In Which The Warlock Taps, Swipes, and Pinches...

A few months ago, I mentioned that I'd come into possession of a certain tablet device, as part of a program through my school.  Now that I've finally had some time to play with the darn thing, it's round about time to give some opinion on the various toys that I've been playing with!

GoodReader

PDF viewing and editing comes foremost for me, in terms of utility on the iPad.  With so many books nowadays coming out in digital and dead-tree versions simultaneously, it's often a lot easier for me to just carry a tablet to my various games around the Ohio Valley, rather than lug books around.  While I still love books while at my home table (and to read before bed!), the convenience of a PDF really trumps a book when elsewhere.

GoodReader's tools are intuitive, easy to use, and usable with any number of cloud storage utilities out there.  Pllus, the PDF mark-up tools allow you to annotate, copy, and denote texts easily and quickly.  I actually used a character-sheet from Cold Steel Wardens to demonstrate GoodReader's PDF mark-up tools to my fellow teachers!  It's that quick and easy.

Hands down, GoodReader is worth the $4.99.  It's gotten rave reviews from numerous sources, and the praise is well and truly due.

Gamer Dice

This one, however, I was much less a fan.  One of the biggest draws for me, as a gamer, is the social and visceral feel of sitting around a table, rolling dice.  While Gamer Dice provides a stable replacement for the actual art of rolling dice, it can't replace that tactile feel of letting your d20s tumble between your fingers, clatter across the table, and roll to a stop.

Now, obviously, there are situations in which polyhedrals simply aren't realistic, but Gamer Dice doesn't do much to make me want to use it.  The app's base configuration is a flat, matte gray.  While its interface is functional, it has no visual appeal and no ability to simply input a number--rather, you have to tap the plus or minus button numerous times.  While this isn't a problem with small dice pools, rolling 5d12+22 would take a huge amount of time.  Plus, Gamer Dice doesn't allow for rolling of multiple types of dice simultaneously, which means that games like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying aren't playable with this app.

I'm sure that there's got to be a better dice roller out there than this one--save your time and effort.

Elder Sign:  Omens

Now, here's a real winner!  Fantasy Flight Games--producers of Arkham Horror and numerous other games--decided to take their card-based Cthulhian race-against-the-clock and build a version for the iOS and Android systems.

ES: O, as a product, is really polished and smooth, using art from its various Cthulhu lines and smooth mechanics.  Visuals and sound effects are evocative and immersive, drawing the player in.  While some have criticized the game for being a "trumped up version of Yahtzee", the more recent patches and the addition of two more Ancient Ones--Yig and Cthulhu himself, to go with the default Azathoth--have really expanded gameplay.

I find myself playing this one anytime I have nothing to do and have my iPad close at hand.  It's addictive, has a good deal of depth, and is outright fun to play.  Pick this one up and splurge on the expansion.  It's worth it!

In Which The Warlock Breaks in Some New Bones...

Just as with most gamers, we're a little dice-nutty out here.  We love dice in all of their incarnations.  I have more than a few sets of Lou Zocchi's GameScience precision dice, a set of Q-workshop's Call of Cthulhu dice, and even bought EEE and the Patriarch each a set of glow-in-the-dark Arkham Horror dice for Christmas two years ago.  Will the ManMan and Chris III even make a habit of using d30s to determine their characters' birthdays!

But, when I got an e-mail from a blogger/dice-crafter about his new store, I was blown away...here's a guy who really has a handle on the dice-crafting!

Unconventional Dice

From tubular (literally, and figuratively!) dice made from aircraft-grade aluminum, to more standard etched dice with a variety of pop culture symbols, to dice with literal screws built into them, he's got it all!

Check out his eBay store here:  Unconventional Dice eBay Store

In Which The Warlock Gets Dice-Whooped...

Fellow gamers, I am truly a creature of karma, particularly when it comes to dice.

Back at Wittenberg, when we were still clustered around 3e D&D, I played in a game run by a fellow named Silas. In that game, my scrawny level 1 psion was confronted with staggering odds for success....and succeeded...time after time after time. From sucking out the soul of a demigod at level 1, to dominating a massive half-giant and stealing his vampiric regeneration ring....that little bugger survived everything.

In WEGS, my Nordling series has caused El Willy no end of pain, surviving everything he and his crew have thrown at my Humnz Trickster horde. In a realm of odds and gods, Nordling and his decendents have made their way.

In my more recent games, my players and I have been referring to one of my dice as the "Black Die of Doom" for its player-killing power. The players know that "shit's gettin' real" once the BDoD comes out, because crits are just around the corner. (I suppose that it doesn't help their odds that the BDoD has a bubble in it, right around the '2', making that natural 20 come around all that more often!)

But last week? I got my dice handed to me on a platter, as the odds and gods came to take their revenge.

At last week's FOPCon 2010, I kept busy by demoing the WEGSventure that I'll be running this year at Origins: "WEGS Plume Mountain". WPM is a thematic rewrite of TSR's classic D&D dungeon crawl, "White Plume Mountain", with some WEGSified twists. As expected, the Arks were in search of the enigmatic trio of artifact weapons--the eponymous Wave, Whelm, and Blackrazor.

The first session went fairly well--with 4 WEGS newbies around the table, they managed to find all three artifacts, but not confront the final, climactic encounter (which I built specially for this adventure!). The second session, though....that's where the the butt-whoopin' started.

With 5 players, including Jules and Ebbs, I had expected much the same session. I was deadly wrong.

The quintet headed after Whelm first, and I knew that the dice were not on my side when Ctenmiir, my Level 6/66 Vampire Warrior Master Minion, took a faceplant in the boiling mud surrounding his home. Two INI rolls of elemental wounds later, he staggered towards the PCs with only 2 chips of wounds to his name. His blood chip? A measly 1 on the d10 roll. Ouch.

Heading after Blackrazor next, the group outmaneuvered the Dun Djinn and his Astral Reavers quite handily. In a mere 6 innings, the group had defeated the group, pulling forth Blackrazor and a much higher Rank Bump than expected.

With the PCs gaining ground on me, I amped up the Wave room, transforming a lowly 6/66 Sage minion into a full fledged Master Minion, and added a few Rangers in for good measure. This, my lovelies, is where my dice turned on me.
The group's Warrior--a WEGS newbie whose dice had been hot all night long--succeeded on his Act Fast test, charging the Beast in the Boiling Bubble with his action. Caught off-guard, BiBBle failed his Invulnerability test (of course!), resulting in a massive hit, as the Warrior rolled a 6 on his Damage Die!

If that weren't bad enough by itself...the Warrior was wielding Blackrazor! It was soul-sucking time, and BiBBle didn't even make it through the first inning!

BiBBle's mistress, the Hag Countess, didn't make it much longer than him, going down to the Warrior's black blade at the top of inning 2. By the end of that inning, all that remained on my side of the battle-mat were my 6/66 Sage and a lowly 4/44 Ranger!

Suffice to say, the final encounter went much the same way, with my overpowered minions going down like punks. What's worse is that I can't even chalk this one up to experience--the newbies were doing the most damage across the board!

While I'm excited to see WPM get put through its paces, it appears that my continual dice-luck may finally be catching up with me. Here's for hoping that it will survive at least through my next D&D session!