The Time Structure of the New Campaign.

I've decided to go a different route with the time structure of the new campaign, and this is going to be important to the players because I will be *starting* the campaign on August 9th with the players having had a complete month worth of  in-game "Off-Table Time" to get them accustomed to using the concept. While it might sound complicated, I'm just going to codify stuff we're already doing...to be as fair as possible. 

When a gaming session is occurring, the players are said to be on "table time," which is pretty obvious-we're playing, etc.

When the session ends, the characters are either paused or in "off-table time" which may be used for traveling (with limitations) or accomplishing things at home (or in another safe place.)

Things that may be done in off-table time include research, conversations and plans between characters, shopping (with limitations), restocking, creating items/spells/special attacks (again, with limitations), leveling up, fixing the fence at your dad's farm, healing from normal damage, recovering from exhaustion effects, etc.  Things done in off-table time accumulate very little experience points per hour, or none at all. (People creating things and spells will get more experience, but have less opportunity to do so.)

Off-table time will be given in the form of "maximums" between "events" (ie: 'There is a maximum of seven days of off-table time between now and next session') and if you intend to do anything off-table, you have to contact the DM at least 24 hours before the next session. There will be no piling on of 'oh, I already did this' at the start of sessions. It makes the DM go crazy.  There is no guarantee that the off-table time will be as long as the maximum, so if you want to do many things, you will have to tell me the order they happen in.

If you need to contact the DM in a hurry, you know my phone number, my twitter and where I live. If you just want to put something on paper, and you want me to get to it eventually, you can send it to thane@fenlock.org or contact your liege-lord on twitter at @ThaneFour 

I will be using these as catch-alls for campaign related questions and stuff. In addition, the office of the thane will provide a "the current time is" tweet on  a semi-regular basis.

Remember, unless something changes, character selection is 6pm this Friday. If you aren't here, you might not get who you want (although there are more characters than players.) Sometime between now and Friday, if the fates allow it, I will post a bit about how the batch character creator worked, and why I chose to go that route.

Proficiency of the Week: Bowyer, Fletcher, and Bowyer/Fletcher

Question: The AD&D Player's Handbook has Bowyer/Fletcher as a single warrior proficiency that takes one slot, but uAD&D Core Rules recommends Bowyer and Fletcher as two separate proficiencies under general. Which is right, and why?

Answer:  They are both right. A player who is a warrior can take Bowyer/Fletcher for one slot. A player who doesn't have access to the warrior proficiency skills tree would have to spend two slots for that. Several people pointed out that it was completely reasonable for a non-warrior to be making arrows for private use, and have great skill at it, and to that end we said you could take either bowyer or fletcher for one slot. This gives the warrior an opportunity for a tiny bonus, and removes a penalty in other situations. This is sort of like the Clockwork and Engineering Bundle.

 

Aret and Ara: The Cartography Problem-Amount of Information

One of the main problems I am having adapting all this information to a free, internet available campaign world is the size of the world, and the level of detail in the world. For some scope, I recently combined several different maps of the main world into one scale map. Since they are not all identical maps, I averaged the images, made them all black and white lines, removed most of the noise, and tried to clean them up where available. Unfortunately, a lot of the 'averaging' makes straight lines, and removes some of the subtlety of the coastlines from my various map makers. So, consider this map of 'playable land and sea area' as very, very, very rough...good for knowing the rough distances between the continents and island groups. I'll show how the LaCroix map (the nautical map used in my campaign) fits into this map, as well.
But, to give an idea of scope, here is the rough map (note that if an island only appeared on one map, it got averaged out of existence) made up of all the other maps. The heavier lines (I tried to clean them up) are usually places where the same bit of coastline was the same map to map.

The map, again, is not very accurate for terrain shape, save in the most general of ways, and I moved continents up and down to 'match' the equator line on all maps. This map is a variation on the square map we've used for tabletop sea battles.

To show the scope of the information problem, I whipped up a quick overlay on this estimating the amount of information I have for each area on the map, ranging from 0 to 10% or so (nothing more than a few names of cities and places) to greater than 90%, where I have the land mapped out over large time periods, huge active campaigns, etc. On this map, black represents information, and green represents a lack of information. I tried to make it out in rough blocks:

And, for my campaign, for the players who've asked how off the official nautical map of the city of Misty Cross (the places that 'officially exist') IS, here is the unlabled background of the LaCroix map.

I think you can see I weighed this map heavily creating the other, at least in terms of continent shape, if not placement.

So, suffice it to say, there is a LOT of room for expansion by other creators on the map.

What is UADandD?

For the past ten years, Phoe and I, and a number of various players, have worked with a formal+house rules edition of AD&D, based on the AD&D Core Rules, namely the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, game settings and "complete" series of class-based guides.

The term "Ultimate" is not used in its definition as the "best" but instead refers to the concept of ultimate as complete, and therefore not subject to having new "player races" or new "rules concepts" thrust upon the players. (Although AD&D has ways to construct by-group rules for each.) New spells, new monsters and new worlds are possible, but at no time do brand new rules come out and destroy or change the rules we are working with, although occasionally spells are changed (nerfed) as they are found to be over powered, or, more rarely, underpowered....if you understand the core rules, you never need to relearn a new system although someone (often me) will occasionally have to rule when there are two published sets of rules that conflict.

The canonical material we use is any official AD&D (and to a lesser extent, Original or Basic D&D) product published before the 2000 switch over to "3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons." This includes both original AD&D and second edition AD&D because they are, in fact, the same game, with only differences in the optional rules (such as psionics) and a few cosmetic differences more important to the DM than to the player (combat charts to THAC0, board inches to yards, weight from gp to lbs, value of coins from 200-20-1 to 100-10-1-0.1 .)

Part of this is disgust at abandoning the game we loved. You can pick up almost any book from 1977 to 2000 and insert it into the existing strata and have it work...3rd edition and parts forward cannot be swapped in this manner...even with "editions" that came only a few years later. You can think of it in similar ways to how operating systems work...you can open a program for an early version of windows in a later version of windows, sometimes with a little bit of fussing, and there is legacy support for many programs. WOTC killed Dungeons and Dragons by killing legacy support...there were two earlier Dungeons and Dragons 'operating systems,' (similar in many ways to MS-DOS and Windows, including being able to use pre-3e Dungeons and Dragons inside AD&D if you knew how to work it) and the WOTC 'operating system' didn't ever run this legacy software.

There was an AD&D emulator, to continue the metaphor, in the d20 system, but one of the things that irritated people like me was the fact that the d20 system allowed the players to use legacy materials without ever needing to reprint them. Some of our friends worked damn hard to write modules and materials, and by sitting on the materials, and providing no legacy support, WOTC has essentially gotten the essence of the intellectual property of their authors without actually having to pay any of those authors for their actual intellectual property.

AD&D then, is an abandoned game, a table top version of abandonware, and if WOTC actually gave two shits about the game instead of just making money they'd either make the books available (in POD, for example) and cut the authors a percentage (which would still be profitable) or they'd release the copyright on all the material that they own (as works for hire) and allow the authors to have name recognition, if not new money. (Actually, releasing the works as copy-lefted, and freeing the AD&D name altogether could also be profitable if they just did reprints of core materials-monsters, spell collections and rules.)

If you have any doubt about the demand for these materials, and the fact that they would be purchased if reprinted, look at the number of uploads and downloads of AD&D materials on any illegal or semi-legal download site. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people have scanned almost every book in the AD&D cannon and made them available. Note I'm just providing that link as an example, I'm not suggesting that anyone, especially my players, download such materials illegally...even if they don't have their own player's handbooks, which can also be purchased used on websites like amazon.com.

So UAD&D is all of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons- spell lists, psionic powers and monsters compiled from all of the published materials and sorted by database or similar techniques so that a DM can have unique worlds and unique creations where players are involved in the world-building experience. It is a full and complete system, where you can't go off of the game board and need a new book to know what's going on. It's a one-book for each player system- players need a player's handbook, and only a DM need blow extra money on having one of everything else.