work, really, so that's a good sign.

8:47 pm Oh and now it's dead.

We were supposed to sign our condition cards, I think--if we had any conditions--and they were gonna sell them on ebay. I got slowed. I signed "Zak Sabbath" under Slowed. Now everyone will know the truth about me.

There is a really nice Martin Emond painting on the way to the bathroom.

Oh, hey that was a good game! That was fun! Yay fun is good! Card? Oh yeah, card...

I should get business cards, Mandy has business cards, Mandy's business cards have her tits on them

Tits.

Tits...


______
*This adventure will, I'm told, be available from WoTC and all proceeds will go to the charity, so I'll try not to spoil anything.

Thought For the Day

I don't want my 4 hours of play to have "a balance between combat and role-playing", I want to have no idea what they'll be like and have no walls between them and nine other things thrown in there too.

Type 4

So I finally played the official version of the game. For charity.

Here's what I think of it:

Nobody would have a problem with this game if it were just called Ninja Destruction Squad 9000 or X-Men: the RPG. It makes a really great kung-fu movie or superhero RPG.

The only problem is that this fun and interesting game of cheesy tactics has been spot-welded onto a game (and a name) a lot of us like to think is also equally about weird worlds and exploration and outside-the-box problem-solving and was maybe even a little influenced by things that happened in books. Type 4 feels like one of those action flicks where everything but the fight scenes seems like filler because you know that what the director's best at is fight scenes and yet the director doesn't seem to know that you know and so keeps thinking he can make you care that the blonde is kissing the hero and the sidekick has a cocaine habit.

Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, Lady, were no crime, but you only play D&D for a few hours and so you wanna know whether you're gonna be playing a Fritz Leiber simulator or a Run Run Shaw simulator. If you want to enjoy fighting in 4E (and you should want to if you're playing it, because otherwise you're missing the only unique part of it) then you have to accept that it's the main event and it's totally stylized and bizarre and non-immersive and hitting people can give you extra hit points and heal your friends and cause Radiant Energy to fly from your ears and the fighting's gonna last until all the nachos are gone and so you'd better (player and DM) put some effort into making it work.

I would totally play Big Trouble In Little China Oriental Adventures 4E. That'd feel right to me. However, for a flexible and mysterious game where the hitting and the exploring seem like they're part of the same movie and you never know what you'll be doing next and maybe there's more than one way to skin a cat, I'd stick with the game I got.

Yeah, a good DM can find a way to do everything you can do in AD&D in Type 4 but then you'd have less time to design the 4E fight scenes, and that's a wasted opportunity. Plus then the gears would start to grind, because the characters feel so unreal and their powers are so vastly out of scale to the world they allegedly inhabit.

Help Us Fight This Guy

Tomorrow, Connie, Kimberly Kane and I will face a most fearsome foe. We will play D&D against...um, I mean with...several fellow D&D-list Hollywood types who invented things like Metallocalypse and The Guild and (-yes-) Robot Chicken.

Now, on account of this charity event being sponsored by a certain company who bought the rights to a double-iteration of a certain letter interrupted by an ampersand, this game will be Type 4 D&D (or Nalfeshnee as I like to call it). (The post-Essentials version.)

So anyway, we naturally want to wreck and to ruin and to hoard glory and loot like mad beasts set loose upon the virgin moors but basically everything I know about 4E comes from:

- listening to Return To Northmoor and
- hearing y'all complain about it.

So, post your Type 4 tips here.

And remember, this is for charity, so all proceeds from the video they're making will go to save tits from cancer or to save Scandinavian orphans from leprosy or dolphins from fishing nets or some shit...I don't know, actually, ask Satine. Anyway, point is this for a good cause so please no Edition-bitching in the comments.

P.S.

The characters will be pre-generated by the DMs so we don't need PC-building tips.

Humanrorschachtest--wow, 2nd comment and you already bitched.

question, progress report, plug, plug, game idea

-Here's a question for you, DMs...Monster stats in RPG products: Ok, you'll want special attacks, defenses and anything unique about a beast to be well-defined, but how much do you really need a product to give you the rest of the stats for new monsters? If it's new, then what's the disadvantage to just telling the DM what the thing is supposed to be about, and DMs can define AC, HP, and damage in whatever way fits his/her campaign?

I mean, if it's just some mook it might be nice to have all that already written out for you, but if a product is providing you with what's supposed to be a cool new monster then wouldn't you, as a DM, want to "custom-fit" it to your world?

Ok, maybe in an adventure module it's different, since the HD etc. tell you where in the adventure's toughness-hierarchy the monster's supposed to fit, but in (say) a sourcebook-type thing? Does me telling you the Orgulus Oozes of Vornheim have 2+2 HD mean anything or help, really?

Give me your pros and cons here.

-Finished almost all the pictures and maps for the city kit, just gotta do the big city map that we're planning to print on the inside of the dustcover. We're (hopefully) doing all kinds of cute format things with this book to maximize the bang for your buck.

-Here's the latest 'Axe' episode, with Bobbi Starr and company getting hurt by gnolls.
The Escapist took out some of the more explicit details of Bobbi and Kimberly's dungeon adventure, to see the uncensored version click that link. The censored version's here, because I can embed it...


-If you live in NYC, Tavis of The Mule Abides is hosting a...thingy (symposium maybe?) on D&D and its relation to contemporary art tonight featuring some excellent and funny and smart contemporary artists that I have personally played D&D with many times and also featuring a video letter from me since I couldn't be there.


-What with all this business I haven't had a proper game in weeks. I played a bunch of German board games brought over by Axe cameraman Darren to pass the time waiting for Mandy to get better: Small World, Samurai, Thunderstone, and Whatever-it-is of Catan.

Catan bored me almost to death. I almost died. Trading sheep? Really? Why people keep making and playing games involving farms I'll never know--so far as this rootless metropolitan Jew is concerned, the point of civilization is to get as far away from animal shit as possible. I'm with Luke Skywalker.

Also it kinda drove me nuts how the little wood pieces didn't really slot into the board, they just sorta sat on top like dry pasta on a cutting board, waiting to get knocked off every time Connie rolled her dice all over them. Which sucks because where the pieces are is really important.

Anyway what I actually want to talk about is how one of the games was really good and has some D&Dable elements.

Hold on, I have to go eat some cheese...

Ok (thank you all dairy farmers) now anyway...

Samurai is a simple sort of cross between Go and Risk where basically you play on a map and there are cities and you build up four types of influence--political, military, religious, and agricultural (yeah, yeah, I know). You have a limited amount of each (represented by cards) and the trick is distributing them around the board, turn-by-turn, in such a way that, when it ends, you've got the right stuff in the right place.

It's not like you have to rule the whole world, you just have to get more total influence than the enemy, so each game results in a distinctive patchwork of overlapping influences over various forces.

It strikes me that, with a little tweaking, this could make an excellent addendum to the D&D endgame or a plot generator for a campaign. Work it like this:

-Play a session of D&D.

-Get out Samurai. Rename the cities (alternately, you could decide the board represents a city rather than a continent, and the PCs are vying for control of neighborhoods). Each player represents a faction, a ruler, or a god (someone or thing that is roughly aligned with the PCs interests).

-Add or subtract cards from the players' hand(s) based on what happened in the D&D game (i.e. if they found the Ice Chalice of Eleth Sussar then they get an extra 2 religious influence or whatever).

-Play Samurai.

-Alter the D&D campaign to reflect the results of this contest of gods/kings/local mafiosos, etc.

-Say "6 months later..." then start playing D&D.

-Repeat.

I Can't Remember If I Drew This Then Invented It or The Other Way Around

Xortoise

The four-headed, radially symmetrical xortoise is half-xorn, half-giant tortoise.

It originates on the Elemental Plane of Earth, moves slowly, eats gems, is about the size of a pair of Toyota Camrys, and--it is claimed--great wisdom can be found etched into the markings on its shell.

However, since the shell is crisscrossed by a great x-shaped, spiketoothed mouth, it is not easy to read the shell of a living xortoise.

The xortoise takes 81 days to digest and can only do so while lying totally still, completely submerged in earth or mud, so adventurers able to explore the beast's stomach before it returns to its lair often find years worth of precious stones inside.

Research Can Be Fun...

Here are some excellent free documentaries on YouTube you can mine for adventure material...

Monty Python's Terry Jones on the Crusades (he has a whole series of Medieval docs, I think this is the only one on YouTube, but there's a bunch more on Netflix if you have that)
(And if you don't want to listen to Terry Jones going on about the Middle Ages then, really, what kind of human being are you?)

BBC doc on Medieval maps, including lots of stuff about dog-headed men and a guy who uses his single grotesquely-swollen foot as a form of sunblock.


Leonard Nimoy narrating a thing on the Library at Alexandria...