You’re most welcome to say it - you just can’t have it!
The teacher was ignorant. :rolleyes: He also taught music and focused on making us learn the birth and death dates of of classical composers, instead of playing and appreciating music.
It’s an English Public School (which for our US posters means it’s a private fee-paying school.)
We have entrance exams and give scholarships, so our kids are above average.
We were the first, but there are now two other English Schools with full-time chess teachers.
P.S. The first adventure I ever played was called ‘The Village of Hommlet’. I liked it so much I still use it today to introduce my pupils to the game.
Now there’s a book and even a computer game.
I’m a big fan, although I haven’t actually played a game of 4th Edition yet (I’ve DMed but not played). 3rd and 3.5 are pretty great IMO: they rationalize a lot of stuff that was pretty poorly thought out in 2E and 1E. The downside of 3rd and 3.5 is that it’s written a bit like an object-oriented computer language: all sorts of things have attributes that affect other things, and it can get incredibly complex. By the end of our 3E/3.5E campaign that lasted 3 years and went from levels 1-20, my druid character consisted of three different spreadsheets (basic character, shapeshifting, shapeshifting with animal growth, I believe) and a 40-page word document (listing summon nature’s ally creatures with augment summoning stats applied). If I spent a combat round listening to what other players were doing instead of crossreferencing my own action, I’d take forever when it got to my turn. I don’t miss that aspect of 3rd edition.
Fourth edition, in my limited experience, is greatly simplified. We ended up putting player powers on color-coded cards, and players could slap down the power they wanted to use while describing, in as colorful terms as they liked, what they were doing. It made combat go much quicker (although I can’t vouch for what it’s like at higher levels, where 3E got so cumbersome). My problem with 4E is that there’s not much interesting stuff to do that’s noncombat. I really liked, as a druid, being able to scout or track or do other things that weren’t necessarily frontline fighting (which for some reason I was always terrible at; every time I tried I had to flee within a round or two or be knocked unconscious).
In December I had a daughter, and in January so did another two gamer friend teachers, and in February so did another gamer friend teacher. This summer I’m thinking of running a group I’ll call Dungeons and Daughters.
Druid’s probably the worst class, in that regard, though: You’re not only changing your form on a regular basis, but few classes other than druids regularly summon monsters, either. Most druid players just pick three or four animal forms they like to wildshape into, and a handful of Summon Nature’s Ally critters. Even if you don’t pick the absolutely perfect creature for every possible situation, you’ll still probably be able to get a pretty good one.
I suppose wizards can get pretty unruly, too, with their spellbooks, but most of that is deciding which spells will make it onto the relatively short list that you prepare on any given day, and that decision can be made in between adventures, not when everyone is waiting for you to take your turn in combat.
Druids definitely are the worst: compare that to the party’s barbarian, who had to choose whether to rage and by how much to power attack, and pretty much otherwise just chopped people up.
Part of the problem is my play style, which is that I like to be doing different things in combat whenever possible: my ideal is for each combat to be memorable for something funky that happens. I loved things like being a natural-spell-flinging eagle throwing flamestrikes at kuo-toa, and then when they retreated to the water diving after them shifting into a dire shark just before hitting the water. But yeah, I ended up using a couple of forms (e.g., eagle) more than others, definitely.
Although, with the right group, even Barbs can be pretty funky. The Barbarian I played a couple years ago, by the end of the campaign, had the following options just for lethal damage:
Spit fire, spit acid, rage, shoot with leg-musket (dwarf-made prosthetic, after losing a leg in battle), gut with foot claw (ditto), punch (enchanted gauntlets), body slam/tackle (spiked armour), bear hug of doom (ditto, plus 22 base strength), Enlarge, smack with enchanted Orcish double axe or enchanted dragon-bone club…Power Attack, get shot at the enemy (only managed that ONCE, sadly)… (Obviously, this was a high powered game.)
When Enlarged and Raging, he was truly fearsome - not least due to the fact that he could eat the massive damage he obviously took due to the hit to his AC, and the fact he was wading into the worst of the battle. A 15 foot tall, 2 ton, blood-spattered, spiked, acid spewing, fire breathing orc, shrugging off cannon-fire, and happily reducing any living thing that gets near him to a fine paste…
We’re using a mix of 1st and 2nd I think – My friends and I who played in the 70s and 80s, plus three of their kids, started a game this year after not having played for about 20 years (except the kids of course). I couldn’t find my 2nd Ed books and I’m the GM so I used 1st Ed spells, but I’ll defer to a 2nd ed rule if the consensus is that it’s better.
In the old days we actually had created our own version with a complete book of C and MU spells and some character classes we made up, and some structural changes on things like saving throws. We were among the first crop of players when there were no books except that blue softbound booklet and a couple of greyhawk booklets, so we were making it up as went along anyway. Frankly, we came up with a better system than what TSR devised. But eventually we learned the 2nd edition rules and played that way for a while.
Nah. In my case, I find it actually increases roleplaying, by making it easier in combat - when I’m playing a character with few combat options, I tend to just zone during combat ‘yeah, I do the same thing I did last round’ roll…when I have a lot, I have more in-character chatter, and describe what I’m doing in more detail. My current character, a mind controlling wizard, whose spells are sung, for instance, usually gets a description of what she’s singing to cast a given spell - until she gets hold of a subject’s mind, in which case, it’s just issuing commands. Which might be roleplayed, or might just be ‘I make him sit down’, or ‘I turn him toward the rest of the baddies’.
I really enjoy playing in such a way that describing something exciting has some effect on gameplay (see example about changing from hawk to shark to pursue an enemy). The old edition didn’t really have a lot of options for changing the game via exciting descriptions: no matter what you described, it usually came down to hitting someone with a sword or spell. 3rd and 4th give more options for having interesting descriptions affect gameplay: you can sunder items, grab them, grapple, trip, bull rush, etc. This is also what makes it so complicated sometimes that you need a spreadsheet to figure things out. It’s a tradeoff.
