The first fight of the day yesterday was against some hobgoblins (including a warcaster) and a cave troll. The party did a lot of planning going into it, and they wanted to try to bluff their way past the encounter. I ad-libbed a skill challenge, which they succeeded, and while they didn’t get to avoid the fight entirely, they did reduce the number of enemies they had to fight and they got a surprise round before the enemies got a chance to react. I thought that this fight would be very, very difficult. The cave troll, after all, is a level 7 brute with 99 hit points and regeneration 10; I thought he’d really give the guys a run for their money. Add to that the fact that there were other enemies to contend with, including a warcaster who I put in the fight specifically so he could throw PCs down a well in the middle of the room, and I figured it would be a challenge. I underestimated my party.

There were five hobgoblin minions, a hobgoblin soldier, the warcaster, and the troll. Sredni managed to push the soldier down the well by the first full round of combat, which did some damage and managed to delay the soldier for the rest of the fight (which only lasted 3 rounds plus the surprise round). The warcaster tried to throw Sredni down after the soldier but missed, and was brutally killed by Sredni, Chance, and Shava in a single round. Kraygin tied up the minions (as he’s very good at doing), taking them all out with a single dose of dragon breath (yes, that’s five enemies dead as the result of a single minor action). Then the party ganged up on the troll. Through judicious use of alchemist’s acid, a critical hit, and action points spent all around, the party managed to reduce the troll from 99 hit points to 15 in a single round, as well as negate its regeneration for a round. On the second round they dropped it, and Sredni finished it off with a coup-de-grace with his flaming glaive. Then they dropped the troll’s body down the well, on top of the hobgoblin soldier who had almost climbed all the way out. I think the troll managed to do about 20 points of damage total, and never got to use the ability that I put it in the fight for in the first place, the ability to pick PCs up and smack other PCs with them.

The PCs then proceeded to knock out two more encounters without taking a short rest between them; they knew they would be safe to take an extended rest once this part of the keep was cleared out (the defenders were running pretty low on healing surges), so they blew all their remaining dailies, which made the fights a lot easier.

Some things that I took away from this session, that I’ll have to keep in mind for future encounters:

Kragyin: this guy is a serious minion destroyer. If I want my minions to last more than a round or two, I need to keep them away from him, and keep them spread out instead of clumped up. If he manages to get into the thick of a minion mob, that mob will be dead very soon. Also, Kraygin is capable of some very impressive damage, so he’s almost like having a third striker in the party. That means I need to start using more solos, probably, in conjunction with other enemies.

Shava: she can really dish out the damage. Shava routinely does 15-20 points of damage per round, and probably gets critical hits more often than anyone else in the group. On a crit, with a single at-will attack, she can deal 2d6+18 points of damage, assuming she’s not getting additional bonuses from Sredni.

Silus: like Shava, this boy is a damage-dealing machine. He’s also a very slippery bugger. Between shadow walk and his cloak of distortion, he’s often imposing an attack penalty of -2 to -7 on his enemies. If they get close, he’s got a couple of powers that allow him to teleport out of dodge. If he can’t, he’s got as many hit points and healing surges as Kraygin does, because of his high Constitution. He almost never uses those healing surges though, because he’s easily the least tempting target of the group.

Chance: boy is this guy durable. High AC plus lots of hit points and healing surges, and he’s got tons of self-healing abilities. Aside from second wind, he’s got lay on hands that he can use twice per day (either on himself or someone else), and warforged resolve is just a fantastic encounter power. He’s got improved warforged resolve, which grants him extra temporary hit points when he uses the power, and he generally waits until he’s bloodied to use it. He can go from bloodied to damn near full hit points with a single minor action. Also, when he charges he’s pretty devastating. He’s got a vanguard warhammer, which deals +1d8 when he charges, so he charges as often as he can. I can’t wait to see him fight some undead now that he’s leveled up. Between holy strike and cleansing challenge (both of which are nice abilities that deal radiant damage), he should mop them up pretty quickly.

Sredni: warlords may not have the healing capabilities of clerics, but they hand out bonuses like candy. The group loves to use action points because Sredni grants them a +5 bonus to damage when they hit, or some temporary hit points when they miss. That’s one of the reasons that the troll went down so quickly; almost everyone burned an action point on it. He’s also got several powers that grant either attack or damage bonuses, or temporary hit points. Add to that his wizard powers and, between him, Kraygin, and Silus, they’ve got the controller role pretty much filled. Minions just don’t stand a chance. Neither do brutes for that matter.

In other news, I bought and subsequently read the Monster Manual 2, which was fantastic as expected. More so than in any previous edition, I love reading monster books in 4E. There are some great beasties in this book, and some returning classics like the frost giant, metallic dragons (which are all unaligned rather than good or lawful good), and (yay) the rust monster. I recommend this book highly.

Into the Keep
An Unexpected Ally

Enjoy.

I love the new warlock pact. The vestige pact allows you to choose one of two “sub-pacts” after each short or extended rest, each with its own pact boon and its own augment to your at-will power, eyes of the vestige (which is a very cool power in and of itself). In addition, a lot of the new daily warlock powers give vestige pact warlocks access to additional vestiges that they can switch out for immediately upon using said power, and these vestiges last until the end of the encounter. The daily power vestiges tend to be a bit better than the basic ones you get access to, which is why they don’t stick around too long. The infernal pact warlock in my D&D campaign, Silus, is actually switching to vestige pact now that the option is available, which I’m all for.

Wizards get lots of cool new powers. Some classics return, and there’s a whole slew of summoning spells and illusion spells. What has me really excited about this is that Sredni, the party’s warlord, is multiclassed into wizard, and a lot of these new powers are right up his alley. Summoning servitors to do your bidding? Check. Using illusions to force enemies to do things against their will? Check.

The new sorcerer stuff is very cool. I particularly like the idea of a half-orc storm mage who zips around the battlefield as a bolt of lightning and tosses people around with thunderous magic. Very cool and evocative.

The swordmage now has an aegis that can teleport an enemy to him, and a lot of new powers that go along with that. Cool stuff, though I think I like being able to teleport and attack, personally.

The new prescient bard is thematically odd, but mechanically gets a lot of great stuff. The most interesting thing is that the lion’s share of the powers designed for the new build are ranged weapon powers, meaning that you can be an archer-bard now. Not quite an arcane archer, but pretty close.

The paragon paths and epic destines are all very cool. I like the arch-lich.

Lots of great feats. Some of the metamagic feats from 3rd Edition make a return, and there’s lots of new stuff, too.

Familiars. Oh, yeah. 4th Edition familiars are so cool that two of my players want one. The warlock is getting a familiar as part of his retcon; he had a feat that was only viable for infernal pact warlocks, so he’s swapping it out for a familiar. Sredni also plans on picking one up at the next opportunity, I think. I love the way they work; they’re simple and minimalist, but with tons of roleplaying potential.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

This all comes with one caveat, though: while I have traded games to Goozex, I have not yet received a game from Goozex. The issue arises from the fact that you’re relying on other gamers, who may or may not be at their computers for a few days. I was slated to receive a copy of Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, pending the seller’s acceptance of the trade. However, because he never accepted, I never got the game. I was refunded my points and my trade token and put back in the queue, but it’s still irritating to be looking forward to something and not get it. I’m now slated to get Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and the seller has 25 hours to make a decision on that. Hopefully I’ll get a game this time.

Update: I’ve now received Puzzle Quest and Assassin’s Creed for the DS and Mass Effect for the PC through Goozex. I’ve also got Final Fantasy III for the DS, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for the PC, and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the GameCube all on the way. Not bad.

At any rate, I’m in the process of migrating the wiki to a new wiki software, and should be done relatively soon. I’ll post a link (and change the link on the left-hand sidebar) once it’s done, and it will include our newest PC, Silus, as well as any missing session reports.

In other news, I’ve recently started reading a blog called Encounter-a-Day, which is a fantastic DM resource for D&D. Oh, and if you’re a player in my game, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t read it, as I plan on pilfering from it. You wouldn’t like it anyway. Ahem.

Also, a week and change ago, we had another D&D Day, and it was a good one. Sadly, Sredni’s player was absent, so Shava’s player pulled double duty and played him on the side (wouldn’t want the party to be down a warlord; that would seriously hurt the defenders of the party). Here’s the short version, with some thoughts.

The session started off with a big fight against a blue slime in a water-filled cave. This was an interesting encounter because it was the party’s first fight with a solo monster, and the terrain was very much in the slime’s favor. The slime started off by dazing and weakening most of the party with a stench pulse, which panicked them a little, then hitting them with a burst of damage, then attacking Kraygin and Sredni (it burned through both of its action points pretty quickly). After the party shook off the stench pulse’s debilitating effects they were in much better shape, and while it was a tough fight, they won.

They continued on (after an extended rest) to fight a hive of kruthiks. Again, the terrain was against them, and Shava in particular suffered because of this. The normally arrow-slinging ranger had to go melee with the giant bugs, while the other striker, the warlock Silus, was able to teleport out of dodge.

Then they backtracked out of the caves and into the keep proper, and entered a crypt where they fought some zombies (a very easy fight), and encountered a room lined with sarcophagi that continuously generated skeletons. Chance spotted some altars to Bahamut with draconic script on them, and the party decided early on that Kraygin (the only one in the party who speaks draconic) should go read the script, as they were probably important. Turns out they were the key to making the skeletons stop attacking. In this fight, the combination of dragon breath and marking everyone you attack came into play; Kraygin breathed fire on four skeletons (two of them minions) and hit only one of them (not a minion), leaving four enemies marked by him in close proximity. Luckily he was backed into a corner between two sarcophagi, and Silus managed to immobilize the two skeletal warriors, which saved Kraygin’s bacon to some extent.

Finally, the PCs continued into the crypt of Sir Keeghan, an undead former paladin of Bahamut who was initially suspicious of the party. This was a skill challenge, but we played it out as a roleplaying encounter with some skill checks thrown in, which was satisfying and suitably tense for the party. They were never sure where they stood with Keeghan (it’s hard to read a skeleton’s mood), and I think a collective sigh of relief was breathed when he decided not to attack them, and everyone was pretty happy when he offered to help them. He even gave them his weapon, Aecris, a lifedrinking halberd that Kraygin will no doubt put to good use. Also, he told them about a hidden armory somewhere within the crypt that the party is now on the lookout for.

Again, a great session and I can’t wait for the next one.

One final thought: I had the players choose backgrounds for their characters during this session, and while some of the players had already thought out their characters’ backgrounds, this gave the others some impetus to think about it some. It turned out well.

I got a new computer, which is causing me to play lots of games on my new computer. I’m currently making my way through Crysis Warhead, and having quite a lot of fun with that, as well as Assassin’s Creed. Good stuff.

Also, last weekend was a D&D Day. I don’t have a session report up yet; this is partially due to the fact that I’m going to be migrating the wiki to a new wiki because my current wiki won’t allow me to insert pictures anymore for some reason. I can, however, tell you some stuff about the game.

We’ve got a new player. Silus, the half-elf warlock, has joined the party, and he’s having all kinds of fun cursing people, teleporting around the battlefield, and dishing out lots of damage. He gets attacked pretty infrequently because he stays out of melee most of the time, and between his cloak of distortion and his shadow walk class feature, he usually imposes a -7 penalty on people attacking him from range, which discourages that somewhat.

The players have finally ventured into Shadowfell Keep, and things are going well. The first encounter started with a bang, with Shava the elven ranger scoring a critical hit with one of her two twin strike arrows on her first turn of the encounter, killing a goblin sharpshooter outright, before it even got a chance to really do anything. In the next encounter, we thought we had lost Kraygin the dragonborn fighter to a pair of guard drakes. Those things are pretty dangerous when they gang up on one PC, and between the two of them they wound up dishing out about 29 points of damage in one round to poor Kraygin, taking him down to -18 (-16 would have been the lowest he could go without dying). However, we had neglected to take into account the fact that Kraygin is a battlerager fighter, and gets temporary hit points every time he suffers a melee attack; with all the forgotten temporary hit points, he managed to squeak by at about -15, just barely surviving the encounter.

The night ended with an encounter against some giant rats and an ochre jelly, an encounter that wound up being easier than anticipated because of the narrow tunnels and good PC positioning. I think the rats wound up doing more damage than the jelly, and the jelly was supposed to be the real threat of the encounter. We stopped just before another ooze encounter, an encounter with a blue slime in a water-filled chamber. We’ll pick up there next time.

I’ll post a full session report when I get the wiki sorted out.

Oh, also, I got the Player’s Handbook 2, which is excellent. Gnomes are pretty frickin’ cool in 4E, as are the other four races in the book. I can see some of the racial paragon paths being popular in my group. And the classes are fantastic. I really want to play them all, particularly the avenger and the sorcerer. I have a concept for an assassin not unlike Altair from Assassin’s Creed who is an avenger, maybe with some rogue multiclassing, and I also have an idea for a half-orc sorcerer (much more viable than in 3E) who uses a lot of effects that push people around the battlefield, almost as if he’s brawling using magic. Good stuff.

The thing that strikes me most about that paragraph is the simple fact that encounter design is fun. Really, really fun. It didn’t used to be in 3rd Edition (at least, I didn’t find it that fun). It was like doing math homework. And it took forever. And, if you design encounters at your computer like me, you had to have several different books spread around your computer in order to create an interesting encounter. Here’s what I do now.

First, I decide what I want the theme of the encounter to be. I come up with some sort of memorable terrain feature or monster or plot element that the encounter is going to focus on because, if there isn’t something memorable about an encounter, it may as well not be in there. Oftentimes I’ll have a monster or two in mind that I want to use, and that helps a lot. Then, I fire up the D&D Compendium (you’ll need to be a D&D Insider subscriber in order to really use that link). I absolutely love the monster search engine in the Compendium; it makes things so easy. I’ll search for the monster or monsters that I want, call up their stat blocks, copy a screenshot of them to the clipboard with the screenshot tool of my choice, then paste the image into a document. Once I’ve taken care of the specific monsters I want in there, I fill it out with other monsters. Usually, this means deciding what role I want those monsters to fill; maybe the monster I picked is a brute, and I want some artillery and maybe a controller in there to make things interesting for the PCs. Maybe I want them to be level 2, and maybe I want them to be undead. I put all those criteria into the search engine and call up a list of potential choices. Then I just scroll through them until I find something that looks interesting, and copy/paste the stat block into my document. If I need a map for the encounter, I’ll usually use Jai’s Dungeon Tile Mapper, but Wizards has a dungeon creation tool in the pipes, so I imagine I’ll use that eventually (Jai’s mapper hasn’t been updated for a while, so not all of the tile sets that I own are in there). And there you go, done. At least, for a simple encounter. I might also want traps or a skill challenge in there (sadly, the Compendium doesn’t allow you to search for those yet, if ever), and that’s another story that I haven’t really tried my hand at too much yet.

Once the encounter is done, I need to assign some treasure to it. I love the 4th Edition parcel system for the ease of use and flexibility of it. If I’m putting magic items in there, I’ll generally either search for items of the appropriate level using the Compendium, or the Character Builder. I like to use the Character Builder to print out my magic item cards, so that’s what I normally use.

At any rate, that’s the process that works for me so far. It’s easy, and it’s fun; it’s kind of like going shopping for cool stuff, and buying it with the XP budget that you’re using for the encounter. The fact that monster stat blocks are small enough to paste a few onto a page or two of a document is pretty nice, but the thing that really makes this whole thing a breeze is the presence of all the digital tools that Wizards is gradually making available. I love the fact that, being an Insider subscriber, I can search the compendium for monsters from any source, regardless of whether or not I own it. It’s fantastic value for money.

Kraygin was once a two-handed weapon fighter. He still uses a halberd, but he ditched the +1 to attack with two-handed weapons in favor of the battlerager vigor class feature, and he swapped out reaping strike (4 damage on a miss) for crushing surge (has the invigorating keyword, which grants temporary hit points on a hit). Basically, now Kraygin gets a temporary hit point every time he gets hit with a melee or close attack, and he gets a temporary hit point every time he hits with crushing surge, and his temporary hit points from crushing surge (and any other invigorating powers) stack with all of his other temporary hit points. Oh, and he downgraded to chain mail, so now he gets a +2 damage bonus whenever he has temporary hit points. The net effect is that Kraygin’s AC is a point lower than it would be, but he compensates by being more durable, and he’s definitely leaning toward striker as a secondary role. He’s got a halberd, which is a pretty high-damage weapon. If he’s bloodied, he gets a +1 to attack (dragonborn fury) and a +2 to damage (dragonborn frenzy); if he also has temporary hit points (which he frequently does), that becomes a +4 to damage, for a total of 1d10+8 damage on a basic attack. If he uses his daily, villain’s menace, on an enemy, against that enemy he’d be at +3 attack and +8 damage (1d10+12). Pretty darned good, if you ask me. The image that this inspires is a warrior who thrives on battle and laughs at pain, who is at his peak when the chips are down and he’s running on pure adrenaline. Kraygin might want to think about picking up blinding smash as an encounter power at level 3, and depending on what you get from multiclassing into barbarian, he might want to do that eventually.

Shava used to be an archery ranger, but has dropped the archery combat style and prime shot in order to pick up beast mastery, along with a predatory bird as a companion. This bird gives her some nice versatility; she can use it to more carefully select her quarry by positioning it near her intended target, and if she’s in a sticky situation where she can’t get out of melee with an opponent, her companion can swoop in and attack for her (and deal hunter’s quarry damage to boot). Shava wants to play up the ranger’s connection to nature, so she may or may not multiclass into a primal class later on. Now, she still uses ranged attacks primarily, and her Strength isn’t that high, so many of the beast-themed powers won’t be all that useful to her, unless they’re powers that allow her beast to attack rather than her.

Sredni Vashtar, the warlord, used to have the tactical presence class feature, but traded it in for resourceful presence. Before, any time an ally spent an action point, that ally got a +1 to the attack roll. Now, they get a +4 to the damage roll if they hit, or 3 temporary hit points if they miss. The nice thing about this is that either is helpful, and it makes Sredni and Kraygin a great team because Kraygin either increases his already high damage bonus, or gets some temporary hit points, which are arguable much more useful to him than to anyone else. Sredni also traded out furious smash (4 damage, and a bonus to an ally’s damage) for opening shove, a much cooler power (in my opinion) that allows him to push an enemy and allow an ally to either attack or shift 4 squares. Between opening shove, wolf pack tactics, and knight’s move, Sredni has lots of powers that allow his allies to move around when it’s not their turn. Between resourceful presence and bastion of defense, he’s got lots of stuff that can grant temporary hit points.

Chance is the least changed character, mainly because he didn’t really have any new options available to him. He dropped bolstering strike because his Charisma is lower than his Strength (it’s a Charisma-based power), and it grants him only 1 temporary hit point when he uses it because of his relatively low Wisdom, making it a trade-off that’s usually not worth it. In its place he took valiant strike, an Strength-based power that grants him a +1 to attack for each enemy adjacent to him. This makes him a great defender, because it encourages him to really mix it up with big groups of bad guys. He’s got a pretty high AC, being the only party member who uses a shield (a magic shield, no less), and it might be to his advantage to make it even higher by picking up some plate mail. There’s also a feat that he’s got his eye on, cleansing challange, that makes to so that every time he uses his divine challenge power on an undead creature, he deals 2 radiant damage to it. This would be a good way to improve the party’s general offense against undead creatures, and would make Chance great at killing minions; even though divine challenge can be used only once per round, being able to automatically kill one undead minion per round with a minor action and no attack roll, as long as its within 5 squares, is pretty darned potent.

You can read the session report if you want to.

Martial Power: This book is just chocked full of D&D goodness. It’s mainly stuff for the players rather than the DM: new feats, new paragon paths, new epic destinies, and lots and lots of new powers. It’s all really good stuff, particularly the new builds for the fighter, warlord, ranger, and rogue. What’s interesting is that some of the powers and paragon paths allow you to branch out a little bit from your class’s role without actually multiclassing. The Guildmaster Thief paragon path is designed for the rogue (a striker), but most of its abilities are decidedly leader-ish. Also, the beastmaster ranger is very, very cool, and I like the idea that, when Wizards decides to incorporate companions, it’ll be on a class-by-class basis, allowing each class’s companion to be unique to that class. I’d imagine we’ll see a warlord build at some point with access to all sorts of followers, and I don’t think that a wizard build that utilizes a familiar is outside the realm of possibilities.

The Draconomicon: Where Martial Power is primarily for PCs, this book is all about cool stuff for the DM to use. The first chunk of stuff is all information on chromatic dragons: phyisiology, psychology, society, etc. It’s not game rules, but it’s really interesting to read, and I feel like a lot of it is useful for role-playing dragons. There are also draconic rituals, some traps, a lengthy section on hoard generation (which could easily be applied to generating any treasure hoard, not just one belonging to a dragon), nine sample lairs, and a bunch of draconic monsters, including new dragons and some lower-level threats, like kobolds. It’s good stuff.

Fallout 3: Wow. Just wow. I’m so hopelessly addicted to this game it’s not even funny. The formula feels a lot like a refinement of Oblivion, but it also feels distinctly like a Fallout game in many ways. There’s a lot of the trademark dark humor and some very interesting post-apocalyptic characters and scenarios. The quest design is fantastic; there’s almost always a twist that you don’t expect, even in relatively minor quests. The combat system (VATS), while not particularly deep (you usually want to shoot the head or, occasionally, the weapon) is fun and satisfying, and slow-motion ultra-gory kill shots never really get old.

Resident Evil 4: Very cool and creepy. I’m not all that far into it, as I’ve been mostly playing Fallout 3, but I am enjoying it quite a bit. I like the atmosphere and the story so far, and there have been some cool set-piece battles, too. I’m enjoying the controls (it should be noted that I have the Wii version, which allows you to aim with the remote) and the combat, and while the voice acting and translation is somewhat silly occasionally, it’s a good survival horror game through and through.

The Growing Hunger: This is the expansion for Last Night on Earth, which is one of my favorite games. The expansion adds some cool new scenarios, new characters to play, new cards for both the heroes and the zombies, and a bunch of optional rules that you can add in or not, as you like. I’ve only gotten a chance to play with the expansion once; I played the Plague Carriers scenario as the heroes, and just barely lost. It was a lot of fun, and it’s very cool to see seven additional zombies on the board.

A Touch of Evil: Another game by Flying Frog, the makers of LNoE. This time it’s a colonial-era supernatural horror game, which can be played competitively, cooperatively, or in teams as a hybrid of the two. It bears more than a passing similarity to both Arkham Horror and Runebound (both games that I enjoy quite a bit), but it’s a much simpler game than either and, once you’re used to it, can probably be played much faster than either. I’ve played it twice now, once with three friends cooperatively (it was fun and we vanquished the Vampire, though we found out later that we had neglected to use a few rules that would have made the game harder), and once on my own. Solo play is not officially supported in the rulebook, but it’s pretty easy to figure out how to do it regardless. I lost, not because the game was particularly difficult, but because the Shadow Track moved really quickly, and when it hits zero, it’s game over. There’s a debate online as to whether to use the competitive or cooperative rules when playing solo, and I feel now that a combination of the two should be used. I think that cooperative rules should be used for the Shadow Track and for the Town Elders, but I think that using the cooperative Mystery Phase Chart makes that Shadow Track move much too quickly, considering that having only a single player gives you little chance to counter its movement most of the time. I believe my game was over after about five or six turns, which seemed way too quick, and I feel like I didn’t really get to do much.

Well, that’s it for now. I may post about more stuff later.

We played a scenario called Plague Carriers. In that scenario, the zombie player has control of plague carrier zombies, which are tougher and automatically turn heroes into zombies when they kill them, but they can only move when heroes get close to them. The heroes have to kill all seven of them before sundown, or they lose. It was a very tense and exciting game. Early on I got a lot of great stuff; chainsaws, dynamite, shotguns, and other great weapons, as well as some nice first aid, and I killed three of the plague carriers pretty quickly. It looked like things were going my way, but my opponent was quietly stockpiling zombies in one corner of the board, where three of the plague carriers were. He then proceeded to pin me in the church for three or four rounds, which made me act a little desperately, especially since he managed to kill off two of my heroes (though they automatically replenish in this scenario). I made a dash for the last three plague carriers and managed to kill one of them, but lost another hero in the process. My newly spawned hero then went up to draw the last two carriers out so that I could blast them both with dynamite, but my plan backfired as the two plague carriers overwhelmed poor Sally and dragged her to her death. Game over, zombies win by killing off four heroes with 2 rounds left in the game.

At any rate, if anyone wants to see pictures of the event, my wife took some.

Something to note: if you play this game in single player, you’re not getting the full experience. It’s fun in single player, but not nearly as fun as playing with real people. The AI-controlled survivors are pretty useful; they have good aim and they’ll watch your back pretty effectively. They do not, however, take any sort of initiative like a human player will, and they also can’t use grenade items. That said, however, playing with even one other human player, especially if that player is someone you know, multiplies the game’s fun by a factor of 10. If you’ve got all four slots filled with people who know each other and gel as a team, you’re in for a real treat.

Also of note is that the versus mode, where one team plays the survivors while one plays the boss infected, is something of an acquired taste. I really didn’t like it that much the first time I played it. Playing the boss infected can be kind of frustrating at times; they die very quickly, and you have to wait 15-20 seconds to respawn. You don’t get to choose which kind of infected you spawn as, which can be irritating at times. Also, it can be hard to judge the range of an infected’s attack and, in the case of the smoker and the boomer, you have to wait a while for your attack to recharge if you miss. Playing a tank can be either very satisfying or also very frustrating; sometimes it feels like your big, meaty fists are going right through the survivors’ bodies without effect. When you get in a few good hits, though, you can really turn the tide of a match.

All that said, though, versus mode is starting to grow on me. I feel like I’m starting to get a better handle on how to play the infected; you have to be very patient and precise, and you have to coordinate both with your fellow boss infected and with the AI horde. You’re most effective when you wait until the survivors are distracted or panicking, then strike. If a smoker and a pair of hunters all strike at the same time during an infected rush, it can spell curtains for the survivors.

There’s also something to be said for playing the survivors against human opponents. They’ll often do things that the AI-controlled infected won’t do, and those things are often unexpected. It is, however, a very different game; there’s less continuity and it’s not quite as cinematic as campaign mode; in many cases, you won’t be making it through an entire level, but you’ll play the next level anyway.

At any rate, I think that there’s a lot of merit in both modes of play. It’s a great game, full of zombie-stomping fun, either way.

Second, I recently downloaded the beta version of the D&D Character Builder. I have to say, it’s very impressive. The program makes it really easy to make D&D characters, and it’s fantastic how they’ve got content from Dragon and other published products, like the Adventurer’s Vault right in there for you to use, even if you don’t own the physical product. It’ll automatically generate a character sheet for your character, which you can customize to a pretty great degree, and it’ll generate power cards, magic item cards, and reference cards for you, too. It’s pretty sweet.

It isn’t perfect, though; there are a few things it could use. The ability to create your own items would be really nice, since most DMs are going to be giving their PCs various things that aren’t in any published product. I’m not even talking about new weapons or magic items here; the ability to give a PC an item like “an old, tattered journal” or “a necklace depicting a skull with ram’s horns” would be fantastic. Similarly, it would be nice if you could edit the text in the character sheet and power cards. Most of it is pretty good, and there’s a lot of auto-calculation (though there could be more), but I would like to be able to type in my own notes in various places. There are also some issues with the personalized information that it puts on your power cards. The ranger’s Twin Strike, for example, allows you to attack with both your primary weapon and your off-hand weapon, but the power card only includes an attack bonus and damage for your primary weapon. It would be nice if your off-hand weapon were included, or if you could type that in yourself. Since many of the ranger’s powers allow you to attack with two weapons, this seems like a glaring omission.

It is, however, still in beta, and there’s time for it to be tweaked still. As it stands, even with a few things missing, it is a fantastic product, and when the full version comes out, I’ll be really happy to be a D&D Insider subscriber.

At first blush, the zombies appear like your garden-variety zombies; they shamble around aimlessly and don’t seem to intelligent. Well, the second part’s right; they really aren’t that smart (as you’d expect). But they don’t shamble around when they spot you; they charge at you, full speed ahead, like something out of 28 Days Later. Individually, they’re not that tough; a couple of shots will take one down. Trouble is you almost never run into them individually; it’s a full-on zombiepocalypse, and that means huge swarms of zombies rushing you from every direction. But that’s not even the worst part.

See, there are these boss zombies, infected that have somehow evolved beyond the rank-and-file undead. Smokers have long tongues that they use to lasso you with and then constrict you, and they blow up in a puff of smoke when you kill them. Hunters are super fast and super agile, and can pounce on you and rip you to shreds with their claws. Boomers are huge and fat, and can vomit on you; when they do this, it blurs your vision pretty severely, and attracts mobs of infected from every angle. Tanks are . . . well, they’re like the Hulk. They smash things. And they’re really, really tough. There are also witches, who sit in the dark and cry until you shoot them or shine a light on them, at which point they go absolutely batshit crazy and rip you to pieces.

I think what I like the most about the game is the sense of teamwork and camaraderie that the game fosters. Sticking together and watching each others’ backs isn’t just a good idea; it’s absolutely critical. separate from the group, and you will die a messy, painful death. Stick with the group, though, and you can watch out for each other, cover each other when you reload or heal up, and fend of the hordes of onrushing Zs with hails of bullets and shotgun shells. It’s absolutely awesome.

Now, the demo is only available for a few more days; once the game comes out, they’re turning it off. Originally I was kind of ticked about that, because I figured I probably wouldn’t be able to pick up the game until after Christmas sometime, if I didn’t get it for Christmas. But then my friends Chris and Tad decided to buy me an early Christmas present. So, when the demo runs out, zombie season officially opens. And I’ll be there, shotgun in hand.

Gamers is a movie about a gaming group about to break the world record for the most hours gamed, or some such thing; at least, that’s what it’s ostensibly about. In reality, it’s less about humor that gamers would enjoy, and more about frat-boy dick and fart jokes that constantly point out what big losers these gamers are. They fit into just about every stereotype that exists for RPG enthusiasts. If done tastefully, this would probably have come off as being charming and self-deprecating. As it is, it’s unfunny and mildly insulting. If you enjoy gaming, don’t rent it. If you enjoy movies, don’t rent it. If you enjoy dick and fart jokes, you might find something to like here.

We also picked up Wii Play (mainly for the packaged Wii Remote) and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, because I had a lot of fun playing this with my friends who got a Wii when it first came out. Wii Play is decent value for money, considering that the game-and-remote package is only $10 more retail than a remote by itself, but only a few of the games have real replay value, and there are only nine total. Super Monkey Ball, on the other hand, has a single player mode (which I haven’t played yet), and 50 multiplayer minigames that my wife and I can play together. Some of them are misses, but enough of them are fun and replayable that I feel like the $6 that we wound up spending on it (we had a gift card from buying a vacuum cleaner) was warranted.