I’ve talked before about how hard it can be to get a friend something game related. Sure, I usually know it’s a safe bet to get Bruce any boosters of the latest Magic set whenever a gift giving occasion rolls around but then it comes to finding the right present that is just off the wall enough, it can certainly be a challenge. Especially since not everyone is going to like elf ear jewelry.

ThinkGeek once again went into the depths of the dungeon lab and crafted an object so unique that only the word “absurd” can describe it – the Magic d20 of Destiny! In reality, it is nothing more than the nerdiest Magic 8 Ball you will ever see. Shaped like the classic d20, but much bigger (it’s almost 3.5 inches tall!) this massive die is painted black and white to mimic the classic 8 Ball look.

If you’ve ever used a Magic 8 Ball, there isn’t anything brand new here really. The place where 20 should be is instead a small window that reveals some blue liquid and a special die inside. You ask a question, shake it and then see what twisted fate the d20 reveals. But unlike your average Magic 8 Ball, this one says some very nerdy things.

Your party approaches some rabbits, what should you do?
RUN AWAY!

Should I buy that new staff?
YES (IF 3^RD EDITION)

Would a TPK be cruel?
RE-ROLL

Should we check the alley next to the tavern?
IT’S A TRAP!

Any gaming nerd will appreciate the references made by the Magic d20 of Destiny. Whether it’s insinuating that the DM favors you, or confirming your last critical hit, it’s a fun and quirky item that brings some smiles. Sadly though, this oversized die will never replace your classic d20.

First off, rolling this thing is a challenge. The massive size when combined with the fact that it is full of blue liquid (which I’m sure will stain your wizard robes) means you only want to roll this on a soft surface – like that hideous couch in your basement that you won’t really care if it gets destroyed. But the biggest issue is the simple fact that rolling this die will result in way too many critical failures. With the 20-spot being replaced by the window, it often ends up sticking on that spot. It will also destroy any minis with ease.

But if you’re looking for a unique way to add some randomness to your campaign without using the 10,000 Magical Effects book, the Magic d20 of Destiny is a fun and unique way to change things up. Just be sure to bring some regular dice along too.

Pros
Perfect nerdy gift for a gaming friend
Great sense of humor
Something both 3e and 4e players can enjoy

Cons
Doesn’t roll twenties
Afraid it will shatter when rolled on a hard surface
I don’t think it’s really magical.

All images from ThinkGeek.com and used for review purposes.

One of the biggest issues with the first printing of Ascension: Chronicles of the Godslayer wasn’t immediately noticeable. But then the expansion came out and they changed the card stock. For people who haven’t sleeved their entire set, this meant cards tended to clump together by expansion which made shuffling a challenge. But now Gary Games has come out and released the second edition of Chronicles of the Godslayer on the new card stock!

In addition to the new card stock, a handful of cards have gotten some minor rewording to help clarify what they actually do or how they work (I’m looking at you Runic Lycanthrope) plus a revised rulebook to bring it inline with Storm of Souls. And the cards are marked as being 2nd Edition, so us purists can brag about how we got Ascension back in the day.

In addition, Gary Games is now selling the Year 1 Promo Pack that contains all nine promo cards released in 2011 for only $8.99! I’ve already grabbed one for myself and we’ll be reviewing the cards as soon as they arrive. I can’t wait to throw a Vortex around.

If you’re unfamiliar with the game Ascension, it is a card game created by the former professional Magic player, Justin Gary. A card game that is essentially a cross between Magic and Dominion, you draft your deck while playing the game. For a complete rundown of the game, check out our reviews on both Chronicle of the Godslayer and Return of the Fallen as this review will also cover both of those games.

For anyone who has played Ascension, the touch controls of Ascension iOS are intuitive and quick to pick up. Consisting of little more than flicking and dragging, the game plays quite naturally. A few shortcuts like “Play All” allow the first few turns to move very quickly when any of the three classic opening hands are present (5 apprentices, 4 apprentices/ 1 militia, 3 apprentices/ 2 militias).

But if you aren’t familiar with the game of Ascension, a decent tutorial is included (which Gary Games really needs to port over to Flash on their website). As someone who loves playing games, but often has trouble teaching new players, this is a very welcome inclusion.

But the real reason I love this game is the ability to find someone to play against at any time. The computer controlled opponents are always available with two different levels of difficulty. Though I have noticed a few odd issues with the computer players. First off, they never seem to buy enough Mystics or Heavy Infantry. Secondly, there are a handful of cards that cause the game to come to a grinding halt. On the fastest setting, a turn takes only a few seconds but when the computer is given the option of banishing a card in the center row, the game stops for 15 to 30 seconds! It’s a minor frustration, though Rachael thought it was absurd to complain about it.

Having played a handful of games over WIFI, I really like how simple the matching system is. Players creating games are able to set a chess clock ranging from 10 minutes to 14 days, allowing people to play games at their own pace. Though I tend to prefer games that are shorter since I rarely remember what happened just a few turns earlier. In the dozen games I played, I never experienced any issues other than only winning half the time. Only the online multiplayer has tracking of a player’s wins and losses.

You can also play with up to three other players locally. The requirement of double tapping the screen between turns makes it easy to pass the iPad when playing and would be great for car trips or waiting in line at an event like PAX. The only weird part is when a card requires everyone to react in some way.

Some other small settings are great too. You can pick as to whether you play with just the core game, the expansion or the core game and the expansions. It is interesting to see how the strategies vary depending on if the inclusion of the Fate mechanic is present.

For only $8 you can get both Chronicles of the Godslayer and Return of the Fallen and that is a fantastic deal – especially since the those two would cost you $70 for the physical copies. Going forward, I don’t know what Gary Games has planned for Storm of Souls or the promotional cards, but it will be interesting to see what they do. As a transfer to the iOS, I’m very impressed with how well Ascension works. The ability to play a game in just a few minutes has allowed me to try out new and different strategies that would come up much less often at my kitchen table. If you have an iPad and are interested in the game Ascension, this the best $8 you’ll spend on an iOS game.

Pros
The ability to play Ascension anywhere
And against anyone!
Intuitive touch controls
Very cheap to get
Great teaching tool
Issue free online play

Cons
Single timing bug is annoying
No promotional cards included
Only two levels of difficulty
No stats for games against the computer

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (2nd generation), iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 4.2 or later.

I somehow found this sitting in our unposted archives. That doesn’t make it any less good. Seriously.

Perspective guys. Via The Nerdist

Those are pretty swanky promotional cards (though it looks like this planeswalker only knows one spell… blue hand!). To get these promotional cards, you’ll need to pick up a copy of the comic at your local comic book shop.

In this sourcebook, I’m hoping to see a few things. I want the ability to include some elemental flavor and crunch in any character I make, regardless of class or race (obviously some will be easier than others), and I want to get some inspirations on running adventures dealing with the Elemental Chaos that don’t play on tired themes: namely “let’s go to the Abyss and kill stuff!” and “in this fortress of the Lord of [element type here], there are hideous creatures composed of [element type here].” Based on Heroes of Shadow and Heroes of the Feywild, I think I have a good chance of getting my wishes. Here goes!

First off, the basics. The book has four chapters, making it similar to Heroes of the Feywild, and the pure-fluff stuff seems concentrated in the first one: “Into the Maelstrom.” It takes up the majority of the Table of Contents but only the first 35 pages of the text. This is not normally something I concentrate on but it’s important with the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons visible down the road. I see some sidebars later in the book, though, that will probably increase the edition-neutral percentage of the book.

Chapter 1: Into the Maelstrom

This chapter starts off with Elemental Magic, which includes some of the elemental magic preview we got back in mid-January. I’ll skip through the Scholarly Debate section since we’ve already seen it and take a look at the intriguing Elemental Expressions section. This discusses elemental magic by power source, pointing out that it is a cornerstone to both arcane and psionic powers and even has a strong presence in divine magic, “though few practitioners of divine magic openly acknowledge this connection” as it points towards cooperation with Primordial powers.

The first sidebar is here, an “Elemental Viewpoint” written in-character from the perspective of a prykineticist.

The chapter goes on to discuss mastering elemental magic itself, not just spells that access bits and sparks. In order to fully partake of elemental magic, the in-book theory goes, one needs to become an elemental creature. This is a dangerous undertaking as one can get lost in the mix and end up a slave instead of an epic-level champion. The demonic Abyss also makes an appearance here with its seductive call, all good reasons for why elementalists are rare in the world and even distrusted.

A brief discussion of the classical “base” elements (air, earth, fire, water) follows and then some more material we’ve seen: the Elemental Influences from that earlier preview. Of course, this leads us to Planar Breaches which is a rupture in the fabric of planes due to a build-up of elemental energies. I can see a pretty awesome campaign already beginning to form with a swelling elemental vortex that could lead to a planar breach someplace catastrophic. This seems especially awesome for Dark Sun. Cinderheart, an elemental fortress in the Core setting (post-Nerath) is given a brief treatment to flesh out one such location.

Next we have a description of the Elemental Chaos which gives you locations like the Feywild ones in Heroes of the Feywild. Reaching the plane, dangers of the Abyss, and elemental realms including the City of Brass, Kaltenheim (land of the frost giants), the Ninth Bastion of dwarves and men, Rheivalt at the center of an elemental river network, and the githzerai city of Zerthadlun (but not Shrak’lator).

To populate such a *ahem* chaotic realm, we have the elemental-touched races next. There are genasi to be sure but also dragonborn (emphasizing Arkhosia’s arcane might), drow (resistant drow favor elemental magic instead of Lolth’s divine magic), dwarves (the people of earth and fire, once slaves to the giants), and orcs/half-orcs (the chaotic and wrathful race) all have substantial material and other races have short paragraphs.

The most exciting part is the legacy fluff that’s attached to the main write-ups. The Crucible of ancient Arkhosia, bent on embracing elemental wrath against the tieflings; House Eilservs of the drow, the house of Erelhei-Cinlu from Against the Giants who serve the Elder Elemental Eye of Tharizdun; the elemental forgeborn dwarves (from a races article in Dragon, I think); and the legacy of the Giants and the Stoneborn among orcs and half-orcs all give ready angles for players and DMs alike to exploit.

The chapter then goes on to discuss elemental patronage with a seventeen prime examples waiting to torment players. These are broken up into Elemental Princes (like Olhydra and Cryonax), Bound Primordials, and Free Primordials. It ends with the awesome list of Primordials that should give DMs plenty of fodder for elemental enemies.

Small but noteworthy is the sidebar by Drundzhar, dwarf cultist, who gives us a look into the psyche of the Primordials’ followers. Not as crazy as you’d think and definitely a neat PC idea.

Chapter Two: Character Themes

Alright, on to the crunch chapters. Character themes may not be as new as they once were but they’re still a neat idea with a lot of room to grow. Like I said in the preview article, some of them echo paragon paths and that’s alright since they have very different mechanical niches.

The demon spawn is pretty self-explanatory, full of powers like dmonic frenzy and Abyssal doom. Earthforger is a way to make any character an earth-themed creature, centered on stone panoply which lets you damage everyone in a close burst 1 and gain resistance to all damage. I have immediate visions of Avatar, and not the blue-skin one.

The elemental initiate seems out of place, being a half-monk theme, but I suppose the “balance of the elements” has its place, and it’s certainly something different. Fire crafter does for fire with earthforger did for stone, and the blazing corona aura power is pretty cool. The ironwrought takes earth-based elemental power in an offense direction which is nice to see. The janissary we’ve seen, but it turns you into a strike-force elemental soldier. Similar to the Feywild tuathan, the moteborn are otherwise normal races who live in the Plane Below and are able to summon elemental familiars to their side. The primordial adept is one sworn to a particular Primordial and get a measure of their power, sort of a planewalking templar, and we get “two examples” here… no doubt we’ll have more in upcoming Dragon articles, hee hee! The watershaper is the wet elemental devotee, summoning buffeting waves out of nowhere, and the windlord rounds out the set with wind fury assault which lets you fly over your enemies.

Chapter Three: Classes

The druid gets a new primal aspect, the Druid of Wastes, who draws his power from “the world’s majestic, desolate places – the icy wastes of the north, the bleak shores, the great sandy deserts, or the barren rocky mountains.” This is a really great idea as it lets them hit all the elements in one while still making it more flavorful than “Druid of the Elements.” The desolate parts of the world are definitely the most primal and elemental, where civilization has not touched, and these powers are pretty neat. They can summon up living zephyrs, which pulls together from the terrain around it, and have nasty, erosive spells. We even have some new Primal Spirits (a la Primal Power) for the Wastes and several Beast Form powers.

The eternal tide monk we’ve seen part of already, but there’s also the desert wind monk who punches with flaming fists. The new powers for the monk have strongly elemental names but not as strongly elemental mechanics, though it shouldn’t be hard for you to spin your githzerai monk as a master of the elements. Sixteen pages of monk material in all, including some “lesser” monastic traditions which DMs and players could elaborate on.

This is a good amount of material and, like I said, it goes to show that Wizards has not given up on the Player’s Handbook classes in favor of Essentials. Shut up, haters.

That said, the next entry is for the elementalist sorcerer, an Essentials-style sorcerer finally which heavily plays up the “living elements” theme that this book is all about. Elementalists get elemental bolt (like eldritch bolt but with 1d12 damage) and then an elemental specialty: air, earth, fire, water. That specialty improves your elemental bolt (damage type and a lasting effect usually) as well as giving you two more at-will attacks and some other abilities at higher level. Of note are the escalation abilities which are encounter powers that super-charge an at-will that you use. You get one escalation power at 1st, 3rd, 7th, and 13th level until you collect ‘em all (like violent Pokemon). There are also other elemental sorcerer powers for sorcerers of all stripes and, while elemental sorcerers are nothing new, they look pretty neat.

The warlock gets an elemental pact, which seems like a version of the chaos sorcerer for the darker class. It comes in eldritch (Player’s Handbook) and hexblade (Essentials) versions; I’m a big fan of the hexblades and the elemental buddies you get here definitely convince me I’m on to something. New warlock powers like tentacles of Cryonax and baleful eye of Imix remind us what an awesome job warlocks have.

Last in the line-up we have the sha’ir wizard, whom we also saw in a preview, with an arcane group (the Society of the Shifting Sands… A+ for aliteration but C- for cleverness coolness), a renowned elemental mages sidebar, and more elemental powers than you can shake an azer at.

Chapter Four: Elemental Options

Only ten minutes left to flip through this chapter but it looks good. The Demon-Bound paragon path seems determined to prove my point with character themes vs. paragon paths (see the demon spawn above), while the doomlord makes the Planescape fan in my core want to crow with delight. The elemental anchorite is a monk path for the truly-devoted chaos monks, the elemental savant is the same for sorcerers, and the favored sha’ir is for a genie’s pet wizard. The elemental viewpoint sidebars in this section look truly epic and I wish I could take a look at them.

The god warder is something in the other direction: a divine servant sent to destroy Primordial spawn that threaten the planes. There’s also the herald of Vezzuvu, a Primordial-specific path, and the advanced paths for paragon elemental hexblades. The prince of genies (like I’ve said elsewhere) is not my favorite, but the reforged soul who gives into elemental tugs on their being seems interesting.

The epic destinies start off with no pulled punches: emergent Primordial. You literally become a new Primordial. Awesome. Lord of Chaos focuses on the other half of the plane and seems destined to screw with whole campaign settings.

The list of feats looks interesting, with several built off a Born of the Elements feats that can make you into a living elemental. You can also gain an Elemental Companion instead of an Arcane Familiar, and the options are pretty cool: arctine, automaton, chaos phage, crysmaline, flame serpent, hordeling, magmin, mud wretch, nereid, pech, or sylph. The weapons and implements are all as expected (though the chronicle of the Dawn War tome seems like a pretty awesome idea), but the primordial shards are just as good as I hoped. I’d list them all but I’m out of time, so let’s just say that Cryonax’s pale tooth is just the tip of the iceberg. Pun intended.

Conclusion

This book definitely meets my initial wants: there are plenty of elemental options for everyone and there are lots of ideas for dynamic elemental campaigns. The only part of this book that could be expanded more is the edition-neutral aspects, but that’s not what the designers were trying to do. If you’re playing a Pathfinder campaign or looking forward to D&D Next, most of the pages in here full of power blocks and class features won’t interest you, but the fluff for sha’ir and elementalists will be of interest and help you flesh out your setting. Eberron games can certainly benefit from extra theory on elemental magic no matter what system you’re using. All in all, a very good buy.

Everyone would like to assume that when we sit down to play a game the outcome is predominantly based on our skills. We win because of superior tactics and decision making, and others lose because they are stupid. This is almost never the case, except for the stupid part. Stupid people lose ALL the time, and sometimes stupid people win, but usually because someone else at the table was even dumber, but I digress.

When we win we want to emphasize how much our own skill contributed to victory. Yet when we lose, many are more than happy to blame it purely on being unlucky, hence the aforementioned utterances.

Aside from being annoying, and belittling the person who was victorious, there’s a problem with constantly invoking luck as an excuse. Aside from a few exceptions, like chess and checkers, all games involve a healthy amount of luck. You might as well use the excuse, “you won because you sat down to play the game.”

If the game has dice or if cards are being drawn then luck is involved. Some games give you decision points to mitigate chance, but in the end, it is still your responsibility to understand how much the fates are impacting the game and adjust your strategy accordingly. Rather than be a crutch for when you lose, luck and chance should merely be additional variables that you factor into those supreme tactics that you like to tout. This is partly why Eurogames have become very popular since most of them focus on resource management, worker replacement and economic growth. They mitigate luck as much as they can by forcing players into multiple decision points each turn.

A great example is Settlers of Catan. As popular as it is the game turns many people off because of how frustrating it can be. Choosing the most likely points on the map (like a 6,9,10) doesn’t always give you the resource economy you want. In fact, it would seem that suddenly fours and 12s are being rolled constantly. Of course we are more likely to remember games when statistical anomalies like no 6s or 8s were rolled than we are games when our choice of placement resulted in near perfect resource income. We also tend to forget that probability is merely an expectation of what should happen given a really large sample set. It has absolutely nothing to do with what will happen.

But this is all stuff that everyone knows, or at least you hope they know. Rather than cast aside a game like Settlers, best to embrace the parts of the game you can impact, what I call the “decision points.” Just like every game has some element of chance, so to does every game have moments of decision.

In Settlers, you have to decide where to place roads and settlements, decide how and when to offer trades, or whether to eschew building for development cards. If the game ends with you losing, it is because you didn’t take proper advantage of the resources you had. Yes, there will be a time or two when you are monumentally screwed over by luck, but this is going to be rare.

With dice games like Settlers, Kingsburg, Monopoly, etc. seeing how luck and decision points interact is pretty easy. In card drawing or deck building games this is a little less apparent. Deck building games like Dominion are a perfect mix of chance and decisions. The cards you draw from your deck are entirely by chance, but you make the choices about how your deck is comprised.

You can actually further affect chance through trashing cards to reduce the size of the deck. Yes, the turn on which you draw your devastating “throne room” into “throne room” combo is entirely based on luck, but you made the choices to go that route and to set your deck to take advantage of it in the right moment.

Not all card games are deck building though. In games like Ticket to Ride or Battlestar Galactica (did you ever think you’d see those two in the same sentence), the strategies come from when to play your cards. Do you build up as big a hand as possible or constantly take actions rather than wait?

This might all seem like common sense, because it is. Luck isn’t something to blame your poor play on, nor is it reason to discount someone else’s good play. Chance effects everyone at the gaming table. The difference is some choose to embrace it and others hide behind it. If you’re not sure which is the better strategy, think about the last time you won a game by just passively sitting around waiting for the dice to fall in your favor.

Monte Cook hase revealed that Dungeons &Dragons (D&D) Next would feature Vancian magic, at least in some form. Before we get to our thoughts, here’s a little history on the subject.

The rules for spellcasting in D&D, prior to 4th Edition, said that after a wizard casts a spell, it is erased from his mind and he must wait until the next day to cast it again. This concept comes from the Dying Earth series by  Jack Vance, fantasy author and anagrammed namesake for Vecna the Arch-Lich of the Tomb of Horrors. In these books, as in D&D, a wizard’s brain can only hold so many of the arcane formulas that control magic. Each day, you memorize a limited number of these spells and then forget each one as soon as you’ve cast it.

Later in D&D history the designers slightly tweaked the “lore” description of this mechanic–for the better, in my opinion–when they suggested that wizards wake up in the morning, study their spellbook, and ritually prepare each spell. As they cast those spells during the day, they are completing the final few incantations and gestures of the ritual, unleashing the stored power of that spell.

Also called “fire-and-forget,” once you’ve chosen your spells, you are generally locked into those choices until the next day. This was a core pillar of the D&D legacy from the early days all the way through 2008.

It’s obviously quite different from most of the fantasy genre, but it has its own quirky charm. Vancian magic takes a firm position on how spellcasting works and says, “Gandalf didn’t have a spellbook and Harry Potter can cast magic all day. You’re neither of them. This game is so much more than a book simulator.”

So what do we think about all this? What can you say about the fraught relationship that many D&D players have with Jack Vance’s legacy? A lot apparently, but in a nutshell: it’s complicated.

Patrick

Something that I really like about Vancian magic is that it encourages the idea that wizards–those diligent students of the arcane–carefully manage their magic. What I mean by this is that your wizard knows the names of his spells and they exist to him as discrete pieces of magic, just as they do to the player, and that he can consider against each other and talk about with his fellow mages.

The list of spells on your character sheet matches a corresponding list in his spellbook. When he studied magic he attended a class called Evocation 301: Fireball. When he learns power word: blind, it’s not because he got a little more powerful and learned how to blind people; it’s because he found a dusty scroll labeled power word: blind and copied it into his book. 4th Edition wizards (and other spellcasters), by being non-Vancian, have an array of powers at their fingertips and, upon finding an opportunity to use one, simply lob a gob of magic at an enemy and it does something. It may have a name (or it may not), and you can describe it compellingly, but ultimately it’s more in the arena of player knowledge than character knowledge.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think all characters should wax nostalgic about where they learned the Improved Cleave feat or debate the merits of tide of iron versus reaping strike. Those terms should be player knowledge, but not character knowledge. For the magic system, though, I really enjoy the thought that spells and magic have such funny-sounding names because that’s what they’re called in the world itself. Rob Schwalb talked about this after last year’s D&D Experience Convention when he talked about 4th Edition removing “concreteness” from the game world. It’s a mixed bag of positive changes and negative changes.

My tentative optimism notwithstanding, I do have a few pitfalls that I hope the designers avoid in returning to Vancian magic:

Jealousy destroys friendships, people.

Infinite Spellbook: In a system where mages fill spellbooks with every spell they get their hands on, wizards can carry around every spell in the game and potentially do anything, limited only by the need to buy enough pages to contain them all.

Conversely, in 4th Edition, no matter how many enemy mages you slew, you weren’t going to get more than two daily spells per level in your spellbook. In this regard, Vancian magic lends itself rather dangerously to the “Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards” problem (warning: TV Tropes link). If you collected enough spells, you could prepare for any conceivable situation. And if that wasn’t enough, you could research new spells and fill tomes with your own creations. It was fun in those days, but it may have been too much favoritism for wizards.

The 15-Minute Workday: This is what happens when a party of heroes enters a dungeon and the wizard uses up all his best spells, then has to take an eight-hour nap to recharge. Obviously, it’s not a lot of fun to stop the adventure just because your bearded friend goes trigger-happy.

Some DMs resort to wandering monsters that interrupt the party’s ability to rest in dangerous areas in the hopes that this will force players to conserve their per-day resources more carefully, but this solution is more stick than carrot. 4th Edition took on this issue in two ways.

First, classes have been carefully balanced against each other so that the party wasn’t reliant on the preparation level of one superstar adventurer in order to survive. Secondly, and more significantly, at-will and encounter powers make sure that no one is ever completely out of whoopass after a single fight.

Crossbow Wizards: A Vancian mage who casts all his spells is just an unarmored weakling with limited weapon proficiencies. Before wizards had at-will spells, they would eventually reach the point that all they had left in their utility belt of spells was a handful of identify and perhaps a detect secret doors. Then you stifle your tears and make ready to ping the enemy with a crossbow, wishing you had something useful to do. It might be hard for old-school gamers who skipped 4th Edition to accept, but a couple low-level at-will spells are your friend.

Combat Loadout: Vancian mages have to carefully weigh each of their spells against the others when they are preparing for an adventure. If you don’t get the balance right, disaster ensues. Without fireball and lightning bolt in your back pocket, you’re defenseless. On the other hand, if you only prepare evocations, you’re unable to knock open doors, get out of a tight spot with a well-timed teleport without error, or call the extraplanar advice hotline with contact other plane. I never cared for the guessing game of predicting what monster would attack me 12 hours from now.

Opportunity Cost: I have been to the other side. I have played a 4th Edition wizard whose utility spells were minor actions and who got to attack something every round. It is wonderful and I don’t want to give it up. It used to be that buffing and defensive spells took up most of a whole turn and you would have to choose between dealing some damage or making yourself less squishy. Metamagic feats from 3rd Edition helped cast them faster, as did a few well-placed buffs before opening the door, but still I can’t go back to the old days of “Round 1: mage armor. Round 2: blur. Round 3: protection from evil. Round 4: stoneskin. Round 5: The fight is over.”

Colin

The Vancian system is distinctive, no one can argue that, and it’s been in D&D from the beginning. I think Monte Cook is right that it’s pretty emblematic of the system, but I don’t think that counts for as much as people think. Other game systems do not handle magic like D&D does (not counting Pathfinder, of course) so keeping it will set the game apart.

Is that what we want? Having a specialized system will make D&D distinctive but a game which is distinctive but not successful is marginalized. I’m not saying that the Vancian system is going to ruin the D&D franchise. (Hear that, trolls? I’m not saying that.) If Wizards of the Coast is trying to pick up new players, though, then it has to be measured what the trade-off for this singular magic system is.

Players want to play characters that let them act out what they can’t do in real life. Plenty of players read books and watch movies, then want to create a character that matches their favorites from the story.

Making a Raistlin from Dragonlance is easier because that setting was written to reflect the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, but even so you end up with situations that would never come up in the novels. When the situation calls for a fireball, our golden-eyed antihero throws one into the mix. He doesn’t worry about whether he’ll need a fireball later on and if that situation might call for one more than this one. Raistlin is a lot of things, but stingy?

On top of this, there are those who haven’t read Dragonlance might pick something farther afield like Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, the Mistborn series, or even Star Wars. All of these book series involve magic that takes a toll on the user and requires rest to regain strength again, but it’s nothing like Vancian mechanics. And, of course, some people are coming from MMOs like World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online who are used to cooldowns instead of day-based recharging. I think it’s a poorly-kept secret that Wizards wants to lure people from computer RPGs and back to tabletop ones.

It’s nothing new to say that Vancian magic is different from other systems, and the internet is full of haters. What would I do about it? In a phrase: exchange rate. From a game design standpoint, the need for resource recharging based on an easy unit of time is obvious. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with daily, encounter, and at-will resource management, but there should be a way to switch between them.

To return to the Raistlin example, the sickly mage gets tired and starts coughing when expends a lot of his spell power and has to rest. But he also starts coughing and has fits whenever he uses a lot of energy all at once even if he just finished breakfast. By the same token, Gandalf gets tired fighting off orcs and is no match for the witch-king, Rand al’Thor collapses after creating a storm of fire weaves, and Yoda sighs and rests after dragging the X-wing out of the swamp.

Let wizards have their at-will cantrips and their daily ice storms, but they should be able to trade them. If my faux-Raistlin chucks a fireball at the draconians who storm the camp and then later has ocassion to heave another fireball at the draconian warlord, let him! Afterwards, of course, he might not have the strength to even light a fire with a simple cantrip, something that was laughably easy before. On the other hand, he might want to trade in that fireball for added uses of lightning bolt once we see how narrow the hallways of the crypt are.

I don’t see any problem with saying that a wizard is able to cast such-and-such a spell once and then has to study, but if he wants to cast it twice at the expense of something else I think that’s still undeniably D&D. And, importantly, it’s right up the alley of the D&D Next modular approach.

Before I go any further, let’s get a few things out of the way. Yes the prequels are bad. Yes they pale in comparison to the originals. Yes George Lucas has done more harm than good in altering the canon several times. No he hasn’t raped your childhood. Yes it is his story and he can do what he wants with it. I hate having to waste time with that but it seems like you can’t have any sensible Star Wars discussion without all of those tired refrains being spit at you. No one ever says anything new.

With that taken care of, a question remains. How much does The Phantom Menace being re-released matter? Admittedly we could analyze that on a number of levels. How does it matter to Star Wars fans, the movie industry and box office in general, the evolution of 3D, or for future 3D conversion re releases like Titanic? Frankly, I’m more interested in the first question than any of the others, because I am selfish and that one concerns me. We’ll touch a bit on the others as we go.

Full disclosure, I’m writing this from the corner of an AMC theater’s lobby. I am sitting in line for a midnight showing of the movie. By the time you read this I’ll have seen the film. That doesn’t really matter, and this won’t contain any of my impressions, I’m more focused on the here and now. A few people down from me is a young boy in a Boba Fett t-shirt accompanied by a man I can only assume is his dad. I hope he realizes how cool his dad is. I wish I had a dad like that.

Even as close as two weeks ago I hadn’t decided I would be here. I went back and forth a few times, wondering if I should just settle for walking into a weekend show on Sunday morning. Then something in me clicked and my decision became clear. This is Star Wars, I have to be there. Why am I even debating this?

I want to clarify that I’m not here because of George Lucas. This seems like another thing that needs to be explained every time we talk about the galaxy far far away. Any discussion of Star Wars is either a staunch defense or vilification of Lucas. This is neither, I’m simply trying to talk about the film. Plus, you know what they say about people who deal in absolutes…

I’m here because of me. Because Star Wars has meant more to me than any other pop culture entity, ever. It’s part of who I am. I imagine the legions of fans that still gobble up each new DVD release and special edition feel similar to me. A sense of personal agency brings us back, not a sense of fealty.

Back to the question at hand. What does this mean? For older fans probably nothing. For younger fans it might mean everything. Anyone born when The Phantom Menace was released in 1999 will be right around 13 now.

That’s right around the age I was when the “special edition” of the original trilogy was re-released during the mid 90s. The perfect age to really fall in love with the saga. No matter how many times you may have seen the films at home it is impossible to overstate the first time you get to see those movies on the big screen. And while I can’t claim the same feeling about the prequels there are kids that can. This matters for them, and it’s something we all forget.

The prequels mean just as much to some kids now as the originals did to kids in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. There are kids that love Jar Jar and think pod racing is awesome (it is pretty cool). That’s just the way kids are nowadays. If you don’t believe me, check out any Sunday morning cartoon. Not quite the same as Looney Toons. Regardless, I’d never want to deny them the experience of seeing Star Wars on the big screen, or tell them it was somehow lesser.

That being said, there are still things I love about the prequels. Yea the list is short. But I’ve always been a quality guy.

• I never forget the feeling when the 20th Century Fox music hits and is followed by the shimmering logo of Lucasfilm. It always brings me back to a moment when I was just a dreamer and the experience of life hadn’t yet hardened me to cathartic moments. Even now when I go to a Fox film and that music isn’t followed by “Lucasfilm” I get a little sad.
• The moment Darth Maul appears and ignites his double lightsaber is the purest “Star Wars” moment of the entire prequel trilogy. An entire world of possibility opened up in those few frames. It gives me tingles in places I don’t talk about at parties.
• In Episode II, when Mace Windu appears on Geonosis and claims that “this party is over”, which is followed by dozens of Jedi erupting into the arena. We’d never seen more than a few Jedi in one place before. Now we suddenly had an army. An army of jedi, just saying the words makes me smile.
• The fight between Obi Wan and Anakin at the end of Revenge of the Sith is a set piece worthy of two men that were closer than brothers. All the other lightsaber battles pail in comparison to the epic duel.

The 3D release of the Phantom Menace won’t revolutionize anything. It’ll make a decent dent in the box office, but I guarantee come Monday you’ll see The Vow overtake it in the final gross. Some idiot will use that to write a snarky article signaling the death of the franchise. It’ll go viral and just add fuel to the schism that runs through the Star Wars universe. Again nothing new will be said. We’ll continue to kill off our own rather than nurturing the next generation.

So, it’s easy to just say it means nothing and I’d probably agree with that. Just don’t tell that to the kid near me in line. For him, Episode I means everything in a way that only the things which should mean nothing ever can. It’s a passion we share despite our differences, and that’s what keeps me coming back.