This is supplemental homebrew material for the 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons psionics rules. The rules for this game can be found online at http://www.d20srd.org/index.htm.
The purpose of this essay was to address some key issues with the existing psionics rules. Namely, "what balances psions for not having to use somatic components and spellbooks?" and "what happens when a psicrystal is destroyed?"
Focus Stones
A focus stone is the locus of a psion's powers, a channel that projects the raw power he wields without damaging his mind and body. Most focus stones are smooth crystals the size of a nut. A psion can only manifest powers if he is touching a focus stone that he has attuned to. Becoming attuned to a focus stone takes 1 hour of meditation. Level 1 psions, psychic warriors, and wilders begin their careers with a free focus stone, usually as a gift from whoever trained them.
A focus stone must have line of effect to work, if a psion's focus stone is covered by clothing or armor, the psion can only manifest powers that target himself. Psionic feats and class features do not require a focus stone to use. Therefore, a soulknife does not require a focus stone.
If another character forcibly covers a psion's focus stone to block line of effect (for example, with a successful opposed grapple check) the psion may manifest powers on himself or that character.
Creating a focus stone requires 24 hours of meditation and a crystal or gem worth at least 1,000 gp per manifester level. The psion's focus stone becomes more flawless and grows as the psion gains levels, which is why its market price increases. If a focus stone is lost or destroyed, the psion must attune to a new one to manifest any powers.
If a focus stone is destroyed but the psion recovers the majority of its pieces, he can reassemble it for half the normal cost (fusing similar crystals into it to repair the damage.)
Because focus stones are so valuable, most psionic disciplines have their students' focus stones surgically implated under the skin, but not deep enough to prevent line of effect. Surgically removing or implanting a psion's focus stone is an application of the Heal skill, dealing 1d8 damage (or 1d3 damage with a DC 15 Heal check.) An implanted focus stone cannot be sundered or stolen, but can still be covered to block line of effect.
Other psionic disciplines have focus stones built into weapons or armor, worn as a diadem, swen into a glove, set into a bracelet or choker welded onto the psion's body, or in another manner. A player whose character is a psion may want to specify how he and those of his discipline use focus stones.
A psion may have any number of focus stones, but each must be created seperately. Only one focus stone may be attuned to the psion at a time. A focus stone that is not attuned does not grow with the psion, if a psion uses a weaker focus stone his manifester level is reduced to the level of that focus stone. A weak focus stone may be improved by fusing crystals into it to make up the price difference, and it will catch up at a rate of two manifester levels per level gained.
A psion may intentionally make a weak focus stone. This may be the only option of the psion does not have enough money to replace or fully repair his focus stone. A psion gains no benefit for using a focus stone whose manifester level is higher than his own, and such a focus stone does not grow until the psion reaches its manifester level.
Psicrystals
A psicrystal is merely a specialized type of focus stone. Many psions use their psicrystal as a backup focus stone. The first time a psion takes the Psicrystal Affinity feat, he can split his current focus stone into a focus stone and a psicrystal for no cost. To create a new psicrystal, a psion must take an attuned focus stone and spend 24 hours meditating with it. A psion may be simultaneously attuned to both his own focus stone and psicrystal.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Real
This short story was published October 11th on 365 Tomorrows, a science fiction website.
The neat thing about 365 Tomorrows is that they publish a short story every day, and have a 600 word count limit. Keeping a coherent story under 600 words is HARD.
The basic concept for the story is augmented reality, which is a fledgeling technology which I'm sure is going to make the Internet a whole lot cooler...
“Plip-plip!” beeped the lenses. Blue jumped up and ran to the bathroom to dry his hair, then stepped back into the living room and pressed his lenses to the bridge of his nose. Glowing green letters reading, “CONNECTING...” seemed to hover in the middle of the room for half a second.
“Blue! How was your day?” A few posters popped onto the walls, followed by a bed, a desk, a high-def console on the opposite wall slightly intersecting Blue's musty couch. He waited for the rest of the room to load, and then Spaz appeared, lying lazily on her bed. She was wearing a more simple t-shirt today, plain and peach-colored.
“Alright, Spaz. You know, you should clean your room,” he said, squinting at the dirty laundry. “My console took a good fifteen seconds to load all your socks.”
They both laughed. “You've already been my boyfriend for a year, you should be used to this by now.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about that...”
Spaz jumped off of her bed and walked across the room to Blue. “Uh, 'scuse me, closet.” She stepped around him, and walked through his couch and the wall. “We've gotta finish Quest of the Dragon-Tiger, Marissa wants to borrow it.”
Blue stared awkwardly at his dingy, peeling apartment wall. “Look, Spaz, I was wondering if, uh, you know, I could come visit you sometime.”
Spaz leaned out of the wall with a few games in her hand. “What?”
“You know, like in real life. In person.”
She laughed. “Now why would you want to do that? If you'd just quit being so cheap and bought some decent VR equipment, you wouldn't have to. The new models are like you're wearing nothing at all.”
She teased Blue with a quick kiss on the cheek before pushing right through him to sit down on her bed. He couldn't feel it of course.
“But I just want it to feel real.”
“Ah, well, you could always go rent some time at a V-lounge.”
“No, Spaz! I mean really real. This whole time, we've never met each other. It feels so strange, but it's like this relationship isn't... I want us to have something that's going to last, something more substantial.”
“What, you want us to have a kid?”
“No! I mean yes, but not now! I'm not like a seventy-something year old having a midlife crisis. I...”
“Okay, Blue. Spit it out. What do you want to tell me?”
He sighed as he felt his cheeks turn flush. “I... I was walking home through the rain today, and thought, 'this is the most real thing that's happened to me this week.' It made me sad, I don't want the cold and wet to feel more real than you.”
Spaz grinned, and leaned forward with interest. Her shirt had changed colors as they talked, it was red now. “Go on.”
“See, I haven't bought a VR suit or new games because I've been saving up money for...” Blue took a small box out of his pocket. “See, I got you this...”
Blue knelt down so that he was at eye level with Spaz, and opened the box.
“Blue, is that... gzz... you... bzz... ring...”
Spaz froze, purple and yellow cubes popped in the air around her. Socks started jumping around. Then everything in the room disappeared, and “CONNECTION LOST” flashed in front of Spaz's eyes in foot-tall green letters.
“Dammit!”
The neat thing about 365 Tomorrows is that they publish a short story every day, and have a 600 word count limit. Keeping a coherent story under 600 words is HARD.
The basic concept for the story is augmented reality, which is a fledgeling technology which I'm sure is going to make the Internet a whole lot cooler...
“Plip-plip!” beeped the lenses. Blue jumped up and ran to the bathroom to dry his hair, then stepped back into the living room and pressed his lenses to the bridge of his nose. Glowing green letters reading, “CONNECTING...” seemed to hover in the middle of the room for half a second.
“Blue! How was your day?” A few posters popped onto the walls, followed by a bed, a desk, a high-def console on the opposite wall slightly intersecting Blue's musty couch. He waited for the rest of the room to load, and then Spaz appeared, lying lazily on her bed. She was wearing a more simple t-shirt today, plain and peach-colored.
“Alright, Spaz. You know, you should clean your room,” he said, squinting at the dirty laundry. “My console took a good fifteen seconds to load all your socks.”
They both laughed. “You've already been my boyfriend for a year, you should be used to this by now.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about that...”
Spaz jumped off of her bed and walked across the room to Blue. “Uh, 'scuse me, closet.” She stepped around him, and walked through his couch and the wall. “We've gotta finish Quest of the Dragon-Tiger, Marissa wants to borrow it.”
Blue stared awkwardly at his dingy, peeling apartment wall. “Look, Spaz, I was wondering if, uh, you know, I could come visit you sometime.”
Spaz leaned out of the wall with a few games in her hand. “What?”
“You know, like in real life. In person.”
She laughed. “Now why would you want to do that? If you'd just quit being so cheap and bought some decent VR equipment, you wouldn't have to. The new models are like you're wearing nothing at all.”
She teased Blue with a quick kiss on the cheek before pushing right through him to sit down on her bed. He couldn't feel it of course.
“But I just want it to feel real.”
“Ah, well, you could always go rent some time at a V-lounge.”
“No, Spaz! I mean really real. This whole time, we've never met each other. It feels so strange, but it's like this relationship isn't... I want us to have something that's going to last, something more substantial.”
“What, you want us to have a kid?”
“No! I mean yes, but not now! I'm not like a seventy-something year old having a midlife crisis. I...”
“Okay, Blue. Spit it out. What do you want to tell me?”
He sighed as he felt his cheeks turn flush. “I... I was walking home through the rain today, and thought, 'this is the most real thing that's happened to me this week.' It made me sad, I don't want the cold and wet to feel more real than you.”
Spaz grinned, and leaned forward with interest. Her shirt had changed colors as they talked, it was red now. “Go on.”
“See, I haven't bought a VR suit or new games because I've been saving up money for...” Blue took a small box out of his pocket. “See, I got you this...”
Blue knelt down so that he was at eye level with Spaz, and opened the box.
“Blue, is that... gzz... you... bzz... ring...”
Spaz froze, purple and yellow cubes popped in the air around her. Socks started jumping around. Then everything in the room disappeared, and “CONNECTION LOST” flashed in front of Spaz's eyes in foot-tall green letters.
“Dammit!”
Friday, June 25, 2010
Save The X: how to GM a fun role-playing game
I've been running Dungeons & Dragons games for about 10 years now, and I have to admit that most of my experience has come through trial-and-error. I am not going to lie and say that I was always a good at running games, I have had all of the players get up and leave in the middle of games because I sucked so bad as a GM.
The problem was simple: nobody was having fun. We were going through the motions, having a dungeon crawl, and nobody really wanted to do it because there was no reason to do it. I was baffled at how nobody could be excited while playing an awesome game involving magic swords and mystical sorcery.
Of course, I refused to give up. I learned from my mistakes, and in the past few years I have run some very enjoyable games where everybody had fun. I have found that there is really only one key thing that needs to be incorporated into a game to keep everything on-track and help the players want to play, and that is "Saving The X".
Save the princess, save the town, save the world. Seems clichéd, right? Well, yeah, it is. They come up in nearly every single fantasy story, movie, and video game. It even extends to action genres. But you should not think that using the trope makes for an unoriginal or un-fun story. Gritty, hardened antiheroes are fine (and increasingly popular these days,) but if they have nothing to fight for, then what's the point?
Chrono Trigger is a prime example of this. No matter what time period you found yourself in, you were rescuing princesses, helping post-apocalyptic survivors find food, or protecting cavemen from dinosaurs. (And, as pictured here, having to save the hero himself.) The plot focused on individual characters and their relatively complex motivations (or, in several cases, monsters and their motivations,) but the driving force for the player at every turn was, "oh, we've gotta go help those people." This is something that I have found the majority of players and player characters respond very well to in D&D games.
This is why I cringe whenever I hear a D&D game start with, "you're all in a bar." And then something bad happens that forces the players to react to it. It's pathetic, really. Blame Tolkien, the only reason the Bree chapter in Lord of the Rings was any good was because of Strider, and you're probably not going to have a Strider in your game.
Characters are the stars of a role-playing story, they're supposed to be effecting change upon the world, not reacting. They have their own motivations and goals (even if they are very vaguely defined in the players' minds.) You can take five minutes of planning and discussion to figure out who the players' characters are, and then simply assign them a mission. If a cleric or paladin is in the party, just use that organization for convenience. "Okay, your superiors have notified you that peasants in the mining town of Eastweld have gone missing and have asked for assistance. The rest of the party members are either acquaintances or mercenaries you have asked to protect you during the long journey." Then ask the group what preparations they will be making for the trip (buying horses, food, researching the region, maybe hiring a few extra mercenaries just in case.) You don't have to start with an ambush on the road, let them get some control over the situation before it even happens.
If you have a group of players who can tolerate role-playing and NPC interaction, you may say, "all right, most of you have grown up in this village, and are friends with [INSERT QUICK DESCRIPTIONS OF KEY NPCS HERE]. Last week, [FRIEND OR FAMILY OF A PC] crawled out of the mines half-dead and claimed that he had been attacked by lots of small, vicious creatures, and now everyone is too afraid to work in the mines." Without even asking, they're likely going to mull it over in their minds for a minute, look at their character sheets, and then say, "I think we're strong enough to deal with this." This also gives the players a lovely sense of dread of the unknown which you can play with even before they set foot inside a dungeon.
Unless you have players who are willing to have psychopathic characters, they will always respond positively to these plot hooks. Drawing up a dungeon from there is trivial (though I tend to cheat with some tools I'll be posting in future blogs,) because the players will have decided to motivate themselves to have an adventure and save the world (or kingdom, or town, as the case may be.) If you are a GM who is having problem getting players motivated, drop a few indications that there are people who have problems, or people who need help, and watch how the party reacts.
The problem was simple: nobody was having fun. We were going through the motions, having a dungeon crawl, and nobody really wanted to do it because there was no reason to do it. I was baffled at how nobody could be excited while playing an awesome game involving magic swords and mystical sorcery.
Of course, I refused to give up. I learned from my mistakes, and in the past few years I have run some very enjoyable games where everybody had fun. I have found that there is really only one key thing that needs to be incorporated into a game to keep everything on-track and help the players want to play, and that is "Saving The X".
Save the princess, save the town, save the world. Seems clichéd, right? Well, yeah, it is. They come up in nearly every single fantasy story, movie, and video game. It even extends to action genres. But you should not think that using the trope makes for an unoriginal or un-fun story. Gritty, hardened antiheroes are fine (and increasingly popular these days,) but if they have nothing to fight for, then what's the point?
Chrono Trigger is a prime example of this. No matter what time period you found yourself in, you were rescuing princesses, helping post-apocalyptic survivors find food, or protecting cavemen from dinosaurs. (And, as pictured here, having to save the hero himself.) The plot focused on individual characters and their relatively complex motivations (or, in several cases, monsters and their motivations,) but the driving force for the player at every turn was, "oh, we've gotta go help those people." This is something that I have found the majority of players and player characters respond very well to in D&D games.
This is why I cringe whenever I hear a D&D game start with, "you're all in a bar." And then something bad happens that forces the players to react to it. It's pathetic, really. Blame Tolkien, the only reason the Bree chapter in Lord of the Rings was any good was because of Strider, and you're probably not going to have a Strider in your game.
Characters are the stars of a role-playing story, they're supposed to be effecting change upon the world, not reacting. They have their own motivations and goals (even if they are very vaguely defined in the players' minds.) You can take five minutes of planning and discussion to figure out who the players' characters are, and then simply assign them a mission. If a cleric or paladin is in the party, just use that organization for convenience. "Okay, your superiors have notified you that peasants in the mining town of Eastweld have gone missing and have asked for assistance. The rest of the party members are either acquaintances or mercenaries you have asked to protect you during the long journey." Then ask the group what preparations they will be making for the trip (buying horses, food, researching the region, maybe hiring a few extra mercenaries just in case.) You don't have to start with an ambush on the road, let them get some control over the situation before it even happens.
If you have a group of players who can tolerate role-playing and NPC interaction, you may say, "all right, most of you have grown up in this village, and are friends with [INSERT QUICK DESCRIPTIONS OF KEY NPCS HERE]. Last week, [FRIEND OR FAMILY OF A PC] crawled out of the mines half-dead and claimed that he had been attacked by lots of small, vicious creatures, and now everyone is too afraid to work in the mines." Without even asking, they're likely going to mull it over in their minds for a minute, look at their character sheets, and then say, "I think we're strong enough to deal with this." This also gives the players a lovely sense of dread of the unknown which you can play with even before they set foot inside a dungeon.
Unless you have players who are willing to have psychopathic characters, they will always respond positively to these plot hooks. Drawing up a dungeon from there is trivial (though I tend to cheat with some tools I'll be posting in future blogs,) because the players will have decided to motivate themselves to have an adventure and save the world (or kingdom, or town, as the case may be.) If you are a GM who is having problem getting players motivated, drop a few indications that there are people who have problems, or people who need help, and watch how the party reacts.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Shrek 4 Review
The worst thing about Shrek 4 was Shrek 3.
Shrek Forever After has got to be one of the best-looking movies in the series, the special effects look great. There are lots of nice sight gags here and there, and the hilarious "fairy tale setting with a modern twist" is done in a way noone else has been able pull off.
The movie did a very good job of duplicating what the first and second movies did: it focused on the relationship of Shrek and Fiona. This is what was lacking in the third movie, which was an obvious attempt to milk the series for all it's worth. In fact, if we ignore number three and call the this a trilogy, Shrek 4 comes across as a pretty good movie. That would actually be the biggest problem I had while watching it, I kept remembering how bad the last movie was and it kept me from enjoying this one.
Now, the one complaint I have to make against this movie is the villain. Lord Farquad, Fairy Godmother, and Prince Charming were hilarious villains, and fit in perfectly by turning their respective fairytale archetypes on their heads. In my opinion, Rumpelstiltskin fell flat as a villain, not from any poor acting, but because the series set such high standards for melodramatic and funny antagonists.
I recommend this movie for anyone who liked Shrek 1 and Shrek 2, it continues the theme perfectly, and is a great family movie that's still targeted at adults.
Shrek Forever After has got to be one of the best-looking movies in the series, the special effects look great. There are lots of nice sight gags here and there, and the hilarious "fairy tale setting with a modern twist" is done in a way noone else has been able pull off.
The movie did a very good job of duplicating what the first and second movies did: it focused on the relationship of Shrek and Fiona. This is what was lacking in the third movie, which was an obvious attempt to milk the series for all it's worth. In fact, if we ignore number three and call the this a trilogy, Shrek 4 comes across as a pretty good movie. That would actually be the biggest problem I had while watching it, I kept remembering how bad the last movie was and it kept me from enjoying this one.
Now, the one complaint I have to make against this movie is the villain. Lord Farquad, Fairy Godmother, and Prince Charming were hilarious villains, and fit in perfectly by turning their respective fairytale archetypes on their heads. In my opinion, Rumpelstiltskin fell flat as a villain, not from any poor acting, but because the series set such high standards for melodramatic and funny antagonists.
I recommend this movie for anyone who liked Shrek 1 and Shrek 2, it continues the theme perfectly, and is a great family movie that's still targeted at adults.
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