We are only a few weeks in to playing 4e but I must say that I am enjoying it. Beyond the joy of discovering how a new system works, I am very happy that I feel like a hero at 1st level. Our party just took on and beat a White Dragon, something that would have been a TPK in D&D 3.5 at level 1.
Pics from our new Campaign
The campaign Wiki on Obsidian Portal

We finished the Shadowlands campaign after about a year of real time, not exactly sure how long in game time. We defeated a Shadow corrupted black dragon, stopped a tear in the Weave and freed a lot of people. Overall a fun campaign and we ended up being granted a keep and have the potential to continue adventuring at a later date.

Only a couple of things I disliked about it.

• A significant majority of the adventure took place on a Shadow plane where the abilities of one of the PCs was severely hampered, making the game less than fun for him I think, and therefor less than fun for me too.
• The GM, Matt, has the most obscenely gifted dice luck, while the rest of us seemed to have more than our fair share of bad luck. 10 rolls in a row with nothing higher than a 5? Check. The entire party failing their save against a Mind Flayer and only barely avoiding a TPK? Check. All while Matt confirmed almost every crit threat and rolled just short of max damage. Can’t fault him for his luck but it sure is more fun when he is a PC!

Matt has a fun GMing style though, have to get him to run a game of 4e at some point so the math wont hurt so bad.

In game, I mean. And when you die, how frequently do you stay dead and have to roll up a new character?

It’s a standard joke in our game about going on The List, but I do not think that in 7 years we have had anyone suffer permanent death. No one has had to roll a new character mid-session. No one has had to mourn the death of a beloved friend. No one has had to fight their way out of the underworld. Characters have been revived, resurrected, raised and reincarnated. They have lost stats, levels and gear. The stories of their (non-permanent) deaths live on, and that is the most likely reason that no PC has died permanently. Consciously or unconsciously, we as a group seem to have decided that the characters we start with are the ones that are integral to the story we are telling. Changing those characters would detract, and in some cases, derail the story.

Or maybe it is something else entirely.

I found some pictures of our latest campaign on my hard drive and realized I had never uploaded them. They can be seen here

I also have a picture of 4 of the new PC figures I am working on for our D&D 4e game that will start soon.

And last but not least, I was hit my the modelling bug recently at the same time as a friend was starting a Dark Heresy 40k RPG. So I dug out all my bits and started making models. I had forgotten how much fun I have doing conversions.

Look out, ZOMBIES!

What better way for me to start updating the site again?
For real.

Not really, I guess, just lots of things going on and so ZitT got neglected…again.

Time for that to change!

For those gamers that somehow are not connected to the Internet (and then you’re not reading this in any case), Gary Gygax died this week. It happened after our regular Monday game, where we completed a year long campaign that Kelly ran, so we have not had a chance to talk about it in person but Matt wrote a good email about it:

“I know that all this has made me look back to when I started and thank those that put me on this wonderful geek path. Sure it is a game that we play but it was really a learning experience for me in my pre/post teenage years. How to puzzle things out, how a man should act when called upon to do great deeds, how to think threw troubles and situations that you could not just fight out of. Above all that, my strongest friends have always been those that I have thrown dice with. It is funny to me that playing a game can put you so close to friends, but I guess behind those pages of characters and mounds of dice we get to see all the parts of who we really are and share those with the others around the table. I feel sorry for those that always bashed on us for being the geeks and D&D nerds, and thankful that we held strong and saw this for what it was.

Matt
D&D player since 1981″

I myself started in 1978 when I got the Monster Manual for Christmas. I wish I still had that book, and all the black and white monster art I lovingly colored, but I lost it at some point. Maybe to one of my many college moves, or more likely to one of my younger brothers who also got sucked into D&D. I think I owe just about everything good in my life to playing D&D, certainly without D&D I would never have seen the SCA at a D&D Convention and without the SCA I’d never have met my wife Sarah. There you go. Thanks D&D.

The death of an RPG icon like this has provoked nostalgia in myself and other gamers I know, but as great as those old days were they pale in comparison to the ZitT gang and the great times we have had over the last 6 years. Thanks guys.

For links to a number of great stories about EGG and D&D, see this article at GameSpy and a host of links ENWorld

January just got away from me.

We are close to wrapping up Kelly’s campaign. With my character hitting level 17 last session I am now playing in rarefied air never before sampled by me. At least not legitimately. I don’t count the made up power gaming characters I made when I was 12. It has been a lot of fun, but I think we are all looking forward to starting new characters and playing in the Forgotten Realms game Matt is planning. I’ll miss Vaal, but I won’t miss

• The complexity of picking my cleric spells at this high level.
• The length of combats at this level.

From the beginning, our game has been about fun and heroic deeds. Spending 5 minutes pouring over your spell list to decide what to do in a tense combat is not part of that paradigm. Neither is 2 hours for 3 rounds. Those 2 things have sucked some of the fun out of the game currently, even though Kelly has presented us with fun new challenges and cool storylines.

Not surprisingly, many if not all of the issues we are having with the way 3.5 runs at high levels seem to be addressed in 4e, at least according to all the info I have read. So I am looking forward to 4e. Sure we could make (and have made) changes to 3.5 to make it run more the way we want, but we are not professional game designers. We are a group of guys with lives and families, but a desire to make Mondays as fun as possible and currently the game can seem like work (especially for the DM). The actual mechanics of the system only matter to us when they prevent us from telling our story, rather than enable us and our creativity.

I’m not sure where all this rambling is taking me, but it is good to be back

Colin and Kelly sent me some of their characters over the holidays and I have now put them up. Still have not done my own yet. I’m a Slacker.

Kelly

Colin

Kelly always starts each week with “Total Party Kill this week, for sure”. We laugh our confident laughter and then proceed to decimate the baddies put before us. Until now.

Apparently having a few weeks off to really research and plan allowed Kelly to come up with an awesome set of opponents with which to challenge us. Plus we were caught at the end of a long, hard day and were low on resources. In the end, 2 of the party were down for the count, 2 were below 1/2 HP, and 2 were below 10 HP. It would have been a lot worse but we were able to use Word of Recall to get out of there before we all died. It was strange to be on the other side of the “whupping coin”, but it was still fun and in many ways refreshing.

As a side note, if Matt ever offers you dice: take them! He gave us all a set for Christmas (delivered this Monday since we did not game on Xmas Eve or NYE) and Kelly used his in an attempt to break out of his abysmal dice luck of late. In our last game before the holidays he never had one roll in double digits. In contrast, 10 out of his first 18 rolls with his new die were natural 20s! Colin’s character was down after 1 round, and we were on the run after 2 rounds. It certainly will affect our cocksure attitude if he keeps pulling out that red d20.