It’s time again to talk to the readers and collect the best 4e posts of the past week. Well, I’m coming up on a lot of work at the Uni, but also 3 days off in a row starting tuesday, all thanks to Veteran’s day! Hopefully I can do something for y’all in that time. I’m planning on having a Monsters of Eden: Antagonists section soon.
I’m wondering how people will react to the fact that I statted 3 gargantuan beasts for the heroic tier, so your heroes can truly feel mythological when they kill something that huge, that early in the level system. Is it pushing 4e too far? Well, I can’t say I haven’t done that before.
On to the posts!
•Greywulf has a piece on his long-term experience with 4e. He began with feelings of anger and apprehension but slowly came to enjoy the new edition. I was pretty excited for 4e, and despite not being terribly excited with 4e products nowadays, I am still extremely excited with the edition itself and playing with it, and reading what people are doing. Not only that, Greywulf’s being a tease at the end with that cliffhanger. I anticipate thrills and chills, Wulfy.
•Save Vs Pointy Stick has a post on the availability of rituals in towns. This is something I didn’t think about myself because my players rarely go in search of rituals. Usually they stick to what they can learn innately, and cast those. Especially because in Spirits of Eden there’s lots of tweaks so casters can be loaded up on rituals easily. But still, I will keep this in mind now and I generally agree with the system expressed there.
•Has there been a week without a Dungeon’s Master article on this list? Get A Real Job talks about developing your PC’s backstory by thinking about his or her job before he or she gained a class and started spamming at-wills at solos to collect phat lewtz and ignoring all of his/her daily powers exist. I typically think about this, but as said in the article, at times the circumstances change your career options, and in a lot of the really high fantasy games, “person who kills things with weird powers” is a very legitimate job option all its own.
•Party Building is a big issue in D&D 4e. A lot of DMs feel that they need all the roles present or the game is ruined. You can see this most starkly in places like Wizbook where people get together to argue about the RAW. Meanwhile other DMs just want the players to play what they want to (me!) and not think about roles too much. Players themselves can also be pushy about roles, asking other players to please play what’s left over.
I personally think that for standard challenges, as long as you have the Leader covered, it’s okay. By standard challenges, I mean Wootsie modules where you’re expected to run huge gauntlets of non-stop fighting. But the beauty of the game is that DMs can always create non-standard challenges towards non-standard parties. You may not be able to get off as easy as just plugging in the appropriate monsters into the encounter types the DMG provides, but your players will thank you for your extra effort.
To answer some fanmail real quick:
It’d be real useful if you could include some of your own posts in your weekly collections so people like me who don’t want to scan every day or dig through the archives could find them all in one place.
My answer is that nobody else links their own posts in these kinds of recap things, and I don’t want to be the one self-absorbed attention-craving douchenozzle who does so and thereby look bad. Each page of my blog contains 5 posts, so you don’t really have to do any digging to find a week’s worth of posts, I only tend to post once a day, so if I post every day, you only have to read the front page and the second page.
Correction, there are some sites that do weekly / monthly / yearly recaps of their own posts. I can think of at least one that does monthly recaps, I personally am not a fan because it always comes off (in my opinion) as “hey look at our content we think is awesome!” but people still seem to enjoy and appreciate it on some levels. Also at Critical Hits we do a yearly anniversary post that links to our benchmark posts and some of our favorites over the years. So linking to yourself wouldn’t be entirely out of the ordinary or out of the question, but I do agree with your decision not to do it.
Yea, just thought I’d weigh in and then agree with you anyway!
I do those too, but separate from the Hymn Collections. Because I figure this is a space for other people’s good articles. I don’t do weekly posts, I do monthly collections of my own posts. Mostly because I don’t write enough weekly to really do a recap, and the front page thing I said above.