Best and Worst of 2005?

Wormwood said:
Most Influential:Serenity (I'd not really seen Firefly until the DVD set came out. Now it colors my RPG perceptions like nothing else at the moment).

Mega-ditto!

My vote for the worst RPG products has to be the WotC Environment books, followed by the Race books after Stone. Best would include A Magical Society: Beastbuilder, and Aasimar & Teifling (GR). Think that last one might have come out in 2004, but I got it this year.
 

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Best Personal Gaming Moment of 2005

Getting the final blow in on a mad wizard who'd taken over the body of a god...using his own powerful gear against him.

Next Best Personal Gaming Moment of 2005

Blinded, my warmage was still in action with his efreet flying him around in the form of a nightmare, and the ghost who dwelt in his belt knife providing targeting information (mostly by physically moving his arm and giving range estimates).

Best Product of 2005

Shadowrun, 4th edition. Woo-hoo!

Most Disappointing Purchased d20 Product of 2005

Magic of Eberron...the fluff is nice, really, but the crunch is bleh, at best.

Most Disappointing Put Back On The Shelf And Left To Rot d20 Product of 2005

Weapons of Legacy...my hat of WoL knows no bounds.

Brad
 

Best moment in a role-playing game:
Martin's Barbarian almost single-handedly killing the Aspect of the Ebon Triad, thanks to squeezing and a tanglefoot bag.

Worst moment in a role-playing game:
Martin's barbarian vs the lizardfolk in Encounter at Blackwall Keep. No challenge whatsoever. I'm going to be using Aid Another a lot more from now on. (Lizardfolk have +2 to hit? That's wimpy).

Best product of 2005
It's a tie between Magic of Incarnum and Weapons of Legacy. Both were immediately incorporated into my campaigns, and have been fascinating to see in action.

MoI has become the driving force behind my new Ulek game, and Weapons of Legacy (apart from being cool) allowed me to reward Martin's Barbarian properly without running into big balance issues.

Worst product of 2005
Only counting the limited ones I saw (which means most of the Wizards releases), the title of worst goes to Lords of Madness. (Races of Destiny escaped by being published in December 2004!) Although not a strictly a "bad" book, Lords of Madness manages to cram in a pack of irrelevance into its pages. Someone explain to me what the discussion of the grell adds to the book, please? More campaign-building help and less physiological discussions, please!

Cheers!
 

Best Moment in game this year.
3 HOURS. That's how long it took my group to do the massive Battle Temple fight in Part 2 of the Age of Worms, The Three Faces of Evil. And yet interest never flagged or waned, and everyone stayed attentive during what ended up being an absolute nail-biter of a fight. When a PC finally dropped, everyone was loving it (one of the most heroic exits I've seen, defending the two tapped out casters from Theldrick for two rounds. Solo. With his rage having run out.) Its moments like that that I GM for.

Worst Moment.
The horribly slow start we had to Age of Worms. Everyone getting used to each other, and one disruptive player we managed to ditch before he did any real harm.

Best product.
(Hey Merric, here's a classic 'not you' moment!) Lords of Madness is a personal favourite, drips with evil idea goodness for me. It made Aboleths interesting, which I thought was impossible, and the new critter, the Tsochari, are fantastic. And do I really need to mention the EXTREME ABBERATION, the Zeugalak? Even typing it brings a smile. This book always manages to inspire.

Non-WotC it goes to Spycraft 2.0, hands down. All I can say about that lethal weapon of a book is OH...MY...GOD. There's so much crammed in there, I'm still digesting it 2 months on. Runner up is Necessary Evil for Savage Worlds, for being one of the best Supers systems I've ever seen.

Worst Product
Weapons of Legacy. An absolute snore-fest, no interest whatsoever.
Fantastic Locations. I pity the trees that died for these useless money-sinks.
 

Testament said:
Best product.
(Hey Merric, here's a classic 'not you' moment!) Lords of Madness is a personal favourite, drips with evil idea goodness for me.

:)

I think Heroes of Horror gives more advice for what I want to do with the subject matter in LoM. (And MoI!)

It's odd. I can see why people like LoM. I can see that there's good material there. But it doesn't work for me. But the Fantastic Locations, Weapons of Legacy and Magic of Incarnum were just what I needed for my game.

Cheers!
 
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Best Gaming Moment
The fight between the party and a Daelkyr (albeit modified and turned into an extraplanar aberration, rather than an outsider), which took place on a demiplane where a portal to the Far Realm had been opened. Lots of wonderfully weird things happened there, and I created opportunities for the party to gain help from the (somewhat sentient) demiplane itself in order to purge it of the Far Realm influence. Absolute key highlight of that fight was when the party enchanter got grappled by a tentacle coming out of the Far Realm portal, managed to pull out the portal demolisher, and hurled it at the portal telekinetically. The portal was instantly destroyed (I rolled a 1 on its save), and the enchanter almost got sucked into Far Realm.

Worst Gaming Moment
Me venting my anger at the DM (who happens to be one of my best friends) for making my cinematic maneuver look ridiculous because I didn't accurately perceive the distance between the enemies and my warlock character. It went something like this: Me: I want to cancel my fell flight and then activate gaseous form the moment before I hit the snow-covered ground. DM: fine, make a Concentration check (check succeeds). You've pulled it off, and you're now on the ground, 10 feet away from the enemies. Me: WTF?!?!?! No way was my character that close to them, yadda, yadda, yadda, I don't accept your ruling, you suck, yadda, yadda, yadda... etc.

Best Product
Dragon Magazine! Erik has managed to turn the magazine into something I eagerly anticipate every month, instead of something I bought, glanced over, and placed on the shelf, never to be looked at again. The magazine is now a perfect balance of fluff and (appropriate) crunch, and the new article series - such as the Demonomicon - are amazing inspirational reads.

Runners up would be Lords of Madness and DMG2.

Worst Product
Weapons of Legacy. Uninspired, bland, boring, and has horrible mechanics to boot. They should have asked the designers from Obsidian Entertainment (former Black Isle Studios) to write this book, because even the most boring item in Icewind Dale 1 & 2 and Torment had a better writeup than WoL items.

Runner up: Magic of Incarnum. Other than Merric, is there anybody here really interested in this book? Does it offer something really new? Nope. It's just some funky-colored "do it yourself" magic items. Pseudo-mystical terminology also grates my nerves incredibly (chakras, essentia, potentia... whateverentia).
 

Best moment:
Tonight, when the barbarian (+6) outwrestled a gargantuan creature (+19). Pwned! :D

Best stuff:
The entire Iron Heroes line, which is the D&D I've waited some 30 years for.
Etherscope, for being just so damn cool, and d20 Modern, to boot.
Shadowrun 4e. Finally, an edition with mechanics I can stand.
Serenity. I never had any interest in the show. Still haven't seen it, or the movie. But the game's a heck of a lot of fun.

Worst stuff:
Magic of Incarnum. Man, the lameness just never stops in this book.

Most disappointing
True 20. The actual changes could have been c. 20 pages and $5. And there's no way to incorporate standard magic items into the damage save formula.

Best Game I'll still end up Selling on Ebay
Spycraft 2.0. Just way too much crunch for my group to ever get into.
 

Best Product:
(tie) Wilderlands of High Fantasy Box Set
(tie) Shackled City Adventure Path

Worst Product:
None come to mind...
 

Sammael said:
Worst Product
Runner up: Magic of Incarnum. Other than Merric, is there anybody here really interested in this book? Does it offer something really new? Nope. It's just some funky-colored "do it yourself" magic items. Pseudo-mystical terminology also grates my nerves incredibly (chakras, essentia, potentia... whateverentia).
Other than Merric, there's me and possibly a few others as well. I like it because it's a new system to tap supernatural abilities that requires less bookkeeping than spells and psionics. I guess it isn't to everyone's taste, but one man's meat, and all that. :p

Now, on-topic.

Best Gaming Moment
In a game I DM'ed, a half-dragon tyrannosaurus swallowed the warmage whole. The other party members wounded it heavily, and when it was the warmage's turn, he made his Concentration check and cast the only spell that he had without somatic and material components: shout. The tyrannosaurus failed the save (rolled a 1 as I recall), took enough damage to push it into the double-digit negatives, and I ruled that its stomach basically exploded outwards, and the gore-soaked warmage strode out of the lifeless husk.

Worst Gaming Moment
In another game, we were on a mission for the King and the DM made us jump through hoops in order to raise enough money to buy passage on a ship. The ship's captain requested more money than the King's Prime Minister had with him when he accompanied us to the ship and refused to take us without the additional payment. When we went back to the palace to get more money, we discovered that the treasury had just been robbed. We tried to raise money by entering a gladitorial tournament and betting on ourselves, but both the owner of the arena and the bookmaker we placed bets with could not afford to pay us when we won. The same thing happened when we tried to win more money at the gambling hall. Fortunately, the DM sensed our rapidly growing frustration and introduced the secret cultists who were trying to sabotage our mission at this stage (he later confessed that he had planned a few other events before this would have happened) because our nominally good-aligned party was almost ready to take over the captain's ship by force.

Most Used Products
The books I got the most use out of were Complete Adventurer, Complete Arcane and Races of Eberron. The two books which I haven't really made much use of yet because they were only recently released, but which I think have great potential, are Heroes of Valor and Spell Compendium. Overall, I think it's been a pretty good year for WotC.

Least Used Products
The books that I think I will probably not use much of are Heroes of Battle and Explorer's Handbook. This year, I also picked up pdfs of Unorthodox Paladins and Heroes of Code. Unfortunately, I don't think I will get much use out of them either. It's probably just me, but I find that non-WotC products are generally not to my taste. In the past, I've picked up Unorthodox Paladins, Arcana Unearthed and Mindscapes and didn't really like them.
 

eris404 said:
Best/worst moments in a role-playing game
Best/worst products, d20 or otherwise
Books/televison/movies/media/events of 2005 that shaped your game

Hmmm, let's see...

Worst moment (I am behind the screen 90% of the time) was having to end a really fun campaign (New Mavarga) because of losing too many core players. :(

Best moment was having the group ask me to start up Ars Magica to replace it! :D

Worst products? Why bother saying anything? I don't use bad products if I can avoid it. ;)

Best products... Oooo... Paranoia XP goes right to the top of my list! Great to see Alpha Complex and Our Friend The Computer (looking very tanned and rested, I may add) after a ten year hiaitus! :D

The one book I can say that has really influenced me and gaming more than anything else would have to be Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, because it has started my new Regency Magica project -- strictly homebrew, but should be wonderful when I finish it! :D

So, yeah, I'd say that despite some frustrating moments, it has been a good year for gaming, even though the D20 seems to be going away.
 

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