T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
A Telltale Autopsy
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
A simpler explanation would be “I’m the king, someone will fetch me some horses”.
In general though, object permanence is a critical skill for a DM to develop, and this strip shows why.
Or if need be: “You left them, they ran back to the Rohan camp. Theoden brought them along, knowing you were also coming here. You can have them back now.”
Given how fiddly (and annoying for some) inventory management can get in a pen & paper game, DnD’s massive equipment list in earlier editions was very odd. I think they’ve been moving to ‘packs’ which are just one weight and price and contain all the usual fiddly trinkets. It never matters how many chalk pieces you bought for a copper each, and once the wizard can cast fly, you will stop remembering how many feet of rope you had left.
The best thing about DnD inventory management, in my opinion at least, are the various ‘overburdened henchmen’ miniatures. I have the Reaper Miniatures one :)
I’m pretty sure the equipment lists were the consolidated results of some player saying “I need chalk (or cheese, or…) for (some scheme to overcome the latest room in the dungeon). How much is it?” and the GM makes up a number that sounds right. He also writes it down.
Do this for a couple of years with a rotating cast of players, and you have a big list. But it’s of a wide variety of stuff that *might* be useful.
I met Gary Gygax once, at Toronto Comic Con. This was a few years before his passing.
He invited me to play if I was ever in the neighborhood. It’s a 12 hour drive (I did it a couple of times to go to Gencon when it was still in Wisconsin). He was perfectly sincere about it; he would GM for anybody.
It may also be due to a number of players who would have been in the military. If it’s not in your pack, then you’re looting it, and you have to come up with a scheme. Or you have to come up with an alternative.
And military loadouts are famously large, yet never complete.
I had to send this to my D&D group. Every now and then this comes up and our DM has us retrospectively say that we brought X along, that really we’d either take for granted as not having to mention, or forgotten about. Occasionally our assumptions and memories differ among the group :D Didn’t we leave that with Rosario? I thought we brought it? I thought we left it just outside the walled city before we came in.
Clearly this means you’ve been scattering it behind you as you go, like Hansel and Gretel.
Scattering horses like breadcrumbs sounds…unpleasant…