Looks like Pang's daily item houserule has just become part of the official rules. I guess we'll have to wait and see how 'rare' and 'uncommon' items are delineated. Based on the writeup, I understand items with daily powers (like Cal's longbow) are uncommon, while those with encounters (like the Bloodclaw sword) and at-wills are rare.

Will you be adopting Essentials modifications into your campaign, Pang? I'm not quite sure on how to view the Essentials line. I understand some forums are calling it 4.5E or something, not that I appreciate how 3E and 3.5E differ.

Essentials and 4th are different animals. Essentials is more or less just a slimmed down version, an even faster pick up and play than the already ridiculously simple 4th edition.

Essentials and 4E are "different animals" in the same way that dogs and puppies are different animals.

By which I mean that they're the same animal, but one version is slightly less intimidating.

Essentials are just books with class builds and monsters in them. You know, like all the other 4E books. These builds and monsters may be skewed toward slightly less complex play. This does not make them in any way incompatible with the "core". They all share a common label because they have "Friendly To New Players" as a shared conceit, much like the Dark Sun books share a common label because they have "Ha ha, you will choke on silt and die" as a shared conceit. People pretending that Essentials is somehow a separate product line or a separate ruleset are either stupid, misinformed, or deliberately disseminating misinformation.

(Races, Classes and Monsters are not part of the game's rules, in much the same way individual Magic cards are not part of the rules. They're content. Essentials does not have different rules, because it's 4E. There is no such game as Essentials.)

If I have a Dungeon Master's Guide from 2008, and you have a Dungeon Master's Kit from 2010, and we both start up a game... we're both playing the same game. Can you stat up a Dwarven Slayer Fighter and play it in my game? Yes. Can I stat up a Githyanki Psion and play it in your game? Yes.

As for this campaign if people want to play a Slayer or a Warpriest or a Thief that's just fine with me since it will introduce no incompatibility issues whatsoever. And as you point out the changes to item powers change nothing and it's not like I follow standard treasure distribution procedure in the first place so there aren't really any "modifications" for me to adopt. It's just more Stuff. I like Stuff. Some of it isn't very interesting Stuff, but it's all harmless Stuff.

tl;dr tedious grognard lies make me wanna smash a bro

Additional Spam:
Bloodclaw is considered by a lot of players to be one of the most powerful and broken item properties in the game, but I don't think either you or Garr have ever actually activated that power because you're all so utterly petrified of taking damage. It's kind of adorable.

Okay then, Essentials will change nothing here. Gotcha.

Well, that and Cal has to be pretty desperate to bust out the melee weapons. At least the claw fighter claws let him twin strike still, just with horrible results :tpg:

But eh, so we get to inflict 2 HP of damage on 1 enemy every encounter, and take 1 HP of damage. Hardly seems broken to me, at least in heroic. Even if it were an at-will, we'd lose in a war of attrition unless we have trollhide bracers or something like that.

Pang, did Glenn pick up the rest of the stuff before leaving? I said he did, but neglected to do anything to point it out.

Oops, guess I skimmed over that somehow. Scroll, sword and crown are in Glenn's inventory now.

Additional Spam:
Also I don't think there will be an incoming character right now since 6 PCs seemed to add significantly more than 20% additional unwieldiness. It was a fun idea at the time but it's just a little bit too much to monitor on a permanent basis.

How do these potions work if I use them on somebody else? Sure, I could just hand them over for them to drink, but it'd be more fun to cram them down their throats.


Also, what does training in armor do? I haven't been able to figure this out or find it in the handbook.

Armor Training lets you wear that type of armor without a penalty. Like, for example, Garr has no training in plate armor which is why he's got all the combat efficacy of a comatose trout. If he was trained, he would get all the upsides of plate armor and none of the downsides. But he lacks the CON score requisite to actually get the training, alas.

You can administer a potion to an ally as a Standard Action, so run over and just cram it in their faces at your leisure.

Who spends the healing surge, me?

Also, probably does matter, but you gave me my armor proficiency outside of my warlord specialization. Kept wondering why I couldn't find it.

No, the one whose HP is being replenished.

Your scale proficiency's coming from the "Armored Warlord" feat.

Hawk, Garr can make use of the sword if he buys a longsword for 15GP and transfers the enchantment for 175GP.

You got bored of that dungeon then Pang?

Well, like it was said, it was either the group or the dungeon but the whole idea of just "wander around randomly" wasn't working for this bunch. So I figured I'd set up a big bright glowing EXIT sign and have 800-lb gorillas push them toward it.

(That, and I didn't really expect them to stick around at length in the cheap one-note FF1 joke dimension so I effectively had no choice but to hit the emergency eject on that one. I'm not playing in that world long-term, so I'm not.)

It was a fleeting beauty. But yeah, I really don't think any of us had any idea of where the fuck we were supposed to be going, given that many options and so few hopes for escape. That considered, hard to be purpose-driven.

Pang, just curious. What does a tent do? I thought there'd be at least a brief description, but it's only a line of text in the PHB item list.

Is it merely a 20-pound alternative to lugging around five 5-pound bedrolls?

Let's say, theoretically, that you have to camp outside, and it might rain.

Would you rather have a bedroll, or a tent?

What does a tent do. IT SHELTERS YOU AGAINST THE ELEMENTS, THAT'S WHAT

I see!

Piece of junk.

Since the sun always shines and it never rains. As long as we don't go on boats.

Sometimes it rains indoors, too.

LIKE WHEN YOU TRY TO BURN THINGS

Fortunately none of us caught pneumonia from th-a-aa-choo!

no pneumonia, but we didn't get to see what was in store for us via the dioramas because of you.

Was my guess right, Pang? if so, can you post the descriptions of the rest of the dioramas? I'm curious as to how you messed with the rest of the adventures.

All In The Same Boat depicted Scary Bob as a pirate captain, having mutinied and seized the Rosy Dawn for himself and his loyal crew of dwarven "cabin boys".

Delicious and Moist was just a satisfied orc with a full belly.

Secret Cow Level was a window onto a brutal future where Doorman's proletarian uprising was much more successful. Doorman easily subjugates the Seven-Pillared Hall and in time establishes a "Dictatorship of the People" over the entire Sea of Fallen Stars region.

Magnum Innominandum depicted events precisely as they actually happened, except that literally everyone in the diorama is wearing big floppy clown shoes — even the roc.

Small favor to ask of you all (both the current players and the peanut gallery): as Zerg noticed a while back I've been working on retooling the wiki sheets a little bit, making them a little bit more efficient. I've started with Gra-fa-zut since his had the least material to convert, and I've managed to crunch what was 13 vertical pages down to 5. Now, you'll notice the portrait, backgrounds, achievements, all that stuff is gone; that'll all be on a separate biography page for each character. Everything is in text now; not a single .png file on the page. Just heavy use of templates and tables.

Gra-fa-zut (Sheet)

Now, before I get to work converting everyone else's sheets over, I'm just looking for a little constructive criticism. What can I do to make these sheets more useful? Even if it's a small thing, throw it out there; it's easier to make the fixes now and use them going forward than to retroactively apply them to everything later.

I would put the check boxes on the page with the abilities listed. If it were me, I'd look down my powers list to see what's suitable then want to check to see if I'd used it yet without navigating away.

You might also want to list a "most used" combo or something since as the characters advance levels there's more scope for chaining together attacks (Wait till you see my minotaur build) and it's hard to remember what goes after what sometimes.

Looks very nice and clean, Pang. Text is good - lets you search for stuff. I guess I'll have to find a way to help you port over Cal's inventory list :tpg:

It would be nice to see the ability score modifiers listed, perhaps as a separate row or adjacent table. There are a few powers that use these modifiers (for example Cal's utilities). Not that it's that hard to memorize (2), but it'd be handy.

It will add to the text, but I think you may want to list racial or class features in a separate section. Some of them can be quite tricky to remember especially when split between feats and powers (Garrmondo's Combat Challenge skills list comes to mind).

And also, maybe a way to distinguish trained skills from untrained ones. I understand certain actions keyed to a skill can only be triggered if you have trained in it (Acrobatics to reduce falling damage, for example). I've indicated this by bolding and italicizing them, but you may have a better implementation.

Finally, will you just put temp HP in parenthesis just as you used to? Not that we have any way of getting them with the current party though.

As you would have seen on my own implementation, I prefer the Monster Manual 3 style of listing powers. Having Traits, Standard, Minor, and Immediate Actions listed helps me strategize better than having a listing of At-Will, Encounters, and Dailies (since we have to pick from a pool of different types of actions each turn). Of course, it's a matter of personal preference; go with whatever the group as a whole prefers.

As for the check mark, having one explicitly sort of ugly-fies the layout. How about putting a big "X" as cell background on the descriptions of used powers? Not sure if this is possible via mediawiki though.

First off, it looks really good. I like it. Let that be understood.

Now, I am running 1280x800, and I still get a bit of a table stretch. I'm not sure where you planning on checking off used powers, so I would suggest maybe instead a row of 3, have each section (at-wills, encounters, etc.) have two columns with a conspicuous checkmark box next to them, so it's easy to tell what's used and what isn't, unless you figure something more creative to fix the tables and such.

Also, a place for temporary HP in the health section, and a way to tell what items are stored inside of other items, ie. indentation.

About checkmarks; as Zerg says, they kind of break up the flow. Instead of the checkmarks what I was planning on was just using the cell text color as a usage indicator; if a power's unavailable its cell will be flooded with bright red. For example, this:

http://www.saxypunch.com/missile/evslash.png

when used, will look like

http://www.saxypunch.com/missile/evslashused.png

Which seems, if anything, more eyecatching than the difference between an empty box and a checked box. I didn't clarify at all how I intended to replace the checks when I put up the original request for critique, so that's on me.

Temporary HP doesn't come up very often anymore, and it seems to me like putting it in a separate field from normal HP will just lead to it being overlooked much of the time. I just assumed we'd continue using the parentheses for that, but if there's a strong demand for a separate field I won't say no.

Ability Mods and Trained Skill Highlights have been added to the example sheet. Most of these other suggestions are good but will take a little more time to implement — especially the width issue, which I really should have seen coming by fitting the sheets to my 1600w screen.

Also a link to the character's other page would be kewl.