I can hear your jeers and grief now. We announced on Monday that we’d probably be opening up to designers and writers today, and here we are today telling you that it’ll happen tomorrow.
Unfortunately, we were not able to get the updates to our submission page done today, but we’re hoping that late tonight it’ll really be done. For reals.
So, we’re going to save our development snapshot for Thursday. We apologize for the delay.
Sorry for the late-in-the-day update! It would appear that the game Rock Band is an evil machination designed to eat at your time with its tendrils of pleasurable activity, thus postponing all actual activities you should be responsible for. I know. I’m lame.
We’ve added a new section to the site titled Unrandom Encounters. We are looking to design single encounters that are clever, fun, and unique, ones that will stand alone as a tactical couple hours of fun, or ones that someone can pick up and use in their campaign when at a loss.
We already have one .pdf in that section of the site—mythos cards! These are a fun template for any encounter to add a random area effect. It’d be super-useful for areas of wild magic or encounters in an unpredictable area. Check it out here! (.pdf)
(a note on printing—make sure your print settings are NOT set to “scale to printable area,” or the cards will print out at much larger than 3×5)
We are going to open ourselves up to commissions on Wednesday, so look for that announcement with our development snapshot. We will be limiting the scope of what we’re looking for, so no full adventures or even delves, but we would love to see your ideas for awesome encounters, themed magic item packs, or themed monster packs see print (even in digital format).
So, that’s us in a nutshell! Let us know in the comments what you think of the mythos cards–do you see yourself using them, or are they just too random?
Literally, I have read, posted, talked, and thought about skills so much this week that the word is starting to look very strange. Skill. Ssssskill. What is the root of that word? All right, thirty seconds on google turns up a Germanic origin, schillen, “to differ” or discern. So I am skilled in something which differentiates me from those who are not.
Ah, English. You don’t just borrow from other languages. You follow them down back alleys and mug them for their loose grammar.
The big thoughts this week seem to be on skill challenges—how to run them, how to make them better, more interesting, more dynamic, more… well, more like combat. We don’t seem to have a problem with the combat system in DnD, but years after its release the skill challenge system still poses a problem.
A problem on which one can easily find a hundred dissertations, so I don’t think it necessary for me to explain them here.
And the truth is I don’t utilize them anyway.
At this point you must be thinking that my games are very dull, with round after round of combat, an endless march of monsters standing in line, waiting to be slaughtered by the players. You would be terribly, terribly wrong, but I can’t blame you for imagining that. I mean, if I don’t utilize skill challenges, how do I fill the gaps in plot and content in between actual fights?
I utilize skills, but not the skill challenge format. I prefer a far more organic, a far less structured approach to intra-combat play. My understanding is that skill challenges are meant to inform roleplay, the way combat is meant to inform the tactical side of DnD. So, instead of calling for initiative, or deciding what skillset applies to a situation, or even tracking successes versus failures, we freeform it. To give an example, the group recently was on a quest to find a sparrow figurine, which happened to be resting in a temple at the bottom of the lake. Figuring out how to safely get to the bottom of the lake and enter the temple is an obvious skill challenge, but rather than disrupt the creativity of the table by forcing initiative and limiting their skill selection, we winged it. They chose to utilize athletics and nature, used a water breathing ritual for which they had to find components, biffed on some skills and nearly got sucked into a whirling maelstrom except for some clever use of the pouch of frozen passage and immovable rods, and on the whole had a challenging time using their skills to get to the bottom of a very deep lake.
I call that a skill challenge. I gave them moderate XP for the accomplishment. Still, I understand why 4th Edition DnD attempted to quantify that kind of thinking. I believe even labeling it as a skill challenge helps diversify the table play of DnD—because DnD is not all about fighting the monster of the week. It’s about roleplay, and becoming these clever, heroic, awesome characters, even if only for a few short hours a week, and I happen to believe emphatically that these characters are far more than the sum of their combat parts, and should be rewarded for that.
Still, part of me feels like I should be adding more structure to the skill challenges. But a bigger part of me realizes that we’re all having fun, and even if you never get the as-written rules to work the way you want them to, if you’re having fun, it doesn’t really matter.
Time for the news!
Apparently, some gaming store may own your soul. A late addition to the April Fools news parade, turns out it’s really important to read the fine print.
NewbieDM posted this week an advice-style format for DnD woes which we really enjoyed. He discussed the unprepared player, and we’re hoping to see more like this from him in the future.
It’s also important to remember that this game is supposed to be fun not just for the players, but for the DM too. That’s why we liked this post from Gronardia discussing the referee as a player in the game.
We always like to see hints and tips on how to write, either for gaming companies or writing as a whole (since that is the basis for our business), so this quote from Monte Cook struck a nice chord with us.
Chris Sims had some things to say about writing a good pitch to a DnD publisher, also.
Critical Hits hosted an article on the merits and demerits of power gaming–it was nice to see the belittled power gamer get some kudos for the efforts he does put in to his character.
Con season is upon us, and many of us are gearing up for a summer of travel and games. We stumbled upon a travel website just for us!
We’re getting some early news on Free RPG day in June, as seen here in RPG Blog II.
We love tools for GMs to make their games more dynamic, so this post on faux fonts from Gnome Stew (or fauxnts, as they’re referred to in this article) tickled us pink.
You know that we believe free stuff is the best stuff, so we were glad to see Underdark Gazette provide a small reference to some free OSR stuff on the web.
Chris Sims wrote an article for Loremaster on getting rid of the D20. It’s an interesting twist to the mechanics of gameplay.
Sarahdarkmagic had a great time with skill challenges this week, and wrote up her random rumor table that made the gameplay extra dynamic.
And, as if to illustrate the wealth of information on skill challenges, Kobold Quarterly gave an exhaustive post on ways they can be tweaked and used.
You know we’re a big fan of DIY DnD, so this post by NewbieDM on a cool way to track initiative caught our eye.
We peruse a lot of design through the week, and always love fantasy illustrations for the game inspiration they provide. Both on the encounter aspect, and for character design.
Epic Win provided us with some proof on the existence of dragons, so how kind of them!
In our own events this week, on Monday we talked about new projects we’re adding to the pile, and announced the winners of our Tekko Mini contest.
Wednesday was a development snapshot, this time of a magic item used by the Taegrin race.
