Caspule ReviewMike Shea, 11 May 2009
I'm going to try to keep this short so I stop wasting people's time. The new Star Trek sucked and it's sickening to see how much everyone else liked it.
J.J. Abrams has built a career out of pulling the wool over people's eyes. For his 5 years on Lost he has mastered the magicians art of misdirection, spinning the camera so fast and speeding through dialog so quick that you don't quite have the time to realize it's complete horse shit.
He does this again in Star Trek. From the first frame to the last we get nothing but explosions, fleets getting destroyed, people flying through the air, constant near-misses with death, people hanging over planets on giant spiked phallic Romulan space drills, Kirk on an ice planet running from a giant vagina monster, planets exploding, and villains with only a rushed two minute monologue about why they're not just crazy.
This illusion works well enough for most people to think Abrams cares. We get all the right characters and all the right tag-lines. Then we dig in and realize that for the past twenty years half of the Star Trek movies have been based on time travel. Granted in Star Trek IV they spun around the sun to go back in time, which was plenty stupid, but I'm having a real hard time with the idea that a Romulan mining ship can survive going through a black hole multiple times and end up only 100 or so years back.
The movie is full of these little "what are the odds" moments that, I suppose, most people hand wave away and exclaim "But it was so bright and loud! Who gives a fuck about odds!? BOOM BABY YEAH!". For example, young Spock shoots Kirk to some random planet and he happens to land within running distance of Old Spock. I guess the odds of that are either zero or 100% depending on how you look at it. In another oddity, even though the Romulans pre-maturely killed Kirk's dad in one timeline, he still manages to be a Star Fleet captain with the exact same crew. Though an absolutely huge part of his life changed, most of it really didn't. That's one strange twisted butterfly effect.
But that's not what bothers me the most. Star Trek always had weak-ass science. What bothers me is a complete removal of the whimsy and wonder of space. The new Star Trek is a whole lot more like the new Battlestar Galactica than it is like Star Trek, The Next Generation. I don't need constant threats to the human race to enjoy a movie. I want to enjoy space travel. I want to look forward to a future that isn't the bullshit fast pace of constant threat so extreme that no one can even spend a moment to think.
Star Trek is the perfect movie for the instant gratification shiny-object loving cellphone pod people we now call a society. And that works well for this movie because in six months, we won't even remember that it happened.
Dungeons and Dragons is a game meant to be played week by week over a long period of time. Sometimes, however, we just want to play some quick D&D with some friends. Maybe we have a group that only gets together once every couple of months. Maybe our regular group could use a side-track for a night or two. Maybe two of your five players aren’t able to show up next time and you don’t want to play your main story without them.
All of this leads to the one-shot game, a game with some pre-generated characters and a one-night adventure.
The Newbie DM recently discussed his challenges running a Paragon-tier one-shot game. Having recently ran my own level 26th pre-gen game, I too saw the difficulties in running a high level game with pre-generated one-shot characters. Today we’ll discuss some tips for making these one-shot games better.
Use Low Level One-Shot Games for New Players
If you have more than one new player at your table, consider running a lower level - even level one - one-shot game instead of a higher level game. As a DM, you may want to experiment at the higher tiers and some of your experienced players may want this as well, but new players will have a hard enough time understanding the mechanics of 4th edition without having to learn about paragon paths, epic destinies, and dozens of powers and feats. The level of your one-shot game should be proportional to the experience level of your players.
Use Known Character Classes for One-Shot Games
Again, playing those new character classes in the Players Handbook 2 may seem like a great way to use a one-shot game, but probably not at higher levels. A good experienced player may be able to understand the mechanics of a higher-level Avenger but only of they took the time to read it through before they show up at the table.
If you’re a DM generating characters for your players, avoid complicated character classes that will not be well understood. Stick to the core classes from the Players Handbook for players who will be seeing their characters for the first time at the table. If a player is interested in running one of the new character types, tell them they can either run that class by building the character themselves or play one of the core classes if they’d rather not.
Select Simple Feats and Powers
If you’re generating pre-gen characters for your players, stick to the most basic and direct powers and feats. Always-on feats like weapon focus, weapon specialization, weapon training, and feats that boost defenses are much easier to manage than feats that require thought to use effectively. Complicated powers may offer some truly outstanding effects at the table but only if well understood. For pre-gen characters, stick to direct and powerful powers that are easy to understand.
Use the Dungeon Delve
The Dungeon Delve sourcebook is quickly becoming my favorite 4th Edition sourcebooks. It has some excellent one-shot adventures that will fill two to four hours and already have the detailed encounter designs needed to run such an adventure. Each of these micro-adventures work very well for one-shot games and, with their extensive use of D&D Dungeon Tiles, they’re easy to set up and run.
House Rule your Monsters
The easiest way to speed up a one-shot game and still make it challenging is to apply some house rules to your monsters. Currently I have three favorite house rules for speeding up combat at Paragon tier and above:
These rules will speed up the battles, increase the threat to the players, and ensure that high-level solo monsters aren’t completely incapacitated by stuns and dazes.
Hopefully, with these simple rules, a good DM can build and run fun, fast, and exciting one-shot adventures at any level of D&D 4th Edition.
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rpgbloggers/~3/ImxhGOIwfqM/
2009-05-16T14:30:59Z
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rpgbloggers/~3/26zTtUn9xmA/towards-more-cinematic-gaming-part-2.html
2009-05-16T02:56:15Z
From: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html
2009-05-14T22:43:28Z
George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChattyDm/~3/HORp38nFv4w/
2009-05-13T02:38:42Z
Shared by Mike Shea
This looks like a really cool idea. You can build a large dungeon for your D&D game but build it as a fun solo game as well. Great idea.
Caspule Review
How to Host a Dungeon is a very clever, dungeon building solo game where you follow the progression of a dungeon and its denizen through a series of ages. Its more of a Sim than a game, but it is a very entertaining concept that leaves you with a side-view dungeon map and a full history ready for your next fantasy RPG campaign.
Well worth the 5$ it costs.
Full Review
Shortly after posting my last article and reading through the comments (thank you all!), I remembered reading about a Dungeon creation game somewhere on the net. I remembered it had the strange name of How to Host a Dungeon so I looked it up, and found that its was indeed named thus and was authored by Tony Dowler.
Tony loves dungeons, he really does. You can see it in his little self-published PDF For the Love of the Dungeon and in his list of links he posted at the end of the webpage for How to
Nethack FTW Tony! The greatest most misleadingly named Solo dungeon crawling game ever!
Anyway, after finding the website, I read on it that you could use the game to help you prepare a complete side-view dungeon in the style of those found in the Mentzer edition of Basic D&D. I thought that this could be a cool way of creating a side-view map for my Primal/Within campaign.
I downloaded the free rules of How to Host a Dungeon (and bought the full version for 5$) and I started to play with them.
It was last Friday in the morning. Then, a few minutes later, my wife told me it was time to get the kids from school it was 3h30 PM already!
Yup I got caught in a nerd trap all right!
How to host a Dungeon is not a really a game. Theres no key decisions to make and you cant directly influence what happens. It is more of a Dungeon Sim or even a toy than anything else. Yet, I was sucked right in.
A rapid read through the rules shows you that you start with a single sheet of paper (the rules suggest using a pad of tracing paper, but its not obligatory) and you play out the life of the dungeon from the dawn of its creation to the end of whats called The Age of Tyranny when the dungeons last tyrant is vanquished (or conquers the world).
Primordial Age
This is one of the shortest part of the game. You roll a few times off a primary table (with some side tables for caverns and rivers) and you build the premises of you dungeon. Gold Veins, Primordial Beasts, Caverns filled with plague and Mithral lodes are a good sampling of what you can find in your dungeon.
The very clever mechanic of placing those elements on your side-view map of your future dungeon resides in placing the element you rolled exactly where your dice falls on your map (you reroll when the dice falls outside your dungeon).
Once this is done, you are ready to have your first civilization move in.
The Age of Civilization
If you play the basic free game, you get access to either the Dwarven or Dark Elf civilizations. The full game also features a Demon civilization.You place a certain number of colored tokens near the precious resources on your map (you roll some if you have none) and these tokens represent your population and its loot.
Now the second clever concept of the game is that each token you add to your dungeon must have a room to fit it. So you build such rooms (big enough to fit the tokens) whenever you are awarded more tokens.
This is where you have an influence on the game as the rules for drawing room are open to interpretation. Once you know how the scripts work, you can influence the games progress by making specific decisions as to where to build the next barrack or Slave pit.
Each turn of the age is divided in seasons. Each seasons, the civilization goes through a script that explains how it grows, mines and build new dungeon structures.
The age reaches an end when some civilization-specific conditions occur or when a civilization discovers some of the Primordial elements of the dungeon that cause it to expire.
The Great Disaster
Something then occurs that affects the topology of your dungeon. An Earthquake opens up various new tunnels or a Lava pushes a plume thought your dungeon and erupts as a Volcano on the surface. Once again this is rolled on a chart. Once this is done you go to the next phase.
This is the shortest part of the game.
The Age of Monsters
This is where the game becomes more complex and slows down noticeably. At this point, you have a dungeon made out of the remnants of your vanished civilization with possible loot and descendants.
You start the age by establishing a surface kingdom (a castle and some farms in the part you left above ground on your map).
Then you roll for a certain number of monsters to appear randomly in your dungeon. Youve got 5 categories of monsters (Delvers, Breeders, Alpha Predators and Wandering monsters). Each represented by numerous iconic monsters of D&D and lend a lot of flavour to the game.
Once the monsters are placed, you go through turns (years) in which each element present in the dungeon (Surface and each monsters group rolled) follow a script. Monsters move out of their lair and extend their Zone of Control, grabbing long-lost loot and battling nearby monster groups. The Surface kingdoms trains knights and send forays into the dungeon. All combat is resolved with a single die-roll (with simple modifiers) and checking the results in a chart.
Things can get quite complex and your map may start looking like a Go-board. While the rules are very well written, you can get easily confused. Still the game seems robust enough and getting something wrong hardly ever breaks your dungeon. Still, things can get to a point where you lose enjoyment of the game to the bookeeping needed to maintain it. The game actually says to move to the next age if things become to heavy to play out.
The age continues until a monster group accumulate a certain amount of loot.
This can be further complicated by rolling an adventuring party that moves in and cleans the whole dungeon of loot and monsters. When that happens, you are invited to start a new age of monsters.
When you do get the the point where a group of monsters accumulates a certain level of wealth, the Age of Monsters ends and the Age of Villany begins.
The Age of Villany
Please note that I have not yet made it to that point.
In this age, a single entity comes into the dungeon and tries to establishes a kingdom/base of operation for itself by taking over all the monsters and bringing new ones with itself.
The full game offers 4 villains:
Once again, turns are divided in phases where your villain builds up (adding new structures to your dungeon), fights the dungeon inhabitants and tries to establish a form of dominion.
During that time, the existing monsters continue to follow the rules of the Age of Monsters and Adventuring parties arrive every turn to try to loot the whole place and live to tell the tale. The game ends when the villain accomplishes his goal, or when they get killed by adventurers.
Once you are done playing with the game, which usually lasts a few hours, you have a roughly drawn side-view of your dungeon. If you want, you can clean it up and make it into the base of your new Megadungeon. Tony even gives advice to turn your dungeon into a surface map and use it in your own RPGs.
As I said earlier, this is a simulator more than a game. The influence you have on the game is to ignore dice rolls you dislike, pick items on tables instead of rolling them, and choosing how and where to draw each new elements of your dungeon.
Also the rules arent all that detailed. This means that youll sometime have to decide how to go at it. For example, I once had a Dark Elf colony grow large enough to come in contact with the Great City is spawned from. I decided to fuse them together (Causing an instant end of the age as the population reached the limit level set by the rules).
All in all, How to Host a Dungeon is a fascinating game/sim that really hooked me in. It immersed me in the story of a dungeon and how it evolves in time. Im not sure how long it would maintain my interest as the elements are very similar from game to game. Yet, I can definitively see how I could use it (or inspire myself from it) to create a high-level map and history of my current dungeon-based campaign.
For 5$, its a steal!
From: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChattyDm/~3/HORp38nFv4w/
2009-05-12T19:39:09Z
Caspule Review
How to Host a Dungeon is a very clever, dungeon building solo game where you follow the progression of a dungeon and its denizen through a series of ages. Its more of a Sim than a game, but it is a very entertaining concept that leaves you with a side-view dungeon map and a full history ready for your next fantasy RPG campaign.
Well worth the 5$ it costs.
Full Review
Shortly after posting my last article and reading through the comments (thank you all!), I remembered reading about a Dungeon creation game somewhere on the net. I remembered it had the strange name of How to Host a Dungeon so I looked it up, and found that its was indeed named thus and was authored by Tony Dowler.
Tony loves dungeons, he really does. You can see it in his little self-published PDF For the Love of the Dungeon and in his list of links he posted at the end of the webpage for How to
Nethack FTW Tony! The greatest most misleadingly named Solo dungeon crawling game ever!
Anyway, after finding the website, I read on it that you could use the game to help you prepare a complete side-view dungeon in the style of those found in the Mentzer edition of Basic D&D. I thought that this could be a cool way of creating a side-view map for my Primal/Within campaign.
I downloaded the free rules of How to Host a Dungeon (and bought the full version for 5$) and I started to play with them.
It was last Friday in the morning. Then, a few minutes later, my wife told me it was time to get the kids from school it was 3h30 PM already!
Yup I got caught in a nerd trap all right!
How to host a Dungeon is not a really a game. Theres no key decisions to make and you cant directly influence what happens. It is more of a Dungeon Sim or even a toy than anything else. Yet, I was sucked right in.
A rapid read through the rules shows you that you start with a single sheet of paper (the rules suggest using a pad of tracing paper, but its not obligatory) and you play out the life of the dungeon from the dawn of its creation to the end of whats called The Age of Tyranny when the dungeons last tyrant is vanquished (or conquers the world).
Primordial Age
This is one of the shortest part of the game. You roll a few times off a primary table (with some side tables for caverns and rivers) and you build the premises of you dungeon. Gold Veins, Primordial Beasts, Caverns filled with plague and Mithral lodes are a good sampling of what you can find in your dungeon.
The very clever mechanic of placing those elements on your side-view map of your future dungeon resides in placing the element you rolled exactly where your dice falls on your map (you reroll when the dice falls outside your dungeon).
Once this is done, you are ready to have your first civilization move in.
The Age of Civilization
If you play the basic free game, you get access to either the Dwarven or Dark Elf civilizations. The full game also features a Demon civilization.You place a certain number of colored tokens near the precious resources on your map (you roll some if you have none) and these tokens represent your population and its loot.
Now the second clever concept of the game is that each token you add to your dungeon must have a room to fit it. So you build such rooms (big enough to fit the tokens) whenever you are awarded more tokens.
This is where you have an influence on the game as the rules for drawing room are open to interpretation. Once you know how the scripts work, you can influence the games progress by making specific decisions as to where to build the next barrack or Slave pit.
Each turn of the age is divided in seasons. Each seasons, the civilization goes through a script that explains how it grows, mines and build new dungeon structures.
The age reaches an end when some civilization-specific conditions occur or when a civilization discovers some of the Primordial elements of the dungeon that cause it to expire.
The Great Disaster
Something then occurs that affects the topology of your dungeon. An Earthquake opens up various new tunnels or a Lava pushes a plume thought your dungeon and erupts as a Volcano on the surface. Once again this is rolled on a chart. Once this is done you go to the next phase.
This is the shortest part of the game.
The Age of Monsters
This is where the game becomes more complex and slows down noticeably. At this point, you have a dungeon made out of the remnants of your vanished civilization with possible loot and descendants.
You start the age by establishing a surface kingdom (a castle and some farms in the part you left above ground on your map).
Then you roll for a certain number of monsters to appear randomly in your dungeon. Youve got 5 categories of monsters (Delvers, Breeders, Alpha Predators and Wandering monsters). Each represented by numerous iconic monsters of D&D and lend a lot of flavour to the game.
Once the monsters are placed, you go through turns (years) in which each element present in the dungeon (Surface and each monsters group rolled) follow a script. Monsters move out of their lair and extend their Zone of Control, grabbing long-lost loot and battling nearby monster groups. The Surface kingdoms trains knights and send forays into the dungeon. All combat is resolved with a single die-roll (with simple modifiers) and checking the results in a chart.
Things can get quite complex and your map may start looking like a Go-board. While the rules are very well written, you can get easily confused. Still the game seems robust enough and getting something wrong hardly ever breaks your dungeon. Still, things can get to a point where you lose enjoyment of the game to the bookeeping needed to maintain it. The game actually says to move to the next age if things become to heavy to play out.
The age continues until a monster group accumulate a certain amount of loot.
This can be further complicated by rolling an adventuring party that moves in and cleans the whole dungeon of loot and monsters. When that happens, you are invited to start a new age of monsters.
When you do get the the point where a group of monsters accumulates a certain level of wealth, the Age of Monsters ends and the Age of Villany begins.
The Age of Villany
Please note that I have not yet made it to that point.
In this age, a single entity comes into the dungeon and tries to establishes a kingdom/base of operation for itself by taking over all the monsters and bringing new ones with itself.
The full game offers 4 villains:
Once again, turns are divided in phases where your villain builds up (adding new structures to your dungeon), fights the dungeon inhabitants and tries to establish a form of dominion.
During that time, the existing monsters continue to follow the rules of the Age of Monsters and Adventuring parties arrive every turn to try to loot the whole place and live to tell the tale. The game ends when the villain accomplishes his goal, or when they get killed by adventurers.
Once you are done playing with the game, which usually lasts a few hours, you have a roughly drawn side-view of your dungeon. If you want, you can clean it up and make it into the base of your new Megadungeon. Tony even gives advice to turn your dungeon into a surface map and use it in your own RPGs.
As I said earlier, this is a simulator more than a game. The influence you have on the game is to ignore dice rolls you dislike, pick items on tables instead of rolling them, and choosing how and where to draw each new elements of your dungeon.
Also the rules arent all that detailed. This means that youll sometime have to decide how to go at it. For example, I once had a Dark Elf colony grow large enough to come in contact with the Great City is spawned from. I decided to fuse them together (Causing an instant end of the age as the population reached the limit level set by the rules).
All in all, How to Host a Dungeon is a fascinating game/sim that really hooked me in. It immersed me in the story of a dungeon and how it evolves in time. Im not sure how long it would maintain my interest as the elements are very similar from game to game. Yet, I can definitively see how I could use it (or inspire myself from it) to create a high-level map and history of my current dungeon-based campaign.
For 5$, its a steal!
From: http://planet-thirteen.com/Dungeon.aspx
2009-05-12T20:14:42Z
Shared by Mike SheaOfficial home page for Of How to Host a Dungeon, a solo dungeon construction game by Tony Dowler from Planet Thirteen Games
A solo game of dungeon creation. Sounds creative!