Socializing

I've been so busy with things that I'm almost never home. I intentionally did this to avoid being lonely in the first few weeks after moving into my new place. I think I'm getting to the point that I need to have some Me-time. At least, more than the 1 hour I have after coming home and just before going to bed.

More Japanese Dungeons and Dragons

Here is a link to the Japanese D&D homepage. One thing that piqued my interest were images of the characters used in their 4E D&D game that would later be published as replays. I'd post their stats but at the moment I can't get a good translation:

Gray, Tiefling Rogue (Player: Kotomi Hashido, illustrator)



Ralph Ward, Human Warlord (Player: Ukyo Kodachi, writer)



Zanadin, Dragonborn Ranger (Player: Naka Amada, writer)



Aura, Eladrin Breast-pact Warlock.. Oops! I mean Fey-pact Warlock (Player: Asako, editor)



Dolin, Dwarf Fighter (Player: Katsura, translator or husband of the translator.. My Google translator is very unclear on this)



This is what I wanted to see when I saw the 3.5 PH from Japan.

Japanese and Dungeons and Dragons

I've always been interested in the Japanese culture ever since I traveled there as a child. They always had the best toys and the best cartoons. As I grew up my love for Japanese entertainment rekindled with anime, manga, and Godzilla. I was there buying Ranma 1/2 BHS tapes before being into anime was "cool."

As a table-top gamer Japan's RPGs always fascinated me (called table-talk role playing games, or ttrpg over there). I've always wanted to see their games with their own rules and see their versions of games like Dungeons and Dragons. When I met and GMed for a group of Japanese players I got a little peek into their world. Here are some of the things I noticed:

1. The Japanese players I met were very team-oriented. More so than the groups I gamed with at the time (really, it's no surprise.).
2. Their 3.5 D&D rulebooks are identical to ours. Same covers, art and everything. I was disappointed by this. I wanted to see manga art with Japanese sensibilities throughout the book. There was none.
3. Lots of barbarian love. The group consisted of Minni (halfling barbarian/fighter), Claud (human barbarian/cleric of Kord), Sakura (human barbarian/fighter), Vance (human mage), Ederic (human cleric). I asked about this and I was told that the barbarians were totally new to Japanese culture. It's just like our culture and how for a while EVERYTHING was a ninja.
4. The Japanese players did not role-play... Much.
5. Sakura blew my mind. I pictured everyone playing things straight out of Core with a very no-nonsense attitude about the game. Sakura was Sakura from Street Fighter. She dressed as a school girl and her weapons were battle yo-yo's that used the blade dagger stats. I love that kind of stuff (personally I would have requested she have a different name so that she was not a total copy of the character, just 99% of a copy).

I won't comment on my game other than my usual whining: My friend told me the evening before that I was GMing for them and that he wanted me to write my own game.. And that it had to involve saving his PC.. And only half the group could speak English.

In the end it was a LOT of fun and I was honored to run the game.

I even left them with a legacy: I gave the halfling ftr/brb a dagger that could be used in the shadow of the target to act as a Hold Monster spell (ripped from the Slayer's Shadow Snap spell). She later used it to save the group by stopping the bad guy and allowing the group to escape from a collapsing tunnel.

I found the website to the group: The A.D.D.A. Homepage

Since I can not speak nor read Japanese I had Google translate the site. It's pretty featureless but it has info on their campaigns. They play 3.5 ed on the Grayhawk world. There is a message board of some sort but I don't know how to access it.

End of an Era

I'm coming to the end of my longest-running campaign EVAAARRRR. It was my first D&D4e campaign, but I cheated: I didn't write most of the adventures. I went into the campaign with a single large story arc in mind - destroy the Nightmare Child. That took longer than I thought and the story arc encompassed the Scepter Tower adventure and about 3 months of real-life play. After that I floundered quite I showed the players a map and asked them "Where do you want to go?" Unfortunately they would discuss where they wanted to go at the end of one session than often change their mind at the start of the next session. I was far from innocent in this.

All in all it was an interesting experiment. If I do it again, I'll try to either
A: Have multiple adventure ideas, let the players pick one and then work on fleshing it out.
B: Demand that the players make a decision at the end of the session and NOT allow them to change the decision after that. I know my group would have been fine with this. Most have GMed at some time so they know what it's like.

Once the experiment was over I said "Forget this nonsense!" and started to run [b]Revenge of the Giants[/b]. I let the players know this was coming up before hand. Normally I would not say anything but I decided to let them let me steer them in that direction.

I actually miss creating my own worlds and writing my own adventures. All the people who keep asking me to GM again are the ones who played through my own creation. It's a nice ego boost and I really need to go back to doing that again.

All in all I get to be a player again. I both love and dread being a player. It's less pressure per week, but I get very creatively frustrated. Fortunately I have another project I'm working on and I can funnel that creative energy into that.

Reset

I hit the reset button on my blog. Most of the story posts were posted on the sites they were written for, and other posts were so laughably old that everything they referred to came and went.