Longest…week…ever.  A massive wave of snow and ice here in TN has made things rough this week.  Deliveries are slow or not happening, driving is treacherous. The warehouse is getting cramped as I prepared a bunch of large orders for a customer, but they haven’t sent routing instructions due to the weather.  Most of the supplies I ordered for this week haven’t shown up on time, including a desperately needed mouse for my home PC.

I haven’t been avoiding DDM, but I have been working on different things than the Skirmish I want to play (Team Underdark vs. Lightning Arms).  If folks don’t know the ‘Official’ owners of DDM is DDM Guild (Their home is currently here; I’m working to get it fixed so it shows up on the proper URL).  They are the folks making 2.0 new cards for miniatures that are released, and they are tentatively in charge of any organized play.  The goal of the organization is noble (keeping DDM alive), however they’re struggling with essentially everything.  Plus, they’ve made some odd choices that have only split our very tiny community even further (Breaking off the 1.0 players to their own website is one of the more mysterious) , when they should be doing whatever they can to keep everyone in one place.  I’m trying to work up a ‘kick in the butt’ action plan to revive the site and interest in the game, but there’s so much that needs to be done I’m afraid I’ll offend folks with my laundry list of challenges and proposed solutions.  Still, I think it is an important endeavor…if you haven’t been to the DDM Guild site, you should go and participate!

My other DDM project, the Pathfinder/3.5 Conversion is coming along well.  A couple of my players have started their characters in Roll20.  It’s been pretty simple to go through the first chapter of the Shackled City Adventure Path and convert each of the monsters to DDM format.  For spell-casters, I’m taking their best combat spells and converting them to DDM-style, though so far many of the spells already have equivalents in DDM (Bless, Magic Weapon, Color Spray (Nebin has it, though I had to use Bifur to look it up and find it)).  We also decided that we would be using DDM-style initiative, as keeping track of initiative individually is for the birds.  (One more rule in favor of DDM over D&D).  It’s taken less time than I would have guessed to covert the entire chapter’s worth of monsters, at probably 2 hours.  Plus, it did take another couple of hours to set up the new card template I demonstrated 2 posts back.  Overall though, the more I work on it, the faster it seems to go.  I’ll let you know how I feel when I get the characters to level 8-9, which is where the troubles usually began when I DM’d years ago.

I’ll try to finish up my project list for DDM today or tomorrow, and get to the skirmish Sunday!

As always, thank you so much for stopping by; feel free to offer any questions, comments or suggestions in the comments section or via email at tobias.truman@gmail.com.