Sunday, August 31, 2008

Roll for Initiative!

My first topic will be Dungeons & Dragons. For those of you who don’t know what Dungeons & Dragons is [I’ll be referring to it as D&D from now on], well you aren’t nearly geeky enough to be reading this blog. If you’re really interested in learning, well, Wikipedia is an excellent online resource. Go look it up, and come back if you’re still interested in what I have to say.

I have a tremendous amount of love and affection for this tabletop role playing game. It’s a perfect outlet for my creativity, and it lets me play the role of a hero in a world filled with monsters.

My favorite part of the game though is the social aspect, I love nothing more than getting together with a bunch of friends and just hanging out. Playing D&D gives me the chance to hang out with some bad ass folks, and roll some dice while I’m at it.

Recently, I’ve been taking on the role of Dungeon Master [DM] more often. This role tends to work really well for me, because I have a terrible habit of getting bored very quickly with my current character and wanting to move on to something new. Being the DM allows me to play the role of several different monsters and enemies in one session, it doesn’t allow me to get bored.

Recently, Wizards of the Coast, the current publisher and owner of the D&D brand ; put out a brand new edition of my favorite game; Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Prior to its release, I heard a lot of different opinions about the product, which is fucking insane because it hadn’t even come out yet!

Every Tom, Dick, and Harry asshole I talked to had a “friend” who was a play tester who just had horror stories about the new addition. Giving me a fucking break, if you haven’t played it yourself shut your damn mouth. I always try to give people and the benefit of the doubt, and Wizards really haven’t fucked D&D up yet, so I was confident the new edition would be at least playable.

I’ve played a couple sessions of the new edition, and I’ve read the Player’s Handbook [PHB}, Dungeon Master’s Guide [DMG] and Monster Manual [MM] cover to cover. Not only did wizards not fuck their shit up, they made the game a hell of a lot better.

They made it quite a bit easier for new people to join the game. The skill system has been condensed and simplified, without losing too much versatility. The spell lists are quite a bit easier to understand, and not so damn text heavy. The combat system has had a lot of it’s more difficult to implement rules such as grappling simplified, or taken out altogether (which isn’t a bad thing).

My favorite part of the new system, is that every single class has an enormous list of attacks, powers and special abilities they can choose from. In earlier editions, classes like the fighter, and rogue spent every single one of their rounds simply swinging a sword or stabbing with their dagger. One of my favorite classes, the cleric, was usually forced to be the “healing battery” for the group spending all their time casting “cure light wounds”. Typically from a wand aka “click stick”. That’s all over my friends, with powers like healing strike which allows you to attack an enemy, and heal an ally all in the same action!

I’ve heard many people complain that they hate the fact that they’ve lost the ability to make their characters a lot more customized than they’re used to. Which in all honesty, is true, but that’s because there are only three books out so far. 3.5 has dozens of tomes out that give you countless options for your character. I have faith that the volumes that are to come will have many different options to customize your character however the hell you want.

Ok, I’m going to end this before it gets too fucking long (a little late yes?). I just want to leave you with one last thought. If you hear someone complaining about a new movie, book, gaming system, whatever, and they haven’t seen it, read it, or played it, do me a favor, walk over to them, slap them in the back of the head and tell them to shut the fuck up about shit they don’t know about, thanks.

Thanks for reading!

~Chopz

P.S. If you haven’t played D&D yet, please give it a shot, I promise you won’t be disappointed, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to get together with some friends, roll some dice and fuck up some goblins.

(Dedicated to the late great Gary Gygax, father of all RPGs, keep rolling those dice!)

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