After not gaming for almost a year, I've actually got two D&D 4th Edition games that I will playing in starting up in a couple works. I've read the PHB and I'm looking forward to giving it a shot. It's definitely a major shift from previous editions, but it has some promise.

That said, I think if I ever run a game again, it will probably be a 3.5 game, house-ruled and borrowing liberally from the Pathfinder RPG.

I downloaded the free beta version of Pathfinder off of Paizo's website and they've done a lot of things I was thinking about doing with 3.5 before 4 came out (merging skills together. Giving characters more feats and more reasons to stick to a single class.) though not necessarily exactly how I would have done it (I probably would have merged skills differently and I think some of the boosts they give to the core classes are either bit over-powered and/or cheezy. The Sorcerer, in particular, has a lot of abilities that make me go "WTF?!?"

But for folks like Sean who hate 4th Ed, it might be worth looking into. Especially right now, while it's still free.

I definitely like the "casters can use as many 0-level spells per day as they want, but the number known being determined by character level. I do agree with 4th Ed's philosophy that a Wizard should always feel like a Wizard, not sometimes forced to being a really crappy crossbowman. And unlimited Ray of Frosts or Detect Magics won't really break the game. (The only 0-level I wasn't sure how to get around was Cure Minor Wounds "I can heal everyone up to full after every fight, it's just going to take 500 rounds to do it!", but Pathfinder fixes it by removing it and inserting a "Stabilize" spell.)

What really leaves me scratching my head, though, is they replaced the Monk and Barbarian per day special abilities with pools of Ki and Rage points, respectively, to power them, but then changed the Paladin's Lay on Hands from a pool of healing points and replaced it with a number of uses per day.

Before the Aus Open Mens' Final yesterday, Wallybee and I had my brother and a couple of his friends around to play Battlestar Galactica. One of them was late, having initially forgotten about it, so the rest of us had a four-player game while we were waiting.

By coincidence, it lasted almost exactly the half hour it took for the other guy to show. While trying to spool up for our very first jump, and fighting the Cylon basestar that starts in front of our ship, we turned up three more Cylon attacks, including one that sent our FTL prep back a space, and no skill checks. Our only pilot, Starbuck, spent more time in the sickbay than in a Viper (and was a Cylon anyway, not that that wound up mattering). We placed and lost every single civilian ship before we jumped even once.

Anyway, the final guy arrived by then, and we started a five-player game. Wallybee was Admiral Adama, and my brother Brendan was President Gaius Baltar, the magnificent bastard. (We also had Starbuck and Helo, and I took the Chief, since someone had to clean up after the others.)

It was good fun. We worked out that Helo was a toaster pretty early, but Baltar was acting a touch suspicious:

"Ok, nice shot Adama, the basestar's at two damage. I've executive ordered Starbuck back out in a Viper. Baltar, what are you doing?"
"I'd like to spend a card to board Colonial One and collect Quorum cards."
"...Did you not notice that we're under attack?"
"We're always under attack."
"..."

And then another Crisis card allowed Baltar to look at Helo's (Toaster suspect #1) loyalty card. Baltar wouldn't tell us what it was.

And then Wallybee got the Crisis card where the Admiral can demand the Presidency.

"Ok, so this is your choice. Either you can tell Brendan to give you the Presidency and force a crisis or you both lose two cards."
"Yeah, he can give me that. President Admiral sounds pretty good."
"You can just both chuck the cards."
"And your point would be?"
"...Ok. Brendan, you can either give up the Presidency or you wind up in the Brig."
"Brig it is. I like my quorum cards."

Of course, while in the Brig, he refused to help with anything. "I need my cards to break out of the Brig."
"So you'd rather see the Fleet get damaged. Interesting."

Anyway, I figured him for a Cylon at this stage. (It's Gaius Baltar. How could I not?) Apparently Helo did too, because on his turn he Exec Ordered Baltar to let him try to escape the Brig (successfully). And Baltar's next action is to brig Helo, who was indeed a Toaster, and apparently Baltar wasn't one after all.

"So why were you just collecting Quorum cards instead of fighting the Cylons before?"
"Have you checked them out? There's one called 'Authorisation of Brutal Force' I wanted to get hold of."
"...Were you planning to shout 'No more Mr Nice Gaius!' when you played it?"

Helo did the honourable thing and reappeared on the Resurrection Ship. He later did the slightly less honourable thing and gave me his other Loyalty card. Dammit. I was now also a Cylon. For some reason, no one else seemed to pick up on it, and despite sabotaging a couple of significant checks, I went undetected for the whole game. We still lost - we got Morale down to 1, but the last few crisis cards included a flurry of jump icons - but I felt pretty good that no one suspected me after I was given a Loyalty card by a Cylon.

So anyway. Fun game. I think we won't have much trouble getting everyone back again.

I've decided that the 3.5 rules are not overkill for a CRPG. Coming up with different character builds is quite enjoyable. Playing with a D&D based game also made me think back and realize I started playing D&D in the 4th grade which is the grade my daughter is in. Somehow that makes her seem suddenly older.

I didn't start playing until sophomore year of high school.

Link presented without comment: [link]

Titan Quest is a Diablo type game that I've played the demo for and decided I'd pick up sometime in the future. Impulse Driven (a very steam like service) is having a weekend sale for $3.99.

[link]

If you ever wanted Titan Quest, I doubt that there will be a much lower price.

Billytea, or anyone else around, have you played Notre Dame? I'm trying to go through the rules to play tonight and I'm hoping it'll make more sense when we play.

Billytea, or anyone else around, have you played Notre Dame? I'm trying to go through the rules to play tonight and I'm hoping it'll make more sense when we play.

I have not played that one. I did, however, find a teaching guide that might help: [link]

Just got back from playing the first session of the 4th Edition game I'm in with several guys from work.

I decided to go a with a Human Trickster-build Rogue. In my 20 years of gaming, I've never played the amnesia card as a player, so I decided to give it a shot this time around. My character's memory only goes back two weeks to when he woke up in a dark alley with an ornate dagger piercing his hand and a note attached reading "Next time, we'll take the rest." His goals are simple: find out who did this to him, force them to give him back his memories, and then return their dagger to them, preferably through their eyesocket.

My first impressions:

Each player having index cards with their powers written out on them seems to the be the way to go. The one player who didn't do it spent a lot of time digging through the book on his turn, which was kind of annoying for the rest of us.

Rogues are bad-ass if they can manage to maintain Combat Advantage. My rogue was easily doing 2-3x the damage of any other party member most rounds. It was kind of frightening. Especially since I took Quick Draw and Jack of all Trades as my feats, so I wasn't exactly trying to maximize damage.

The game is fairly easy to pick up: we were playing with one complete newbie, one person who hadn't played since 2nd Ed and one person who had played WoW, but not table-top before and then myself and one other player were experienced D&Ders. There was a definite learning curve, but by the end of the night only the newbie was asking questions every round. The other two only had to ask questions occaisionally by the end.

Healing surges seem like a nice addition. Especially coupled with Healing Word being a minor action for clerics. The cleric never had to spend a turn just healing someone. Which was a definitely problem in previous editions. It seemed like you were almost always stuck playing medic and that any other spells you cast were potentially robbing the other party members of precious hitpoints.

Overall, the powers work pretty well, though there is a tendency to just repeatedly do the same At-Will power most rounds (which really doesn't achieve the goal of giving you something to do other than simply attacking every round). One of my At-Wills, Sly Flourish, was notably superior to the others so I tended to use it constantly, but I tried be creative with describing the distraction aspect of the attack to keep it from seeming too repetetive.

We didn't engage in any skill challenges, so I can't say how well that part works yet, though lousy math aside, I do like them as a concept.

Role-playing doesn't seem any more or less encouraged than in previous editions. The folks who want to RP are going to do it, and those who don't, aren't. Of course, with so many new players, it's going to be awhile to find out who does actually want to RP and who doesn't.

The hardcore "watching encumberance, tracking rations, make sure every hitpoint healed is accounted for, what's the overland movement rate for this terrain, etc" simulationist in me doesn't care for the simplifications, like everyone completely healing over night, but I think 4th Ed definitely manages to be fun in its abstractions.

Notre Dame was very fun. As with many German-style games, there was a lot to read through that made no sense since none of us had played, but once you start it goes pretty quickly (there is a set number of rounds).

I think I may like it better than Catan since I think it is easier to pick up on the first time you play, and play itself is fairly flexible so you don't get locked into a certain style of play based on the initial set-up. I also think it is slightly more obvious what you should be doing. However, if you are more of a strategy type of person, it might get old quicker. There is randomness because you do a card exchange every round, but you have more control than a random role of the dice as in Catan.