Seems that Cubical 7 had to pull The One Ring PDF's from RPGNow due to request of The Tolkien Estate. Follow the link for a break down of the interview.
Sedulia's Translations: Christopher Tolkien interviewed by Le Monde
Games, General Geekery, and what knots found on the web
Friday, August 3, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
D&D Next Q&A
Will there be rules or guidelines for smaller or larger groups? 1 DM and 1 Player? Groups of 10 or more?Our plan is to have our DM’s guidelines on designing adventures cover any possible spread of characters and character levels. Since our idea of adventure design is largely based on the characters’ abilities and how much punishment they can take, the DM should be able to simply take the level of each player character and the number of characters in the party, reference our adventure design rules, and come up with an appropriate adventure challenge. This also handles having players at different levels, so that groups that like having players at different levels can do so without worrying about the adventure balance.
That’s obviously just the basic adventure balance. There are certainly social issues that arise from having 10 players in a game (time between turns, ability to get spotlight time, etc.) that no amount of mechanical design can help with, but there have been many volumes of DM advice written in the past to cover such things.
Will NPC villains in D&D Next be "built" like player characters, with classes and specialties, or will they be "built" more like monsters?
How will you define the "adventuring day?"
The conceptual definition is, “The quantity and relative danger of hazardous challenges that a character can handle between long rests.” The more practical definition is that it’s the amount of XP worth of monsters, traps, exploration hazards, and other things that players can overcome in between long rests. The long rest—a.k.a. sleeping overnight—is our “reset button” for player abilities. In order to help the DM design adventures, we provide guidelines for filling the time between long rests with challenges that are appropriate for the characters’ levels, based on the resources we have given to those players. This is expressed in the form of an amount of XP. Since most hazards and monsters should have an XP value associated with them, the DM can simply populate the adventure with that many XP worth of challenges and feel secure that the adventure is balanced so as to provide a challenge for the players. Of course, we also provide guidelines for running adventures that are easier or harder than our expected middle ground, allowing the DM to tweak accordingly.
It can also work the other way around; if the DM wants to design the adventure first, populate a dungeon with monsters as he feels appropriate with no regard for balance, the DM can then compare his or her creation to our expected guidelines to get an idea of where the break points in the adventure will come in. This can help prepare the DM for how the adventure should play out, and can also provide suggestions for places where the DM may want to include safe places to rest in the middle of the adventure, based on those break points.
The Wizards Community > DnD Next > Blog > D&D Next Q&A
That’s obviously just the basic adventure balance. There are certainly social issues that arise from having 10 players in a game (time between turns, ability to get spotlight time, etc.) that no amount of mechanical design can help with, but there have been many volumes of DM advice written in the past to cover such things.
Will NPC villains in D&D Next be "built" like player characters, with classes and specialties, or will they be "built" more like monsters? Ideally, both—or rather, whichever way the DM wants to do it. We have certain expectations for what average monsters of various challenge levels should look like, and building an enemy NPC to those specifications should work just fine. The guidelines for designing monsters should work the same way when designing enemy NPCs. That way, the DM that wants to design NPCs quickly or the DM who just wants to provide them with a few iconic abilities can do so without having to go through a more involved process.
However, we know that there are DMs that enjoy having their NPC villains built just like player characters. In those cases, what we’ll likely do is allow the DM to build the NPC, then provide guidelines for comparing the end result of that character creation system to our expected values in the monster design system, then derive the NPC’s XP value from that. Regardless of how the NPC is built, the important thing is how tough and deadly the NPC is in play, and our XP system should be able to take whatever the numbers are—no matter how you built the NPC—and help you determine the appropriate XP value. Building a highly dangerous NPC is no different from building a highly dangerous monster, and how the DM gets to the statistics should be a matter of personal preference.
How will you define the "adventuring day?" The conceptual definition is, “The quantity and relative danger of hazardous challenges that a character can handle between long rests.” The more practical definition is that it’s the amount of XP worth of monsters, traps, exploration hazards, and other things that players can overcome in between long rests. The long rest—a.k.a. sleeping overnight—is our “reset button” for player abilities. In order to help the DM design adventures, we provide guidelines for filling the time between long rests with challenges that are appropriate for the characters’ levels, based on the resources we have given to those players. This is expressed in the form of an amount of XP. Since most hazards and monsters should have an XP value associated with them, the DM can simply populate the adventure with that many XP worth of challenges and feel secure that the adventure is balanced so as to provide a challenge for the players. Of course, we also provide guidelines for running adventures that are easier or harder than our expected middle ground, allowing the DM to tweak accordingly.
It can also work the other way around; if the DM wants to design the adventure first, populate a dungeon with monsters as he feels appropriate with no regard for balance, the DM can then compare his or her creation to our expected guidelines to get an idea of where the break points in the adventure will come in. This can help prepare the DM for how the adventure should play out, and can also provide suggestions for places where the DM may want to include safe places to rest in the middle of the adventure, based on those break points.
The Wizards Community > DnD Next > Blog > D&D Next Q&A
Medieval Cities of Europe: Click, Tweet, Map, and Present
Medieval Cities of Europe: Click, Tweet, Map, and Present
By Kathryn Reyerson, Kevin Mummey, and Jude Higdon
The History Teacher, Volume 44:3 (2011)
Introduction: During sping semester 2010, a long-standing upper-division lecture course, Medieval Cities of Europe, 500-1500 CE, underwent a course transformation. Our goal was to address specific challenges with student engagement that we had experienced in the course in the past; our overarching strategy was to introduce technology into the course to allow students additional opportunities to engage with the material and get feedback. This course had been taught since the late 1970s to student audiences of between 40 and 60, but in the last decade, the course began to attract greater numbers of students, over 80 in some cases. The course format was the traditional lecture without discussion sections or small group exercises, taught with an instructor and a reader/grader. Because of the numbers of students and the increased enthusiasm for alternative learning opportunities through technology in the classroom, the instructor applied for a Course Transformation Grant sponsored by the Offices of information Technology in the College of Liberal Arts and the Digital Media Center at the university of Minnesota. The instructor, along with a graduate student who would be the reader/grader, an undergraduate, and two educational technology consultants, worked as a team for nine months to produce a plan to transform the course. The course transformation included a small budget for technology support, but obviously precluded any major investment in software or “Hollywood-like” multimedia development. The course transformation team looked instead for simple, existing technologies to facilitate transformative learning experiences in the classroom.
The transformation was intended to create more opportunities for active learning, increasing student engagement in the course lectures and in the subject matter of medieval cities. A particular goal was to limit “lights out, heads down” disengagement and distraction during in-class films. One of our goals was to provide students with new ways to master the core course concepts, such as the reality of the negotiated topography of medieval spaces, and we were interested, to the degree possible, in increasing the efficiency of the course and reducing the administrative overhead.
Medieval Cities of Europe: Click, Tweet, Map, and Present
By Kathryn Reyerson, Kevin Mummey, and Jude Higdon
The History Teacher, Volume 44:3 (2011)
Introduction: During sping semester 2010, a long-standing upper-division lecture course, Medieval Cities of Europe, 500-1500 CE, underwent a course transformation. Our goal was to address specific challenges with student engagement that we had experienced in the course in the past; our overarching strategy was to introduce technology into the course to allow students additional opportunities to engage with the material and get feedback. This course had been taught since the late 1970s to student audiences of between 40 and 60, but in the last decade, the course began to attract greater numbers of students, over 80 in some cases. The course format was the traditional lecture without discussion sections or small group exercises, taught with an instructor and a reader/grader. Because of the numbers of students and the increased enthusiasm for alternative learning opportunities through technology in the classroom, the instructor applied for a Course Transformation Grant sponsored by the Offices of information Technology in the College of Liberal Arts and the Digital Media Center at the university of Minnesota. The instructor, along with a graduate student who would be the reader/grader, an undergraduate, and two educational technology consultants, worked as a team for nine months to produce a plan to transform the course. The course transformation included a small budget for technology support, but obviously precluded any major investment in software or “Hollywood-like” multimedia development. The course transformation team looked instead for simple, existing technologies to facilitate transformative learning experiences in the classroom.
The transformation was intended to create more opportunities for active learning, increasing student engagement in the course lectures and in the subject matter of medieval cities. A particular goal was to limit “lights out, heads down” disengagement and distraction during in-class films. One of our goals was to provide students with new ways to master the core course concepts, such as the reality of the negotiated topography of medieval spaces, and we were interested, to the degree possible, in increasing the efficiency of the course and reducing the administrative overhead.
Medieval Cities of Europe: Click, Tweet, Map, and Present
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Adam Savage’s Blade Runner Blaster Pistol : Discovery Channel
Adam Savage recording from his workshop/man cave with Will Smith of www.tested.com
Adam Savage’s Blade Runner Blaster Pistol : Discovery Channel
Adam Savage’s Blade Runner Blaster Pistol : Discovery Channel
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