Web of the Spider Queen Pre-generated Characters!

The new season of D&D Encounters is going down to the Underdark.

Here are six new per-generated characters for the upcoming season. Keeping in line with the theme of the adventure, all of them are Drow adventurers. Plus, the template has been redesigned for maximum ease of use and legibility. Credit for the template design goes to James Stowe, who's an amazing designer and has come up with a number of awesome pre-gen sheets for younger players.

 All of the drow art on the sheets is made by me, though was heavily influenced by Warcraft artist Genzoman. I used a fair amount of his poses and armour designs for inspiration.

As always, if you spot any math or spelling errors, let me know in comments. I'll re-upload corrected sheets asap.

D&D Encounters ONLINE update:

We finally have enough players to run multiple sessions of D&D Encounters Online. As such, we'll be starting off with the new season "Web of the Spider Queen", which is set to begin in game stores on Wednesday, May 16th 2012. 

So far, here are the dates for the first sessions of D&D Encounters Online, to be played over Google+ hangout:

 *Thursday, May 17th, 7pm-10pm EST

*Friday, May 18th, 7pm-10pm EST

*Sunday, May 20th, 7pm-10pm EST

If you're interested in playing in any of these games, there's still spots available. You can sign up by following the instructions on THIS PAGE.

If you've signed up already, and none of these dates/times work for you, please send me an email at
dndencountersonline@gmail.com

If you're having trouble working out the time zone differences between your time zone and Eastern Standard Time, visit this site to work out the details. The above times have been made to accommodate the requested availabilities of players.

Homemade Character Sheets

If you've been playing D&D since before the advent of a digital character builder, then making a character sheet from scratch is probably nothing new to you. Published games often came with a limited number of pre-printed liscenced character sheets, necesitating the use of some loose paper.

Still, even now when building a Type IV D&D character is just a few mouse clicks away, many still prefer to make their own character sheets from scratch. Being able to scribble in details, notes, personal flourishes onto one's character sheet is the core of what makes D&D such a DIY game. Even if you use a printed, liscenced character sheet, after a series of game sessions it will no doubt be covered in notes and doodles.

I've often lamented that fourth edition D&D wastes a lot of paper with its current character sheet format (5-6 pages!), and the game seems to necessitate making your own sheets from scratch just in an effort to conserve paper.

Here's a collection of some of the best that the internet had to offer at the time of this post's writing:



A bunch of these are my own, others are sheets from I Hit It With My Axe, the rest cropped up from a Google image search.

If you have any homemade character sheets, provide some links in comments.

Because Mass Effect 3, that's why!

It's been almost a month since I've updated Dungeons & Donuts. Why is that?

Mass Effect 3, that's why.

There is definitely no shortage of controversy over this game. [All links contain some spoilers].

Above that, it's still a fantastic game, and will probably end up on my own list of the greatest video game achievements of all time (right up there with Portal, the first Resident Evil, Super Metroid, um, all of the other Mass Effect games...and Angry Birds).

The trilogy of games as a whole are an imperfect mix of "traditional" roleplaying game and third person shooter. It never quite does either perfectly, but it gets close enough that the games' flaws can be overlooked most of the time. What really seems to draw people into these games, turning average fans into outright fanatics, seems to be the world of story and the well-developed characters. Bioware has always been a company known for producing games with an emphasis on good story and characters, and ME3 is no exception.

I'm still torn about the ending. It's either an agreeable change of pace for endings in videogame narratives, or it's just unsatisfying. I don't hate it, but I still feel like it leaves something to be desired.

Still didn't stop me from beating it twice and enjoying every moment of the game up to that point.

So that's the reason there's been a lack of D&D and RPG updates on the blog.

I've got some cool things coming up, as well as some updates on D&D Encounters Online.