Having not been able to attend DDXP last weekend, I queried a few folks I knew that went for their impressions of the upcoming new edition of D&D. Here are the responses I got.
xkcd had a wonderful new comic posted today:
I just received an email from my friend Peter with some sad news:
It is with great sadness that I have to tell you that Gary Gygax has passed away. He meant a lot to me, even if I sometimes joked like Gary was some crusty old guy from a previous generation. The truth is, he was one of a kind. He created something that I have always loved, and I will miss him.
http://www.freeyabb.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=4373&highlight=gygax&mforum=trolllordgames
It would be hard to quantify the contribution Gary Gygax has made to my life, and to the lives of countless other people like me. So much of the gaming culture I consider myself a part of has been influenced by him, directly or otherwise. So much of my childhood and teenage years was spent playing games based upon his work, games that I continue to play today with friends old and new.
Your presence will be missed, Gary. My deepest condolences go out to his family and friends.
Update: Here are some of the wonderful tributes I have seen across the web today:
From the DDXP Liveblog Gamer Zero’s DDXP Videos:
I just saw that Gamer Zero posted a whole pile of videos from D&D Experience including just about the entire design and product release talk.
I wasn’t able to go, so I am looking forward to watching these when I can get a free moment. Should be some pretty interesting stuff!
Ground Zero Games’ Stargrunt II announcement:
We are happy to announce that hard copies of Stargrunt II are so low they will no longer be available for purchase from teh store. They will however be available for FREE downloads from the downloads section, or for those in a hurry right click here and select save as but be warned it is 23MB.
We are working on a higher quality scanned copy than the one currently available but that will take a while so we have made the current one available now.
See the downloads section for the counter sheets and QR card.
Heading over to their rules download page, you can see that now all of their published rules (that I’m aware of at least) are available for download. This makes me want to pull out the giant bunch of GZG minis in my backlog and get to work on them!
A gaming buddy just sent me a link to somebody liveblogging Dungeons & Dragons Experience, where WotC is giving folks a preview of 4th edition: http://ddxp.tumblr.com/
Some highlights so far:
New Player’s Handbook every year with new and updated classes
Sounds a little odd to me. I hope they’ll be making the changes available online to existing PHB owners for free or very cheap. I don’t want to have to buy a new book every year. (Correction: Looks like it’ll be a supplement, not a new book).
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DM’s screen sounds nice and hefty. Forgotten Realms in August with a Player’s Book in September. Hopefully I can make do with the current 3.x version until then, if I end up running a FR game.
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Online character sheets. Much nicer than the quickie hacks I/we always use for tracking those things. Rules database. Some kind of virtual game table? Interesting.
With any luck, I will be running a Call of Cthulhu game around Halloween. It’s something I used to try to do every Halloween. I haven’t run a Halloween game in years unfortunately, but I have been recently getting back into the RPG game, so I thought I would give it a shot again. I’m meeting new people, and I consider it my mission to introduce them to CoC.
Many years ago, I actually ran a small weekly CoC campaign with two players for a couple months and we had a blast. Though I wouldn’t say we played with as significant a level of seriousness that people might expect from a game of CoC. Either way, it was definitely a learning experience for me and I plan to use that in getting ready for this year’s game. With any luck, I might be able to turn it into a regular thing (maybe monthly?) but I’m not going to set my expectations that high. The key is to have some fun. And in that vein, I am going to try something new with this game: minis!
