Editorial/Opinion

Getting back to the story: Hands-on with Dungeons & Dragons Next - Charlie Hall writes on Ars Technica:

The most impressive part of WoTC’s presentation, to me, was the admission that they were somewhat behind the times in not offering digital copies of their properties, both past and present. They promised that, in the coming years, they would finally release searchable PDF copies of books from every system, all the way back to the original 1970s classic. Gamers will, as the keynote’s moderator Kevin Kulp politely put it politely, finally be able to play D&D from their tablets like they can with competing properties from Paizo and countless independent RPG makers.

From io9.com:

On the cover of his most recent newsletter, artist Christopher Hiers is credited with the left illustration, which — Rush's severed head and hypno-Obama eyes notwithstanding — looks exactly like artist Wayne Reynolds' drawing of the "Nightmare Beast" from the 2002 Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition Monster Manual II.

I am so weirded out by this. Rush and D&D is the last thing I would put together in my mind. Perhaps Wizards should pay Rush a favor back and make him an evil NPC in a DNDNext adventure? He should be some kind of leacherous, bloated, windbag of a high priest with lots of brain dead gullable minions.

I've noticed and number of posts on Google + about how to handle punishments for difficult or inattentive players. The Lords of Tyr is a fairly laid back group of players. We all have our moments of inattention. However it rarely gets to the point of rudeness and can be solved by a simple "OK that was a fun tangent... now back to the game!"

Not every group gels as well as we do however. While I have a distaste for any kind of in game punishment, it is something that every DM or gaming group needs to think about.

I have a two part philosophy to in game punishments.

1. Make the "punishment" transparent. The rules must be known to the entire group before they can be used. Its not fair to surprise players with penalties until they know what is expected of them and what the penalties are.

2. Keep it simple. There are two situations for punishments in game, in combat and out of combat.

In Combat Punishment

If I were to punish a player for being difficult or inattentive during combat, I would to work it into the game by making them dazed.

I've really been enjoying Google Plus as of late. Partly because there are so many awesome gamers using the service. Today I stumbled on this really neat house rules post from Moe Tousignant. His house rules are based on a blog post by WoTC employee Greg Bilsland.

I created a nicely formatted Google Doc for it here.

A great deal of the document is focused on Fun Points

5. Every player can collect fun points. Fun points can be acquired for a variety of reasons all of which are listed below. Fun points can be used for two things:
   1. Modifying a D20 die roll: After any standard roll (initiative, skill check, attack, etc) a player may spend any number of fun points to modify that die roll. This must be done before the results of the roll are known. Making a roll a 20 does not result in a critical hit.
   2. Taking a roll on the Fun Point Table: A player can trade in 10 fun points for a roll on the fun point table (below). These give a wide variety of in game benefits.

The Fun Point Table is a 100 item long random table that you roll against. Its chalk full of fun stuff. One of my favorites is:

76. My Name is Enigo Montoya Keep fighting even while at negative hit points. You still make death saving throws.

You can get Fun Points for one time things, like creating a character background, creating a treasure wish list, and other character startup tasks. You can also get Fun Points for reading up on the rules regarding your character and general rules, as well as for things like showing up on time. 

Its just plain cool. I've used a similar system in the past to encourage players to get their character backgrounds completed. But it was far simpler than this creative and fun setup. Thanks to Greg and Moe for post this. I love it!