Dungeons & Dragons 5e Starter Set

DSCN1944Summer of 2014 saw the release of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons in a box set designed to introduce new players to the game. The box includes a rule book, an adventure book, pregenerated character sheets, and a full set of dice. It retails for $19.99.

Create Your Character +0: The production quality of the box is fairly average. The dice are a nice, marbleized deep blue with bright white numbers. The rule books use thick, glossy presentation pages, and the character sheets are on heavy-weave linen. Both books are coverless, saddle-stitched jobs. A 64-page rulebook and a 32-page adventure book. The included rules are meant to take characters as high as 5th level, and the adventure booklet maps out this structure very well. The box set plays as a quaint little self-contained game that will provide four or five complete gaming sessions. read more

Fateful Concessions

Curt and I fire up the reaction chamber to talk about some of the documentaries we’ve watched recently. We review “Rewind This”, about the VHS tape collector’s community, “The Game Masters”, profiling the lives of several people who are into pen and paper RPGs, and “The Dungeons & Dragons Experience” a general treatment of the hobby. Following the movie reviews we discuss the mechanic of Concession in the Fate System, a counter-intuitive method of conflict resolution that has still made its way into our games. The Kickstarter for Opposing Forces is still funding, so don’t forget to check out the project and help make an awesome game book! read more

Pathfinder is DnD 3.75

The guys and I are well-pleased with the new offering from Paizo.  Pathfinder is the next evolution of the d20 fantasy system, and they’ve done it up right.  Join us for an enthusiastic review of the new product, and help us decide whether or not Bards truly suck….

The Bard Contest:

Create a Bardic character using the Pathfinder ruleset; the system reference document may be found online in the links below.  Characters must take at least 8 levels of the Bard core class and no more than 16 levels total. Characters may not use any other core class.  The deadline for submission is Dec 1, 2009.  A single winner will be chosen by the committee to receive a CD copy of “Sprit Blade” from Spirit Blade Productions.  (‘Cuz I like giving away their stuff.) read more