Archive for January 16th, 2012

The gaming world is alive with the sound of WotC. They’ve announced that playtesting will start on a new version of D&D. And everyone in the gamerati is chattering about it, for better or worse. So, as one of the thousands of people who has only read announcements and not seen any of the actual work, I’m more than qualified to speak about it. So here goes:

Good luck, folks.

We learned a lot with Third Edition — in design, in marketing, in the OGL experiment, in long-tail publication, all of that jazz.

We learned a lot with Fourth Edition — again in design, but also how the effects it had and the different crowds it drew to and away from it

Regardless of which edition you like better, if you like either at all, you would be a fool to not learn from all of that. And I hope that D&D Next will give us more to learn from again. Not just the negative examples the Twittersphere harps on about, but some honestly good stuff too. And given the design team, I trust we’ll see something eye-opening.

Rock on, folks.

And to everyone who is going off crazytown, making huge, declarative statements about what will happen, keep doing that. I’ve bookmarked some of the crazier ones for when I need a good laugh.

- Ryan

Atlas Games is doing this thing called “Reverb Gamers 2012″, with 31 question prompts to kick off 2012. I’m going to post one up each day, including weekends, throughout January. I invite you to do the same! And check out @ReverbGamers on Twitter or Facebook.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #16: Who was the most memorable foe you’ve ever come up against in a game? How did you beat him/her/it? Or did you?

Since I play so many games, and since my games tend to run more to story than adversarial gaming, and because I GM so often, I don’t have a good answer to this question.

Right now, the most memorable are from various games of Dungeon World. The DMs I’ve run with have had some challenging monsters, and Dungeon World is a bit rough on characters. The first time I played, Hamish Cameron had us fighting a giant water demon. (To be fair, my fault.) It knocked me down to one hit point in the first hit, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me.

Andrew Linstrom had us fight an iron golem. It knocked my character clear across the area…which is where I my character discovered he was really, really good at jumping across shit to kill a metal fucker.

Nora Last did a really great take on a cave troll, beating us over and over, driving the excitement home. Pretty much every game of living Dungeon World I’ve played has had a strong sense of exciting foes.

But none of those were anything but momentary battles. As far as long-term foes go, I think that’s something players in the games I run would have to speak toward. And I hope that what I do is at least a little memorable. But it’s more important of their own interactions are memorable, and my foes are merely catalysts for that.

- Ryan