How to Be: Frieren (in 4e D&D)

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is an anime about what happens after an adventure is over and the player character with all of their level 20 powers wanders the world keeping their brains from being pickled by the feelings of losing all your friends. It’s a well-regarded, critically acclaimed series, and it’s clearly resonating with a lot of people. It’s a story about grieving and loss and finding your own purpose, as well as a story about connecting to your own emotions, and recognising the way your own life can pass by you.

It is also a story about a petite smug elf who turns into animated gifs really well.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Winaleon (and Aazum)

It’s always a lovely day in Winaleon. The bees are buzzing, the fields are growing, the coin is flowing. Winaleon, Winaleon, beautiful Winaleon, with its golden days and its golden words. Winaleon is the safest place in the world, a land of gentle slopes and careful lawns, all tended and cared for, so that the children of Winaleon have so safe an upbringing that not even night itself dares touch them.

Winaleon is a land so perfect that the sun never sets on Winaleon.

Ever.

Art by Jeremy Paillotin, Shire Terrace (MTG)

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4e: The Paladin’s Engagement

Ah, the Paladin. Derived from the term, originally, of palantine, it’s interesting how these days it’s used to refer to a virtuous and usually, religiously empowered knight in heavy armour. Interesting given that its origin point was from a term for palace guards, the people closest to the king and inevitably, the kind of people you have to route around in a dramatic conclusion to a story when you’re storming the castle to interrupt a wedding at the last possible moment (but hopefully it’s the kind of story where it all works out in the end).

Perhaps I’m thinking about weddings, though, because I’m thinking about the Paladin outlined in the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. They are, after all, the kind of character that first and most thoroughly introduced the idea of maintaining an engagement. Thanks to their power, Divine Challenge, they were, in a way, the most romantic of the Player’s Handbook 1 Classes.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Xwera

Are you free?

I ask you this, I ask again, are you free?

If you live under a king, if you live for coin, if you live for a church, then are you ever truly free? You can be free to taste the boot above you, but are you free?

Can you take your weapon and your wits and walk into the wilds and make your own way, know your own self, and share in your spoils without anyone demanding or commanding how it should be done? Can you call yourself free when your own death isn’t even something you can trust, and where you might just fall because a guard or a thug or a brute took a liking to hurting you? Don’t you want the purity, the honesty, of knowing your death comes from the quarry you hunt, that you did something wrong, you slipped at the wrong time, that you weren’t as good as you thought you were, and that your death is something you deserve and that you chose?

Come to Xwera.

Be truly free.

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Frage an #dnd affine #pnpde Leute: Was ist eure Lieblibgsedition des Spiels bzw. eure Lieblingsversion? Retroklone und Hacks zählen auch, so lange sie sich noch im Rahmen der (bizarren?) Traditionskerne „sechs Attribute“, „Rüstungsklasse“, „Charakterklassen“ etc. bewegen. Und was begründet eure Präferenz? Ihr könnt gerne furchtbare Dinge, wie „Ich mag am liebsten die DnD 4. Edition“ sagen - ich bin nur neugierig.
#osr #dnd5e #adnd #ose #dnd3e #dnd4e #pathfinder1e

How To be: Sherlock Holmes (In 4e D&D)

In this project, there’s always a challenge presented by every character. Even when the character straight up ports from a piece of media based on Dungeons & Dragons there’s always going to be something that comes in the translation that has challenges going back. Usually, the problem is one of specificity, where the character is represented in a particular form that can be very clear, with fine detail — a high resolution image, as it were. If a character can leap twice their height and do a diving bomb attack with their weapon, and they do that all the time, any build is going to have to represent that meaningfully or it won’t feel like the character.

The other, rarer problem, perhaps only encountered once before with Robin Hood, is when I’m talking about a character with such vast cultural presence that there’s almost anything they could do.

The game is afoot.

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Alpha Strikes in 4th Edition D&D

It’s a new year, so why don’t we start off our discussion of 4th Edition with a bang?

A concern in the design of 4th Edition — That is, a thing that people complain about on the internet, in this case assuming good faith from people who can come up with a third topic after “it’s good but it’s not Dungeons & Dragons,” and “it’s just like an MMO,” style big-thonk thinkers — is that in 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, too much importance is placed on the capacity of players to do an alpha strike that allows them to trivialise combat, assuming they win initiative and aren’t therefore, immediately folded by equally alpha-strikey enemies.

The notion is that if combat is extremely deadly because players are extremely powerful, then the turns that orient around when players do stuff are the most important. Players can kill things more efficiently, which means you wind up with fights that shrink and shrink, resolved in fewer and fewer turns as players level up. This concern is expressed in the form of what’s referred to as an alpha strike — a term I believe that gaming in general got from Battletech, and they got it from somewhere else, I have no doubt.

Alpha striking is the notional idea that if you spend all of your resources up front in the most decisive action possible, then it doesn’t matter that you don’t have resources to last any longer.

You have, after all, won.

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Nations of Cobrin’Seil: Fuszaint

Bidestra is a cradle and grave both of empires. Some are completely collapsed, gone beyond all signs or showing, like the Urd, or the First Elves, or the Tieflings. They stood tall and proud and asserted themselves rulers of the whole continent — but now, they are nothing but ancient statues in lost glades and the broken histories of deranged libraries. Only one Empire, in the history of Bidestra, has conquered the continent, and then, with wisdom and care, chose to withdraw, to become just another nation, and to maintain its place as first amongst equals, after bringing language, roads, medicine and currency to all corners of the continent, and only that Empire, the mighty Fuszainti Empire, can thank their current king for his choices two centuries past that led to this current glory.

Glory, glory, glory, to Fuszaint, and its ever-living, eternal Knights and King!

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