4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

I have to say I didn’t know what to expect of PAX. I knew there would be a lot of games, a lot of panels and a lot of people. Beyond that I really had no idea what lay in store for me. I even intentionally avoided information at times, lest I build it up too much in my head only to be disappointed. I was not. Far from it. On the other side of the universe from disappointment. It was fan-freaking-tastic.

If I have any criticism of PAX, it’s that the schedule was truly daunting. There was no way to see everything. A lot of what we wanted to see was on at the same time as other things we wanted to see. How is one supposed to choose between Fallout 3 and a Wil Wheaton reading? It was also a convention of lines. Glad they are splitting it up into a West Coast (Seattle) and East Cost (Boston) convention next year. It will hopefully cut down on the crowds a bit.

Hands on with D&D Tools

One of the highlights of the trip was hanging out with Didier Monin, otherwise known as WotC DM, talking his ear off for at least an hour about the new D&D tools coming out. I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised and a bit torn. I really like some of the features of the new D&D Character Creator, the Character Visualizer and the Dungeon Builder. I also appreciate the difficulties that a small development team within an RPG company must face.

It was obvious to me that WotC has bitten off a bit more than it can chew and is currently back peddling a bit. Didier was fairly frank on the subject, remarking that they’ve brought development in-house and are currently taking baby steps towards making one solid product at a time. I can certainly appreciate that. Making software is no minor task and I give them credit for recognizing mistakes and learning from them. On the flip-side, I want really great tools, and while what I saw shows promise it lacked the polish and ingenuity of the majority of desktop and webapps that I am used to. Of course, they aren’t done yet so we can’t be too harsh of judges.

D&D Game Table

First off, the D&D Game Table was a complete surprise. This was a much more solid, useful tool than I imagined. What I saw was only running on a local instance of the software but it seemed promising if the connectivity and communication tools work as well. WotC has erred on side of flexibility. The Game Table is an extremely flexible and powerful map builder and online game tool.

The DM had very precise control over every aspect of the map, from lighting to layout. A DM can pull up multiple windows at time; one for controlling the game, another for rolling dice, a third for managing combat initiative and stats and another for seeing exactly what the players see. One could easily use a couple of monitors just to use all the various windows at once.

Another bonus was that it seemed to be tightly integrated with the character builder and the rules compendium. Didier remarked that as long as your subscription was up-to-date, the rules for all of the applications would be kept up to the most recent errata. You could also refer to the rules compendium for any abilities, stats or information not completely spelled out on your map or character. I was also very pleasantly surprised to find out that you could create a reference or game piece out of any imagery on your hard drive. Overall the map builder was pretty nice.

Character Builder

The Character Builder seemed surprisingly well put together. It was a fairly straight forward and responsive program that walked you through the steps of character building, starting with race and ending with equipment. All of the standard races were there as well as a surprising amount of content from Dungeon and Dragon magazine, such as the Warforged. I noticed that I accidentally skipped over a step a few times and couldn’t continue with something until I went back to a previous tab. It wasn’t the most obvious of errors but something I figured out fairly quickly. I really liked that at any point I could flip to the very last tab to get a preview of what my sheet looked like.

The one criticism I had from my limited time with it was that I couldn’t figure out how to only see abilities my character could use. For some reason it was showing me all the abilities for every level of every character. I suspect it may have something to do with a borked search within the abilities fields that a previous PAXer had been doing.

Character Visualizer

The Character Visualizer was actually probably the least developed app. I found this surprising as it seems to be the most heavily promoted and in my opinion, least useful. It worked basically like any other character editor in most MMO’s or other games that lets you customize a character. Most of the races weren’t very fleshed out so I stuck with mostly the human and the dragonborn avatars. Didier was kind enough to let me play with his development version as the other demo builds were a bit older if more stable.

Basically you picked out your race, a few defining characteristics and then dressed your character with the armor and clothing for your race. There was also an option to use items designed for other races with a slider to help resize the item to fit your character. Most items looked a little off, given that a human helmet would never fit the snout of a Dragonborn. Still, I appreciated the option to fiddle with things. Overall I wasn’t that impressed with it. I’ve seen better character editors from MMOs from a few years ago. I’m hoping it was mostly due to the unfinished state of the product.

Tools Summary

Of course one of my criticisms is the UI. Everything seemed very raw and a little low res. The chat window in the map builder was basically raw text. A majority of the buttons and UI elements were misaligned. There seemed to be a fairly heavy reliance on nested menus, which could get confusing. In the end, I’ll be happy to just have the tools they promised as long as they work very, very well. I do wish they’d just pony up and hire an amazing UI designer. The tools show a lot of promise but need a few more rounds of spit and polish.

Magic the Gathering: Duel of the Planeswalkers

It was even worse when you compare something like the old and busted online version of Magic: The Gathering to the new , a version due out soon on XBox Live Arcade. The XBox version had a simply gorgeous presentation and stunningly simple UI. I was very impressed. I’m not a huge Magic player but this could definitely bring back my interest.

Of course PAX wasn’t only about D&D. It was three days of pure nerdgasm. Here are a few of the highlights.

1. Met tons of cool people. Using twitter on my iPhone and searching for every tweet in a small radius helped us track down fun stuff to do, shorter lines and people to hang out with. Ate breakfast with a group of twitterers. Talked to many people in lines and while watching game dmeos. Met many cool people all because of technology.
2. Saw the most amazing diorama by Rob Hawkins from Privateer Press. It was freaking amazing, complete with missile smoke trails and explosions. I’ve never seen such a breathtaking display of miniature awesomeness. Epic win.
3. Randomly bumped into Jeremy, one of the owners of my LGS, Rainy Day Games, at the D&D booth.
4. While at the concert, randomly talked to some strangers. Turns out they live or lived very close to us. One of them houses the game night for the owners of Rainy Day Game. Small world x10.
5. Watching my wife, Joleine, sing in front of a gimongous crowd on Guitar Hero 4. Could actually hear her and she sounded great. She got many claps and even
   some cheers. Go, Joleine!
6. Beyond D&D Panel: A great panel by the guys who do the Geek Nights podcast. It was a really awesome talk about D&D, the niche it plays in the RPG genre, things it does poorly and well and what other games there are out there. I am very interested in some of the games, like Burning Wheel, Inspectres, Dogs in the Vineyard and more. I just searched for info on the panel and found a random picture of my arm while I waited in line for it. Randall is the guy smirking. Talked to him a lot about RPGs and DMing. Cool guy from Sacramento.
   
   
   After the panel, everyone was so into the discussion that we moved to the annex to watch some demos of actual gameplay. I barely missed out on getting into one of the demos but it was cool seeing it in action, from the mouth of the creator.
7. Got to talk to Felicia Day. I think we convinced her to beg Joss for a role as a Zombie version of herself in the next Sing-a-long Blog. She seemed genuinely interested in the idea. That or to wear a goatee and be an evil version of herself. She definitely implied #2 is on the way. Also got pics with her and a signed copy of The Guild. She also sang Still Alive with Johnathan Coulton. How hot is that?
8. Ate dinner next to Wil Wheaton. We were cool though and followed his rule “Whil says, ‘Don’t be a dick!’” Should have sent a drink to his table but didn’t think of it until after dinner. Epic fail on our part.
9. Briefly met Mike Krahulik, the artist of Penny Arcade while getting coffee early in the morning at my hotel. He seemed exhausted. I wasn’t 100% it was actually him until we saw him again at the Make a Strip panel.
10. Signed Star Dock’s Gamer’s Bill of Rights. I 100% agree with them and gained a lot of respect for their company. Great games and a great mantra.
11. Asked a stupid question at the Make a Strip panel. Felt like a total idiot when a cameraman got in my face. Perhaps I will be on the DVD.
12. Got to play with / see Warhammer Online, Dragon Age, Champions Online, Aeion, Gears of War 2, Left for Dead, Fallout 3, LotR Online: Mines of Moria, Rockband 2, Guitar Hero 4, Buzz, Singstar, Iron Chef, Maw, Starcraft 2, WoW: Wrath of the Liche King, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Rayman Ravig Rabbids TV something or other, Lord of the Rings something or other Xbox action game, Spore, and really just too much to remember it all.
13. Barely losing out on a competition to win a copy of the PS3 game, Buzz. It makes Scene It look like a piece of crap. I got all the questions right in 2 rounds. So did the girl I ended up going against. We had an identical score until the very, very end. The final game was a hot potato sort of thing with a bomb. Basically you answer a question and toss it to the next person. Fortunately she wasn’t a douche and didn’t hold it extra long to send to me at the last second. Alas, the bomb asploded like the 10th time a question came to me. Didn’t even get to see the question. :( Oh well. Was a ton of fun and did it in front of a ton of people. Got to show off my comic, video game and sci-fi knowledge and not get anything wrong.
14. Hanging out with Buck, Rachel and of course Joleine. We had a grand time together. Many people were jealous that I had a hot chick on my arm who was interested in the stuff at PAX.

All in all I had an amazing time and can’t wait to go again next year.