D&D Session 2

This is a couple of months late, as session two of our three player (plus one GM) D&D adventure took place in May.  However, I've been busy and only just got around to reviewing the game I set up and ran.

My players started and remained level 2 throughout, the dungeon started with the group having to solve a simple pattern to visit a certain house (in a small four house village) there they heard about a third party none player character called "Bard", and suddenly they were confronted with "Bard" in a carriage to take the group to his country estate... I gave them the option of "The Easy Way" or "The Hard Way".

However, both options were for the group to be knocked unconscious and to awaken without any gear, two of the group woke in a large stone holding cell, which happened to have a dwarvish door, which could be opened by interpreting the magic runes, so the wizard in the group had to read magic and got the runes saying "I open when wet".  The group struggled with this, and in the end I had to intimate they could spit, or find any other body fluid, to touch the door with.

When it opened the stone unblocked the noise of the third party member being tortured, the free members burst down the door and a hand to hand fight ensued.

Upon beating the two goblins there, they had a dagger and all were free, they used candles to find their way to a store room where they found their gear had been picked over, but was present, but upon picking up their stuff the door behind them opened and two more goblins plus a goblin boss attack them.

The fight ends, when the boss drops, any remaining goblins ran away, or they were all killed.   In the event they concentrated fire on the boss and burned him down very fast, finding a set of keys, opening the door they found they were in a basement sort off, but two cells had been erected and inside was a trembling figure in one bed, and an Elf Wizard was in the other, she had a friend, an armoured Guinea pig, which would fight for her later.  The other figure though was Bard.

The real Bard, he had been duplicated, the group learn now that the creature in the carriage had actually been a doppleganger.

The elf is called "Eluna", along with Bard they join the party, and Bard explains, this is his mansion, bought for through all the concert ticket sales he's made being a... well a Bard.

He explains the evil cult took over and banished him here, but had sent a note just before for help, that was the note the group got at the beginning.

Leading the group into a corridor the group have to fight flesh eating worms in the dark, then they enter the old kitchens and fight a guard, and finally enter the main hall of the mansion, and there fight two twin swordsmen, who both had to die together, the doppleganger and the boss "Bolvier", the cult leader.

A great moment came when the Wizard in our party grasped she could do anything, and came up with using a belt knife to cut down a tapestry and having it float over the heat of one of the twin swordsmen and wrapping him up whilst they fought the other characters.  This was the first time the group benefited from any form of crowd control, and it was epic.

The session ended with the group taken into the mansion to relax and recoup with Bard, Eluna sets off to report her troubles to her Priestess bosses.

The third session was meant to happen last week, but one of our members, the youngest, was not being a very good girl, she was very annoying and not bothering to play Scrabble... And so because she couldn't be arsed to play Scrabble... She wasn't allowed to play D&D.... Despite her moaning "But D&D is the best game ever".... yeah, it would have been if you'd have applied yourself to Scrabble.

Gaming Update

Well, aside from blogging about shoes, I have actually been gaming this weekend... And I've been improving the man lab a little.

I've still not had the chance to clear the corner and drill the holes to wire ethernet directly to the router downstairs... However, I have had the drill out and fitted new black-out blinds to the window.  This made the room a lot darker for game play, and allowed more uniform lighting for when I plan to stream.

Gaming wise, the weekend started with board games, a little D&D, then some Pathfinder and finally Scrabble... Yes, physical gaming at it's best.

H1Z1 also featured a lot, the wife and I enjoying hardcore Battle Royale mode, and achieving a 3rd place finish on just our second game.

WarGame Air Land & Sea was also played, I finally went into skirmish  mode against the AI, and first was defeated squarely but then pulled a draw.  My major losses were a squad of Royal Marines whom I'd moved up in their lynx helo carrier, who were overrun with a pact flame tank when the lynx 20mm rockets ran out, and I had no support near.

However, I held my flanks successfully and I am getting the balance of supply.

WarThunder also featured, I spent several hours playing about and working with the settings of both my X55 Rhino and Track IR, to better fly simulator battles.  Initially all controls were being set and checked in the P38 due to it's balanced torque and ease of take off.  I worked on the aiming and gunnery settings, the sensitivity and profiles of the joystick and the Track IR.

There's still work to do there, the Track IR for example is very twitchy, so I've got the sensitivity too high somewhere, but I did notice the Track IR was just generally playing me up, it maybe it's age... Gimball lock was common when glancing down, despite it not being set possible on the profile I had loaded.

---- And in news from the blog ---

This is my 800th Post... Huzzah!

Pathfinder

There's not a log going on, save to say I've been reading and following the Pathfinder RPG game rules.  Which are essentially D&D v3.5 rules. Message ends.

Week Without a Post?

Could I leave you, my darlings, without a post for a whole week?... No, of course I couldn't.

So what is going on?... Well, I'm trying to arrange a Friday night D&D game with a group of mates - but two of them are being quiet on the availability, one doesn't have a webcam or mic to join in with, one is eager and I'm getting blue balls about the whole affair.

I've been playing some games, notably Cities Skylines, and I've been made to play a lot of H1Z1 Battle Royale for the wife, our best result has been #2 so far, so near, and yet so far from a win!

Today see's the release of WarThunder patch 1.70, their 1945 release, and it's biggest item for me is the new British Naval Aviation line, which I'll look forward to unlocking and getting to ace status.

Beyond all that, I think we're going to be busy Saturday, the father-in-law is having his boat launched (seriously, a whole boat) so we've got to go to that.  Then Sunday we're meant to be going to see some friends, but I don't know what that'll entail.  If I can throw together a D&D game and their kids are in the mood I'll drag that with me and make them play.

Development wise for the Dungeon Crawler, I've been tidying up some of the C++ code under the hood, and I've formally sorted out the XML loaders, so that's the format for everything, settings and screen layout will be the next feature I look at.  Doors are still a work in progress, and I'm still mulling the whole steps thing...

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL - Loading Maps

Very quick update, I've been taking the XML Maps from the Editor in it's current form and loading them into the actual game now, this has required a change of several subsystems inside the Grid/Map loading code.

The most important change has been caching one copy of each image, so minimising memory use, and then customising them at a surface level to add walls, drawing all this once and then just rendering the one single image we hold in RAM, whilst the rest of the images can be dropped out of memory to again free more resources.

Anyway, here's a screen shot of the game (background left) with the map editor open showing the map in design.

Path finding of course routes around the walls, and tiles can be toggles as blocking or not, opening up the ability now to add doors or even hidden/false/magic doors.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL/C# - Map Editor Updates

So, the Map Editor, I made a brief mention of progress on Tuesday's post, but I've refined a few things, and I'm ready to show you some screenshots of how things look...

Here we see a tile set being imported, and placed down, then I've laid a set of dividers, a divider is a none-crossable wall like structure, but it lets us use a single square as a wall, rather than using a blank gap.

So, hopefully you can see that we can enclose spaces without so much blank black squares.

Which then leads to more complex structures:

The next item I'm literally coding now is a door, which will go into places as highlighted in red here...

Supporting single spans, or double spans...

And of course, once all this is designed into the map editor it's going to be ported into the game itself to give us the basics of the Adventure loading & walk through.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL/C# - Representing Stairs Challenge

So, the game, at the moment is totally top down 2D, there are no camera angles, no isometric perspective, it's just all looking straight down at the canvas below.

So, one challenge is how to represent depth, I've seen some art styles showing walls rising from an edge of a square and away to the centre, so it looks as though it's a wall climbing up towards the camera.

And, this effect is built in, not by the game, but by loading the pictures/images from disk, so anyone can draw like that.

One thing I can't do however is I can't draw, not very well, not on a computer.

And the next challenge facing me is how to represent stairs, if I can't do it easily with a single tile, do I need to make stairs which take up several tiles and have isometric effects to them, or do I need to increase the size of the tiles?

You see, there are options, which work to represent top down stairs...

That looks right to me, but it's done with shadows, alpha and importantly to work it all needs more than 70x70 resolution...  The same trick for me, using gradient brushes, at 70x70 comes out like this:

It's not the same is it?... No, I didn't think so.

Other options are to make stairs as I would with a biro on a table top map:

But, again this needs more pixels per tile, and definitely needs more than one tile.

Stairs going down are also a challenge, they need just as good a resolution which my tiles don't provide:

From http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=22407

Suggestions on a postcard please.

D&D - Session 1

Last night, I had the pleasure of hosting my first D&D Fifth Edition game, now I did vastly simplify the rules and let lots of the detail slip, because not only was it my first time hosting, but it was my players first time playing.

So, we simplified the D20 use and the character sheets, but I kept the story rich and powerful, I'll relay the whole story below, with the options I gave people.

The adventure was in two parts, one needed no board and it constituted me taking the players together to a small village to get a task, the task was given by the inn keeper (a woman) to track down her son who had gone missing looking for treasure in the nearby mountains.

The party had to roll perception to spot a picture of the son, and note he wears a distinctive hat, and they could roll charisma with the inn keeper to negotiate their fee...

The party then had to move along the obvious path the guy took through the forest and to the foot of the mountains and the first dexterity and athletics tests were put to them, with a party of a rogue then two cloth wearers you could imagine the rogue would spring up the mountain side, but they rolled a 1... So fell flat on their arse, this made the other two more wary of climbing up, so they missed a surprise round here against a rat enemy in the entry way...

I had it scripted that there was a rat, if they killed the rat by getting up there quietly it could not run into the next room to alert the next enemy.  As it was they didn't surprise the rat, it saw them and ran off, and alerted the next enemy.

Meanwhile I had them see a fissure in the wall looking down on a grander room below, this was the end goal room, so the dungeon they were in was a simple four sided affair, but they can only see this room, so I ask for a perception/history check... They fail this...

So the elaborate story about the light below and foot prints in the thick dust was lost on them, all they got to be told about was a shabby carpet which looked like it might have once been grand.

Into the next room, it's a church like vault, rotten wooden pews line it and it's rubble at one end.  At this point I explained "light" for the wizard and they elect to light a coin and throw it to the back of the room, where they see the first enemy a cockatrice (vastly lowered in HP)... If they had not let the rat go, they would have faced four 1HP bats, not a 8HP cockatrice.

This thing takes a bite out of the rogue, it also takes a bite out the priest, but they subdue it and then I offered them a rest.

No-one searched the corpse, the rogue just opted to chop it up for meat, only to find it's bad meat and not for eating.

Next there's a set of rotten double doors, they peek around and the rogue uses slight of hand to spot a trap, which they avoid.

Unfortunately they left the light on the coin, now they're in the dark and I point this out, but the wizard fails to light the tip of their wand again and the rogue falls down a set of steps in the dark.

The Priest manages it down the stairs, only the wizard manages the stairs well, and so at the bottom of the stairs the wizard manages to light their wand again and they see two sets of doors, one left with a grill, and one dead a head.

The door to the left is an old cell, the priest opens the door, by bashing them with their club, the wizard lights a coin and throws it in, they see nothing save a pile of bones and old straw, so they leave the room alone.

If they had stepped in, they would face a short sword wielding skeleton... However, the wizard and priest both stop the rogue going in.

They instead try to peek through the closed double doors, and they managed with detect magic, to find out there's a flame skull beyond the doors...

They open it, and surprise it, gaining advantage, the wizard slows it, it hits the priest and hits the rogue, it also silences the priest, but they beat it down... Not before however it bloodies the rogue down to 8HP.

They heal up and rest here briefly, then search part of the room, and find an important story line item I invented the "Globe of life", filled with good green energy.

They history check on it and find this is a much fabled vial of pure life, it was what the flameskull was seeking to bring itself back to real life.  The priest tucks this away.

They move on, and enter the final room, which has two halves, the half with the rug they saw previously, and the half just in stone... In the corner is a prone bundle, which is the body of the inn keepers son.  The players didn't know this however, as they failed their checks on it... They know it's dead...

The rogue then did a detect traps and spotted a gargoyle about to pounce, they fought this down fast, and had it at 5HP, when it offered to parle.... But they refused and tried to kill it, getting it down to 1HP, where it slunk away... It would have told them to use the vial on the body... As it was however, they decided to use the vial on the body and it was the innkeepers son, it was a check someone did to see if it had a hat on did the trick...

He takes a breath and says "don't step on the rug"... So they didn't.

Not using the vial they would have faced him as a zombie and not been able to get home with him to get their reward.

However, they also open a treasure chest, this spawned the final boss, however, as they didn't stand on the rug she's only 1/4 her normal strength, and with the wizard using all their dailies she's burning and charred and the DOT takes her down on the third turn after opening the fight.

This was the end of the run, it worked out, the flameskull was the hardest enemy they faced, at no point were they close to a wipe.

Feedback

And in general feedback they decided the priest wanted more to do.

But each party member went away with 25 gold pieces each, some XP and a good grounding in the game mechanics.

Because the boss wasn't full strength they didn't get any special items, also because they didn't fight the skeleton the rogue missed out on a nice +1 short sword, and they didn't search a table in the flameskull room, so they missed 3 more gold pieces and some magic items for the priest and wizard.

But they missed this more through wanting to not take all night and getting to the end within two hours, so I may award them to the player character sheets with some story about adventures they've been on and add them some more skills, especially for the priest.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL - VLOG 3

The third VLOG in this on going series, see's me finding I've unexpectedly broken token collision detection.... But I'm; at last; loading maps from the MapEditor.

I've also fixed scaling issues which were causing the map to scale to the screen when it was a map which was intended to be smaller than the view area of the screen.

Update 3.5

D&D Starter Set

When I was at college I remember briefly trying to play D&D... From a second edition manual, it was hard... The two guys setting up characters with me were baffled and the GM was no help.  A hopeless, pretty boring situation, as none of us had read the players manual and the GM hadn't got a grip on how to play, needless to say I never even touched a D20 let alone rolled anything.

At uni I remember the Student Union Bar one day hosted a Magic introduction, but Magic never appealed to me.

Years later I've been a World of Warcraft player, but the computer games never get to the exploitative and environment freedom D&D promises... Could I pull a brick out the wall in Stormwind and thrown it at someone?.. Nope, can I in D&D... Sure!

So it is that I've come full circle, and I've just ordered the Starter Set for D&D Fifth Edition...

God Help Me.

Confession Time - D&D

I've got a confession for you all... I have never played Dungeons & Dragons... There, I've said it, I hope we can move on after this.

Now I'm not including the online incarnation of the game, which I've played, and also blogged about...

I'm talking about the actual pen & paper, around a table, D&D...

I'm not sure where or why this passed me by, it is exactly my thing, but I think my trouble is I don't want to be a player, I think I want to try my hand at being the Games Master.

I dunno, I wonder if you can D&D via skype?... Anyone want to try?

General Dross

With a week between posts you might get an idea how busy I've been, I'm fighting several problems at work, project problems, and I'm also trying to figure a few things out at home.

Hopefully over the next few weeks some regular game-play items might be brought up.

I did have a play with some red stone and rails in a test work on Minecraft... And I had a few hours playing my big main world over the weekend... but Enjoyed a brief swim in Lava which put me off.

My current big world project is an mob spawner, which of course means I'm spending a lot of time lighting u p the caves below my world.

I've also enjoyed the latest installment from Acquisitions Inc...

Minecraft Ordeal 3

I've been back in my Minecraft world, and I'm a little disappointed by a couple of things, first of all, that lava pool, I've breached it above and below with glass, it's even bigger than I previously thought, it goes under other rock in a circle now over 100 squares around.

This is a major problem, you can see my lower mining hall below, were I've propped the lava pool up on glass, and you can now see above where I've made a passage directly through for my higher mining shafts, but it is a lot of dangerous work, I was at one point down to 1 heart and burning before I had my water out to quench myself.

And that only then resulted in more damn problems...

Then the temple... What a let down... There was basically just a shaft down the middle, and TNT below a pressure plate... No adventure there at all, not what I expected.  I dunno, I expected something like CubeWorld, I assumed CubeWorld had copied Minecraft, but now it seems not.

Here's my expedition and you can see I expose the trap after digging down parallel with the shaft, in the chests was gold, bones, iron and one saddle as well as a lot of rotten flesh.

I had all the sandstone I could away with me, filling my inventory... But still no adventure, no fulfillment.

CubeWorld lacks any depth, Minecraft lacks any adventure... I don't know what to do... I'm tempted to sub to Eve to make sure my name gets on the statue... And I'm even tempted to download WoW again.

I would love to have the time to sit down and write my own new game, a mix of D&D with Lort of Ultima, with I dunno, something else... But I really don't have the time when I'm in a programming mood... Work is taking over, I worked a 6 day week, where I should have done 37 hours I've done 54; and the project is still not done.

I need something I can put on and zone out with...

So Wow is the perfect place for me, I find other games, like D&D online, LOTRO and the like to look terrible... I like the cartoony world of WoW... It's just not the same as the old days... And I've been out of it for 2 years... and really for the amount of time I'll get to play it, would £9 a month be worth it?... I doubt it.

But, take a look at my Battle.NET account and it says there's "Wow Starter", which is free to play?

It's a whole other account?