RPG Podcast Mini-Reviews

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I started getting into DnD again over the past year, I've been listening to a number of podcasts.  I thought I'd do a quick overview of some of ones I've enjoyed.

Exemplary DM Podcast - ***** Simply the best rpg podcast out there.  Timeless, genuinely funny, well produced, on topic (mostly), and bursting at the seams with great ideas for DMs and players alike.  This is a podcast about playing tabletop games, not about any specific product releases, and as such it will be as relevant in five years as it is today.  For the most part, it works for any gaming system, though they focus mostly on DnD.  I love this podcast.  They recently released their last episode of season two, and I hope that they will be able to continue in the future...though one of the hosts is moving, which makes this hard to guarantee.

Official DnD Podcast - ***** These are not frequently produced at this point (though there has recently been more activity following the release of dndnext), but there's a tremendous back catalog of episodes spanning the entire history of 4e.  Many of these feature designers pitching their products, which can be interesting on their own.  The best part, however, are the Penny Arcade actual play sessions.  Most are DM'd by Chris Perkins, who is a phenomenal DM, and the characters include the guys from Penny Arcade as well as (starting in series 2) Wil Wheaton.  Yes, that Wil Wheaton.  They are super funny, and are a wonderful model of how DnD can be played.  Really fun stuff.

Haste by Obsidian Portal - ***** Great current events in gaming podcast.  They cover everything, from indie rpg's to kickstarter, but DnD gets a bit more attention than other systems in my experience.  I love that it's fast, focused, and often has interesting guests.  They also take questions from twitter and provide DMing tips and such.  It is a vehicle for advertising Obsidian Portal, but these are genuine gamers behind that company so it is easy to overlook this...and they're not in your face about it.

Icosohedrophilia - ***** With the possible expection of the DnD podcast, this is the best live DnD action podcast that I've encountered.  I tried to do with it like I did with Critical Hit (see below)--start from the first episode and move from there.  Unfortunately, early episodes have pretty bad sound, which makes it very hard to keep track of all 7 PC's.  I gave up on it this, but then later tried again by listening to "The Story Thus Far" episode and going from there.  This is definitely the way to do it.  More recent episodes have far better sound, this lets you enjoy the strengths of the podcast.  Chris Heard is a terrific DM, with great mastery of the rules, and more importantly the ability to concisely and yet vividly tell a great story--both in and out of combat. The recent Kiss of the Spider Woman chapter was amazing fun, so perhaps start there?

Critical Hits - **** I've only recently started listening to this one, so I haven't explored the back catalog.  But recent episodes include Mike Shea interviewing another blogger or industry person about a specific topic.  I enjoy Mike a lot, and he does a great job conducting interviews.  He asks good questions, and is always focused on pulling practical tips that can be directly integrated into folks' tabletop games.

Beer and Battle - **** Another live DnD action podcast.  This one's overlooked, I think.  It's focused on fun, but DM Peter tells a very good story (though sometimes can be a bit too heavy-handed with combat descriptions).  The PC's know how to run their characters, and are genuinely funny people.  I'm sort of taking a break from it for now, but that's more due to competition with other podcasts for space on my playlist than a lack of interest in continuing to listen.  This sounds like the kind of gaming group that everyone wants to be a part of.

Critical Hit by Major Spoilers - *** This is the first live DnD action podcast I started listening to.  It's ok.  Rodrigo has created an extremely interesting world, and the story is absolutely top-drawer.  I also quite enjoy DnD Brian (Randus), as he seems like a great guy and is does a great job as a player.  Some of the other players, however, can be maddening.  For some reason, I keep coming back, though I think it's mostly for Rodrigo.


The Tome Show/Dice Monkey/4geeks4e - *** I'm throwing all of these into one, which is probably not fair ...although they are all (as far as I know) basically part of the same family of podcasts.  They are part of the same network (along with Icosohedrophilia) and often feature the same cast of characters.  With the exception of the occasional (and quite good) Dice Monkey podcasts, the Tome Show and 4geeks4e podcasts tend to be pretty long and freeform.  That's often not a good thing.  Their product review episodes are worth listening to, but I often find myself skipping past substantial portions of their other episodes.

Going without the DDI Character Builder

A little over a month ago, I spontaneously decided to subscribe to DnD Insider for a month to see what I was missing.  I was generally pretty happy with what I got for my money.  Dungeon magazine, in particular, as full of great ideas, and the monster editor was a fabulous resource as I started working on my first adventure.

Probably the most essential application on there, however, was the Character Builder.  While I enjoy the process of character building, as a new player I'm prone to making errors (e.g. I just discovered a few nights ago that shields give you a bonus to both AC and Dex).  Furthermore, the product that the character builder creates is very nice; the character sheets were far easier to use for my new/young players, and the power cards were terrific.  Furthermore, I loved how easy it was to roll up a character, paruse the various feats and powers, etc.  It reminded me a lot of the Neverwinter Nights character creation engine, in fact.

The problem with DDI is that it's expensive.  My wife is already bothered enough by my return to overt geekery over the past few months.  Spending $70/year on a subscription to DDI isn't something that is going to be an easy sell in my household.

So instead, as my subscription lapsed a week or so ago, I began looking around to see what else I could use to manage my characters.  After a fair bit of trial and error, here's what I came up with.

The Character Sheet

I wanted something that would do some of the basic, repetitive calculations for me.  The logical thing to do, therefore, was to build something in my old standby, Excel.  After spending about 15 minutes working on it, however, and realizing how much work it would take to get it formatted prettily, I decided to look around and see what people had already done. :)

There are some very complicated spreadsheets out there that try to essentially replicate the Character Builder in terms of scope (e.g. this one).  I wanted something more flexible, though, so that I could work up the characters myself and only rely on the sheet to do basic things like add my +1/2 level every time I leveled up.

I found this one by Rohin Joyce, which I just adore.  It does all the basic calculations for you, but leaves a lot of room for customization.  At this point, I'm using it with only small modifications to create my characters.  But then, I'm pulling data from it to create a kid-friendly character sheet that I put together myself.  Here's the result:

This represents my attempt to create a noob/kid friendly character sheet that, when used with power cards, has most of the stuff they will need to operate their characters.  It is very slimmed down.  You get defenses at the top left.  You get your basic attacks and whatnot right below that.  You get hit points right below that. The top-right has initiative, speed, and your passive senses.  And the bottom-right has all the skills and attribute modifiers (borrowing from the Essentials character sheets, I'm nesting the skills within the attributes). Importantly, as these are kids, there's a huge portrait area that can hold whatever picture my player wants (as long as I can find it on Google image search).

Obviously, I left out a lot of stuff.  I didn't even give them their attribute scores, for example--just the modifiers.  But as Mike Shea has pointed out (somewhere, sorry, I don't have a link), all that really matters is the modifier anyway!  Omitting attribute scores just saves newbie confusion.  I'm also omitting deities (which won't play a big role in my game, at least for now), action point trackers (I use tokens), feats, etc.  All of that stuff is on the other character sheet, which can be printed out and stapled beneath this one.

With the exception of the notes part, and the graphic, which will need to change for each character where it pulls its info, it's entirely automated.  Fill out Rohin's character sheet and all of this populates.  It's just more approachable for my players to use this in the game.  If someone is interested, I'll post it.  Just let me know.

What About the Power Cards?

A nice excel-based character sheet is great, but I really became infatuated with the power cards that the Character Builder generates.  My players responded very well to them in our last session, so I wanted to make sure that I still have something workable.  I originally planned to just make them in excel, but I ran across this thread about using a Magic the Gathering card editor, with an all-text template, as an alternative.  Here is a screenshot of the result:

I absolutely adore these.  I'm able to make cards that are bigger, cleaner, and easier to use than what the character builder generates.  Even cooler, I can use it to generate treasure cards in advance that I can hand to players as they uncover magic items.  Here's what I'm handing out over the rest of the Twisted Halls:

How cool is that?

What have you done to work around the DDI Character Builder?

Essentials Magic Item List

I'm relying on the treasure tables in the Dungeon Master's Kit to distribute treasure in an appropriate way within my compaign.  Thanks to R.M. Walker's Automated Treasure Finder spreadsheet, this is pretty easy--though I had to edit his spreadsheet to include a means of adjusting for party size.

The one stumbling block to this process has been finding appropriate magic items.  The DM Kit tables will tell you to give an item of a specific level and rarity value (common, uncommon, etc).  I'm currently running with only the Dungeon Master's Kit and Heroes of the Fallen Lands, and as a result I have a limited supply of magic items at my fingertips.  This can make it hard to find, for example, a level 6 uncommon item, especially if I'm trying to get something for a particular player.  And the process is made all the harder by the fact that I haven't found a good index of the magic items in these books.  So, I decided to make one.

As I acquire other sources (I'd really like to get Mordenkainen's...), I will no doubt add to this spreadsheet.  But for now, this is what I have.  I'm posting it here in case someone else can use the info.

List of Magic Items, by level and rarity, in Dungeon Master's Kit and Heroes of the Fallen Lands

D & D Doodle Index (and Love)

Edit: I discovered tonight (11/15) that the author below has removed a substantial number of his old posts.  Whether that has something to do with this post, or is just a coincidence, I don't know.  If I offended or otherwise freaked you out, Brandon, I do apologize.  I just really enjoyed your stuff.


One of the fun things about being so late on the scene with DnD 4e is that I get to discover wonderous things that people have probably known about for a long time.  One of those is the work of Brandon Kruse at DnD Doodle.  His masterpiece reimagining of Fallcrest is to the right, and has been widely circulated, often without credit.  I myself first found it at an Obsidian Portal website.

The thing that's so exciting about Brandon's work, aside from its obvious brilliance, is his cartoony style.  Since I'm largely running my campaign for a group of little kids, I want to try to keep things a bit lighter than a lot of campaigns probably do.  As such, the stock DnD art isn't always ideal.  Kruse's area maps invoke excitement and fantasy, while his character sketches have a whimsy and humor that I think the kids will find very approachable.  For this reason, I've largely abandoned my plan to get my players into the Forgotten Realms as soon as humanly possible.  The Nentir Vale will work great, mostly because I get to use this art!

I'm using Masterplan now to write my post-Twisted Halls adventure, and one feature I really like is the ability to broadcast maps to the players via a separate monitor attached to my laptop.  I'm planning to use this ability, and/or some powerpoint slides that do the same thing, to send a lot of Kruse's images to the screen.  My players will be able to see the town, the buildings they will visit, and even characters via this interface.  It should be a lot of fun.

As such, I've decided to do a quick index of Brandon's work here in this post.  I'm doing this mostly for myself, but if someone out there finds this useful, rock on.

Maps
Along the King's Road
Cave Drawing
Dwarftown (his version of Hammerfast)
Dwarftown - Top Floor
Dwarftown Underground
Fallcrest
A Generic Town
Goblin/Bandit Camp
Harkenwold
The Lonely Tower
Nenlast
Nentir winding way out of vale
The Restwell Keep on the Chaos Scar
River RoadRoad to fallcrest - Similar to below scene, but more of a map
A road through the wilderness (DM + Player)
Rushbottle and Camp Ozborg (south of Vale)
Thunderspire and surrounding areas
Winterhaven DM Map

Scenes
Another road to Fallcrest
Fallcrest in Flames
On the road to Fallcrest/Moon Hills
Winter Ruins
The Rainy City
South of Nentir Vale
Wintery farmland...or blockade

Locals
Blue Moon Alehouse
The Lucky Gnome
Nentir Inn
Nentir Inn Second Floor
Nentir Inn First Floor
Raven Roost
Tower of Waiting, Nentir Inn, Blue Moon Alehouse

Named Characters
Princeling Ardjuna
Redlock
Serim Selduzar, Orest Naerumar, High Priestess Dirina Mornbrow, Par Winomer of the Blue Moon, and Lord Walden Faren Markelhay
Grundelmar, Lannar Thistleton, Lady Allande Markelhay, Sergeant Thurmina
Sergeant Gerdrand, Lord Amos Kamroth, A River Rat, Wisara Osterman of Silver Unicorn, Kelson of Lucky Gnome
Irena Swiftwater, Nimozaran the Green, Tobolar Quickfoot, Teldorthan Ironhews
Raven Roost Roster
Gragnok, dragonborne paladin

Random Characters
Random People
Vikings
Owlbears and Orcs
Owlbears and other misc
Mostly guns, but a few fantasy, including goblin king
Wizards, lizardmen, wolves
Wizards and barbarians
Adventurers and a Kobold
A noble, robber, knight
Kids, or hobbits, plus dark rider
Goblin Golfers
Half-Orc
Randoms, w/ briest, witch, devils
Skeletons with Turbins
Gnoll Archer
Mehrat Sorcer and other creatures
Dragonborne
Merchant on road