My old guild has responded and...

Well they turned me down, I wasn't given a reason but I can assume one of the following:
1) They already have enough Prot Pallies.
2) When I left the game before I just sorta dropped out, I honestly didn't give enough warning.
3) They don't want to be forced into taking me or my wife in order to get the other one.

I'm not sure why, and I'm honestly not too worried about it.

I've thrown myself into trying to raid with pugs, but it seems like there's an over-abundance of tanks lately. It's seemed easier to find a pug raid for my mage than it has for my tank, so he's been able to gear up better than my main.

Recently I've started playing my DPS warrior again, when I've finished what raids for the week. He had been leveled from 71 to 80 without going into instances. I'm sure you can imagine how poor his gear is as well as how poorly I can play him. I can usually maintain skill with 2 or 3 characters, but after that it falls off a little bit. My current talents lie in Prot Pally, Arcane Mage and Holy Priest. Anything else I play is just a button mash fest hoping to put out reasonable DPS.

I had a good night raiding two nights ago

I finally got a chance to see ToC 25, I had done ToC 10 last week. I really hate being a newb on an encounter when I'm one of the tanks. When I'm in this position I have a whole raid ( 9 or 24 other people ) depending on me to know what to do and how to handle it, without the benefit of failing a couple of times with the raid. Luckily both times (10 and 25) I ran into a nice pug of mostly guildies that were willing to suffer along with my questions and misunderstandings. In the 10 man we had some issues, I think I may have been the source of them, but then we went on to one-shot the rest of the raid. In the 25 man we had a few little things along the way but for the most part it was painless.

Luckily I have a pocket priest who is my social director as well as raid healer support. She is willing to go out there and find the pug raids or put together the heroic instance runs while I am a quiet little tank.

Between the two raids I managed to pull together a few pieces of higher level raid gear as well as emblems of triumph that I was able to use to upgrade. I am getting closer to being more properly geared for the current end game, now I'm just waiting to hear a yes or no from my old guild renamed.

A small update

It's gone dark here, mostly I think because I don't have much to say and partially because there aren't very many people listening here.

Well news for those who do listen here.

I have given in and have gone back to WoW.

It doesn't help that the love of my life never left and she has managed to pull me back in. First it was "I need a tank, can you play on my other account and tank for me?". It sort of grew from there. So I'm back in with both of my accounts, I've been busy trying to get my gear back in order and waiting for my application to be approved by the new guild that my old guild has become. It's been fun, and addictive and back to a grind. I don't like being guildless and playing russian roulette with pug raids, but it's all I have on the raiding scene at the moment. So that's what I've been doing at nights and weekends and work is work, which is good because if work wasn't work, then I'd probably be out of work.

Back to my other reason for this blog, D&D

WoTC ( Wizard's of the Coast ) for those of you not into p&p RPGs, has unveiled their new forum/blog/wiki/everything else website here http://community.wizards.com/. I linked from there to here, hoping to find some new readers and to keep my thoughts centralized.

What I have seen so far over there is:
They have kept the old forums together - Good thing
They have added blogs for every one of their users - Probably a good thing as once the newness dies down the serious bloggers will keep bubbling to the top.
They have added a wiki - Probably good, will depend on an active community which it seems they have.
They have added Groups - Seems like something useful, I think I will try and use it for my current gaming group.

It seems like a worthwhile though un-necessary change. Previously Wizards had a forum system and this will still be the core of their site. There will probably be some community stars that will rise to the top and provide insight, information and materials of worth in their blogs and groups, but the most important information will still be found in the forums.

Hopefully I'll have more to say once I've had a better chance to look around the new site.

Surviving in a new world...

The Fallen Earth NDA has been lifted, this means I can make some comments on the game I was beta testing.

Fallen earth is a standard quest/xp grind MMO with an interesting story to be discovered as you adventure. It is set in the Southwestern United States following the downfall of society.


Your attributes are raised by 1 point when you level and can be increased as you wish with attribute points. Your attributes are used to calculate the max lvl of your skills, in addition you can use APs to raised the max level. The only way you can raise the actual value of your skills is through use. So if you want to get good at cooking it's time to start putting together some of that grilled tainted goat and get your skill up. The crafting areas you get are: Armorcraft, Ballistics, Cooking, Geology, Medicine, Mutagenics, Nature, Science and Weaponry.

The equipment and abilities you can use are limited by the amount of skill you have in a particular area. For example, a light crossbow is not usable until your skill in rifle has exceeded 21, the mutation "patch 2" is not available until your alpha mutation skill is over 15, etc. If you have ever played Asheron's call you will get the idea, its a skill based system, and I expect that it will have issues with minmaxing just like Asheron's call. I did not get a character very far into the game, so I can't comment on how much of a problem it is with the game in it's current state.

What I did see was very interesting. You gain xp for completing missions, killing monsters, gathering resources and crafting items. The game is very crafter friendly, it seems like you could probably level up completely by gathering and crafting, though some defensive skills might be handy when that mutated chicken is guarding the old barrels you want to look through. Crafting takes time in the game, from 2 minutes for small things to 15 minutes for more complicated things like a gun. I believe some of the higher level items took even longer, I seem to recall someone saying that crafting an item took 6 hours. The nice thing is that your character can be crafting items while you are not logged in, as long as you have something in your crafting queue when you log out you can get something done while you're sleeping. Another nice thing about the crafting system is that nearly anything in the game is craftable, chances are the clothes you're wearing and the ammo you're using will all be made by you or your clanmate crafter. I saw some items drop from human mobs, but by that time I was already wearing something better that I crafted myself. I felt like I was a survivor taking what I could scrounge up and making use of it. I really liked what was done with the gathering/crafting system.

My highest level character was 9th lvl. I know it doesn't sound like much but that was a decent amount of play time, not the first 9 levels in 60 minutes or less you get from WoW. I think I probably took about 20 hours of play time to reach that level. Luckily there is quite a bit to do in that level range, the newbie town you start in can easily get you through the first 5 levels and after that you will be visiting many other scattered town and enclaves. You have a chance to "train" a horse by crafting it before you get to 5th level, with a horse the long distances that really help make this game immersive. Early on you are also started down a quest path to gather parts for an ATV to get you zipping around the post-apocolyptic waste.

I still haven't decided if I liked the game enough to buy it and subscribe, I can't decide if it's really ready for release yet.

I know I didn't cover everything about the game, it really is quite extensive. I will keep posting thoughts as I have them and I will answer any questions people might have.

How should I improve my descriptive vocabulary?

Ok, I'm trying to improve my DMing. I want to be able to come up with descriptive words at the right time that convey the right feelings for the areas my players are in. In an effort to add these words to my vocabulary I have spent some time searching for words, hopefully in list format so that I have many to choose from. I am not sure what words I will need though, I have started with a couple and have provided those below, but what other words should I find synonyms for? Where do other DMs find their words and inspiration?

For instance, I know there's a number of words for a mausoleum:

boneyard	charnel	charnel house
churchyard	city of the dead	crypt
marbleown	memorial park	mortuary
necropolis	ossuary	polyandrium
potter's field	resting place	sepulcher
tomb	vault	funerary grounds
God's Acre	boot hill	catacomb
cemetary

I have looked up words for castle but what else should I be looking for?

Anything New?

Haven't posted in a bit.

Reason 1 - We skipped a week of gaming, our host had something come up so we did not have a place to play and we would have been short of our 3/4 quorum.

Reason 2 - Other than not having a game session to talk about, I haven't had much else I wanted to talk about.

So I have decided to ramble a bit before I continue preparing for another session of D&D this week.

Regarding D&D
I have started using more and more a program called Masterplan. This is an application specifically designed for 4th edition, though with the extensibility that is supposed to be built into the app, I suppose it could be adapted for any game system.

Masterplan is designed around libraries, which are collections of objects. These include monsters, map tiles, templates, traps and skill challenges. Each object has its own editor, specifically designed to capture the information that is important for the object you are creating. The only object that doesn't have an editor is the map tiles, instead these are imported images of the WoTC Dungeon Tile products. You can find these images elsewhere on the net, or I suppose you could scan them yourself if you own the tiles like I do. The image in my previous post is a screen capture of a map I made using the tiles, though I planned the dungeon out with my tiles beforehand so that I knew I wasn't using duplicates.

The main work area of Masterplan is the Workspace. In here we can create plot points and join them together in decision tree format. I have used it to this point just to organize my thoughts and prepare for the near future, it would probably make more sense to break down each mini adventure into plot points and keep them seperate. I'm still trying to decide how this will work best for me. I'll try and give some more feedback regarding my experiences as time goes by, but in the meantime, go check it out for yourself at http://www.habitualindolence.net/masterplan/

A simple dungeon

This is the map of the last dungeon my players have run through. As I mentioned earlier this is the first time in 4th edition that I had to put together some encounters and map out some dungeons. In earlier editions of the game there was less need to make an encounter challenging via character mobility. In most cases you had a fighter type standing in front of the rest of the players, creating a "log jam" at a doorway allowing the less armored members to pew pew at the baddies while he held them off being healed by his cleric.

In 4th edition they have emphasized the mobility of the characters and their opponents. Most if not all player classes have abilities that allow them to move opposing monsters as do some of the monsters. The players could just turtle up in a hallway if they wished, though as I'm writing this I suppose a little discouragement by an "area effect" attack could have ended that, though their warlock tries to do this as well by bunching the monsters and dropping his one AE attack on them .

I referred to this dungeon in my previous post. The first area where the players grouped up in the entrance stairway and tried to reduce the amount of attacks they took at any one time is in the upper right hand side of the map. Then they went down the stairs and fought a demon and some gnolls in the lower tomb area. This was where the new player dumped the oil filled brazier. In the upper left side of that room you see a trap door that leads down into some natural caves.

The players decided to go down into the caves, the warlock being all pessimistic and assuming he was going to fall when attempting to climb down, suggested they go down prior to their short rest after combat so that he could recover from the fall. The players used a rope that was spiked into the tunnel wall, As fate would have it the warlock did fall as foretold with a roll of a 1, the other characters made it down successfully. Before the characters started their rest, which I would have interrupted with a gnoll attack, they found some of the gnolls around a corner and a fight ensued.

I had designed this fight as two encounter fight, shortly before they would finish off the first encounter I was going to have one of the monsters call out that they were being attacked. I also hoped the fight was going to be a bit more mobile, I had made the area fairly huge and I had put various ways for the combatants to move around and flank. I had also included some Shadar-Kai, these shadowy humanoids have short teleport movement power that added some chaos to the fight. In the end the characters prevailed ( as they should ) and we ended it there. I have yet to find out if they thought the encounter was interesting and if they felt challenged.

For any D&D 4th edition players that may wander by, here are the two encounters that they ran into in the last room:
6 - Gnoll Raiders ( a minion variety that I created )
1 - Evistro AKA "Carnage Demon"
2 - Gnoll Huntmasters


The second encounter in the caverns was:
1 - Shadar Kai Witch
1 - Shador Kai Gloomblade
6 - Gnoll Raiders ( a minion variety that I created )

A D&D update.

We played last night. Our new player is actually new to our area as well. He said he's played RPGs in the past and has enjoyed playing/GMing Deadlands and may run a short campaign for us in the future, woot! I might get to be a player.

One other nice thing is that I think our new player will add some thought and analysis to the situations and story. In the one combat we were able to finish last night, he thought to use a brazier bowl filled with burning oil. He dumped it over on a monster doing some damage to it and also created a terrain hazard for a couple of rounds in a patch of burning oil. I had planned on having the monster use a similar tactic if the other characters happened to get closer together.

I hope this inspires the other players to see some of the terrain as tools to be used in an encounter as well. I think that I may be to blame for the lack of "outside the box" thinking of the existing players. I feel that I haven't put enough of these types of challenges into my game up till now. I'll be trying to add the extra elements to an encounter going forward instead of the somewhat stale room(s) with monsters.

This current dungeon is the first that I am putting together for 4th edition, up till now I had used the "Keep on the Shadowfell" module. Since this module was the first published by WoTC for 4th edition I think that it is very basic and was more designed to introduce the system and some simple combat scenarios. My first room in this dungeon was a fairly basic affair with an attached room that allowed me to add some additional monsters part way through the combat. I didn't forsee the players deciding to clump up in the entrance hall though so it was another static combat encounter. What I did with the second room was ensure that they would have to deal with monsters coming from two directions, as well as adding some additional props.

Next week they will get a chance to meet with my latest creation which should add some movement challenges as well as throwing a second combat immediately following the first. I'll let you know how it goes.

What's going on here?..

Not much because...

There's not much going on with my RPG game. We've had a drought in gaming due to one of the player's job as well as his vacation. Two good things this week. We are finally going to play we're still not sure if my recently absent player is going to make it. We have found a new player to add to the group, he's just someone we picked up at www.penandpapergames.com. We figured we had been playing with 3 players up to now, we can continue minus the "vacationer" this week.

I'm pretty excited about this, I have a story to tell and hopefully a new player will add some more focus and insight to the group. I'll let you know how it goes.


On the MMO side I've still been playing City of Heroes, though the boredom factor is coming up again. It is a nice game with some great mechanics, but it get repetitive fairly quickly. I've also been Beta testing another MMO, I can't say what it is, but it seems like it may be a little more on the hardcore side. Crafting is a major part of the game and supposedly the best items are going to be player created. I've only barely scratched the surface so far, I originally got distracted by Ulduar and then I got distracted by CoH but I'm poking around a the game a little more now.

Expectations?

One of the 4th edition campaigns I am running started with the first module for this editions, H1-Keep on the Shadowfell. Since I started with this module and have a few maps in the DM's guide I decided to continue using the maps and locations provided, I have re-created the map provided in the DM's guide Soon to be posted here. I did add my own twist with an overarching storyline that is supposed to get the characters involved.

Edit: Here is a link to the map that I made from the one provided in the DM's Guide.
Winterhaven and surroundings


You see a couple of centuries ago an oracle just spouted out an epic, as oracles sometimes do. In the epic it was described that the royal family was destined to be the end of Orcus, or at least banish him for a millenia. That epic lists out where the hero is expected to go, what he is expected to use and how he is supposed to end Orcus' reign.

Here are some stanzas that the players have already discovered:

From the past, the future's written
Of the blood of ancient kings
They shall be Orcus' destroyer
Through powerful prismatic rings

In their path, shadows fallen
His death, black and painful fated
By his master, unlife granted
until his soul's hunger sated

Mountain's protectors have the answer
To travel the path of glory
Forged by their ancestral spirit
A ring begins the blood's story

Before ancient Shadow's Pillars
Beneath the shadow darkened sun
With heartening strikes on Orcus
The cleansing war has begun

Bright now is their shadowed future
Strengthened by the coming sun
Fear and horror reduced to nothing
In the end the battle is won

Part of the story is a mercenary company that was hired to guard the royal family until the prophecy came to pass. Red Mithril stayed with the family wherever they went, unfortunately There was an incident at the Keep on the Shadowfell that broke up the mercenary company and scattered the few remaining members of the family.

Assuming the characters find all the information they need, what do you think the chances are that the campaign will go as expected?

Didja notice?

I was re-arranging my blog today. I wanted to keep my blog related items up top but also wanted to make my amazon links more visible.

I started thinking about two things.
1. Do any of my readers ( like 3 of them ) know the 20 year history I have with the name Laslo? and...
2. Why do I have D&D amazon links on my blog page if I haven't really talked about it?

I'll start with #1, but in doing so I'll delve a little deeper into my past and my adolescence. When I was in 8th grade, about 30 years ago ( go ahead, do the math ), we were required to have homework or something to read for half of our lunch period. I was fortunate enough to sit across the table from someone who had already been introduced to D&D. He usually had the "Monster Manual" with him and allowed me to peruse the book during our "study" time. The images and the statistics listed for the imaginary creatures intrigued me, it was so stimulating to my imagination that I had to learn more. I got to know another classmate, who was also into the gaming scene, both roleplaying as well as strategy games. I still call him my friend, and we get together once in a while with our wives and other couples. Him, another friend and I stumbled into the roleplaying world of "Basic Dungeons and Dragons" not knowing exactly what we were doing other than playing make-believe.

Years went by, we tried many different roleplaying games. Fantasy Games Unlimited had quite a few games that were unique and interesting. Aftermath, Daredevils, Villains and Vigilantes and Bushido were FGU products we played. We played some Champions, Car Wars, and of course AD&D.

On to college, I was strangely enough assigned to room with a gamer and learned that my college campus has an RPG club that met every week. All it really did was provide a place to meet without having to deal with pededstrians stopping by to ask "What're you doing?". It was in that group, my first character with that group that Laslo was born. The system was a mixture of AD&D and some very well done homebrew rules. Spells were "invented" by the player by combining words to make the spell effect and every character started with a social status background to help determine their place in the world.

Laslo started with mediocre stats and a horrendous social status. I rolled a 1 on a 20 sided die. This didn't make me a bastard child, this didn't make me a slave, this made me the bastard child of a slave. That's right, Laslo's mother had been a slave in the middle-eastern style city of Kaylith and his father was some northern mercenary who just passed through. So by combining the traits of these two fictional characters, Laslo was a blond haired, well tanned short street urchin who grew up thieving from the plentiful merchants of Kaylith. He went on to have many adventures in many places and became one of my favorite characters.

As far as #2? Maybe I'll cover that next time, I'm DMing a 4th edition campaign that I run on a weekly basis that started in the area that is provided in the DM's guide and the first module. I can talk a little bit about it, but my players haven't really gotten into the meat of the campaign yet so I will have to be careful about what I discuss.

No more WoW

I have been quiet here for a while.

I apologize for not providing the promised follow up to our awesome raiding weekend, but I lost interest.

I have basically quit WoW cold turkey, the few times I have logged on was because my wife was in need of some gems cut and once because she wanted some DPS for a pug raid and asked that I log on my mage. What I have been doing with my time has been playing City of Heroes.

I had played this game when it first came out, kept my account going for about 3 months before I grew bored with the repetitive nature of the game.

At the time, if you completed a mission with a group that was the same as a mission in your list, you did not get credit for completing it unless it was YOUR mission that was completed. This was a serious sore spot. Well Cryptic/NCSoft fixed that, now if you complete a mission with a group that you have in your mission list you will be asked if you would like to complete your mission as well. This was a nice simple fix that could have kept me playing way back when I started.

Another issue that was addressed was difficulty. CoX ( City of Heroes/Villains ) is a class based game, depending on which role you chose to file you are allowed to choose from certain power sets and you get a certain size health pool. As in most MMOs different roles have different damage output versus survivability. If you are a tanker you can take a lot of punishment but dishing it out is a little tougher. If you are a blaster (ranged DPS) you can deal a lot of damage, but have to be careful of letting your foes get too close. A defender ( healer/buffer ) can keep themselves alive a bit longer, but have a hard time arresting ( killing ) anything. This led to having some classes very reliant on grouping and others able to easily plow through missions. Now in CoX you can choose your difficulty from among 5 different settings, you start out at level 1 and can go up to level 5. This was definitely a much needed improvement.

There have been many updates and additions since I last played on a regular basis, maybe I will spend some more time at a later date describing more changes.

I went to two raids since my last post.

The first raid we fought and defeated Auriaya then we went back and beat up Ignis.

Auriaya was fun, still a bit nerfed ( yeah, I noticed ). Our plan was to take down her four adds then focus on her. We had three people assigned to AE her kittens that pop in to see what's happening but leave the defender alone. We knew that during the AE the defender takes some damage, so I have to help deal with it. Once it gets to about about five to ten percent, it is my job to taunt the thing out of the group and stun it. Well that didn't quite work right, I did taunt, I did stun but it didn't want to come to me on the taunt. Instead the AE dpsed him down in the raid group, luckily everyone was quick enough to move out of the area before they died. The defender came back only one time before Auriaya died. One other thing we didn't do was move out of line-of-sight of the defender's death spot. I would have expected at least a couple of people to be feared through the void zone, but I don't think one person died to that thing. In the end it all worked out and we got our first progression kill of the evening.

So with Auriaya dead, we went back to the beginning to see Ignis. First of all his trash is challenging ( I don't know what it was like pre-nerf ), and took some strategy. There are patrols at the bottom of the ramp leading to Ignis, these need to be handled one group at a time. There are Molten Colossus(es/i) that get tanked apart. If I remember correctly, they explode when they die. There are also Magma Ragers, they throw out a tornado of fire that we need to avoid. To make these guys easier we had a hunter kite one of them far away from the raid, only feigning once the first one was dead.

This was the first time I had seen Ignis, and I had only read up on him a little bit. It took us six tries, and I think I was the reason we had to do two of those. Once I figured out the adds and we had a second tank ( Karthis ) helping, it became like a dance where everything just started to come together.

We also went a took a quick look at Hodir with the last minutes left to the raid. His trash was challenging, though not as bad as Ignis'. Merely another learning curve. Hodir of course thrashed us after the quick description by the raid leader.

Tomorrow I'll post about Sunday's raid, we did well then too. More progression, let's keep it going.

Post nerf experiences

Well I went back into Uldaur again. As I said in my comments on Karthis' blog ( see the link to the right ) in response to other people's comments, I was going to wait and see what the nerfs looked like. I also made a silent promise to Jacemora to experience it first. Here are my observations on the changes.

First noticable nerf:
XT-002 - The tantrums were noticably shorter, did they NEED to be? I don't know I would have to hear from my healers on that. I know that I really didn't have a lot of problems in tanking its adds. I have also done this fight now on my undergeared mage, in it's old form I would have had to count on my healers during the tantrum, now not so much. The enrage time is noticably longer as well, having DBM tell you one minute to enrage though makes that one more obvious.

Razorscale - I don't know if any of the nerfs are obvious, but then again I think we had this fight down already.

Auriaya - We cleared the instance up to here and got one shot before the end of raid time. We got her considerably farther than ever before. It's hard to tell if its the nerfs or just us understanding the fight a little better, though in support of my previous post I choose the former :)

I was also able to learn two new fights ( to me at least ):
Iron Council - we three shot this fight. The first wipe was attributable to me, I wasn't quite ready for the runes that were put under the bosses and didn't react quick enough. The second wipe was one of the other tanks not seeing a rune under the boss he was tanking. All in all a pretty simple fight, we got the "Heroic: I Choose You, Stormcaller Brundir achievment.

Kologarn - we two shot this, I don't remember what caused the first wipe. Another simple fight for me anyway, I just had to pick up the adds from the right arm and DPS a little bit when the adds were gone. It again seemed to be a pretty simple fight. I have also done this now with my mage. From this side of things I had to pay a little more attention to the lasers, I didn't pay much attention to them while I was tanking adds on my paladin.

Hopefully a few guildies or any other readers will post their thoughts about the changes to these fights.

I still stand by my position that they should have waited another month before "tuning" these fights down. Stay tuned for my comments on the next round of nerfs that you know have to be coming.