It's Friday evening here in Indianapolis and all is going well.
The dealer hall is not quite as exciting as it has been in years past. At least, there isn't anything that I didn't already know about.
The Paizo booth is perhaps one of my favorite stops. They've released (and sold out of) the Pathfinder Beta rulebook (essentially a beta version of what amounts to "3.75" D&D). It's a really interesting book that I expect will be very popular over the next few months at the store for those who aren't ready to let go of 3.5 D&D. It's far more interesting than I had expected it to be. I think we'll have this book in the store sometime over the next few weeks. Definitely check it out.
On Thursday, six of us entered the D&D Open Tournament (a competitive, 3 or 4 round D&D Tournamtent) and have successfully advanced to the second round this Saturday. On Thursday night we survived the True Dungeon experience. It's sort of like a live-action, puzzle-solving series of rooms in which you race against the clock to find the solution on how to progress to the next chamber. We made it through alive, only failing one puzzle in the first room. Luckily, we killed the stirges that attacked us and were able to continue.
Friday morning, we went to the D&D 4th edition R&D seminar. Chase was finally able to put the lead designers of 4th edition in the hotseat by asking them to clarify a as-yet unanswered question regarding rogue sneak attack damage and whether or not it's maximized on a critical hit. He pointed out to them some flaws in their rules terminology and am happy to report that he had James Wyatt furiously scribbling on a piece of paper notes on the inconsistent rules.
"We'll look into that," they said.
"Please do," said Chase. It was very funny, and I have it on video. Youtube FTW.
Later that afternoon, eight of us played in two groups of four in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Tournament. Group one consisted of Matt MacGregor, Rob Aldred, George Collins and myself. The other consisted of Chase Laquidara, Cale Laquidara, Adam Zaremba and Joe Creighton. My group... did not do so well. Matt's character and my character died in the first encounter, while George and Rob survived for two more encounters before meeting their doom. The other group had a great run, surviving against all odds before finishing their session in a slaughterfest in which they brought down 56 minions before time ran out. We're currently waiting to see if they did well enough to advance to the next round tomorrow. Hopefully, they'll be posting the results soon.
Tonight, we're going to try to enter an event called "The Tower of Gygax." It's basically a 1st Edition D&D game being run in honor of the passing of Gary Gygax. It's supposed to be super-hard, run in the spirit of the famous killer-dungeon: "The Tomb of Horros." I'm hoping our characters die in the first 5 minutes to uphold that spirit, and the memory of my personal hero.
Tomorrow, is the big D&D Miniatures tournament, in which some of our Tuesday night players from Battleground will be competing. Hopefully their D20's will not be cruel to them.
That's all for now...
D.
