Gencon and Brisbane, Campaign Law

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Recently returned from a solid four day's gaming and engaging in related seminars at Gencon Australia in Brisbane. Spent most of my time at various seminars and was impressed and amused by the various presentations by Tracy and Laura Hickman and the insightful comments by robin_d_laws. It was good to hear from other designers and their perspectives, including of course stephen_dedman along with quite a number of other Australian freelancers. Somewhere among all this managed to get a the opportunity to play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition which now bares very little resemblance to a roleplaying game in a systematic sense but rather is an very well designed single-unit wargame. Also managed to spend some time playing Feng Shui, watching movies, and visiting stalls.

The Con was also particularly good for caseopaya as there was a "Living With Diabetes" convention next door for the third and fourth day. The first day was a little surreal with the XXII World Poultry Expo next door with various delegate wandering around with little faux chickens attached to ID cards. Also whilst in Queensland went along to aromameet on Friday eve and spent time with the ever delightful drjon, one_bat and many others including Emily, the six-fingered librarian from Melbourne with turbercolosis (no really, I'm not making this up). On Sunday also caught up with doomydoombear before she moves to the UK.

Returning from the Con, discovered that the first draft for Campaign Law had been rejected by ICE who have decided that the much of the basic outline was wrong and out-of-date and much of the writing and material was not of high enough quality. I could agree more, although it has hit some of the other designers quite hard with at least three indicating they don't want to work on the project anymore. To me the only really annoying part is the time that has elapsed between submission of the first draft and this response (but I feel fairly confident it wasn't my writing or material they were referring to). So far I am the only one who has indicated that they wish to continue with development. Finally, I must also mention that my review of Mongoose's RuneQuest Deluxe has been published on rpg.net and apparently I've won a prize of some sort at said site for my review of Legend of the Five Rings.

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Tracy Hickman was in Australia?
Cool.
I still love the Dragonlance books for all their flaws.

[mikey-ob.livejournal.com]

I am eager to hear your views on 4th ed.

From my second hand explorations I think the only reason I will own 4th ed is for completeness of my D&D rules collections, although I wouldn't mind playing dungeon through as a once off, just to try.

From what I have seen so far - the Penny Arcade podcast and other reviews - I tend agree with your description of the rules set presenting a tight single unit tactical wargame. I do love my wargames and euros, I play them more than RPG's these days. If I want to play single unit fantastic themed battles, I may as well play Descent, which already does an excellent job, has a campaign mode, and it already comes with all the miniatures.

There was a long thread on BGG discussing classifying 4th ed as a board game.

[grailchaser.livejournal.com]

ICE's Campaign Law???

They're rewriting it again?

Tell me more! What does it take to get involved?

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Thanks for those helpful reviews of RQ and L5R: exactly what I needed to know. And ...

bares very little resemblance to a roleplaying game in a systematic sense but rather is an very well designed single-unit wargame

Bingo. Those are exactly the words I've been looking for.

(Though I have to admit, it's pretty crafty how the game makes CHA a useful attribute in combat.)

[aurickandrien.livejournal.com]

I'm not really sure about fourth edition. It may be a great game, but in the end I think that it's a bigger jump in some of the mechanics than it was from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition, and I think that flavourwise they've changed a number of things in their implicit setting that as far as I can see have always been a part of Dungeons & Dragons*.

Good luck with the second draft of Campaign Law!


*Please note that I haven't properly played with the basic boxed sets and with 1st Ed though I have at least browsed through them.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Bad luck with the first draft, good luck with the next. Persistence pays off in the end :-).

Narrow-focused question, here

[wylde-writer.livejournal.com]

Re the new D&D version: you liken it to good single unit wargame. Yet supposedly overall it serves the purpose of narrative gaming as well. I understand that transplanting its encounter dynamics more thoroughly unto a wargaming grid (essentially) makes it look and play more like a wargame, but do you think this will cause it to lose its narrative gameability? I.e., do you think the one attribute excludes the other?

~W~