Author Archives: tony

New restaurant

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There’s a new restaurant / takeaway place opened up in town, Indian and Nepalese cuisine.  We saw it a couple of days ago and a menu was popped through the door today.  Quoting verbatim, you may enjoy the following dishes (I checked my spelling four times, anything I write below is verbatim),

  • Tender of baby lamb traditional bring spiced from Nepal add fresh garlic & highly flavour coriander.
  • Tender of lamb cubs slow heating cooked with fresh herb and spiced.
  • Cooked with chef secret spices creating exotic taste on the top boiled eggs.
  • Assorted fresh vegetable light spiced herb freshness cooked.
  • Charcoal grill salmon tikka tandoori king prawn, prawn cherry tomatoes fresh fenugreek leafs, home made spices, smooth sauce.
  • Cooked creamy coconuts nuts very mild dishes
  • Plain think curry cooked with fresh green chilli and spices.

I kinda feel sorry for them, I think they rushed the menu out and opened in a hurry but if I was printing their menu, I would have called them up and maybe offered some advice.

More encounters

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Wrote a couple more 4th edition D&D encounters last night, again won’t really know how well they play out until the characters get to them (maybe this week, maybe not, depends how quick we get through the remaining encounters in the ‘intro’ adventure).

I knocked up a quick spreadsheet (yes Grete), which does the work of adding up the numbers so you can play with how many of each creature type you want included.  That makes it easy to move between a load of minions and a few tough mobs, to more tough mobs and fewer minions while staying within your XP budget.

I did flirt briefly with the idea of signing up to WoTC’s D&D Insider thing which gives you access to some online tools, but decided not to in the end, we’re on a budget this month for one, and secondly I think I can probably hack together anything I really need.  We used to do all this by hand you know 🙂  I’ve enjoyed working out the maps for the encounters as well, trying to take into consideration the different kinds of terrain and situations that affect abilities, to spice things up.

The three encounters are sort of bridging encounters between the starter adventure and the published module I want to run.  I’ve added some treasure although it’s a bit of guesswork as to how much I should be giving out.  All-in-all it should be enough to get the PC’s to 2nd level and give them some excitement.  We’ll see if they turn into pushovers or are so deadly the PC’s die three times over.

Proving who you are

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Wizards of the Coast provide a mail service where you can send rules queries for their games, including D&D.  This is cool, because it seems no matter how well a rulebook is written there are always some issues which are confusing.

I thought I’d send them a query about a rule – and you have to sign up to their site, okay, I guess that keeps the spam down.  So I started the signup process.  They needed the regular stuff, username, e-mail, date of birth.  My postcode?  Filled them all in – then, three, security questions and one additional question you might get asked on the phone, all required so they can prove who you are if you forget your account details.

Come on.

It’s a forum user ID.  If I answered those questions they’d know more about me than the bloody tax office.  Anyone who did manage to get access to my data would know enough to convince other people they were me.  It’s not like WoTC are running a banking operation or something like that.  I just wanted access to their forums and the option to mail them a rules question.

Clearly, I just made up answers to the questions that I’ll remember but that aren’t true, in fact to simply things I just picked the same answer to all four questions even if it made no sense.  Reducing the point of them having multiple questions.  Sometimes you can have too much security.

D&D 4e – Creating Encounters

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I tried my hand at creating an encounter last night using the guidelines in the 4e DMG – and I have to say, I found it a lot more intuitive than it was in v3, and none of the random guesswork and knowledge of creatures required in 1st and 2nd edition.

We’ll see how it plays out when the party meets the bad guys.   I can see that it could turn out a little formulaic, but then it’s based on a formula so there’s always going to be that risk, the difference will be how well a DM can turn things around to give the same results without always ending up with the same encounter structure.

I created a 4th level encounter for a party of 5 1st level characters, which makes it a pretty tough encounter.  I love minions, in older versions of D&D you’d end up to 2 or 3 tough creatures and the fight would feel small, with 4e the encounter has 11 creatures and feels much larger and epic even if 6 of those have essentially 1hp.  I tried to make sure the terrain played a role, giving the enemy cover and adding some terrain which slows movement, and then picking creatures which could take advantage of that (don’t want to say *too* much since my players are reading!)

I certainly feel more confident that the encounter will at least be appropriate, without having to test it too hard or run through too many details, and that leaves me more time to think up exciting situations and more encounters.  I’d love more electronic tools for doing this, but I’m not going to pay Wizards for theirs, I may have a go at putting some basic creatures values into some spreadsheet tables and just giving myself the option to quickly build encounters and add the XP totals as we go, which is the only non-creative hard bit.

I may post the encounter was the players have defeated it.

HeroQuest!

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I loved HeroQuest, even though I never really got to play it enough.  I have several versions, and some expansions, in various states of repair, and that means I have a lot of plastic mini’s that came with the game.  I’d mostly forgotten about them until last week, when I was wondering about getting some figures for our D&D sessions.  It suddenly occurred to me I probably had enough stashed away (I wanted something durable, and lightweight that we could chuck about on the battle map and not worry too much about) so I collected them all up and yep, there’s loads.

Mostly unpainted though – but I set about fixing that.  Finished up all the zombies (8 of them), and decided to start on the goblins (since both myself and Chris need a lot of zombies and goblins in the games at the moment).  I asked Grete if she wanted to lend a hand, and she did, helping paint her first miniatures.

Here’s the resulting goblin hoard (I base coated them yesterday so they’ve gone from nothing to game-ready in 2 days).

Goblins!
There’s 18 of them all-together including one I painted years ago.  It’s a superfast paint job, base coat, wash, dry brush, clothing, wash, drybrush, detail.  But it does the job for miniatures you’re going to be gaming with.

Now, if only I knew where to get the 4 red dragons in hard waring plastic resin I’ll need for the next game … 😉

Scaring your players

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How do you scare the players in your D&D campaign?  Tell them you thought you’d paint ‘a couple’ of miniatures ready for the first encounter of the next session, and then show them this photo 😉

Bunch of HeroQuest miniatures

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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There are major spoilers in this review, past the jump on the main page, but if you’re reading the article page or via RSS there will be no jump, stop reading now, you have been warned.  You will not be warned again.

We took the chance to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine at our local Showcase De Lux (sic) in Derby.  The sound and picture were really good, the leather reclining chairs were okay (not as comfortable as we’d hoped), the service and prices in the bar were shocking (prices not so surprising, service disappointing).  Combined with the price and the cost of parking (during the day) we’ll probably stick to the premier seats in the Nottingham Showcase.

Anyway.

I thought X-Men Origins: Wolverine was okay.  The movie tells the story of the (apparently) most popular X-Men member, Wolverine.  Unfortunately, a lot of that was already covered in the first few X-Men movies, so there’s a little bit of repetition.  Sure we learn some new stuff (for people who’ve never read the comics) and we see a little back story about how Logan started out, and we get to see how he turns from man-with-bone-blades to man-with-adamantium-bones.  The problem is that there’s no tension.  Spoilers follow.

Continue reading →

Give a man a fish

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… and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.

I love that proverb.  In fact, I live by it.  Although I didn’t really know it at the time I was living that proverb at school and university.  I was trying to understand the things behind the facts, how we got to them, what they meant, why they were relevant, rather than memorising them.  You can expand on understanding into other areas, but basic facts are essentially dead and lifeless.

So anyway, I love the phrase, the idea behind it and I try and keep it in mind if I need to help teach things to people.  It often leads me to answering questions with questions.  I can tell you one thing for certain, if you believe teaching people to fish is better than giving them smoked kippers you will annoy people who are asking you for kippers.   Sometimes people just want a kipper, sometimes they just need a kipper and spotting that moment isn’t always easy, especially when you’re knee-deep in explaining how to fish.

My favourite version of the proverb is from a computer game (Baldur’s Gate, not sure if it’s 1 or 2),

Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day.  Give him a sword and he can chow down on the marrow of evil.

More colourful but essentially the same message 😉