Is an ultimate edition of D&D possible?

Wizards of the Coast has officially announced Dungeons & Dragons 5E.  This probably isn’t a shocker to people who follow the industry.  The rehiring of veteran game designer Monte Cook, especially considering the tenor of his recent Legends & Lore articles, pointed to a new edition.  Recent rulebooks have also seemed more willing to experiment with the existing D&D 4E rules, reminiscent of late D&D 3E books like the Tome of Battle.

And of course sagging sales of D&D 4E products probably sped things along.  After all, traditionally nothing sells as well as the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual.

What I find interesting is that D&D 5E was announced so early in the process.  Even though it was obvious a new edition was in the works, I expected them to keep mum out of fear that they would torpedo the sales of upcoming 4E products.  After all, why would you buy books that will soon be considered obsolete?

Well, according to Mike Mearls they intend on conducting open playtests and soliciting feedback from the gaming community.  Of course this is a great marketing line, but the fact that they would risk hurting sales of these upcoming books makes me think that they are serious about getting feedback from the gaming community on D&D 5E.

The real question is whether or not this will work.  Wizards of the Coast is hoping for an “ultimate” edition of D&D that will help unite the fractured fanbase.  I’m not sure if this is even possible.  D&D means different things to different people, and when products are designed to please everyone they often end up pleasing no one.

Nevertheless I remain hopeful.  There are a lot of talented game designers behind this new edition at WOTC and if RPG blogs have taught me anything it is that there is a lot of untapped talent in the gaming community.

In any case, this new approach to creating the new edition has piqued my interest.

Thoughts on the Amazing Spider-Man teaser trailer

The teaser trailer for the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man movie is out.  Feel free to check it out below.

I have to admit Andrew Garfield makes a better Peter Parker than I thought I would.  Nevertheless, the trailer leaves me with several concerns.

My biggest reservation is that I simply think it is too soon for a reboot.   I understand that bringing back the old cast simply wasn’t feasible.  There was also no way Sony was going to let this property revert to Marvel without squeezing every last dollar they could out of it.  So a new movie with a new cast was inevitable.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  I just wish the movie didn’t go all the way back to the origin story.  A soft reboot, like Marvel did with The Incredible Hulk after The Hulk flopped, would have worked better.   Most people who are going to see this movie already know how Peter Parker became Spider-Man, and if they don’t, the briefest of recaps should suffice.

See that wasn’t so hard!

Another thing that seems odd is that it looks like the movie is going to play up the fact that Peter Parker’s parents were secret agents.  This is a part of Spider-Man’s backstory that is probably best ignored.  It complicates Peter’s origin and yet makes him a less relatable character. 

One of Peter Parker’s strengths as a character is that for all of the strangeness in his life he remains relatable.  This works because he was a relatively ordinary kid prior being bit by a radioactive spider.  Adding fantastic elements into his life prior to the spider bite eats away at this ordinariness.

Of course, maybe I am just making too much of the scenes where his father says goodbye to him and when he finds the old attaché case. 

I certainly hope that is the case.

Forgotten Realms Issue 18–Fallen Idols (Part 4 of 4)

This issue begins with an extremely nervous Foxy attempting to free Agrivar and Ishi.  Unfortunately, their jailer is a god, so Foxy gets caught in the act.

As Foxy leaves, he encourages Ishi to remain unconscious since Labelas’ Chaotic Good alignment apparently prevents him from raping sleeping women.  Foxy doesn’t notice that Ishi is merely playing possum.

Back up top, Labelas continues being a major dick to everyone.  He does his own version of “Alas, poor Yorick!” with Minder’s head and threatens to release Captain Omen’s fatal disease back to him if Omen fails to do his bidding. 

Apparently Captain Omen picked up some sleight of hand in his travels, because during his pleading for his life with Labelas he managed to palm the magical key to Agrivar and Ishi’s bonds.  For reasons unknown, the two choose to have a whispered conversation about it in front of the god.  Luckily for them, Labelas must be preoccupied or stupid because he fails to connect the dots.

Maybe Labelas is preoccupied after all, because as soon as the Realms’ Master crew leaves he begins arguing with himself.  Well, more correctly he begins arguing with the part of him who is still Vartan. 

Vartan is understandably upset by recent events, but Labelas counters that all of this internal arguing is tearing his godly form apart and that Vartan should just calm down while Labelas murders, threatens and rapes his friends.  Vartan ultimately concedes that he has no choice, and sets Labelas up for his best line in the series.

Foxy proves that Mama Cardluck didn’t raise no quitters as he attempts to free Agrivar and Ishi again.  He proves much more successful now that he has the magic key.

Meanwhile, Captain Omen continues to make the modifications Labelas demanded to the Astrolabe.  Once they are completed, Labelas launches the Realms’ Master into the sky as part of his mad plan to take down Helm and force his way back into the heavens.

Victory seems within Labelas’ grasp when team Agrivar, Ishi, and Foxy show up to take him down.  Of course they quickly run into the same problem they did the last time they fought Labelas, namely that he is a god and they are merely mortals.

Some quick thinking on Captain Omen’s part helps even the odds.  He opens up the Demiplane of Fear, figuring if it is good enough to dispose of unwanted artifacts that it should work equally well on unwanted deities.  Captain Omen and Ishi then hurl the jars containing Omen’s death and Foxy’s addiction at Labelas, hoping the god’s own magic will hurt him.

It works long enough for Ishi to kick him into the demiplane.  At first Labelas scoffs at this tactic, but soon realizes that some presence in the Demiplane of Fear prevents him from entering.  Thus a disembodied and helpless Labelas is forced to flee while Vartan floats helplessly in the void.

Agrivar is unwilling to leave Vartan behind and selflessly hurls himself into the void after the elf.  Ishi throws them a rope and hauls the two of them back to the ship.  They both promptly collapse.

At this point Ishi assumes the threat is over, but Captain Omen knows better.  The Realms’ Master is still on a collision course with the gates of heaven, and they no longer have a god of their own onboard to deal with the guardian god Helm.

Captain Omen decides the only chance they have is a blind teleport.  He activates the astrolabe, but not before Helm cuts the Realms’ Master in two!

The issue ends with the remains of the Realms’ Master strewn across a desert.  The only sign of our heroes is the head of Minder in the wreckage.

Thoughts

• IDW just collected the first eight issues as Forgotten Realms Classics.  If it sells well I imagine more will follow.  When I first started posting recaps and reviews of a twenty year old comic book, I never imagined it would become topical again.
• Not a huge fan of Labelas repeatedly increasing Agrivar’s need to drink.  I understand it is the jumping off point for upcoming storylines, but having him do it once should have been enough.
• It was nice to see the crew come together at the end.  I especially liked that Agrivar flung himself after Vartan without any thought of his own safety.
• I admit to being somewhat lukewarm on the avatar storyline as a whole, but this issue has a hell of a cliffhanger ending!

Looking at the “Essentials” Warlord

When Dungeons & Dragons 4E was first released, I found the warlord to be the most intriguing addition.  So I was intrigued when Dragon announced the new Class Compendium feature, which converts classes to the Essentials format, was tackling the warlord.

I assumed we would see a new build of the warlord which favored melee basic attacks over powers.  After all, the knight and slayer builds of the fighter, the executioner build of the assassin, and thief build of the rogue all took this tack.

What I was not expecting the changes to be as minimal as they were.  I would hesitate to call the new marshal build a build at all.    Instead, it seems to simply be a rewriting of the tactical warlord and the inspiring warlord using the new Essentials format.

The few mechanical differences seem to merely be errata rather than any attempts at new mechanics.  The power selection is slightly different than the Player’s Handbook Warlord, but is more of a “greatest hits” from existing source books than anything new.

The Good

I like the existing warlord, so the fact that the marshal build changes nothing isn’t really a negative to me.

The Bad

Frankly, I am confused as to what the point of the Class Compendium feature is.  I assumed it was going to provide new builds for existing classes which were similar to the new builds created for Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms and Heroes of the Fallen Lands.  Instead, all we seem to have gotten is a change in the layout with a little errata thrown in.

As content for Dragon goes, that seems a little thin.

“A Former Hooters Waitress” -- Really MTV News?

The comic book blogosphere has been abuzz with the news that Amy Adams has been cast as Lois Lane in the upcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel.  There has been a lot of talk about the fact that she is a three time Academy Award nominee.  Along with the casting of big name actors like Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Jonathan and Martha Kent, this is seen as a sign that the reboot is going for a more serious and less campy tone than some of the previous films.

There has also been a lot of coverage about the fact that she is 36-year-old woman.  This probably wouldn’t be getting as much press as it is if it wasn't for the fact that Superman Returns featured 22-year-old actress Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, who was supposed to be believable as the mother of a 6-year-old kid.

I’m glad I read the MTV News write-up of the story though, or I never would have known that Amy Adams was a former Hooters waitress!

The reference bugged me.  Please note that I have nothing against Hooters waitresses, present or former.  I found it annoying because it seemed to be included in the article simply because some people would find that detail salacious.

After all, when Kevin Costner was announced as Pa Kent, I can’t imagine anyone wrote:

“A former bus driver and male model, Kevin Costner made his debut in 1981’s Malibu Hot Summer playing John Logan.”

Oh well.  It is really nothing to get too worked up about I suppose.  After all, it IS only MTV news and not a “serious” news publication like the New York Times or the Washington Post.  MTV News makes a business of being provocative.

I swear though, if I am ever written up by MTV News and they describe me as “a former Patio busboy”, it is on like Donkey Kong!

Crisis of infinite comics

Recently a friend of mine asked me why I have not reviewed the new Dungeons & Dragons comic series IDW is publishing.  It makes sense that he would ask; after all I have spent a lot of time on this blog reviewing old Forgotten Realms comics from the eighties.  Reviewing the new series seems to be right up my alley.

The answer is simple enough though: I haven’t read any of the new Dungeons & Dragons comics.

Don’t take this to be any judgment against the new series.  In fact, I am looking forward to reading them at some point, most likely when they are inevitably collected in a trade paperback.  Rather, the new Dungeons & Dragons comic book is simply a victim of bad timing.  After nearly thirty years of  collecting comic books on a monthly basis, I have finally quit.

I suppose I have been quitting monthly comic books for years.  There was a point in my teenage years where I was easily collecting more than thirty comic books a month.  When I ended my monthly purchases the number of comics series I collected regularly was less than ten.

There isn’t just one reason behind me quitting.  It is fair to say price is a factor.  When I started collecting the average comic book cost around $0.65.  Now comics books cost $2.99 or $3.99 an issue.  Annuals and special issues can cost even more.

I understand the reasons behind the price increases over the years.  The biggest culprit has to do with the economies of scale.  Few comic books crack 100,000 issues sold a month nowadays.  Several month recently have had no comics sell over 100,000 issues.  With so few comics being sold, the price per issue has to go up in order to make a profit.

$3.99 still seems like an awful lot of money for a mere twenty-two pages of entertainment.

An even bigger factor leading to my quitting monthly comics is that month to month is no longer the optimal way to read comic books!  Back when I first started reading comics, “done-in-one” was still the primary format.  Even though there were continuing plot threads, the default assumption was that each issue of a comic book should tell a complete story. 

Most comic books nowadays are written with the inevitable trade paperback in mind.  The average storyline lasts about six issues, meaning any individual comic book only tells a fraction of a story.

So the optimal way of reading a comic book nowadays is waiting to read it in trade paperback form.  You get a full story, without having to wait a month between each chapter.  Even better, the cost per issue is inevitably less than buying the comic off the stands.  The only downside is that you have to wait a few months until the trade paperback is released.

Waiting simply isn’t as big a problem for me as it used to be.  It may even be an advantage.  While I might have a few plot twists spoiled while reading my favorite comics blogs, it also gives me a chance to see what the reviews look like.  After reading blog after blog complain about Superman: Grounded, I will definitely give it a pass.  On the other hand, it is unlikely I would have found the budget to buy an unknown quantity like Morning Glories on a monthly basis.  Having read so many glowing reviews of the series now though, picking up the trade paperback seems like a no brainer.

I do worry about the future of the comics industry.  I probably bought monthly comics for far longer than I should have out of some misguided sense that I could single-handedly hold back the tides of change sweeping though the comic book industry.  In the end  though, there is nothing I can do.  The comic book industry has to either adapt or die. 

I hope it adapts.

The Internet’s foremost Batmanologist appears on John Stewart

I generally avoid link blogging, but this clip from The Daily Show is hilarious.  It features the Internet’s foremost Batmanologist Chris Sims (who blogs at The ISB and is a staff writer at Comics Alliance) talking about Nightrunner.

For those of you who are not keeping up with Batman at the moment, Bruce Wayne has recently begun recruiting other superheroes to act as regional Batmen throughout the world.  In Paris, he chose Nightrunner to be “Le Batman of France”.

This would not have been controversial if it wasn’t for the fact that in addition to being a citizen of France, Nightrunner is a Sunni Muslim.  Of course, this caused the Internet to explode.

So check out the clip!