It also comes with a sample. somewhat mini event, Breakout, which was the feature story in the first volume of the New Avengers. I loaded up comixology and purchased the Breakout trade paperback and read it earlier this afternoon. It was a fairly decent story with an interesting mix of characters. I can see why they chose to include something like this in the base game.

I’ve been talking to a couple of the local game stores trying to get them set up as preferred retailers so that we can run the launch day event a week from Saturday. Unfortunately, the process has not been going as well as I would’ve liked. I am not deterred. We will get it set up, there is no way that I’m going to allow an opportunity like this to slip through my fingers.

Thus, this is my first effort to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to compose a post. It seems to be going relatively well, but there are a number of errors that do occur and are a bit of a pain in the ass correct.

But, I think after I get this thing trained it should actually be a pretty productive tool at least for composing rants and other things that I don’t really need to type, and I’ll just save my hands for coding since that’s my job, blah.

Opportunity Cards, what are they?
An opportunity card is simply an index card that you put on the game table as a tactile and visual cue for an opportunity that the PCs might pursue in the game. At any given time (especially in a “sandbox” kind of game) there will be many opportunities in play. It’s easy for players to forget about some of them. So, write the opportunities on cards, thrown ‘em on the table, and keep them in front of everyone’s eyeballs.

Depending on the game, an “opportunity” might be a mission, contract, quest, promise, faction goal, debt, etc.

What goes on the card?
The exact details on a card will depend on the specific elements of your game. But in general, this is the template:

- Name of Opportunity
- NPC and/or faction linked to the opportunity
- Location(s) in the game world related to the opportunity
- [Actions involved in addressing the opportunity]
- [Reward for addressing the opportunity]

Those last two are optional, but I like them since they often help players prioritize opportunities and better assess risks and rewards.

Organizing the cards
Since opportunities are written on cards, it’s possible to arrange them how you like. The players might group them into stacks related to factions or locations on the map, by relative challenge, reward offered, or however they please. It’s easy to move cards around as they change status, add details when they learn them, discard them when completed, or save them as a record of what’s been accomplished.

http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=15710

The trip down, and the returning trip back up were fraught with hazard. Another one of my brothers asked to borrow the highlander for the weekend, so I was using his car. I didn’t think it would be a big deal as we have been having a mild winter and the forecast show clear sailing for the weekend. Unfortunately, things never go so smoothly. There was a nasty winter storm sitting overtop of us the entire way, both ways. It was crazy. And, to make matters worse, my brother’s car stunk pretty bad. I never did figure out what the smell was, and we gutted the car and bombed it with fabreeze. We stayed in the D&D XP block and the Marriot, and it was a pretty decent hotel. It was quite nice being directly across the street from the convention center.

The convention itself was a fairly small affair. The entire thing was in one event hall, things were loosely divided by fencing. There were only a few vendors, and they did not have anything of particular note. Although, I did pick up the original Forgotten Realms box set. As wizards noted they had 363 different playtester for D&D Next, which sounds about right, because I don’t think there were more than 500 people at the convention.

Ultimately, I think it was a pretty positive experience, and I do not know if I would have gone had it not been for the play test. And, with D&D XP being folded into Gen Con next year I am not sure if it would be worth the trip down next year for “Winter Fantasy” or whatever it is they are calling the convention now.

BBC XP with a Twist

Using the BBC XP system instead of highlighted stats has been a great success for me. I think it captures a lot of what AW achieves without highlighted stats that doesn’t work in DW. Additionally, I remove XP for bonds and Alignment. Instead, when those are hit I’ve been giving +1 forward.

Dice

Rather than using the standard 2d6, I’ve been having players roll 1d20. If you use 1-8 is a fail, 9-17 is mixed success, and 18+ is success that probabilities are very similar and feel “right” in play for players used to rolling a d20 for almost everything.

Hidden Moves

When I run for a first time group I do not hand out the moves sheets. I like to establish the “if you do it, do it” principle up front. Then, after a couple sessions once the behavior has become the normal I pass out the moves sheets for reference.

Saving Throws

I like that in the new beta 1.1 defying danger has been adjusted to allow for all the stats. I’ve been using this system for a while and I’ve found it works pretty well. I basically have the same move which I have been calling Saving Throw (rather than the original move which has since been removed) which I have players roll when I make an unprompted move against them in support of the fiction.

My biggest issue was trying to determine what the correct scale for actions was, and whether or not people were supposed to be acting independently or as teams. The biggest issue for the group was catching the exceptions to the rules, the fiddly bits proved to be a little too fiddly, for example that d4 complications are rolled by the player, but d6 complications are rolled by the GM.

After the game we came to a consensus that the game may be worth revisiting once the full version comes out, but we are going to avoid it in the mean time.

P.S. Since Atlas is a table top role-playing company so the answers to the questions will be related to that, not video games.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #1: What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it? How did that introduction shape the gamer you’ve become? 

My first role-playing experience was with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons second edition in the spring of 1999. A couple of my friends strong armed me into it due to our shared interest in role-playing video games, and fantasy novels. I was reticent to play due to my mothers initial, misplaced, believe that D&D was associated with devil worship. However, after reviewing the material I was prepared for the following social complications that arrose.

We each had purchased a copy of the Player’s Handbook, and one of us had purchased the DM’s Guide. The initial plan was to rotate as DM. I am not exactly sure where the initial monsters came from because I do not recall getting the monster manual until later.

The first session we all took brief turns behind the DM screen, and brutally slaughtered each other because we had no sence of balance and difficulty in encounter design. As I recall my wizard did not fair well, as he fell before acting, and ending up drowning in a pool of filth. It did not take very many attempts before I realized that I enjoyed being the DM much more than playing, so I bought the DM Guide from my friend, and proceeded to write up our first adventure.

Our initial experience had a single profound effect: the desire to teach others. When we were first getting started we had to piece together what to do out of the core rule books, no one would help us. We were able to find other groups in the area, but they had no interest in assisting a group of high school kids get started. As a result, we mostly got the core of the game running but hand waved a lot of it. In fact, in recent months reading through Dungeon World has codified many of the aspects of the way we used to play. I did not want anyone else to experience the same thing. So, I couple years later I started running games at a local FLGS to help connected experienced players with new players. Unfortunately, this was not quite as successful as I would have liked due to my time constraints.

I took some time off gaming for graduate school, and when I returned I decided to take the reigns and start organized sanctioned RPGA play at another FLGS. This program was considerably more successful, and I’m pleased to see the amount of youth getting into the hobby now. But, I do have to say that 10 year old DM’s have NO mercy.

UPDATE: Wow, I have missed OS X. I think was finally started to get used to all the headaches that Windows and Ubuntu cause me, and now running with OS X is like coming home again. Sadly, this is only going to make me want to replace my defunct MacBook Pro all the more.

On October 31, 2011 Google Reader effectively died. By stripping away the social features, google reader is little more than an average RSS feed aggregation. To read the full blasphemous press release check out the following:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design-and-google.html