Putting together rough ideas about your characters beforehand is a good idea. We can adjust things later, but for now you can work with 10th level characters, so not quite paragon tier yet. Use 22 points for the pointbuy method to generate ability scores if you want to get that far (you will obviously get the level increases separately too).

Stuff outside of the PHB is to be approved item by item.

As already mentioned in the other thread, I would like to avoid using the blood mage paragon path, so if someone wants to make a wizard, I advice to look for the other options.

My suggestion for party composition is:
Leader
Controller
2 defenders
2 strikers

This is by no means mandatory. Just a guideline for something that should work pretty well.

I believe Talae already mentioned he wants to play a Warlock.

I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve devised a few games that we can represent with dice rolls and few that i’m going to use cards for…

Roulette:
the players bet money like on a standard roulette game (red/black, numbers 1-10, numbers 11-20, or on a specific number) I roll the d20 and they get paid out.

Blackjack:
I’m gonna deal the cards out for this one and just play a hand or two as with me being “the house” standard rules.

I was also thinking craps… cause it’s easy and makes sense…

finally I wanted to do poker but I couldn’t think of how to run it.
playing it straight up is too out of control for my liking.

rolling results seems way too involved…

Any ideas?

I tend to drop Whales on them.

On the year 1385 DR a group of adventurers was tasked to set forth and investigate a portal that appeared in the dalelands, close to the ruins of Myth Drannor.
The portal was some kind of a rift in the time/space continuum and seemed to lead to another world entirely, but still resembling Toril. It was a stable portal and passable both ways.

The world on the other side of the portal was called Abeir. Compared to Toril, Abeir is a less civilised world and more connected to the primal elemental energies. Dragonborn and Genasi are native to Abeir.

The adventurers explored Abeir for some months and made friends among the local people who were adventurous enough to get to know the strange newcomers.

They formed an adventuring company that was supposed to traverse both worlds and bring knowledge of Abeir to Toril and vice versa.

Part of the initial group was going to return to Toril from Abeir around 6 months after the portal originally appeared. When they entered the portal, something strange happened. The portal begun to pulse with magical energies and exploded when the group was passing through it.

The adventurers found themselves stranded in the woods surrounding Shadowdale on Toril (this is some ways from the original location of the portal). After investigating and contacting the people in the Dalelands, they found that they had been missing for some 100 years. The original portal closed about 6 months after its appearance on Toril.

It was now the spring of 1481DR, first three-day of Ches. Strange things have happened during the last 100 years and the adventurers decided to find out about the recent events and investigate the original site of the portal that began their journey. Nothing remained in the woods surrounding Myth Drannor. The magical upheaval of the spellplague had erased any sign of the portal.

The adventurers decided to split into smaller groups and learn about the areas surrounding the Dalelands and also find some of their earlier comrades (Elves and dwarves survived the 100 years of their absence).
Some found new adventures and explored close-by ruins and other areas of interest. Before splitting they agreed to have a meeting exactly 6 months from their return in the town of Shadowdale. The day they agreed on is on the day of high harvestide holiday, between the months of Eleasis and Eleint, the 8th and 9th months of the year.

The campaign starts when the characters return to Shadowdale from their recent adventures. Not all of them made it back.

OOC:
The party consists of those adventurers who meet in Shadowdale. There are a few others there (around 10 of you in total). Let’s keep the others a bit “murky” so that your possible future characters can be from among them.

The character’s know about as much general information as the FR player’s guide tells you. The spellplague has not affected the immediate surroundings too much.

Short description about Shadowdale is about to follow in the next post.

Feel free to invent “filler” events for the parts of your adventures after your departure to Abeir and what happened between then and now.

EDIT: Added some dates in above text.

Map of the surroundings of Shadowdale is here:

1) This is cheesy.
2) Is this balanced? sort of?
3) Should it cost a feat or be available to all?
4) I was going for being able to extend a character during battle at the cost of a DST failure.  I’m sure there are other ways to do it but this seemed the easiest and didn’t provide a constant penalty for something you may not have used this encounter.

Third Wind [Heroic Feat]
You gain use of the Third Wind action.

THIRD WIND: IMMEDIATE REACTION
Trigger: You drop to 0 or fewer hit points and you have used your second wind this encounter or you have no more healing surges lest.
Heal: Regain hit points as though you had spent a healing surge.
Buff: You gain a +2 bonus to all defenses until the start of your next turn.
Once per Day: You can use your third wind once per day and can use it again after you take an extended.
Save or DIE: Until the end of the encounter, until you die, or until you fail a death saving throw you must make a death saving throw at the end of your turn.  Failed saving throws from the having 0 or fewer hit points does not count for stopping the Save or DIE property of this action.  Therefore you could be rolling 2 death saving throws per turn if you start dying.  Such is the cost for a chance at honor and glory.

1) Maptool
http://rptools.net/doku.php?id=maptool:intro

2) Skype
http://skype.com/

Here’s our situation:
I, my wife and one of my good friends are located in Montreal, Canada. Another of my friends is in Toronto and another couple live in Victoria, BC. This situation spans three timezones so we play once the kids are in bed on a Friday or Saturday @10pm Eastern (which is 7pm Pacific) for roughly 3 hours. We’re fortunate because just about everyone involved has their own computer (mostly laptops). I use one to run the session, another for the players in Montreal (at the same table as me), one more in Toronto and the couple in Victoria each have their own computer.

We had tried using video chat via iChat but two things prevented this from being a great solution:
- It ate up bandwidth/computing resources like crazy and made everything else slow down.
- Not everyone was using a Mac so we needed a solution that could work across both platforms.

As a minor additional reason, we spent so much time looking at the map that looking at each other simply wasn’t happening very often. In the end, Skype allows all of us, regardless of platform and without overly taxing anyone’s computer, to talk together. Skype has a great Conference Call mode that allows us to speak together for free over the Internet and it works great. Occasionally, someone will get dropped but it’s simply a matter of adding them back which take seconds.

The principal reason our whole “play over the net” plan works is because of reason #1: Maptool.

What is it? Instead of everyone sitting around a table looking at tiles or dry-erase markings, you’re all looking at a screen with a map, that has a grid on top. You can drag player and monster tokens on to the map and it, essentially, looks like what you’d see on the table. Except now you can pretty much be anywhere in the world and you’re all seeing the same thing.

How does it work? The DM (in this case, me) starts Maptool and begins a Server session as DM. Everyone else fires it up and joins the Server as players. This likely requires a brief lesson in port-forwarding but the Maptool forums have a ton of support and the people there will help you out if you get stuck. Once everyone is logged in, the DM controls what map is used, the monsters, etc. The Players can move around. I trust my players to roll dice locally but if they want, Maptool also has a robust dice roller where if you type {3d6+5} (or something like that), boom, you get your answer in the public chat window. You can even pre-program these with Macros so they’re one click away.

What can it do? There are a couple of builds available on the Maptool site. I’d strongly advise against getting the Release Candidate and go for the Development build (which is 1.3.b45 as of this writing). It has all of the latest features, many of which are must-have. As you drag your tokens around a map, Maptool will display your movement so no need to count squares. It supports both 3.X and 4e movement (diagonals) and the grid can be customized to be hexes or squares. Just about every major system is usable under Maptool.

Maps can be imported as images and if there’s a grid on the image, simply adjust your grid size in Maptool until they line up and you’re good to go. If you want to get really fancy, though, Maptool handles line of sight. Each token can be given a light radius (torch 5, lantern 10,etc) and the fog of war will not be revealed until the character moves into an area. This is awesome but it requires a good bit of extra work for the DM who has to draw in where all the walls and doors are. The tools provided are great but for a super detailed dungeon, it can get a little hairy.

Other things: Players don’t need to get confused when attacking one of the 20 goblins ("which one?” “that one” “which one?” “THAT one” “I don’t know which THAT one you’re talking about!!"). A simple press of the spacebar pops up an arrow on everyone’s screen. There’s a great initiative tracker that lists everyone’s turn in the latest build. You can add light sources to areas, reveal hidden monsters and draw notes on the map. It has a crazy ton of features that I’m only beginning to use after a few months with it.

The Maptool Forums are essential for learning and asking questions:
http://forums.rptools.net/viewforum.php?f=3

Plus there are some awesome users that post insane works like the full campaign file for Keep on the Shadowfell (this blew my mind and shows the full power of what Maptool can do).
http://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?t=4714

But the biggest help for me were the screencast tutorials:
http://www.rptoolstutorials.net/maptool.htm
These are mandatory viewing if you plan on using Maptool.

The interface is pretty unwieldy and it will devour your resources if you try to do too much. But the plan is to improve the interface in 1.4 and, unless you drop 100MB images every five seconds into the app, you can do quite a bit without taxing your CPU and mem (the KOTS campaign really is jaw-dropping).

Anyways, I hope people find this useful because I am nothing short of a happy customer with these two FREE bits of software. I’m sure I’ll be skipping the official tools even though they might look pretty. Maptool and Skype have been rock, rock solid. Just beware the steep learning curve and intimidating interface.

If you have any questions, I’ll try my best to answer them.

Cheers,
vinny9

NCIS is my wife’s show, but surprisingly this season doesn’t look as awful as the rest.

Knight Rider was atrocious, IMHO.

Fringe is one I can’t judge well.  It’s JJ Abrams, so I won’t know until the damn show is over.

The Mentalist is okay.

Sarah Connor Chronicles is okay, but I’m a Terminator fan.  This show is really just like a circle jerk for Terminator fans in general.

By far the best show of the season is Sons of Anarchy.  Hands down my favorite.

What about the rest of you?  Favorites?  Total flops?  As you can see, I don’t think highly of any of the sitcoms (except Always Sunny in Philadelphia but I don’t get to watch much of it).

Here are some Gambit pics:

And here are some people that have made costumes:

I personally have found (most at the thrift store):
Trench coat
Black long sleeved shirt
Abs (Red from a child Power Ranger costume...hopefully it will work)
Leather pants (similar to the left costume above)
Some regular Bicycle playing cards

Still Need:
Head piece (thinking ski/biker mask type, but unsure where to get it)
Gloves
Boots

I figure that I could dye the abs material pinkish and use the excess for the pattern on the legs.

Any suggestions?

OOC:  Everyone consider yourselves introduced and equipped and ready to go right now.  You have already gathered supplies and things like that.  And Jaxus has offered to put you all up in his house seeing as how he called the band together, free of charge.

My first RPG experience was at the age of 8 in 1983.  A friend of my dads was visiting with his two sons.  They brought the Star Frontiers boxed set.  I don’t remember much of the game other than I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  I never saw those boys again, but I sure wanted to play again.

I don’t remember how exactly, but somehow I obtained the D&D Basic Boxed set.  Remember when you could play an Elf or a Fighter, but not both?!  Really funny to think back on it.  I can’t remember my first D&D game, but I sure do remember killing many a wary Kobold!