Car Wars Gets More Love

A lot of gaming news is coming out of Austin, TX these days (and not all of it is Munchkin related)! In the run up to Car Wars 6th edition, it appears Steve Jackson has found that Car Wars has a fair amount of pent up demand.

The first print run of Car Wars Classic sold out to distributors almost immediately, and the second print run should be hitting store shelves soon... So get yours today before they sell out! Back to the news...

Over the last week, there have been several exciting announcements related to Car Wars. "Sixth Edition" is not yet ready for Kickstarter, but they have announced a couple of items intended to support the Car Wars line.

Artistic freedom or overt sexism?

So recently there was a bit of a brouhaha about about an article on Gnome Stew. +Matthew Neagley noted that artwork in certain RPG products makes him uncomfortable. The usual suspects then came out in strident defense of artistic expression, including some of more notable and notorious when it comes to topics of risque art. This topic resurfaces every couple years and unfortunately, I'm about to step into the s#!t storm to provide another perspective.

The problem is that most comment posters and blog authors missed the mark when it came to the real, underlying issue.

Hero Forge Miniatures Review: Ready for Prime Time?

[Update 08/30/20]: A lot has happened in 5 years and this review is no longer valid. But have no fear. I have NEWER reviews. 

Hero Forge has added the new "Plastic" and "Premium Plastic" offerings to their materials selection which solve the fragility and detail issues. An updated review of the new plastic and metal offerings is now posted. Read the updated review here! ]

Original (now out of date) article:

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When I heard about Heroforge.com, I was excited to try their online character visualization. If you don't know, Heroforge.com lets you create a custom 3D model of RPG character in a variety of genres - Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Modern, Western or East Asian (Wuxia/Wushu). After you've created your custom model, you can then send it to their 3D printer to have your very own custom designed miniature!

Sounds awesome, right?

Well... it certainly is in theory, but in practice it leaves some things to be desired.

Rendered previews of the miniatures

50 Shades of Greyhawk

I originally posted this to social media the other day... but I thought it needed a more permanent home.

Thanks to +Scott Nicholson for the idea (which I modified) and +Aaron Harmon for the improved title (which makes the joke way better). And thanks to +Judd Apatow for Freaks and Geeks (as well as +James Franco for Carlos the Dwarf. Long live Carlos!)

Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil... Again

Just this week, Wizards of the Coast has officially announced what had been whispered around the net for the last few months. The Elemental Evil story line will encompass several releases across product lines... An expansion for the Neverwinter MMO, module(s) for D&D Adventure League and home play, and most interestingly a new D&D board game based on the Temple of Elemental Evil.

I say most interestingly not just because it's the The Temple of Elemental Evil, but because it will be using the D&D Adventure System, introduced with the Castle Ravenloft, Legend of Drizzt, and Wrath of Ashardalon board games.

D&D: New Basic Rules Web Site, But No New PDFs

So, the buzz this week is that Wizard of the Coast quietly launched a hypertext version of the Player's Basic Rules for 5th Edition.

It's a fairly straight forward reading of the text with some Javascript controls for chapter and section navigation. It's a clean interface and relatively easy to navigate. It's a bit mono-chromatic, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

It does, however, leave on gigantic question in my mind:

Why didn't they spend some of that time improving the PDFs?

Since their release, people have been asking

1. Where is the table of contents? 
2. Where is the index?
3. Where is the corrected alphabetization of the monster list? (i.e. - Young Green Dragon should be under "D", not "Y").
4. Why isn't the Hoard of the Dragon Queen PDF content merged with DM's PDF yet?

I can't understand the priorities here. The time it took to "pretty up" the rules for layout on the web could have been better spent (or at least co-prioritized) with prettying up the rules in the PDF releases.

I can forgive the lack of index. For a living document, the upkeep on an index can be a pain. Given that PDFs are searchable, it's a nice to have, but not strictly necessary (though it would help with printed copies). The lack of a table of contents is not really forgivable at this point. It doesn't even take that long to set up the hot links in an Acrobat document. Insert a new page 2 and voila.

At least they added PDF bookmarks in the last revision, but PDF booksmarks don't help you if you are printing via Lulu (or on your home printer, for that matter).

What do you think? Am I hand-wringing over minor issues?

Perhaps... However, the addition of a table of content is only about 2 to 4 hours worth of work at most for a layout designer.

Hell, I could do it, given the InDesign files and style sheet examples.

Fixing the alphabetization and including the HotDQ content may take a couple days, but not much more than that, if anything. Since we don't expect a lot of editing for any major releases coming out soon, what the heck else do they have to work on right now?

When it comes to utility, all the players I know would be using the PDF on their tablets. The web version is a nice-to-have, but with the occasional lack of wifi and the much more search-friendly format of a PDF, why isn't updating the PDFs more important, if not as important, as the web version?

It's just another case of WotC not paying attention to the digital needs of their customers.

D&D: A New Quick Start Tutorial Format

Too Long; Didn't Read?  Start with A Quick Start Primer, Revising the Quick Start and A New Primer for 5th Edition which encompass the primary points.

Several months ago, Angry DM posted a rant about how Wizards has been "challenged" in recent years converting new players into new DMs. Let's face it. DMing is a daunting task for a new D&D player. It's hard enough to learn the game as a player, and the new DM resources aren't the best at really walking a newbie through the hardest parts.

In response, I started to prepare my own primer for new players and DMs, but that hasn't progressed as quickly as I've liked because… reasons. (I'm a father of three who works behind a computer all day. Sometimes side projects suffer as a result).

A Quick Start Primer

Fast forward to 2015 and Monte Cook's peeps are proposing a National New Game Master's Month or "NaNewGaMo" as they are calling it, which lead to this short exchange on Twitter.

+Bruce R Cordell noted: "We're trying to encourage completely new GMs into the fold. A simple quickstart doesn't target or encourage NEW GMs."

(This was really about Numenera, but I'm going to speak about the context related to D&D. The ideas, however, could be applied to any game),

I think Bruce is only partly correct. He is correct in that current examples of Quick Start rule PDFs have not targeted new DMs. However, that's only because RPG publishers have never written a Quick Start with that goal in mind. Quick Starts are traditionally written for existing consumers of other RPGs to try and win their business over to a new system. As such, they are written for the experienced gamer. However, an RPG publisher with the right end goal could very easily write a Tutorial Quick Start PDF that teaches and/or encourages new DMs.

This has been a goal of the D&D Primer that I have been working on (and to which I hope to get back to soon). For full-time RPG publisher, this idea should almost be a no-brainer (I say almost because I understand small press publishers need to target their R&D money carefully). While sales to existing gamers is critical, a modified Tutorial Quick Start PDF for DMs would not be too difficult to develop and could help win new gamers as customers. If done well, one could even use the same Quick Start for both experienced and new players/DMs, perhaps with a sections that experienced players could skip past.