{"id":617,"date":"2018-08-10T00:32:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T00:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/d-d-5e-review-part-15-spells\/"},"modified":"2024-01-17T15:17:36","modified_gmt":"2024-01-17T21:17:36","slug":"d-d-5e-review-part-15-spells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/d-d-5e-review-part-15-spells\/","title":{"rendered":"D&D 5E Review Part 15: Spells (Actually a GenCon Report)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spells are a very important part of D&D, especially for spell casters. The selection of spells a spell caster has available to him can have a major effect on his or her spelling. I think the most important aspect of spells are their spell like qualities…ok, you got me, I didn\u2019t read the spell section, and I\u2019m not going to read it. It\u2019s like 40 pages of repetitive entries, most describing things I\u2019ve known since 4th grade with minor variations. Let\u2019s talk about GenCon instead.<\/p>\n

First off, the secret to a happy GenCon (at least for those of us who aren\u2019t willing to fork over a few weeks\u2019 pay to stay downtown): Leave your car at the hotel on Friday. Last year I drove in, paid $50 for parking just so I could stop driving around in circles, and still had to walk several blocks. This year I spent $50 to get a cab to the convention and back and never left JW Marriott property. Saturday and Sunday I drove in and parked across the street like always. Not having my first experience at the con be deep, intense hatred for Indianapolis, GenCon, and humanity in general really improved the weekend.<\/p>\n

Friday was my busy day, with two games: Dungeon 13 and DinerPunk. While Dungeon 13 worked better than it did at Diecon, it was still a mess. I\u2019d originally envisioned it as a very Qerthy game, with monsters coming up with wacky plans to protect their home from those interloping adventurers, but the miniatures and maps killed any chance of that. Once players spend the better part of an hour setting up what\u2019s basically a small-scale wargame, there\u2019s no room for role-playing and it\u2019s just a slog (though at least it was a short one, thanks to giant spider webs being extremely effective). If I run it again, I\u2019ll skip the miniatures entirely and set it up so the adventurers\u2019 arrival is the beginning of the big final battle montage, not the beginning of the game. I\u2019ll also probably officially brand it as a Qerth adventure just to reiterate that it\u2019s supposed to be funny.<\/p>\n

My second Friday game was \u201cVanishing Blacktop,\u201d featuring an incredibly vague blurb for the DinerPunk game that\u2019s still germinating. When I ran it at DieCon, it veered more in a \u201cSmokey & the Bandit\u201d direction than I\u2019d imagined and we all kept wishing we had toy cars for the big final chase scene. So the day before I left for GenCon I spent way too much money on a bunch of toy cars. We didn\u2019t really end up using them for much because this was one of the most unusual con games I\u2019ve ever run. The adventure started off with the PC convoy on a mission to go to a truck stop in the next state and trade some mystery meat for fresh vegetables. My assumption was that I\u2019d throw the \u201creal\u201d adventure at them along the way, but my players were focused on the lettuce and walked right past 3 or 4 potential plot hooks. Eventually I tied several of them together and managed to get the players to a point where they could fight the bad guys, but instead of trying to kill the bad guys and take their stuff, the group negotiated a trade that benefitted both communities. I\u2019ve run convention games without combat before, but usually because of a deep hatred of the players involved and a firm decision not to give them the satisfaction of killing things. This is the first game I\u2019ve ever run where there was no combat and it was entirely due to the PC group\u2019s choice to play characters who acted in their own best interest. I was so impressed I went all Oprah and gave every single player a (Hot Wheels) car. Things were definitely looking up.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, I ran Famous Monster Hunters of Filmland. The basic premise is that the players are actors who played beloved movie monster-hunters (real or imagined) who are guests at a big science fiction convention. Monsters attack, and since science fiction fans don\u2019t have a great grip on the line between fantasy and reality, the actors are expected to save the day. [Side note: Completely by coincidence, Leighton ran his MarmiCon Conundrum game, also set at a con (and based on the novella<\/a> in which I appear as a character), at the same time at the next table.]<\/p>\n

The characters were Ron Perlman, Ben something (aka Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter), Kolchak the Night Stalker, an over-the-hill actress from a mid-80s \u201cbad-ass martial arts chick in tight clothes\u201d show, Horst Janson (look it up), and Roddy McDowell. The first act was a little rocky because it turns out that being a guest at a con isn\u2019t very exciting to roleplay, but once the plot was introduced (the search for a \u201cwizard\u201d who had set a vampire loose on the con), things picked up speed and got increasingly absurd in a good way.<\/p>\n

Sunday was Lance Jackson and The Red Sun. First, a little background: not long after I moved to The Armpit of The Midwest, I ran an M-Force game set in New Orleans. One of the characters was a washed-up former actor from the 60\u2019s science fiction show \u201cLance Jackson and the Red Sun.\u201d The player took a lot of inspiration from Adam West in Family Guy, and it was always fun. Lance Jackson was kind of like Star Trek, only lower budget. Also, instead of \u201csocialistic sci-fi utopia,\u201d it was more \u201cheavy-handed Cold War propaganda,\u201d with Lance Jackson and the crew of the U.S.S. Freedom protecting the solar system from the constant threat of commies. The \u201cpulpy sci-fi heroes fight commies\u201d premise seemed like it would run itself, and it basically did, especially once I threw some Space Nazis and a doomsday weapon in for good measure. While DinerPunk was by far the most surprising game of the con in a subtle way, Lance Jackson was definitely the purest fun of the weekend. I just regret that I didn\u2019t get a chance to include a cybernetic gorilla with Lenin\u2019s brain.<\/p>\n

Next week I\u2019ll talk about the D&D Appendices, then do a final wrap-up, then we\u2019ll never talk about D&D again. [Full disclosure: that last bit\u2019s almost certainly a lie].<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spells are a very important part of D&D, especially for spell casters. The selection of spells a spell caster has available to him can have a major effect on his or her spelling. I think the most important aspect of spells are their spell like qualities…ok, you got me, I didn\u2019t read the spell section,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3486,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2062,2004,25],"tags":[30,1118,1739,1863,1930,1931,1932,2101],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-gaming-articles","category-con-reports","category-reviews","tag-gencon","tag-dd","tag-cinemechanix","tag-dinerpunk","tag-lance-jackson","tag-red-sun","tag-dungeon-13","tag-dungeons-dragons-5e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3603,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions\/3603"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}