Game Mastery

An odd thing happened in the shower today. I had an interesting realization about the way I run my games. That wasn’t the odd part. The odd part is that I remembered it. Showers are not conducive to notebooks or iPhones, so most of my hygiene related epiphanies go down the drain.

Anyway, what I realized was that my style of writing complex games with lots and lots of subplots may actually be easier to write than the simplistic one plot at a time approach.
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Last post about 4e PDFs.  For realsies.

I wrote a script that adds margins to the PDFs produced by Character Builder.  It’s available as a website.  Just upload your PDF and download a new one with margins.  At some point I’ll add an option to control the margin size.

http://files.sagotsky.com/pymargins/index.py

A couple unrelated thoughts on fudging preferences and long term plot.

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I have trouble running NPCs.  It takes me a while to get into character and even longer to switch between characters.  This isn’t news.  I’d be surprised if less than 1/3 of the posts here mentioned  this fact.  It’s something I’m aware of and I’ve been trying to work on.
I was talking to one of my PCs today, expressing this problem, and we came up with a possible solution.  I don’t know if it’ll work or not, but it’s definitely worth trying.

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For some odd reason the 4e character builder fails at making PDFs.  The margins aren’t right so when you print you lose a bit of data.   Here’s a workaround:

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I made a couple tools to help with my 4e game.  They’re of limited appeal and they’re still works in progress, but someone out there might find them interesting.

If you haven’t heard of vim or LaTeX (the typesetting system, not the material) this post doesn’t concern you and should be ignored unless you’re having a really boring day.

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Holy crap, I’ve had this blog for more than a year. Weirder still is that I still enjoy posting in it.

Anyway, today I wanted to discuss an idea I’ve had for a while but never actually played with. I’m very fond of this idea because it does something that a lot of 3rd ed D&D players request, but it hardly touches the game rules. Spellcasters, especially wizards, are criticized for being too powerful. Some fixes alter or remove spells. Others change the levels or numbers of spells casters recieve. I propose using a mechanic already present, but often ignored – spell components.

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I’ve always defended D&D as a platform for roleplaying.  Sure it focuses on combat by providing an abundance of interesting combat rules, but that doesn’t prevent you from roleplaying in it.  I’ve run entire d20 sessions without even looking at dice.  A character is a character and as long as a system supports a setting appropriate for your character, you can roleplay in that system, right?

Well, I’m not going to talk about that right now.  I’ve been playing 4th edition lately and will be running a pre-written 4th ed module this weekend.  I wasn’t able to get through a full reading of the mod without finally understanding why people take exception to using D&D for role play.  This post is an airing of grievances (in full Festivus spirit) I had while reading through a single D&D adventure.  I’ll bitch and moan and maybe, if we’re lucky, figure out a thing or two about writing good RP by examining the bad.

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Sign my game is going well: added a new player last night and then had another player deal with backstory colliding with in game events for 90+ minutes.  New player was content watching backstory emerge.  I think this means I’ve done my job when it comes to making the story engaging.  Best of all, backstory came to light and nothing has been resolved.

Today I stumbled upon something I made about a year ago.  It’s a DnD 3.5 character sheet.  I made it because I wasn’t satisfied with the default one when playing Grimble, my overleveled gnome wizard.  Wish I published it earlier, as 3.5 is kinda obsolete these days.

Anyway, here’s the character sheet.  Description below the cut.

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