[powerpress] | Episode 49 |
Announcements
Thanks to AwesomeDice.com you still have about a week left for your chance to win a pound o’ dice. You’ve also got about 2 weeks left to get your caption on in our new d20Monkey comic caption contest! Lastly, check out Crimson Skies, our Campaign of the Month for June!
Topics 
“The Future of Tabletop RPG’s”
An ambitiously named kickstarter here with a lot of potential for any tabletop gamer, these portables are pretty awesome. Check out the kickstarter and tell us what you guys think. We’re teetering on backing this project!
Bounded Accuracy
Possibly the biggest change coming to D&D within D&DNext since the creation of the game, Micah and I discuss the pro’s and cons. There aren’t many cons. Be sure to read the whole article on the subject and tell us what you think.
FreeRPG Day!
It’s that time of year again, time for a ton of free RPG stuff if you’ve got a local participating game shop. FreeRPGDay has got what you need from a bunch of big names in the industry, drop by and grab up a system you’ve never tried before!
Tip Corner
Obsidian Portal has finally been moved over to Ruby on Rails 3.0, Micah explains the process and we thank you for bearing with us through this process. You should notice the site is considerably faster now too!
Twitter Question
@revenganceful asks: What was your best gaming ‘flop’? Have you ever tried something new and have it backfire (good or bad)?
Listen to find out!
Music Credits | Intro: “Prelude” | Outro: “Stande Alone” | by LukHash |
Obsidian Portal is the award winning Online Campaign Management System for tabletop role-playing games. It’s free to use, it can be accessed from any web browser and it's built from the ground up for gamers by gamers. 
Around the 18 minute mark while describing the Ruby update, all I can hear is repeated mouse clicks. Its kind of distracting. Probably not much you can do to stop the mic from picking up that noise.
Hmm yeah I didn’t notice that when editing. Thanks for pointing it out, I’ll keep an ear peeled for it from now on.
After the discussion about players not paying attention, or not getting the desired reaction from a DM’s efforts towards drama and such, I couldn’t help but think “That is the time to sit down with them, and discuss what exactly they want from the game.”
As a player, I noticed this in our last few sessions. It seems only a couple of us are actually paying attention to the story the DM is telling, the rest seem disconnected or buried in their books. Especially the wizard. Anyways, it seems some of us are only there for the combat, which is kinda sad. Perhaps that’s the time for the DM to address the players, and get a better idea of what to focus his time on preparing?
While it’s always good to know what the players want, I think there are certain situations that will always result in players tuning out. In my case, it’s when I have NPCs talking to each other or I’m trying to give a ton of backstory. My players don’t necessarily want to be in combat the whole time, but they do want to be involved in what’s happening “on screen”. If I’m delivering a long monologue, or worse, running both sides of a dialogue, then the players naturally stop paying attention.
I am not sure if I understand Bounded Accuracy and Mika’s issue with low level characters. I don’t play 4e but I do play AD&D, and every player has at least a 5% chance to hit any creature. Even with an AC100, a natural twenty rolled by any character will hit! Therefore unless 3.5e or 4e removed the little caveat that a 20 is always a hit, this Bounded Accuracy is not useful. I must not understand what it is, I guess.