Dungeons & Dragons

[tughy]

I have to say I'm a little bit shocked that there is no D&D representation on these forums. I know it's geeky, far more so than gaming but Warhammer gets some occasional love on here. As 4E is coming out now/soon and I'm older and don't care about being cool anymore I am actually very tempted to make a purchase.

Does anyone play? I've never considered it before as there was always a good singleplayer RPG either in the works or in the wild. But as far as I can tell there is not a single D&D videogame in production and so my craving has turned me towards the tabletop. I may have done earlier but honestly, I never really liked 3E or 3.5E much until this year through playing NWN2 and MotB but 4E makes some fairly radical changes and I think its a good time to get into something new.

I can't be the only one with a flicker of interest in this can I?

 

[Overload]

thought about it then decided it didnt really interest me. ever play heroscape?

 

[Wenbobular]

My friends used to play quite a bit, we had a club at our school and we used to play every Wednesday...
Then we kinda lost interest as our DM became interested in women
We still play every so often for kicks though. Since most of us are going to the same college...we might pick it up again.

 

[Chief Mendez]

4th Edition seems silly to me. I already payed Wizards out the freakin' nose for my 3rd Edition stuff, and now they want me to pay them more just so they can remove Gnomes as PCs? Not happening.

But then, that's coming from a DM who usually ends up making every one of his players' characters for them, so maybe I feel a bit one-sided on the matter. Still though, my group's been playing more-or-less regularly for the past few years with 3.5, and I really don't think using a computer's going to really help the process move any quicker than it already does with a group of experienced players.

 

[Mic_128]

No one's making you stop 3.5 . With how long it's taking my group of friends to get Vers. 4 (Our first DnD) I don't blame ya for not wanting any changes. so freaking complex.

Still, absolutely fun. I'll see if I can find my post from the Broom about it.

After four hours of fun we finally had our characters finalized, stat points passed out and ready to actually play (we were quite surprised to find it took that long and no one really cared) I'm a Dragonborn Paladin named Dragomic (I suck at names) and on arriving at a tavern we asked the barman for work since we were all broke. After being told the King was looking for adventurers, we begged the barman for donations a few times. After one of the guys rolled perception and we were told there were cockroaches everywhere we entered epic combat with one of the roaches. After a mighty hit, it was slain. the barman wasn't impressed and refused to tip us. *******.

We moved on to the kings guardman nearby, informing him we were adventurers looking for work. We were told we had to prove our strength in battle before we could be trusted and had to report to the arena. Yay. We rocked up and were informed by the guy that we had to fight a group of monsters caught and we had to defeat them. Walked in, out ran a bunch of giant rats, dire rats and a pair of scorpions.

After epic combat where I was chain-grabbed and poisoned by the freaking scorpions, we had one rat left cowering in the corner. As we approached it started to panic. I picked up a rat's corpse, thinking to bash the rat with it. We all grouped around the rat (who had decided to try and commit suicide by bashing it's head into the wall) we decided to torment it a bit by attempting to bluff, intimidate and so on on it. We decided to end it's misery and our wizard decided she's snap it's neck. She failed her strength roll and ended up just brutally mutilating it, and after a few other moves that the rspca would arrest us all for, including me looting some poop for future torment, it was, to quote the GM "Vomiting out of it's eyes".

We decided to take pity on it, and thought that perhaps we could heal it and then tame it, as a mascot. the rogue slipped it under it's cloak and our epic combat ended. Hoorah! the guard came in, applauded our efforts and demanded to know what was the stuff oozing out from behind the rogue's cloak. Curses! After a brilliant sob story, and some horrible rolls, the guard didn't care for our story about the wizard's fragile magic ring being inside it, ripped the rat apart. He then noticed my Rat-flail and started to badger me about that. Jerk. Luckily our cleric asked about gold and exp, which the guard gave us, and I quickly ran out of the arena before the guard remembered I stole a rat corpse, rolling a natural 20 on my stealth check.

I could go on about our first dungeon (which we only went into the second room before it was 1am) with traps that were poorly designed to miss people standing in front of them, but I'll leave it there.

DnD freaking owns.

 

[Zook]

God, I hate this game. My friends are constantly trying to get me to play it, but whenever I do, just one person takes over the entire freaking adventure.

My character is a Kobold Beastmaster named Hank Kimbal (I bet none of you get the joke), just to piss them off.

...The first time I played, I had no idea that I could use my animal companions to fight. I thought they were like a personal council. Of course, if you've ever seen the intelligence of a bison, dire bat, and monitor lizard, you can imagine how well that went over.

 

[SmashAura4]

I would play with my friend over his house, since my parents thought the game was dangerous. But since my friend moved, I've lost all sense of the game. If I could find someone around to play with, I'd definately get into it again.

 

[lycrof]

I have the 4E books and play. I also play d20 Modern

 

[Sensai]

/bump (figured it'd be better than starting a new thread about it)

Just rediscovered DnD recently and fell in love with it again. God ****, what an amazing game.

[Long version:]

I played back when it was 3.0 for a long while with my friends until the group splintered due to the fact that too many people would be nazi's about the rules. That may have been around the time that 3.5 was coming out...

Either way, I was worried about 4E being a little...I dunno, basic. For God's sake, they narrowed down the skills to SEVENTEEN. Jeah, I was pretty worried about it. But, I had a blast. My group consisting of 2 DMs who knew 3.5 and 4 well enough; me, who knew 3.0 fairly well and thus most of the terminology and the general flow of the game; 3 guys who had never played ANY DnD before and one more guy who had just recently gotten into 4E pretty much rolled right through about 6 hours of it (the first hour or so being a short tutorial/getting characters/etc).

And it was simple enough so that these guys could just jump in, yet deep enough so that I could delay my attacks and have a fun time figuring out tactics.

Jeah, I loved it and can't wait to play again.

 

[derek.haines]

>.>

<.<

I doubt this is the right room for this. At any rate though, I used to love D&D. Haven't played it in a while, but I wouldn't be against picking it up again at any time. Plus, it was one of the few things that me and my girlfriend could talk about when we first started dating, so I am eternally in it's debt. :D

 

[DARKALONDITE]

I played it once. It was fun but I really don't care for it.

 

[Sensai]

This space is reserved to relate to you guys (or the ones that care) the AWESOMENESS of what happened on my fourth encounter.

[Edit:]

For those of you playing the KotS (don't ask me, I don't even remember) campaign for 4e, you might not wanna read this as it contains so slight spoilers...fair warning.

.
..
...
..
.

Ok, so we're in our 3rd encounter (the one near the waterfall) and the party consists of the pre-built characters (I was the only one to have previously played DnD, excluding the DM...we figured this would be best). This is our second encounter without a rest (and, stupidly, the fighter and I had already used our daily powers).

I'm playing the rogue and notice the kobolds on the other side of the trees and signal to the others, who all see me...except the paladin, who's towards the south. He runs into a kobold who shouts out and alerts the other. Dumb pally...

Anyways, this fight goes on pretty much as expected and we decide to follow the kobold that ran away down the waterfall. We all agree it'd be best to send me (rogue) in first, stealthed (like I said...we're all fairly unfamiliar with the rules).

I roll TERRIBLY (I think my combined total was a 12...and that's with a +9 skill) and jump down and get absolutely laughed at by the 12 or so kobolds there who all rush me.

They're mostly minions, so no sweat and we kill them. As the last one's about to fall, Irontooth shouts out at us and charges in with 4 or 5 significantly stronger guys.

Keep in mind that this is, essentially, our 4th encounter since we'd last rested, meaning we're down a ton of healing surges, daily powers, etc. Irontooth and the fighter pretty much start dueling, leaving the rest of us to take care of the new non-Irontooth baddies...which we attempt to do, but do poorly.

After 4 rounds or so, Irontooth has successfully knocked out our fighter while we've leveled 3 of their guys while the other 2 are completely unscratched. Irontooth charges me (Irontooth has taken 3 damage by this point, I have 16 health or so at this point, as I'm pretty decent at not getting hit; the Paladin has 6 while the cleric is at full health and the wizard has like 2 left).

It's now that our wizard remembers that he hasn't used his daily, Sleep. So, he casts it aiming at Irontooth and the priest. Misses the priest, but hits Irontooth. Cool. He's not asleep yet, but if he fails his throw, he will be.

Next turn rolls around, Paladin is slain. Irontooth swings and misses me, fails his check and falls asleep. The three living PCs jump on this opportunity, and attempting to coup d'grace like nobodies business.

We get him bloodied before he wakes up. The two knocked out PCs are rolling well enough so that they're not dying and we somehow manage to kill all the enemies that are not Irontooth without losing much health (I think I had 9 HP now and our cleric is completely out of healing abilities).

So it's 1v3 when our fighter comes up on his last roll (if he fails it, he's REALLY dead, like, for serious. Not joking around). He rolls a natural 20 and stands up alive with like...7 health. Instead of being intelligent and attacking from a distance, the man runs headlong into battle, swings, misses, and dies. :-/

I am attacking like nobodies business, slowly backing up to draw Irontooth away from our casters. He finally hits me again and gets me to about 4 health. Our wizard is shooting magic missles by this point and misses (no exaggeration here) 6 rounds in a row. Our cleric rushes out to stabilize our fighter, who's about to (really) die again.

He kills me and runs at the cleric, who dies in a fell swoop.

So, now it's the wizard versus Irontooth, who's pretty ****ed up after all the damage I had done to him. Irontooth is blocking the waterfall (the exit) and is too close to the wizard for him to do anything but run...so he does. He bolts.

Halfway through the charge, he decided to die without the bull****. He stops mid-run, turns around, and fires a magic missle. A magic missle, from the guy who's missed 6 rounds in a row.

It's a natural 20. It deals full damage (12). Irontooth falls over, dead. It was the **** coolest thing, and **** fortunate too.

Since that night, I've discovered that had I played my character to its fullest, we woulda been fine. Also, the pally had an encounter power that he never used. ALSO, I was rolling at -3 the whole time because of the way the pre-generated character sheet was written up.

...so, all errors aside, still pretty fookin' epic.



(If you read all of this, you're a pretty amazing person.)

 

[sevenmorehills]

The possibility of missing with magic missile makes me sad.

 

[Sensai]

^^^

I know what you mean.

Also, does anyone know anywhere (forums, etc) that people play DnD online?

 

[missedwithtruestrike]

The possibility of missing with magic missile makes me sad.

national dnd gamegay 2008: me and 2 friends drove an hour so we could play 4e early. we end up in the back room of a comic book shop and there are about 12 people includeing us. there were 2 dms runnin 2 diff. premade campaigns at once and the guy in our party says "i use magic missle"
dm: roll an attack
me: hey guys did he jus say....?
dm: you miss.
me, my 2 friends and some girl at the other table: magic missle can miss!?
well.....i must say i dont like 4e but we have the core books and the martial powers book. as far as 3.5 goes, its my preferred game, i like prestige classes more than paragon crap, Dwarvern Defender ftw!
on another note, im happy i found this cuz i was gonna make two threads, one for 3.5 and one for 4e, thanx op for savein me time
edit: bout 2 mins after this post i realized how epic a bump i just did....lol

 

[Zook]

national dnd gamegay 2008: me and 2 friends drove an hour so we could play 4e early. we end up in the back room of a comic book shop and there are about 12 people includeing us. there were 2 dms runnin 2 diff. premade campaigns at once and the guy in our party says "i use magic missle"
dm: roll an attack
me: hey guys did he jus say....?
dm: you miss.
me, my 2 friends and some girl at the other table: magic missle can miss!?
well.....i must say i dont like 4e but we have the core books and the martial powers book. as far as 3.5 goes, its my preferred game, i like prestige classes more than paragon crap, Dwarvern Defender ftw!
on another note, im happy i found this cuz i was gonna make two threads, one for 3.5 and one for 4e, thanx op for savein me time
edit: bout 2 mins after this post i realized how epic a bump i just did....lol

Why on Earth would you bump a 5 month old thread?

 

[missedwithtruestrike]

Why on Earth would you bump a 5 month old thread?

so i didnt have to make a new one for the exact same thing, i used the search button, and it worked. it saved me time and now i dont have to make a thread that will just get closed and redirected to here.

 

[McFox]

As someone who has NOT been playing for years, I've been having a ton of fun with 4e. Three of my friends and I just got it like last week. I don't think we're exactly following the rules 100%, but I know that I definitely don't care, as long as we're having fun (which we are). Here's what happened to me last night. Keep in mind that, like I said, we're probably not following the rules correctly, and also don't care:

So, there's only three of us playing last night. One of the guys decides to DM for us, so my friend Jared, AKA a Dragonborn Fighter and I decide to play. Oh, my character, you ask? His name is

Gobold
the
Kobold.

He's Gobold because he GOES BOLD.

He's a Rogue.

So anyway.

We're fighting our way through this dungeon. There's a lot of minions, which kind of sucks because the Fighter doesn't even have Cleave, so we don't really have any attacks that can hit more than one person, beyond his Dragonbreath attack.

We keep fighting our way through, and the DM decides that it would be funny to have an entire roomfull of zombies and skeletons ALL ATTACK ME.

So, literally, my character is on a tile, and is completely surrounded by 8 other enemies. They all take their shots at me, and I have like 4 health left. Out of 37.

Luckily, I have an attack that lets me switch places with an attacker. So I nail that guy, switch places, and bolt away. The Fighter comes up, and gives every single one of them Dragonbreath. He hits all but 2 of them, and the 6 that are hit go down. We quickly dispatch the other two.

So I spend most of my healing surges, and we move on to the next room. In the next room, there's a low wall we can use for cover, with a statue next to it. I stealth to the entranceway, and see two skeletons over to the right. I can't see into the room. I was about to sneak attack the zombies, but then I thought "F*** that, I'm Gobold, and I'm GOING BOLD!" I roll a d20 to see if I can do a flip over the wall into the room. With my +10 to Acrobatics, I get like, 27. I do a graceful flip, and the Fighter jumps over the wall with his Athletics (I don't care if this is how the game is supposed to be played or not).

Well, turns out in this room, there are also 4 gnomes and a ghost. They immediately surround me and start taking potshots. So what do I do? That's right, I immediately flip back over the wall (as soon as it's my turn). The Fighter stays out there.

However, I'm taking a -2 to Attack rolls because of the cover. So, each turn, I roll a d20 to see if I can get back over the wall. It's working pretty well for a while. I use Deft Strike, which let's me shift two spaces before the attack, so that I don't spend my Move action getting over the wall. After the attack, I Move back over the wall.

This is working well for a while, until I roll a 1 on the d20. The DM says that I attempt to backflip and instead slammed my head into the wall, and didn't make it over.

That's fine! The Kobold racial power let's me shift 1 square as a Minor Action. So I use that to get back over the wall.

Or rather, I WOULD HAVE, except I rolled another 1! So I attempted my first backflip and slammed my head. I got up and tried to go over the wall again, but didn't even leave the ground, and I just sort of flopped against the wall. So I had to stay there that time.

It was pretty hilarious, and I had a ton of fun. On one of my flips I rolled a 20, so the DM narrated this little thing where I swung off a chandelier, did a cartwheel in the air over to a statue, and then flipped down to where I wanted to land, which was literally 1 space away from where I started . I'm really loving this game.

 

[Sensai]

McFox, that sounds awesome; rules shouldn't get in the way of having fun, period.

 

[missedwithtruestrike]

yea, fun is more important than rules always. at least you have a seemingly good dm, im dm'ing my 1st 3.5 campaign starting soon, i did a 4e one before but than i decided that i dont like 4e and we called it quits.
i remember my 1st character...he was a dwarf fighter (3.5) that prestiged into dwarvern defender..i had like 32 ac, it was fun, screwed the team though since the dm had to make everything stronger to hit me, which meant everything would rip my team apart.

 

[Skler]

...

I started playing D&D about 2 weeks ago and love it.

Am I going to hell?

 

[Sensai]

Absolutely!

Also, for any of you who have somehow not seen this:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/unforgotten-realms/49-Episode-One-The-Remaking-of-Heroes

 

[Skler]

That's awesome.

My group has a really hard time always showing up. It's usually only 3 or so players and the DM. I have tons of free time in college, why doesn't my group!?

 

[Spire]

I taught myself Ver. 3.0 about six years ago (holy ****, it's been that long?) but I never played it. I was just really interested in learning the game. I knew most of the stuff inside and out, particularly creature statistics, but have since forgot almost everything.

I probably would have played it if given the chance - that being the reason I never did.

 

[Skler]

If you aren't afraid of talking about it you can find plenty of people interested in playing. Somebody walked in on our group today (only 4 people were there, we had people playing everyone's characters) and wants to join in. He'll probably be replacing one of the people who hasn't shown up since the first game. I recruited a bunch of my friends just by bringing it up in conversation. Something like "hey, what's up?" "PLAY D&D WITH ME!"

As far as my group goes...
...We're moving at a snails pace, we've done 3 encounters so far IN 3 SESSIONS. The thing is each session lasts about 2 hours because somebody inevitably has to leave for some reason without telling us beforehand. The encounters take a while because everyone is new (except one person). Extremely fun to play, just a bit annoying too since the game is chugging along at a really slow pace as everyone learns their powers and what they can do.

Edit: Everyone's been having a blast though, and so far one person has been near death. Silly rouge, guard drakes can see you. Another thing to mention is we play 4e, if that changes anything.

On a side note, dungeon tiles are awesome. I'm thinking of buying a bunch of sets because I love them so much (and because amazon is making it nice and cheap). I imagine without them we wouldn't even get through one encounter a session because I'd have to draw up the map of every room. People would also be very confused by my poorly drawn pits/coffins/everything instead of being in awe at the beautiful art.

 

[Sensai]

@ Skler: A thing to consider since everyone's new and things are going slowly: make power cards. It'll speed things up significantly.

[Edit:]

Also, I'm jealous of your ability to play DnD. My group has been on hiatus for more or less 2 months due to everyone simply having something else to do. Things may pcik up this weekend.

 

[Skler]

We have the power cards that you print out with the character creator. Nobody knows the rules/owns any of the books so we desperately needed them. The thing that slows us down is that all the new players didn't know anything about actions, trading down, cover and all that other jazz. This includes me, I was so confused first session.

2 months is rough (granted I've only been playing 3 weeks), make them have nothing else to do. I've got a week off from it and it's going to kill me. Fortunately everyone should be able to play next week, which would make it our first session where everyone shows up. I'm excited.

 

[Mic_128]

@ Skler: A thing to consider since everyone's new and things are going slowly: make power cards. It'll speed things up significantly.

Looking at making some of these for our next session this weekend after the ones I used from the DnD character creator were a big help, but I don't want to pay a subscription just so I can print out a few pieces of paper every month or so. Anyone know a place to find some Power Card templates?

EDIT: Nevermind, just found a brilliant one here.

http://thegamerdome.com/power-cards-character-sheet-etc-for-4th-edition-dungeons-and-dragons/

 

[Skler]

Now I can talk about DnD without double posting!

That power card thing looks pretty good, but then I saw the crib sheet. That thing is exactly what I needed since nobody but me has easy access to the books. It answers about 80% of the questions I get asked!

Player's Handbook 2 is one of the greatest things ever, what do you guys think about it?

 

[Sensai]

I like most of it, but the Bard is one of the best things ever.

Seriously, I really enjoy the Bard class this time around; in 3.x, he was more like a jack of all trades, master of none and in this...he's a f*cking Bard and don't you forget it.

Very cool.

 

[Skler]

I'm a huge fan of the avenger, he just seems so different from everyone else. All the other classes are like "Yay, teamwork!" and the avenger just calls out some poor guy and beats the crap out of him regardless of what his team does. The concept is just really cool, imo.

Sure he could do things like teleport people into spots that would help his team and such, but most of his powers seem to be based around giving him a 1v1 against whoever his oath of enmity target is. Oath of enmity is also one of greatest class features ever, double attack rolls!

 

[Mic_128]

I'm planning on ulti-classing to get that skill. I mean sure, it only lets me do double rolls for two turns, but that's still awesome :D

 

[Skler]

If more people on smashboards played/posted here, I think it would be awesome to do a play-by-post game. Not that I have a clue on how to do them.

Somebody should hop on that.

 

[Sensai]

I'd be game, even if it just a 'let's see if this works' type thing.

That being said...I don't think it will. Unless we get MapTools going on too, but that makes it much less...play by post.

4E is centered more around minis and squares than any of the previous additions. I'm pretty sure that we could do 90% of the 4E by post, but combat would be difficult, to say the least.

 

[Mic_128]

Awesome new class preview for Players Guide 3.

I'd hit it.

 

[Glitch Adonis]

Retired 4E Wizard..
I kinda miss it..

 

[Skler]

The witchalok seems to have a hard time doing damage, but has great unique control effects. I mean, with Big Skull you could inconvenience enemies on a crit, wolfoids can creep people out and one spell can even make people sad.

I must say "Which Witchalok", "Death Laser", "Slow, Dramatic Clapping", and "Turn into a dinosaur" are some of the funniest things I've seen.

Maptools (I shall google it)? I was thinking somebody could be a total badass and use the awesome power of Photoshop or MS paint to draw maps. It would be both ghetto and amazing. Time would slow down quite a bit during combat in play by post, but that's how it would have to be I guess. Either that or we could try playing over AIM or some other message thing at a specific time. Again, we'd need to find a good way to represent combat. To the internet!

Edit: Now that I've seen maptools it looks amazing, but kind of complicated. It has a chat, dice roller and tons of other stuff. I'd be down for playing a game on that.

 

[Sensai]

I've been meaning to fool around with it, but you're right: it looks really complicated.

 

[Skler]

It has some tutorials, I think I'll watch them and see how easy it is.

Photoshop would probably be better for play-by-post assuming you can make grids with it (easy to post the image/make marks after each turn/round). Maptools would be better for an actual session online.

Edit: The tutorials can be found here

 

[Mic_128]

Pic from session two weeks ago

The Dragon statuette is my Dragonborn Paladin, Dragomic