Today, with very little surprise, Wizards of the Coast announced that they were working on the 5th edition of the venerable game Dungeons & Dragons. Rumours of the announcement have been swirling through the Internet for a while now, particularly after it was revealed that veteran D&D game designer Monte Cook had rejoined the R&D Team.
First of all, a brief summary of the facts as we know them:
The following is a guest post by Symatt which originally appeared here. Check out his Counter Sketches, or get him to do a character portrait of your next character.
Once again I was looking, lovingly, over my collection of roleplaying books. As I went through them, I discovered that there was a book I hadn’t bought yet from the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition set. I immediately became anxious that my collection wasn’t complete. It had become important that I had a set, a complete set and I had found that it was less than it should be.
But hang on a second… What am I thinking? I don’t need or use nearly any of these books, including Call of Cthulhu, 7th Sea, Star Wars and many, many more.
As means of a Holiday Gift we decided to get off our butts and pause writing Goblins! long enough to issue forth this final edition of the Dice of Doom podcast for the year.
During the podcast we give you the chance to create a campaign setting for one of our months in 2012 (with some conditions). Yes, this is serious. We will do it. When you hear what it is, you will understand why we are confirming this…
The Lore of Heavens is an averagely powerful spell Lore in Warhammer Fantasy Battles, with a mix of Augments, Hexes, and Direct Damage. It notably features the (in)famous Comet of Casandora spell. It has an interesting selection of spells for both defensive and offensive purposes. It is somewhat a jack-of-all-trades Lore. Whilst primarily used by those who have no choice, like Skink Priests, the Lore of Heavens has some interesting options available, particularly for movement control and area denial, and can perform well in the hands of Level 1-2 Wizards.
The port of Minecraft to iOS has been a long and uncomfortable wait for many. Despite an original announcement stating that iOS was going to be first off the rank, Android pipped iDevices to the post when Minecraft Pocket Edition was announced for the Xperia Play. Thankfully, for those of you with an iOS enabled device, the wait is over and you can now enjoy the fruits of Mojang’s labour in the form of a much cutdown version of everyone’s favourite sandboxed game.
In this gripping episode of the DoDcast we discuss our first impressions of Eclipse Phase, debate what to do when good rules go bad (or, in Paul’s case, what the hell to do when you stuff up) and we look at polarising roleplaying games into left and right. This last topic is a revisit of an idea that I originally posted a while back in an attempt to help us better understand our players and the games that we play.
We also take the time to thank our loyal readers/listeners for their kind generosity in shopping at Amazon through our link. Thanks guys for allowing us to purchase Pathfinder,
Recently, in one of our podcasts, we discussed the idea of rolling your skill checks first in response to a challenge and THEN roleplaying the resulting success or failure. For example, you would roll your diplomacy check, and then you’d roleplay the resulting success or failure based on the result. The idea has been picked up and run with by the guys at Roving Band of Misfits who discuss it at length, along with some very useful rule interpretations for implementing it in your D&D 4e game. It is well worth the read.
In this episode of the Dice of Doom podcast we review Dragon Warriors through hopefully not particularly rose coloured glasses. We discuss the question “Total Party Kills:Who’s to blame?” and what’s more, identify exactly who it is. We also, as part of Play a New RPG Month, are offering you the chance to win your Character a set of Steak Knives in game*. That’s right, we will write the rules, compose a short note to your GM and email you a certificate of authenticity that we scribble up if you let us know what your group is playing for the month of October on one of these locations:
First introduced in The Big Bang Theory episode “The Creepy Candy Coating Corollary” in season 3, the (until now) fictional collectible card game Mystic Warlords of Ka’a has intrigued nerds as to how the game might be played and whether or not Enchanted Bunny is really that useless. Well, now is your chance to find out. The game has been released as a Facebook game. So far, it seems pretty polished, with tutorials, single play, duels, collectible cards (which cost Facebook Coins) and the ability to challenge your friends. You can install the game to your profile by clicking this link.
It’s less than a week till the official start of Play a New RPG Month so I thought I’d write an update on what has been going on in preparation for the month. It has been pretty humbling (and downright awesome) to see people that we don’t know discussing PANRPG independently of our involvement. This means that the idea is spreading, and we couldn’t be happier.
