As some of you probably know, I'm not super happy with our current content host for our shows, podshow.com (now mevio.com). I have found a new place to host our shows and I'm very excited about it. The great people at blip.tv have been so helpful. They even helped me move all of the content over, so that we would not have to upload everything all over again. It's going to take some work for me to integrate it into the site, but in the meantime I was thinking that I would give you a sneak peak. They have a web media player that is just amazing. Please take a look, watch a few episodes and see what you think.
After six long weeks, we are back with a new Obsessed Gamer News. Gary is getting healthy and we are proud of what is probably the best episode we have ever done. This is the official start of season 2, so you'll see some things that are different then normal. It's also a bit longer than normal, but we tried to cover our favorite news from the past six weeks as quick as we could!
A bit over a week ago, I ran a 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons session using their pre-made adventure (pre-made hack and slash action-thon). I had said that I would talk about my opinions after playing 4th edition, but was intending to wait until we had played at least one more time. In my world, D&D never seems to catch on. After just one session, two of the players said that it was very fun but they did not have the time to play again. Well, without them, we really don't have enough players. I'm going to look to add more people to the party but I just don't have that many friends that are the appropriate type of nerd. So, since this might be my only experience with fourth edition, I should share what I thought.
Overall, I think it's great. I enjoyed it quite a bit more than I did in 3.5, 3.0 or even 2nd edition. For me, the problem that D&D ran into was that the mechanics of combat were simple to learn, yet boring and way too focused on ease of learning. If you were playing a magic user of some type you would have a certain number of spells that you memorized and when you get to use them, that part of the combat will be interesting. If you were a melee character, then things were rougher as you basically rolled a D20 each turn, and that's the extent of your options, for the most part. I preferred other RPGs because I liked their background or combat system better but they never caught on with my friends because they were not D&D.
In my ever so humble opinion, I would say that the combat is fantastically better in fourth edition. Everyone has a slew of special abilities and they need to decide the best time to use them. Some of them they can use every turn if they want, others they can use once per combat, and the most powerful yet can only be used once per day. I especially like that the fighter now has three separate attacks that are able to be used as often as he wants. That means that instead of attacking, he needs to decide which attack will serve him best in that situation. That level of tactics and thinking adds a lot to the combat in my opinion.
A lot of the criticism of the game is that they left out a lot of rules that used to be in the game for when you were not in combat. This did not effect me much, whereas I liked to have a complicated and interesting plot with lots of actual role playing, I rarely used the rules in such situations. That's just my style. Basically, when I buy a roleplaying game, I'm looking for a set of character sheet/leveling rules and a set of combat rules. That's all I really want.
Now, I think their adventure is not that great at all. Whereas I loved playing 4th edition D&D, the pre-made adventure left a lot to be desired. There was a very small amount of plot or things for the players to do outside of combat. Basically, we just did combat over and over again all day and it began to wear on people (of course, we did play for 8 hours).
One major failing in the adventure came at the end of our day. Everyone was still level 1 and I was reading the next combat that said something about how your players should reach level two after it, so the party rushed into the combat. I had to work really hard at not killing them. The combat was WAY over powered. I would say that it was ridiculous to imagine a group of 5 level one players having any hope of surviving. As this was our first adventure and killing off the party was not really what I had in mind, I had an NPC I was about to work into the story, come in to heal some people. During the combat, we called him deus ex machina man.
I hope I get a chance to play again, but I do think that Wizards did a good job.
