Roll Through The Ages

Tonight, I was at the Hobart Games Society’s Winter Games Fest. I missed most of the fun (since Saturday is almost always a work day), but I managed to play a couple of short games with a lot of very friendly people. The highlight of the evening was a round of Roll Through the Ages.

Playing with Wire

During the off-season maintenance period, there’s a lot of simple work, like sanding and painting. In addition to that sort of work, there’s also a number of traditional skills to learn. This is one from last week:

It’s a wire seizing. It looks neat and tidy, but actually making one work is fiendishly difficult. In “The Rigger’s Apprentice”, it is introduced with the words “there is no more subtle knot than this one”.

Musings on D&D 4th Edition

In an effort to indulge my inner nerd while on board, I wind up reading a lot about RPGs in general and D&D 4th Edition in particular, since that’s what we last played. Those who are only here for the sailing should probably skip this entry.

Over at the Wizards of the Coast web site, Chris Perkins writes a column called The Dungeon Master Experience. It’s very interesting to see how much he’s prepared to change the rules:

• He only keeps 2 dice behind the DM screen (1 d20 and 1 d6), reasoning that he knows how much damage monsters are meant to do, and that a little variance is all that’s needed to keep things exciting.

• He’s created ridiculously overpowered magic items for the PCs and their foes, with heavy (but fair) restrictions on their use.

• On one occasion the party warlock woke up with a new tattoo that gave him powers and a curse, but no idea where it came from and why it was given to him. It was the starting point to one of the campaign sub-plots.