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Documentation & Dragons

One of the enduring fixtures of my time in Austin has been Saturday gaming. We've gone through a variety of systems in our time, including GURPS, a couple variations of D&D, and some pretty interesting indy systems (and some Mary Sue-tastic stretches of freestyle storytelling). Of late, we've been playing Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, and having a blast doing it.

D&D4e has streamlined a lot of the combat from previous incarnations, and, dare I say it, made it actually fun. In earlier incarnations, I had special abilities, but I never particularly felt encouraged to use them. In 3rd Edition especially, I felt I spent most of my time doing auto-attacks. 4th edition almost falls over itself to throw a variety of powers at you, though, and most of them are one-time-use, so you're actually encouraged to mix up what you're doing. Because the combat is more fun (and also because good GM software tools are provided to ease the creation of encounters), we find we pull out the grid map way more often then we ever did before.

At some point when we were doing this, Kevin -- our GM -- started trying to take pictures of the board as we were going. He'd been inspired by the Penny Arcade d&d session twitters. I found this to also be pretty interesting, especially with the following combo platter of geek tools:

  • camera on iPhone
  • twitter & facebook apps on iPhone
  • decent photo editing tools on the iPhone (like my current favorite to abuse, TiltShiftGen)

I do have a blogging app on the iPhone, but it's way more annoying to use. So I thought I'd take the time and put together a longer entry on the phenomenon and output of this.

Beginnings

I started using the camera just to document stuff that I'd put on the tabletop whiteboard, in case it got erased before the next week. For example, here was an experimental system we used to track a particularly amoral character's swings to and from the dark side:

Systems experimentation, before we dug into D&D 4e.

I took the shot as a quick and dirty way to make sure I knew how the points were laid out between sessions. This actually predates GM Kevin's interest in the PA twitter feeds.

Here's another example, where I was tracking gold & XP for my character on the whiteboard (our GM has moved to tracking this stuff via a D&D oriented wiki space):

Record-keeping via pictures. Note the pattern spider!

The dapper gent with the multiple legs and the top hat is the famed "pattern spider," who likes from time to time to jump into our games and dump lots of exposition on us. (As I recall, the in-joke here is mostly making fun of me, for badgering Kevin in an early game to explain the whole mystery through this one NPC that had the grievous loophole of having an omniscient viewpoint. For some reason, the spider had a fancy hat and a cigar and a Brooklyn accent.)

Action shots

Our first fight with a dragon, after having proceeded through a dungeon.

Here we see my first effort. Note how masterfully I tank the dragon away from the group, putting all of my hard-won World of Warcraft experience to bear. (A few turns earlier I'd let the dragon turn and toast everyone >_< )

Later on, I picked up Camera Bag, which had handy pre-canned photo effects. I became a quick fan of the vignetting here:

...and after. This was our first serious dragon fight, and marked the transition to the Paragon tier.

At the end of the day, the iPhone camera is fine, but it's not going to shine in a room that's only lit by some normal light bulbs. So I'm kind of trying to embrace the grainy, cruddy nature of the cameraphone with this. Also, it's in Fantasy Past Time, and thus should be colored in the style of a Wild West Poster, which was pretty much the same timeframe.

Later on, GM Kevin picked up the aforementioned TiltShiftGen, and started FBing pictures that were clearly manipulated with it. A tilt shift lens (or software program used to fake the effect) provides a very distinctive dollhouse style, as you can see at the linked website.

I've only used it a bit, and I will freely confess that I actually am using it even more for the color sliders. But being able to fake a depth of field effect is pretty nice. The main problem I have with it is that it degrades pretty quickly at the cruddy resolutions & qualities that I'm capturing in this environment. But still, I was pretty happy with the ominous result obtained here:

The umber hulk lurks in the distance.

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