Not so long ago, the 4^th Edition DMGII came out. With the general high quality of 4E splatbooks so far, this looked promising: but for those out there for whom “promising” isn’t enough, this in-depth review should give you everything you need to know about the book, helping with the critical decision of whether or not to actually go out and buy it.

Continue reading 4E Dungeon Master’s Guide 2: In-Depth Review

We all love to use Dungeon Tiles in our D&D games. It adds to the realism of combat, provides for more strategic play and helps everyone see what is going on. With the release of D&D4E the use of Dungeon Tiles became an integrated part of the game to the point where it is hard to play without them. This has created problems for GM’s who like to create their own campaigns and who need maps. While you can easily print off a tiled A4 or A3 sheet and draw in your maps, it would be even better to be able to create your own dungeon tiles from scratch to match your creations exactly.

In the first part on creating your own dungeon tiles, we show you how to create basic rooms of any size.

Continue reading Create your own Dungeon Tiles from scratch with Photoshop

One of the great perks of writing for the Dice of Doom blog is getting asked to play with loads of iPhone dice rollers. We get a few gentle requests to try a new one out, and generally speaking we try to cover as many as we can. A couple of weeks ago I was asked if I would like to try out dynamicDice, a new entrant into the Dice Simulation category (as opposed to the Number Generation category). Like Pip, Dicenomicon and MachDice before it, this RPG Dice Rolling app is designed to give you the feel of actually rolling dice in front of you without having to carry a dice bag around.

When reviewing a dice simulator, obviously the realism of the dice rolling is paramount. Using a true 3d engine, dynamicDice does this really well, although it currently suffers from some memory issues (which the developer assures me they are currently fixing and a free update will be upcoming) and sometimes the roll seems a little choppy (Pip on the other hand is very smooth). The quality of the graphics is extraordinary with reflections and shadows and is certainly on a par with Pip.

Dice are added to the table from the dice selection page by clicking on the die desired repeatedly (which actually works a lot better than many of the alternatives) and the entire dice selection can be erased easily by clicking the trash can. There are no adding of modifiers or adding of dice in the roll, keeping everything simple, much like Pip does. The ease in which dice are added to the table view is one of the things that dynamicDice does really well.

dynamicDice allows you to set up 5 tables with 5 differently themed dice sets, and has included d6 with round corners in both pips and numbers as well. The application comes with 20 table themes and 20 dice themes and they are all very attractive and are a nice touch addition to the app.

There is one thing about dynamicDice that I actually really like and sets it apart from some other apps, and that is its 3d perspective. You can move your iPhone around to get a complete 3d view of the dice sitting on the table. This is also supported in landscape mode.

All in all, this is a very good entrant into the dice simulation category and we look forward seeing what else this company puts out.

• dynamicDice $2.99 (iTunes Link)
• Dynamic Realms website

The spoils of last Nerd Day

Or, What We Do On Nerd Day.

After spending some time living and working in the US, I came back to Sydney accustomed to the resources available to Nerds even in a town like Atlanta. While I had spent many years in Sydney previously, I was still in for a bit of a surprise. The bottom had fallen out of the RPG market, and all my favourite stores had closed to be replaced by the Starbucks of gaming, Games Workshop. This meant that the only way I could get my Nerd on (wow… even I shuddered at that phrase…) was to visit the hub of Sydney, the ‘City’ as the locals call it.

This visit has become a bit of a school holiday tradition (I work as a teacher) and there are usually three to four of us who go. What follows is a guide to the day as we celebrate it, and I’m including some variations as well that we have enjoyed in the past.

Step 1: Breakfast

Incredibly important as you will be on your feet all day. We go to Jet Cafe in Town Hall  as it is very near the train station, has a wide selection for breakfast (ranging from $5-20 for meals) and is across the road to our first step on the journey. The coffee is usually excellent at Jet, budget to have a couple (but don’t be too surprised if the staff are a little gruff…).

Step 2: Galaxy Bookshop

This is a nerd’s paradise – a massive bookstore that has only three sections – Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror. That’s it. They import a lot of books as well, so if you MUST have the latest Terry Pratchett six months before it is released locally, this is your store. We allow for 30 minutes here…

Step 3: Napoleon’s Bookstore

Napoleon’s Bookstore used to be a separate trip on the tour, but has conveniently moved in with The Tin Soldier (see Step 4 below). This is purely a military and history bookstore. They have an excellent selection of resource materials for the historical tabletop battler’s out there, as well as an excellent range of documentary’s and other such things. This is also the only place I have seen where you can get WWII action figures (at least since Action Man started sucking…). They also sell a wide range of gaming systems for re-creationists and models for such. We usually stay about 15-20 minutes here…

Step 4: The Tin Soldier

This is pretty much the main event. Tin Soldier used to have lots of stores all around Sydney, but few of them have survived. The Sydney store however is excellent, and still has a thriving business. The front of the store is the traditional role-playing store. It has a wide selection of game systems, models, dice (I bought a HUGE d20 this year…) and the usual paints, brushes, paraphernalia.

Out the back of the store (almost as much room as the front) is the military section. Here you will find lots of painted armies for sale, military books, and resources and rule systems for military tabletop games and is now run by Napoleon’s Bookstore (see above).

The staff at The Tin Soldier are really friendly and helpful and seem genuinely interested in making sure that you leave the store with as much gaming gear as you can… We stay here as long as we like – usually about an hour.

Step 5: Vary the plot

In times past we have:

• gone to watch a nerdy movie at the George Street Cinemas (very close by)
• visited the Powerhouse Museum – a museum of technology currently hosting a Star Wars exhibit
• added Utopia Records to the list of stores to visit – specialist Metal, Black Metal, Death Metal, all things Metal store
• gone home and painted all the models we have bought…

Guide to Places Mentioned

View Larger Map

Jet Cafe

Queen Victoria Bldg
Level Ground, Shop 55, Druit St
Sydney NSW 2000
Phone: +61 2 9283 5004

Galaxy Bookshop

143 York Street
Sydney NSW 2000
Phone: +61 2 9267 7222

The Tin Soldier

40 York Street
Sydney NSW 2000
Phone: +61 2 9279 2668

The regular 4E D&D sheet is too limited for use without other accessories.

Some time ago, I wrote about the choosing of the best D&D 4E character sheet. That was when I was creating my very first 4E character: now that I’ve actually played the game, and have had some experience, I decided to revisit the subject.

As I’ve gained experience with the game, I’ve learnt an important lesson: even if you can remember your powers (I can), you are going to get items which have lots of details, and a single line entry on the character sheet just doesn’t cut it. Ideally, you need plenty of room. Then means that, unless you’re using other cards and the like, the standard D&D 4E character sheet simply doesn’t work. It also has very small (and poor) sections for writing mundane equipment.

I have been using this sheet and, frankly, I’m disappointed. I suppose during playtesting they were drunk or something, because there’s no way you can fit all the required information onto the sheet. I mean, honestly, the AC doesn’t separate armour and ability bonus: annoying for anyone using light armour, such as my Wizard.

Update: Previously, I had recommended Ema’s Charsheets as neat new-player-friendly dynamic sheets. However, Wizards of the Coast recently asked for the site to be taken down, possibly because the dynamic sheets put in a bit more rules information than they liked, so these sheets are unfortunately no longer available.

Shado's sheets are beautiful, and fit everything quite nicely.

Alternatively, there’s Shado’s Character Sheets, shown left. They’re gorgeous landscape sheets, and sport plenty of room for absolutely everything, including an acceptable amount of space for equipment. The power sheet is very well designed, and means you don’t have to worry about power cards if that’s not your thing. The sheer prettiness of them is fantastic.

Shado’s Character sheets definately get the award for the prettiest ones: they’re what the official 4E sheets should have looked like. They use the same style and colours that the rulebooks use, which helps in quickly identifying various elements.

Download Shado’s Character Sheets.

However, whichever you choose, the amounts of text associated with the powers and items, you may have to resort to using cards. Specially made Power Cards are quite popular. After a bit of searching, I must agree with Google: the best power cards I can find are Ander00’s, found here. You should check that link for the current version, or may download the complete set as a pdf here, although it may not be up to date. There are also cards that can be used for items, and other such things.

Of course, if you don’t want to fuss around proper Power Cards, there’s the ultimate D&D player’s tool: The index card. Buy a pack of them at the newsagent, and they’ll serve you well.

A few days ago the developers of iPhone polyhedral dice rolling application ‘Pip’ (Mystery Coconut) sent me a request to look at their application and offer my thoughts. Well, we have had a play around with it and we have to say that we are quite enamoured with this new entry into the Dice Roller club. Their design philosophy is quite different from other iPhone Dice Rollers like Diceonomicon and MachDice – instead of trying to cram everything into one application, they have concentrated on keeping the whole thing simple.

What you won’t get is a log of dice rolls or a formula editor, a stack of different backgrounds or dice colours. Instead, they have concentrated on making a very realistic physics engine (comparable to MotionX) and beautiful graphics. The result is quite refreshing – it is really really really simple to use.

If you are not playing games using the FUDGE system of White Wolf system, this is probably the best dice roller for you. We found having to type in formulas to be a bit of distraction in the end, it proved much simpler to just roll the damn dice and not worry about it. Pip allows you to just add the dice you need and roll them – all you need in the majority of your games.

A few things we’d like to see in future versions include a way to re-roll the dice that doesn’t require us to shake the iPhone, and perhaps a selection of different dice skins. Overall though, a very polished app, and we feel, well worth the cost of purchase.

Features:

• Full set of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d10 (alt colour), d12, d20)
• Multiple pages – save pre-set rolls
• Hold dice to prevent re-rolling
• Highly polished physics engine

Pip USD 2.99 | AUD 3.99 (iTunes Link)

Some of you might remember my previous rant on this topic. Back when the iPhone 2.0 was released, the App Store contained a pretty poor collection of RPG dice rollers. And some were asking extraordinary amounts for them. Well, that sucky state of iPhone Rollers is happily over. There are two examples of a excellent rollers which should meet pretty much everyone’s needs (if not, the developers would probably love to hear from you…).

The basic criteria that I feel is necessary for a dice rolling app on the phone is pretty straight forward:

1. Has to actually illustrate polyhedral dice rolling around
2. Has to have an editor to create custom rolls (for e.g. 3d6+2, etc.)
3. Has to have reasonable physics to the rolling process
4. Should be able to select saved dice roll sets
5. Should have some customisability for looks, etc.

The two stand-out applications available at the moment that address all five of those are Dicenomicon and MachDice.

Update: We have also recently reviewed Pip here.

Dicenomicon

Let me just get out and say it upfront… this is my favourite of the two. The choice of dice available to roll is exhaustive, the formulas that you can type and save is pretty much going to solve everyone’s needs and it has complete customisability in regards to looks.

List of dice supported:

• Standard 7 die set (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, d100)
• Less Common – d1, d2, d3, d5, d7, d9, d14, d15, d16, d18, d24, d30
• Other – d6a (averaging die), dF (positive or negative), 1/2d6 (effectively a d3, but you can see the original roll), Open Ended rolls and d1000 rolls
• Dice results with text (alignment, weather and hit location)
• Support for the FUDGE system (Freeform Universal Do-It-Yourself Gaming Engine).
• Support for the Storyteller system
• Supports THAC0! And because it supports parameters (meaning input before a roll) it will calculate a hit and miss easily for you.
• Support for the White Wolf system

Where Dicenomicon stands out is in its formula editor. The formula editor even allows you to set up dialog boxes, meaning you can change the number of dice rolled or modifier at roll time. You can very easily and intuitively set up dice rolls that roll 5d6, keeping all rolls over 5 plus the best 4 d10 rolls, adding to that 2d5+7 with a d30*d4 for good measure. Why you would ever need this roll is not the point (no, really…) the fact that you can do it at all is testament to its very versatile system.

Dicenomicon also supports multiple virtual tables that allow you to keep your most used dice rolls separated (and if need be, with different backgrounds, etc…).

My only complaint about Dicenomicon is the occasional sudden burst of energy that some of the dice sometimes display. Having said that, you can change the gravity settings in the app that pretty much put that to rest.

MachDice

MachDice has a better feel to the dice rolling physics. Where Dicenomican can (rarely) spit a die randomly in one direction, this has never happened to me using MachDice. The dice are not as good looking in MachDice, and sometimes you can’t see what the d4 is showing, but the basics are pretty good.

The editor for creating lists is perhaps a little easier to use, but that is largely due to the much smaller list of functions that you can use. It has keep the highest, but not lowest, nor targets, nor many of the others. It currently does not support systems like FUDGE or Storyteller. The application does not support Dice Combination Bookmarks either.

One thing that MachDice does do better – its easier to switch virtual gaming tables.

List of dice supported:

• Standard 7 die set (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, d100)
• Other – d1 (as a coin)

Summary

Both dice rollers do the basics quite well, but in my opinion, Dicenomicon is the absolute best RPG dice roller out. In terms of functionality and completeness, it stands out from all the others and is certainly worth the extra money.

Dicenomicon: $3.99 | Website | iTunes

MachDice: $0.99 | Website | iTunes

One of my pet annoyances with doing everything on Dungeon Tiles is the complete and utter unrealistic nature of the scale when you are not in a bare dungeon fighting monsters. Recently this was brought home when we used our new Dungeon Tile A2 sheet to play a scene out in a rather large inn. What become immediately apparent was that Dungeon Tiles, and the whole five foot square thing, are completely out of scale.

As I drew out tables and chairs, rooms, staircases and everything else in the building, we realised that if we were going to fit our characters in there with their own square for every model, the tables were going to be about 30 to 40 feet long. That’s probably a bit big. And chairs immediately have a seat that is 5 feet by 5 feet. Very uncomfortable I’d imagine.

And then I noticed that the same 8 players (who’s characters were in the inn…) where sitting around a table that was only 6 foot long in my small living room.

After a quick think (we were in the middle of An Encounter), we came up with the following idea. We’d use tokens in situations like these – a different colour for each person. We’d identify who’s token was who’s by placing a token next to their model on the side of the sheet.

This worked so well, I am considering using it for a lot more of our gaming situations. It restores the sense of scale and reality to the map and keeps the utility of using the system intact. For those of you that might need tokens, Chessex has a great range of colours, and they are pretty damn cheap too…

[You will notice that there is one white token in the private rooms at the back of the inn. That's our resident Halfling mischief maker. He has a Charisma of 20, so I don't need to tell you what he was doing...]

Update: Click here for instructions on how to create your own Dungeon Tiles using Photoshop.

One of the big changes in Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition (D&D 4e) is the almost mandatory use of dungeon tiles and models for every combat encounter. While this had been a big push in D&D 3.x, it had never had the feeling of being absolutely necessary to run the game. This of course presents a bit of a challenge to a lot of gaming groups as they move across to the new system.

Wizards of the Coast of course have endeavoured to make some money facilitate groups in making the change by releasing their series of Dungeon Tiles. I have to admit, including these in adventure kits is absolutely awesome, but overall they haven’t proven to be that useful to our gaming group. I’ll save my complete comments for a review which I will one day get around to writing, but suffice it to say, there is a lack of variety and depth to the tile sets to make for interesting dungeons (or outdoor areas…).

This lead me to thinking about creating our own dungeon tiles for use in our games. My first plan was to use photoshop and start creating my own sheets which I would then print and use in our games. The problem with this was that it took a VERY long time to create a single room (I learnt a new respect for graphic artists…), and it still didn’t suit my GM’ing style.

Previous to our switching to 4e, I would draw all the maps out in fine detail as the characters explored. The maps would be filled with little details, but were drawn to a scale where an entire building could fit inside a 5 inch square. Not very useful when using models.

I then decided to go in a different direction. I would print out large, table sized grids, laminate them and use a blackboard marker to draw out the maps. This really appealed to me as it would allow me to make changes on the night and I could effectively draw quite large maps for everyone to play on.

I used Incompetech’s site to create the grids. These guys have built tools that let you create all kinds of documents and then save the pdf’s in almost any size. For my project I created an A1 Square Grid (for inside buildings and dungeons) and an A1 Square Crosses Grid (for outdoor areas). I also added A2 sizes of the grids for when I might need a smaller section or sub section. These I got printed and laminated for $50 (AUD).

These have worked out absolutely great for our group, and I can highly recommend the approach. I am including a link at the bottom for pre-made hex grids, square grids and square cross grids in sizes A1, A2, A3 and A4. These should also print just fine on the ANSI size equivalents as well (there is a bit of a margin around each – although the hex grid might be a bit tight – let me know how it goes if there is trouble…). If there are any other sheets that you might use, check out the incompetech’s site as they have great resources for gamer’s.

• Tabletop Grid Package (60KB zip file)
• Incompetech’s Graph Paper Generator