@Zardnaar The latest special edition release of the Lone Wolf saga is now available. Get them whilst they're still there!
The Role Playing Game Thread: Shiny Dice Roll Better!
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Zardnaar
Deity
Zardnaar
Deity
Are they hardcover? It's about $20 just for postage.
22 pounds is $45-$50 off the top of my head. I would need book 24 onwards.
I've got the money no credit card to pay for it but I could go and buy a console plus games for those 7 books.
Zardnaar
Deity
Ah price is ok then. I bought 3 hardcover D&D books that are quite large from the publishers. Cost me over $300 ($200 USD)to get to NZ.
Zardnaar
Deity
Yeah I know but each book us gonna be $20+ postage.
Unless bookdepository.com sells them. Hmmmnn.
From the WSJ today. D&D goes legit!
Dungeons & Dragons Players Battle Intruders As They Migrate Online
BY JAMES RUNDLE
Dungeon-delving is going digital as coronavirus shelter-in place orders have sent devoted roleplayers online. With the mass appearance of wizards and warriors—many of them children— platform providers are scrambling to expand capacity and address cybersecurity risks. Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop classic since the 1970s, is usually played in person, in after-school clubs, at friends’ dining-room tables or in local gaming stores, to weave tales, roll dice and portray elves, dwarfs and other characters.
Though the game has occasionally been played virtually, online play has taken off since coronavirus lockdowns began. But online tools such as Discord, a popular gaming chat application, and Zoom Video Communications Inc.’s teleconferencing product introduce privacy and security concerns.
Online intruders look for “zoombombing” opportunities to disrupt Zoom conferences with offensive images and comments or spy on meetings. Zoom’s chief executive, Eric Yuan, has pledged to improve the platform’s security.
For some players, the desire to play games can outweigh worries about cyber intrusion. “The privacy concerns fall by the wayside because I’m just trying to connect with my friends, and I deal with that stuff so frequently in everyday life that I’m just not worried about it,” said Joseph Andrews, a 19-year-old freshman at George Washington University who started playing Dungeons & Dragons online with friends in high school.
Games once supervised by parents or school clubs are now vulnerable, and the platforms are aware of this. Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro Inc. unit that makes Dungeons & Dragons, and Fandom Inc.’s D& D Beyond, a tool that allows players to manage their characters, have posted guides on how to run games remotely. Both companies say security must be a priority, especially with minors involved.
“We encourage parents to exercise caution and look carefully at what their kids are doing online, under all circumstances,” said Ray Winninger, the game’s executive producer at Wizards of the Coast. The company ensures that the third parties it works with, such as D& D Beyond, adhere to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and similar laws, Mr. Winninger said. Children ages 8 to 17 years old make up roughly 24% of the game’s players, according to the company.
Teak Esneault, 13, plays a weekly game from his home in Dallas with his friends via Zoom that in freer times used to rotate from one player’s home to another’s. His mother, Sacha Troxler, said she was satisfied with the security of the platform, as he himself approves any player who wants to join the call and it is password protected.
Teak said he is likely to continue using the platform for some games even after curbs on social gatherings end. But he also wants to get back to play in the actual world. “I still think I would like doing it in person more, just to see people,” he said. “But it’s pretty easy online, and not that different.”
The proliferation of users has strained online systems. Roll20, a virtual tabletop operated by the Orr Group LLC in Overland Park, Kan., said that when Italy closed its borders in March, traffic on Roll20’s platform briefly overtook that in the U.S. The company then started to expand server capacity and hired additional staff in anticipation of broader demand.
Nolan Jones, Roll20’s managing partner, said he suspected Roll20 may have been targeted in a number of cyberattacks in recent weeks. He has seen possible denial-of-service activity; an abnormal number of requests were sent to Roll20 servers. He doesn’t know if the intention was to shut down his systems or attempt to scrape data from his servers, but the attacks didn’t disrupt service.
Housebound gamers are flocking to other services as well. “We have absolutely seen all of the usage metrics go up across the board since this started,” said Adam Bradford, vice president of tabletop gaming at Fandom Inc. and a cocreator of D& D Beyond.
Mr. Bradford said the number of registered users has tripled in the past month, and the number of online players at any one time has doubled on average. The uptake has forced the company to accelerate the expansion of its infrastructure, which otherwise would have taken place months from now.
Doug Davison, president of SmiteWorks USA LLC, a company based in Merritt Island, Fla., that operates the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop platform, said roughly 50,000 new users have joined in the past month. That is a 25% increase in users, he said.
Before the pandemic hit, the company had decided to test a new version of its software at about this time, Mr. Davison said. The combined strain has forced him to hire more staff to keep up with customer demand for technical support and other areas.
“It’s been hard on our infrastructure to kind of scale to that. And we’ve had to spend many, many sleepless days just working on systems and diagnosing and debugging issues to try to wrap things up, and to get the capacity to handle that much of a big load all at once,” he said.
Teak Esneault, 13, plays a password-protected online game through Zoom videoconferencing. SACHA TROXLER
Game’s Popularity Attracts Bad Guys
Dungeons & Dragons has had a renaissance in popularity in recent years and the shift to online has been going on for some time, even before the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns accelerated the trend.
Wizards of the Coast said the surge is thanks in part to gamers broadcasting their campaigns on social-media websites such as Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and Amazon Inc.’s Twitch. Wizards of the Coast estimates roughly 16,000 campaigns were broadcast across the two services in 2019, with fans watching around 146 million hours of that content.
This popularity has drawn hackers. Roll20, a virtual tabletop operated by the Orr Group LLC in Overland Park, Kan., was hit with a breach in late 2018. The company disclosed the following February that it affected four million users.
It then hired Kroll Inc., the cybersecurity forensics firm, to investigate after learning that some data, including the last four numbers of users’ credit cards, were offered for sale on the dark web.
Nolan Jones, Roll20’s managing partner, said the company continues to employ outside consultants and focus on how it stores customer data. “Our mind-set since the very beginning [of this company] has been that we would have a target on our back,” he said.
Mr Jones said he suspected Roll20 may have been targeted in a number of cyberattacks in recent weeks. He has seen possible denial-of-service activity; an abnormal number of requests were sent to Roll20 servers, but the attacks didn’t disrupt service.
I was a Lone Wolf'er myself... obviously... Prior to Lone Wolf, I only had Zelda II: The Adventure of Link... Never got into D&D, other than the cartoon... which was awesome
.There wasn't a D&D community where I grew up (mostly black lower/middle class suburb). I didn't have any neighbors, friends or relatives who were into it. Also, my mother was fundamentalist Christian and she viewed Dungeons and Dragons to be "from Satan" because of the magic and dragons and because the kids who were popularly portrayed as being into it were also portrayed as being into "evil" heavy metal music... so that kinda put a damper on me being able to acquire any content. I would sometimes peek through the content books for D&D if we were ever in a bookstore, but if mom saw me doing so I'd get yelled at. Dad wasn't religious but he just saw it as the kind of thing that was "for white people" so he wasn't spending his money on it either.
I had to wait until I was old enough to buy my own stuff to get into RPGs... and so Lone Wolf was ideal since all I needed to buy was one book at a time. Other than that Zelda 2 was my only RPG.
I've got both but I can't see buying more Lone Wolf just to sit on my shelf. My oldest son showed some interest in it out of the blue, which gave me an excuse to replace my collection of the original 12... but sadly he lost interest after being unable to complete book 2 without dying.Requires money/job.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
My friend is DMing 5e Eberron via group chat. Eberron pains me greatly, as it’s in the uneasy spot of abundant magic and technology is magic D&D. So I had to get into it by creating a high society pistol wielding ranger who is an active member of the The Society for The Public Collections of Refuse & Fire Brigades, regional 2nd place winner of the Dragon Tango, appointed district deputy constable who upon taking the higher position after a higher up scandal failed to win re-election, and is 200 gp in debt due to a prospecting attempt at lesser beholder parts encountered a real beholder wiping out all of the people and stuff and while the insurance paid out he hasn’t been able to pay back the loan for the insurance.
Session 2 of our new CoC campaign tonight. I'm playing Nurse Ratchett, a women who has seen things that can't be described.
Book 1 was indeed super easy, you basically have to be trying to die intentionally to fail that book. The "hard" path at the end through the "Graveyard of the Ancients" actually ends up being easier than the "easy" road into the city, but even when you get into the city the game basically keeps trying to get you to the successful ending and you essentially have to keep refusing to just finish the book to avoid "winning" until you eventually either die stupidly or the game forces you to "win" anyway.
Book 2 on the other hand is pretty difficult. The game is set up so that practically everyone you meet double-crosses, robs and/or kills you. I'd say I died more times trying to finish that one than any other book, maybe with the exception of Book 7 and Book 4, but with Book 4, the problem was that I started with that one. Once you have the Sommerswerd Book 4 is much easier as are many of the later books. In fact the hardest books are the ones where you lose access to the Sommerswerd. The problem with Book 2 is that you don't have the Sommerswerd yet and are in fact on your way to get it. There are a couple bottlenecks in the game that you absolutely cannot get beyond if you don't make very specific choices or have certain items and/or gold that you could only have gotten previously by doing very specific things.
Zardnaar
Deity
Book 2 has the helghast.
No spear= death.
No spear= death.
And if you don't have Animal Kinship, which, as you correctly point out... nobody would pick unless they knew in advance that they needed it... IIRC you have to make a specific set of choices to even get the spear in the first place, without even taking into account that in your ragged state its a pretty tough fight to even survive and get the spear... especially if again IIRC, you don't have Mindshield, which again... who the hell picks that by Book 2?. But even if you did happen to pick Animal Kinship, you still have to choose correctly, which, again, given the overall "Ha Gotcha! You Dead!" tenure of the entire book you still might not choose correctly... unless, again... you had already failed before and figured out that for a change, trust was your only hope of surviving. But even then... you lose all your gold for the trouble of taking the "easy" path.
Its just a pretty tough bottleneck overall.
@Zardnaar - Since you've apparently read the novelizations... which path is the "correct" one, ie. the one Lone Wolf takes in the novels? Does he use the spear or Animal Kinship?
EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it, there's another pretty harsh obstacle in the book. There's a point where you MUST have a pretty substantial amount of money to get an item that allows you to proceed, but if you don't have the money you can still proceed with the story a pretty long ways, until suddenly, as a consequence of not getting the item, you die... and there is no way to avoid this death if you didn't get the item way back prior in the story.
Its just a pretty tough bottleneck overall.
@Zardnaar - Since you've apparently read the novelizations... which path is the "correct" one, ie. the one Lone Wolf takes in the novels? Does he use the spear or Animal Kinship?
EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it, there's another pretty harsh obstacle in the book. There's a point where you MUST have a pretty substantial amount of money to get an item that allows you to proceed, but if you don't have the money you can still proceed with the story a pretty long ways, until suddenly, as a consequence of not getting the item, you die... and there is no way to avoid this death if you didn't get the item way back prior in the story.
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