Where I’ve Been, What I’ve Been Doing, and What’s Next
It’s been sometime since I’ve been able to sit down and work on an update for the site. So where have I been and what have I been up to?
After getting my computer working, I began working quite hard on re-working the Aleph Fantasy game to incorporate a number of changes and modifications that had come to me in my dreams the week before. Most of the changes are largely cosmetic and focused around filling in some blank spots and tying game elements together. Unfortunately, because my data files had not yet been restored, this meant that I had to re-type the ~90 pages by hand, reading the old hard-copy version and making changes as I went along.
Tuesday night I ran a quick test session to ensure that the changes didn’t have any unintended ramifications of impacts. If you’ve ever spent two solids days re-typing, modifying, formatting and editing information before staying up all night to run a game you can understand and appreciate the coma that followed.
I’ve had a lot of 4e rage lately, a lot of which resulted from reading the Races and Classes preview book, and being shocked by how uber the Dragonborn are and the knowledge that Tieflings would be in the core books, but not Aasimar because, to paraphrase, it’s hard to make them look cool. However! They will be introducing a new Celestial race that’s crafted out of the same pool of uber as the Dragonborn.
The next bit of 4e anger came when I read a Wizards article on Death and Dying in 4e, which included a little section on how to implement the 4e-style rules in a 3e/3.5 game:
If you’re dying at the end of your turn, roll 1d20.
Lower than 10: You get worse. If you get this result three times before
you are healed or stabilized (as per the Heal skill), you die.
10-19: No change.
20: You get better! You wake up with hit points equal to one-quarter your
full normal hit points.
…What? As far as I can tell, you’re not be healed or treated in this instance. This is for someone who is bleeding out on the ground by themselves. And there’s a 5% chance they go from dying to one quarter health. I simply can’t wrap my mind around that logic.
The article insinuated that the actual 4e numbers are likely to be a bit bigger, so we’ll see what changes are made there, how well it’s explained and how well the rules work together (the most important bit). If you’d like to read the article in it’s entirety, you can find it here.
Or if you don’t want to sign into Wizards to read it, you can read a copy of it here without signing into anything here.
One of the best things that can happen to me is getting an e-mail about some new gaming service/product/website from a reader or company, it always make me happy to see how much content there is out there and how much more good content there is for me to discover.
Recently I was e-mailed and alerted about a DnD Blog called the Tavern of the White Wolf. The content seems to exclusively be DnD-related, and a lot of the content can be pretty easily adapted to other systems. The content is all of a good quality, and since the site is still active and updated once or twice a day, you’ll likely find a good stream of DnD content here for at least some time.
I was also recently contacted by Trask from LivingDice.com who has started a nice gaming blog with some great content as well as a heads up about free d20 modules.
So what’s next? For the next week, I’m going to work on a series to help you build a campaign world. Information will be included on topics from map making to religion design.
Computer Update
Windows Vista is truly an evil beast. It regularly interrupts my internet connection, making doing anything from checking e-mail to checking forums. Out of three attempts to shut down Windows Vista, only three succeeded without the computer crashing during shut down - all applications were closed and all non-system processes had already been stopped. If anyone is ever considering using Vista, for your own sake I urge you not to. The compatability problems I’m already running into are astounding. Attempts to download a compatable version of Linux have been interesting. The first three downloads all seemed to go smoothly, until it came time to put the files onto disc. The burning process went smoothly each time, however there was an error while finalizing the disc, making it (apparently) unreadable. The fourth attempt seemed to be going smoothly right up until the download reached 101%. By the time it reached 110% and 710 MB out of 698, I cancelled the download. The fifth attempt is now underway. I fully expect to have these issues taken care of by the beginning of the week - but I also expected to have them resolved yesterday.
Wizards, 4e, and the OGL
If you haven’t heard elsewhere yet, Wizards has announced that they are selling the rights to publish anything under the 4e OGL for $5,000. Purchase now, and you can sell your products for several months following the release of 4e. If publishers don’t purchase the license, they’ll still be able to publish material for 4e - just not until 2009.
Why? Wizards say they’re doing this “to ensure quality.” Somehow, I doubt it. To be sure, following the release of 3rd Edition a lot of unbalanced and poorly constructed products were released by third parties. But then, Wizards released an unbalanced and poorly constructed product when they released 3rd Edition. The product was so unbalanced and poorly constructed, in fact, that they had re-release the game a few years later - no new features were included, only fixes to what was broken before. Oh, and Wizards doubled the money they made off 3rd Edition.
But what does this really mean in the long-run, other than more profits for Wizards?
We’ll see less support for 4e. Not just initially, but for the lifetime of the product, there will be substantially less third party products. Many companies won’t bother to switch to using the new d20 license, but instead focus on continuing to use the old d20 system that all their products have been released for in the past. These companies will also be catering to the crowd of players who won’t bother to switch from 3.5 either, which brings me to the next consequence.
Less people will play. Less support, no conversion guide from the old editions, and no ability to preview and even test-play the system in-depth thanks to the OGL? People will stick with what they already know, have, and love - and don’t have to spend another $100 on to start over.
New systems will come out and compete with d20 and the new 4e system. Publishers who aren’t using the d20 OGL may find that it’s better for them to create a new system or fall back to an old one that fits the game better than shoe-horn the game into d20. This competition will further take away both support and players from 4e and Wizards community.
New players will be attracted to the game table again due to the new array of choices and products. Players who left because it felt like they were repeatedly playing the same game in different settings when they played d20 will be attracted by the new choices and systems, and may return to the game table.
Wizards will begin to lose its ridiculous monopoly on RPGs. I’m not saying that Wizards will go out of business or even stop being the biggest company in the industry, but as they continue to do things which create more growth in the industry outside of their company than inside, or things which push potential customers away from hearing about products or increasing their costs to play and use their products - as all of these things happen, Wizards’ grip on the RPG industry will begin to slip, and other companies will slowly begin to gain ground and fill in the cracks left by Wizards.
What’s next, Wizards?
About Me
My name is Daniel Burnet, and I live in Southern Pennsylvania.
I’ve been playing RPGs for eleven years, and running them for six. My first experience with RPGs was in an online Star Wars Diceless Game, which lasted for about three years in a row before its eventual disband. Following that, I played in several Anime RPGs for a year in a half, Dragon Ball Z and Tenchi being two examples.
Finally in my Freshman year of high school, I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, and invited to play with a friend in his basement after school. After that first game of ADnD, I was immediately hooked and played at least once a week for the next three years, the only exceptions being during blizzards which made travel impossible.
Following my move to Texas to study Computer Science Engineering, I began running Dungeons and Dragons for a semester before moving back home due to disagreements with the way the University was run. For the next five years, I continued to run games as I continually refined my skills through practice, study, and observation.
During all this time, I began keeping a log of problems I encountered with games, situations where mechanics where required but completely unsupported by the system. These notes would later make up the framework for several RPGs which are currently in production.
To me, games are not “just” anything. They are an art, a science, and a form of expression. Without the ability to play games, I think we would be neither sane nor human. RPGs are a passion of mine, one which has affected my life greatly.
Why I Do It
The past week has been spent contact people in the RPG community and offering help with various projects that they have undertaken, and during this time it occurred to me that I have never explained why I am doing any of this.
RPGs are a defining aspect of my life, and have been since I first started playing them. Much of my knowledge in diverse areas of history, religion, geography, weapons and a dozen other things has come largely from experience garnered during play. (Pun possibly intended.) Further, it was through gaming that I first began to develop any real social skills. Without exaggeration, I can say that RPGs have made me who I am today, and without them I would be an incredibly different person, to say the least, which brings me to why I do this.
I love RPGs. As I explained above, I owe the life I have to them, and because of that I can think of no nobler task than giving back to the RPG community in any way that I can. I started this blog with the hope of offering help and insight to people. I join communities with the hope of offering help and making a real connection with people who share my greatest passion.
Anything I can do to give to the community, I will do my best. If you are involved with an RPG related project or otherwise know of one, please get in touch with me. You can leave a comment on this article or send me an e-mail at Daniel (at) AlephGaming (dot) com.
Alive and Eating
Last week after returning from PhilCon, I stopped posting for a few days, except to say that I had not eaten in several days and my headache medication had stopped working.
First off, I’d like to thank everyone who sent me kind thoughts, either through comments or e-mail. They were very much appreciated.
Second, I have a condition known as Ulcerative Pancolitis. In layman’s terms, it means that the length of my colon is covered in a series of ulcers. When I have flair-ups, eating anything becomes absolutely impossible, which often causes my stomach to shut down entirely and stop processing anything, liquid, food, or medicine. This is what happened to me last week, and I hope you can understand why it prevented me from posting.
Though I am still weak, and find my appetite severely limited due to my stomach shrinking after nearly six days of not eating, I am recovering and feel well enough to resume. So now I’m back to work, with 150+ RSS entries to catch up on in Google Reader, pages to update on the site, and entries to write up for everyone here on gaming goodness.
