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Why Clerics (Still) Suck

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There are some jobs that are just terrible. Cleaning industrial septic tanks. Being that kid with the drum at the front line of those old army battles. Even working on a porno set, which one would think is the best employment in the world, has at least one position that downright sucks (pardon the pun). Seriously, would you want to be the guy that has to mop up/towel down/hose off the actors and set afterward? Depending on the genre of movie being filmed, you may have some seriously screwed up stuff to deal with. Know what’s even worse than all of those things? Being the cleric for an adventuring party. It used to be worse. Through third edition, clerics were treated like a walking first aid kit. You were one of those little boxes with a red cross on them like in Wolfenstein or Doom, but with sexy legs that stick out of the bottom (that’s how I always pictured clerics, anyway). Your job was to cast healing spells, and if you ran out of healing spells you got out of the way whi...
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Why Star Wars is the Best RPG Ever

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Everyone has some event in their adolescent years that shapes their lives and their outlooks as an adult. Perhaps it's a particularly bad breakup, or your parents’ divorce, or witnessing the horrifying murder of your father and vowing to avenge him. For me, I can name three things that made me the man I am today: 1) Robotech 2) The Swords of Power books by Fred Saberhagen 3) Star Wars : The Role-Playing game The first two are topics for another day, but Star Wars is always an acceptable topic for any conversation. I'm referring here to the original Star Wars RPG that was written by Bill Slavicsek and published by West End Games back in the late-eighties/early-nineties. The d20 by Wizards of the Coast was pretty good, but it doesn't deserve to hold the black felt, satin-tipped Sith cape of the original. In fact, I can't think of any other game that can compete with this masterpiece. You have to be really badass to get away with a head this shiny. ...
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Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaign

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There are many bands out there who like to play loud, ass-kicking, speaker-bursting music with thrashing guitars and pounding drums. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, most of them are total geeks. They may look like hard-ass biker leather fetishists, but in reality they're just D&D and Lord of the Rings nerds who hope that if they sing about dwarves and elves loud enough, people will think they're tough and not pick on them anymore. He was almost cool. Then he opened his mouth. Although I'm sure we could list thousands of bands that could fall into the genre, I'm just going to list The Top 4 Bands That Write Songs Based on Their D&D Campaigns. Actually, they're just my 4 favourites, but whatever. 4. Iron Maiden Seriously, how many kids back in the 80s ran home after school to play D&D and listen to Iron Maiden? Well, probably not THAT many, but if you're reading a blog about role-playing games and you're over 30 years old, you know what I'm ...
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Why My Favourite D&D Class Sucks

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I don't get to play D&D as a player very often. I usually end up on the DM side of the screen, which is cool because I generally enjoy it more anyway. But from time to time it's a nice change of pace to only have to worry about a single character instead of an entire world. It's also fun to throw down and beat the living daylights out of some monsters. My current D&D of choice, for better or for worse, is 4th Edition. The first time I got to run my own character in this edition was at last season's D&D Encounters event ( Keep on the Borderlands ), and I made the damn fool mistake of playing the cleric. ( See here for why Clerics, especially 4E Essentials clerics, suck. And while we're at it, here's a good argument for the suckiness of Monks). Next I tried a Gnome Bard for a high-level Living Forgotten Realms game, but that turned out almost as bad as the cleric. Seriously, what was I thinking? For the new Encounters season, I almost made...
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How to Run a Long-Term Zombie Apocalypse Game

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In the past few weeks I've written a bunch about zombie apocalypse games (I blame it on The Walking Dead ). I've also been running my regular group through bi-weekly " zombie grinder " sessions, which is basically DCC Funnel adventures but set in a modern zombie apocalypse. It's a hilarious good time  but not a basis for a long-term campaign, so I've been trying to come up with some ways to stretch it out and get some more mileage out of a pretty simple premise. I realized that zombie apocalypse scenarios , as depicted in movies, books and games, can be broken down into three distinct stages (there may be more, but three works well for my purposes). Each stage comes with its own story possibilities and game mechanics, which will hopefully revitalize the players help the game go longer. Tell me what you think: PART 1: THE FALL Civilization is crumbling. Humankind has been struck by a terrible plague that is killing people by the millions and caus...
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Monks Suck

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Continuing the idea of sucky character classes from C.D.'s last post , I humbly present the Monk. Monks in D&D suck. They sucked bad in 1st Edition, they sucked bad in 3rd Edition, and even now they suck more than a little. The only edition they didn't suck in was 2nd Edition. But that's because they weren't there. I suppose my beef against the Monk class is not so much in its intended function but in the players who choose to try and play it. Never has a class been more rooted in a heightened form of reality than the Monk. Except maybe the Thief/Rogue, but I can't say anything bad about them or they'll steal my coinpurse. Now see, I've always had this understanding that a monk was a fairly religious fellow who didn't care much for the company of those that didn't share his belief. Or, so I've gleamed from various PBS documentaries. I'm sure things are a little different in real life. But I've yet to encounter a player who understood ...
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Old Map of Awesome

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So yesterday I was digging around my RPG stuff. I don't have a lot of books or anything, I mainly have an extensive collection of things I've created over the years. Most of what I've written looks like the scrawling of a madman and only makes any coherent sense to me, and the vast majority of my maps and dungeons have unfortunately been lost or destroyed. But then I found this... Click to embiggen I had thought that this map was lost for sure. I made it when I was around seventeen or so, and It's the first real campaign world I ever created. The names are mainly rip-off's from the Forgotten Realms or pseudo-Tolkien in nature, but it was my first real attempt to create a game world of my own. The map itself is hand drawn in ink and coloured in watercolours. My friend James and I played off and on in this world for nearly three years and many of the seeds for my later ideas were first planted here. It's always nice to find something that reminds you why yo...
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