Actions and action points

Remember when you used to play a cleric and you had a chance to finish the big bad guy but you didn't because if you did Bob the Fighter would have died from his wounds. So you cast your heal on Bob and forgo your attack for the round. The next round Bob smashes the bag guy, grabbing the glory as you mutter quietly to yourself.

Actions in the fourth edition make it possible for you to avoid this kind of situation. First each character can use three (3) actions* during their turn. A move action, and minor action and a standard action. So how can you and Bob keep Bob alive and slay the bad guy without the cleric giving up his shot at glory?

1. Bob can give up his standard action to heal himself with a healing surge (more on these another day).
2. Clerics can use certain healing abilities as a minor action so both you and Bob can both attack the bad guy.
3. You can attack the bad guy as a standard action and use an action point to heal the Fighter as a second standard action.

Action points are not really new to fourth edition but the coolness they add to the game can not be underestimated, allowing for heroic action sequences. Characters start with one action point and can earn them through game play. Don't hoard them though, when you rest you lose any unused action points and return to one action point.

So what kind of things can you do with an action?
A move action lets you move. Depending on where you start will determine how far you can move and whether or not you are going to give anyone an opportunity for a free attack.

A minor action lets you do all sorts of things. Drawing a weapon is a minor action, many at will abilities are minor actions. Healing Word for example is a minor action that allows you and one ally to both take a healing surge.

A standard action will let you make an attack use a skill and use many of the new abilities. The Clerical powers Turn Undead and Cure Light Wounds both use a standard action.

You can also take these action in whatever order you decide.

*There is also free actions, you can take as many free actions as the DM lets you take.

At Will abilities

Digging into the rules and I have found some things that I really like in the first day.

At will abilities are simply a great idea. I can not recall the number of times that as a mage or cleric I have been at the game table and cast my magic missile or cure minor wounds spell and found myself playing a background role for hte rest of the evening. The rarity of being able to cast that spell sometimes limited the mage and cleric to secondary roles as the action passed them by after they had used their daily power. Rogues and Fighters had abilities that you could use all the time. Fighters cutting into foes and Rogues sneaking about trying to catch an opponenet by surprise.

In the new rules evereybody gets at will abilities. So the Mage and Fighter can both bring a cool ability to bear each and every round.

That is all for today, tomorrow actions and action points.

Starblazer Adventures

The Starblazer Adventures RPG is now available for purchase as a PDF. This is the first RPG book that will list me in the credits. You can get some more information on the game at Cubicle 7.

You should go buy one or two (I don't get a cut of sales). You can get it at RPGNow.

Return of the blog...

Well its been almost a year since my last post. I really lost the passion for writing on my blog after my vacation last year.

However, after a long time off I am ready to start again. I picked up the new gift set of Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition and I am really excited about gaming again. I have a full table for a planned game.

I will be running the H1: Keep on the Shadowfell adventure as written and using only the core books. Once that adventure is done I might buy the Eberron campaign setting if the group is interested in the "steam punk" feel of the setting.

I'll post more as I get through the books and start the sessions.

Cool New Dice (now imageless!)

Edit: After fighting with blogger I have given up on getting the images to work. I'm going to go back to imageless posts until I can get a reliable way of displaying the images.

At Gen Con I picked up some new dice.

First I picked up a set of hand carved Fudge Dice at the Q-Workshop booth. They are pretty sweet looking. They have a few flaws (I got the last set) but they are still a really great set.

I also picked up a new Fudge GM set to use when I play Spirit of the Century. I know I am a little geeky about dice but I am super pleased with this set because the sets of fudge dice are all either left or right handed. The last Fudge GM set I purchased had a mixture of left and right handed dice in each set which drove me crazy. [editors note: I am seeking help.] The dice were also super cheap - about 25% less than I can get them locally.

Finally I picked up a World of Warcraft dice set. The dice are meant to be counters for the World of Warcraft card game. The container for the dice is a chest like you would find in the game. The set looks Great.

Gen Con 2007

Edit: Something is going wrong with the images so I have pulled them and I will republish with the pictures once I know what is going wrong.

Edit: Images fixed

I had the pleasure of going to Gen Con this year.

I was volunteering at the tNook booth but I managed to escape the booth and spend a good deal of time and money on the exhibition floor.

Some of my favorite places to visit:

The IPR (Indie Press Revolution) booth. I purchased both Spirit of the Century and The Burning Wheel. I got to speak with Greg Porter about EABA and I got to meet Ben Seth Ezra and ton of others.

I also got to meet a young lady named Julia. Julia Bond Ellingboe write a new game called "Steal Away Jordan". Based on slaves and slavery it is a well written and well done book from all I have been able to see. It might be a bit scary to actually play the game but discovering some of the scarier bits of a life of slavery might not be a bad thing for a middle aged white Canadian. I never got to play the game with Julia as I had hoped to but I hope that this one is a big success for her and that she keeps writing new games.

I also got to meet Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Lenny Balsera and each of them offered to run a demo of "Spirit of the Century" with me. My biggest regret of the Con was not playing with them. Maybe next year. Each were really great and were good enough to sign my new hard cover. Lenny even asked me to bear his children.



I also got to meet Luke Crane he was demoing Burning Wheel and I got to watch a demo and got to talk to him a bit about the game. He also signed my burning wheel.

I seemed to visit the IPR booth everyday except Sunday. Sunday was the UDE volenteer meeting - more on that in another post.

I also spent some time watching a demo of Fudge by Ann Dupuis. Ann has done more for FUDGE over the years than maybe any other publisher.

I also got to see a lot of pretty cool new toys. UDE had the next raid and expansion set on display. One of the biggest surprises is that the booster packs will go from 15 to 19 cards with the Legion expansion. The UDE booth had a quest challenge with 8 questions and if you were one of the top 50 to complete 5 of the 8 questions you got a Fires of Outland playmat. Since tNook had 5 of the 8 answers in the WoW card database so it was pretty easy for me to complete the quests.



UDE also has BIG plans for VS with the release of a Galactus deck that is designed to be battled like a raid deck in WoW. I am learning to play VS just so I can play against the Galactus decks.

Wizkids had a bunch of really cool things on display including the Halo Action Clix Scarab vehicle. They had the Fin Fang Foom again for sale and it is a really nice looking giant size piece. I can't wait to take a team against him to see if we can tame the dragon.

Blizzard had the new expansion available for people to try and it was almost always packed to the rafters in the Blizzard booth. I got to watch for a bit but did not get to play. They also had Starcraft II and it looks completely awesome. I wish my PC was even close to playing that game.
One surprise was a game called the continuum. I took a quick look at it but later on Sunday both myself and Troy went and got to play in a demo. It looks really cool. It is not a splashy game but the tactics and strategy of the game will keep me interested. I spent close to a half hour playing the demo and it was a lot of fun. I didn't know it at the time but the guy stepping me through the demo was the CEO of the company.

I think some of the most fun came in the tNook booth. After I had purchased Spirit of the Century I put it out on the table and several people stopped to talk about the game or ask about it. Especially after it had won an Ennie award. We got to meet a lot of really great people. Some people would stop by a second or third time to ask more questions or because they had an idea about something else. Now I am in contact with some of those same people as I build new tNooks, which is totally cool - more on that in another post too.

To cap off the weekend I me a young man named Alex at the Indianapolis airport. He had gotten several loot bags at Gen Con and each bag contained a World of Warcraft starter deck. Along with Troy I was able to teach him the basics of the game and coach him in a game against Troy. I hope Alex keeps playing and had as much fun as I did.

The Con really sparked in me a new desire to roleplay on a regular basis again so I hope to have an online game of Spirit of the Century or Burning Wheel up and running in the near future as time allows.

"Gatecrasher" and "Believe It Or Else"

For some reason I missed the part about the recent transfer/sale of Seraphim Guard that said that Gatecrasher reverts to Richard Gazely. I am curious what will become of these games. I really liked the mix of fantasy and technology presented by these games.

I never quite liked the slapstick nature of the setting (I liked the humor but I would rather it be a bit more muted than the books portrayed) but playing the game serious or with a comedic flavor could be done.

There were some things about the setting I really liked:
1. Magic and Technology together.
2. The back stories were great.
3. The humor - Church of the Game and all.

There were some things about the game that I didn't like:
1. It is the crunchiest Fudge game I have ever seen.
2. More technology means less magic and vice versa.

I just grabbed the books from my bookshelf and I am going to re-read them as soon as I am finished reading through "Spirit of the Century".