Robert Fisher: Thinking out loud (my blog 3.0)

Hyperlinks

2012-02-02T22:00:00.001-06:00

So, I’m sitting here polishing up some blog posts. I’m grabbing URLs to create hyperlinks. And it strikes me...

It’s taking me longer to create these hyperlinks than it will take you to select some text, search Google, and get to the same page. Not only that, the hyperlinks might grow stale, but a Google search won’t. Heck, Google might turn up more relevant results than what I choose to link to the moment I post. Even after Google, some other even better search engine will be available. For all I know, what you’ll really be interested in following up on won’t even be anything I create a hyperlink for.

Google is making hyperlinks obsolete. But Google is built on hyperlinks. It’s only by analyzing hyperlinks that Google can come up with such good results.

Weird.

Edition wars

2012-02-02T11:00:00.001-06:00

If I have ever offended anyone when discussing differences between editions of D&D, I hereby apologize. That was never my intention, though I can have a hard time seeing someone else’s point-of-view.

D&D Next Classes

2012-02-01T22:00:00.001-06:00

From EN World: What We Know About “D&D Next”:

The goal at the moment is to include all the classes that were in the first PH style book for each edition.

Surely someone else has already compiled this list, but since I didn’t find it, I compiled it myself.

Note that many classes appeared first in a supplement for a previous edition. I’m not listing the first appearance of each class. I’m listing its first appearance in Men & Magic or a Players Handbook (first PHB for editions with multiple PHBs).

In the non-advanced line, you had race-classes and the Mystic. Race-classes aren’t included because it seems that D&D next isn’t going that direction. The Mystic, rightly or wrongly, I’m counting as Monk.

AD&D2e had the “specialist wizard” & “specialist priest” which I am also omitting from this list.

Assassin (1e PHB)
Barbarian (3e PHB)
Bard (2e PHB; optional 1e PHB)
Cleric (0e Men & Magic)
Druid (1e PHB)
Fighting-man/Fighter (0e Men & Magic)
Illusionist (1e PHB)
Magic-user/Mage/Wizard (0e Men & Magic)
Monk (1e PHB)
Paladin (1e PHB)
Ranger (1e PHB)
Sorcerer (3e PHB)
Thief/Rogue (1e PHB; the Holmes Basic Set)
Warlock (4e PHB)
Warlord (4e PHB)

For a grand total of 15 classes. Though I think there is the possibility of some of them being combined.

Note that a Psion class was also mentioned in the D&D Experience seminars.

Here they are in roughly chronological order...

Cleric (0e Men & Magic)
Fighting-man/Fighter (0e Men & Magic)
Magic-user/Mage/Wizard (0e Men & Magic)
Thief/Rogue (1e PHB; the Holmes Basic Set)
Assassin (1e PHB)
Druid (1e PHB)
Illusionist (1e PHB)
Monk (1e PHB)
Paladin (1e PHB)
Ranger (1e PHB)
Bard (2e PHB; optional 1e PHB)
Barbarian (3e PHB)
Sorcerer (3e PHB)
Warlock (4e PHB)
Warlord (4e PHB)

Why are we still talking about piracy?

2012-01-18T22:00:00.001-06:00

heavy sigh

I’m so tired of it.

The software industry—other than a few special cases—figured it out decades ago.

The RPG publishers figured it out about five years ago. (Don’t get me started on Wizards of the Coast and this issue.)

The music industry figured it out three to five years ago.

Seriously? Why are we even talking about this anymore? Piracy is not the problem you think it is. The pirates weren’t going to pay you anyway. Copy protection doesn’t work and doesn’t help you make more money. Overreaching legislation doesn’t help you make more money and probably won’t work either. Just make a good product, charge a fair price, and concentrate on the business you’re winning instead of the business you wrongly think you’re losing.

Maybe 3D movies aren’t just a fad this time

2012-01-09T22:00:00.000-06:00

Instapaper led me to “Four reasons 3D movies aren’t just a fad”. (And I’d highly recommend reading it through Instapaper or Safari Reader.)

The Wikipedia article on Hugo led me to “Can Martin Scorsese’s Hugo save 3D?”. (The BBC News site is better than Mashable, but I’d still recommend Instapaper or Safari Reader.) With this quote from Martin Scorsese:

I found 3D to be really interesting, because the actors were more upfront emotionally. Their slightest move, their slightest intention is picked up much more precisely.

I think you missed the point of “less is more”

2012-01-08T22:00:00.000-06:00

Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto - Boing Boing

Google supplied me with the full family (so far) of 16 faces to examine: a regular and oblique (the sans serif name for a slanted type that's not drawn differently, as with italics) of Light, Thin, Condensed, Bold Condensed, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black. This warms the cockles of my typographer's heart, because with many different weights of a typeface, you can use differentiation to signify importance or meaning without having to rely solely on placement, size, or other faces. (The sign of a bad design is typically the use of many different sizes and faces. Find a great design, and you'll find remarkable restraint. The exceptions, which are legion, break that rule and prove it at the same time.)

I’m not convinced that using eight different weights of a single typeface in one document is superior to using eight different typefaces. The advantage of eight different weights is that you can pick a subset best suited to the use, not so that you can use them all.

...but what exactly do you mean by “blog”?

2012-01-07T22:00:00.003-06:00

Matt Gemmell explains why blogs should have comments turned off.

I don’t know how many bloggers I’ve seen make a comment to the effect of: As usual, the comments contain greater wisdom than my post. It has been a bunch. There is perhaps something of a difference between most bloggers I read and Gemmell, Marco, and Gruber. Indeed, “blog” has become about as meaningless as “anime”.

“Anime” certainly has meaning—animated films/video from Japan. The trouble is that most statements about anime are really about a subset of anime.

Likewise, most of the comments I see made about blogs and blogging are really about some unspecified subset of blogs and bloggers.

FFX vs LoZ:SS

2012-01-06T22:00:00.000-06:00

A more interesting question, for me, than Civilization versus Final Fantasy might be this: Why do I enjoy Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword but not Final Fantasy X?

They’re both linear storylines. In both, you walk from cut-scene to cut-scene, possibly with some combat in between.

It’s not as simple as real-time versus turn-based combat. I tend to prefer turn-based, and FFX is the one with turn-based combat.

Create food

2012-01-05T22:00:00.002-06:00

So, I’m thinking of ripping off Skyward Sword for a classic D&D setting. The lands are overrun by chaos. The remnants of law have retreated to a floating island in the sky. So, that gets me thinking about how big a community needs to be to be self-sufficient. What will be their source of water? How much land will they need to raise enough food?

Then I remembered how some people say how spells like Create Food would completely change a medieval economy. So, based on the 1981 Expert book, here’s the number of people (and their mounts) that a cleric can produce food for. (They can also supply water for at least this many.)

Level	# people	casts/day	total
7	12	1	12
8	12	1	12
9	24	2	48
10	36	2	72
11	48	3	144
12	60	3	180
13	72	4	288
14	84	4	336

The spell will keep scaling up by 12 people per level, but the book’s spells/day listings only go up to 14th level.

That’s pretty impressive. The Wikipedia article on space colonization suggests that 50 people for the short term and 500 people for the long term are minimal populations to keep inbreeding under control. A couple of 14th level clerics could easily feed 500.

Which, so far, seems to essentially be the answer for Skyward Sword as well. It seems the goddess who created Skyloft provided a magic spring of water and supernatural agriculture.

This is also handy for isolated communities encountered in dungeons or the wilderness.

Looking over the rest of the cleric spells, it’s clear that—if a community’s clerics are generous—Continual Light, Cure Disease, Raise Dead, and the Cure Wounds spells are going to drastically improve the quality of life. Nothing too crazy, though. Interestingly, this version of the game doesn’t have any truth divining cleric spells.

Open phone

2012-01-04T22:00:00.000-06:00

What would an open phone be?

1. It would be one where I buy the phone from a hardware vendor. The hardware vendor wouldn’t care what I did with it.

2. It would be one where I install whatever software I want to on the phone. Most likely starting with an open-source system that I download for free.

3. It would be one where I pay for cellular data service. The service provider wouldn’t care what hardware I’m using, what software I’m using, or what bits I’m transmitting and receiving.

Without those three things, the word “open” shouldn’t be used without being highly qualified.

Ironically, I think the iPhone may be a key component in this ever happening. Because Apple and the iPhone have come the closest opening up the cellular service providers to being simply cellular service providers. They’re the ones succeeding as a hardware company that thinks of the end-user as the customer rather than the service provider being the customer.

I can’t say for sure that I’d choose such an open phone over the iPhone, but that’s the open phone I would consider. Less than that isn’t worth my time.

FF or Civ?

2011-12-29T22:00:00.000-06:00

“Do you prefer Final Fantasy or Civilization?” noisms asks.

I’ve played Final Fantasy X, and I found it frustrating. I’ve also played Square-Enix’s Chaos Rings, which I found similarly frustrating. Though FFX’s story at least kept me more interested than CR’s.

Civilization, on the other hand, I enjoyed a lot.

That said, I wouldn’t say that my problem with FFX was that it wasn’t Civilization.

In the days before WIMP

2011-12-28T22:00:00.000-06:00

You can look at the changes on Twitter similarly to the advent of a graphical user interface that made its debut in early-1980s computers. The design was called WIMP and stood for “windows, icons, menus and pointers.” Before WIMP, the only way to use a computer was by writing code, something most people couldn’t even comprehend.

—Nick Bilton, The New York Times

This isn't just oversimplification. It is just wrong. Before windows or pointers there was “user friendly” software. There was quite a lot of it.

My question about Louis C.K.’s experiment

2011-12-27T22:00:00.001-06:00

A comedian named Louis C.K. produced his own comedy special and sold it through his web site for a low price without any copy protection or region locking or whatnot. He made a nice profit. Great story all around.

But...could he have done it if he hadn’t already made a name through the big media companies?

3D again

2011-12-26T22:00:00.000-06:00

If you want to understand how I feel about stereoscopic video, replace 2D versus 3D with...

black & white versus color

silent versus sound

monaural versus stereophonic

stereophonic versus surround sound

Yes, the things on the left side can be used to great artistic purpose, but that tends to be the exception rather than the rule. Yes, the things on the right side can be used in gimmicky ways, but most of the time they just add depth (pun intended) rather than becoming the message.

I suspect, however, that stereoscopic video will indeed turn out to be a fad yet again. Why? Simply because the fundamental technology has been around for ages and it has never made it out of the fad phase yet.

Now, there have been some recent developments. There has been some movement of some technologies towards greater practicality at the consumer level. So, I hold out some hope.

The golden rule

2011-12-25T06:00:00.000-06:00

In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)
What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. (Talmud, Shabbath 31a)
Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself. (Hadith)
This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you. (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. (The Buddha, Udana-Varga 5.18)

Console game dialog

2011-12-23T22:00:00.000-06:00

I got Sonic Generations for Christmas. It’s nice to have back the classic Sonic gameplay that was sorely lacking in the last couple of Sonic titles I played. Though it is going to take some getting used to it in stereoscopic 3D.

So many console games have really annoying dialog. It uses a dozen lines where three or four would have sufficed. The player has to click through it three or four words at a time. And then there’s the ones that throw in lots of pointless interjections for more pointless clicks.

Does anyone really enjoy clicking through this stuff? I enjoy the stories, but I’d enjoy them a lot more if they weren’t so poorly delivered. I used to come up with excuses for why this was handled so poorly, but these days the excuses are worn out.

So far, the biggest sin in the Sonic Generations dialog—ignoring the sin of having dialog in a Sonic game—is the pointless interjections.

The difference between science and religion

2011-12-22T22:00:00.003-06:00

Penn Jillette, via Gruber, via Kottke:

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

Actually, I think it is pretty clear that the basic truths—which you find repeated in nigh every religion—would reappear.

The big difficulty with religion is that it is easy to get caught up in the unimportant parts and lose sight of the important ones.

(Though, we don’t need to be putting science and faith into opposition.)

CT CD surprises

2011-12-21T22:00:00.000-06:00

Due to a mix-up, the first time I tried to order the classic Traveller CD-ROM from Far Future, I got the Traveller⁵ CD instead. During FFE’s December sale this year, I ordered it again. No mix-up this time. Looking through it, I found a few of unexpected surprises.

Firstly, it’s got earlier printings of some books including the 1977 versions of Books 1–3. I’d read about some of the differences therein, but this is the first time I got a look at them myself. Most interesting to me is the “Jump Routes” table from the 1977 Book 3, which was omitted in later versions of the game.

The next surprise was a classic Traveller errata compendium.

And the last surprise—so far: Special Supplement 4, Lost Rules of Traveller. The blurb on the back describes it thusly:

This special supplement examines and interpolates various Lost Rules tucked away and forgotten in various Traveller® sources, and was produced to complement the Classic Traveller Reprints from Far Future Enterprises.

It is really great that Marc has been making all this GDW stuff, as well as stuff produced by other companies under license from GDW, available.

Touchpad: What is it good for?

2011-12-17T22:00:00.000-06:00

OK, one more Touchpad post, and then I think I’m done...at least for a while. Maybe then I’ll get around to finishing up some posts on gaming and other topics.

Playing around with the Touchpad again while finishing these posts, I’ve been wondering: What am I going to do with the thing? Well, this is the answer I’ve come up with so far:

PDF reader

One big change for me since getting the iPad has been around PDFs. Before, I would typically print pages from a PDF if I actually wanted to use the content for anything. The iPad, however, let’s me take PDFs anywhere. I’ve even started actually buying content in PDF form, and I seldom print from them anymore.

This is one task that the Touchpad seems to do fairly well. Its Adobe Reader is no GoodReader, but it gets the job done. And the card UI works OK for switching between multiple open PDFs. My burgeoning PDF library is mostly RPG books, and it can often be handy to have multiple copies at the table when playing.

$99 ain’t bad for a decent 10-inch PDF reader. Heck, I’m even thinking I might pick up another one sometime. Of course, the problem is that it was sold at a loss.

The iOS ecosystem

2011-12-16T22:00:00.002-06:00

There’s been lots written about the advantage of the iOS ecosystem. The wide range of apps and accessories that competitors can’t yet match. Having a Touchpad has really made me appreciate this, though.

Just a few of the iPad apps I’d miss on the Touchpad: AmpKit, Amplitube, Flipboard, GoodReader, Inkpad, Instapaper, MarkdownNote, Netflix, Premier Guitar, and Reeder. There may be a Touchpad Kindle app, but there might as well not be. And there are the Apple apps like Garageband and iWork.

Then there are accessories like the Apogee Jam, iRig MIDI, or Digitech iPB-10.

There was a time when iOS didn’t have any of that. WebOS could have all that and more...someday. But today, it does and webOS doesn’t.

Touchpad: Likes & dislikes

2011-12-15T22:00:00.004-06:00

Here’s a list of some of the things I like and dislike about the Touchpad and webOS.

LIKE

The hardware—from a user’s point of view—pretty closely mimics the iPad, and that’s a good thing.

A feature they call Synergy. (Though I haven’t seen that name appear within webOS itself.) WebOS allows you to enter information for your Google, Microsoft Exchange, Facebook, Skype, Dropbox, AIM, Box.net, Linked In, MobileMe, Photobucket, Snapfish, and Yahoo accounts in one central place. Then the e-mail, contacts, calendars, photo browsing, file browsing, etc. apps will automatically access those accounts, when appropriate. It also gives you the ability to turn each feature on or off for each account. It appears that third parties can extend this system as well.

The “card UI”. When you press the home button, the view zooms out and the current app appears on a “card”. Swiping left and right shows you the cards of other apps that are running. Pushing a card off the top of the screen quits the app. There’s some other details, but that’s the gist of it.

The menus. At the top of the screen, you have three menus: An app menu, a notifications menu, and a system menu.

The app menu is analogous to the menus of a Mac app or a Palm OS app. This is something that iOS lacks, and I think there are pros and cons to each approach. The app menu seems underused in webOS, though.

The notifications were a clear advantage over iOS before iOS 5. The webOS notifications system still seems a bit ahead of the iOS notifications.

The system menu gives you quick access to system features such as Wi-Fi, VPN, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Rotation Lock, and Mute. This is something I wish iOS had.

I’m no fan of Adobe Flash. I agree with Apple’s choice not to support Flash on iOS. I did try out one Flash game I like, though. Chat Noir. It worked fine, though it is admittedly a very simple game. I wish I had the time and motivation to finish my Javascript clone.

Rooting. This is the equivalent of jailbreaking on iOS. WebOS, however, doesn’t appear to discourage it. Certainly not to the extent Apple does. I understand why Apple discourages it. Still, it is a lot of fun for someone like me to be able to get into the lower levels of the system. It allows us to do things some useful and fun things.

Just type. This is the webOS equivalent of iOS’s Spotlight. Though it seems to promise to be something of a keyboard-driven Siri. Truth is, I haven’t used it much, and when I have, I haven’t found it any better than Spotlight. I do like its prominent position in the system, though.

DISLIKE

WebOS doesn’t have support of auto-configured proxies. This means that when I connect to the wi-fi at my office, I can’t get to anything on the Internet. In fact, it doesn’t support proxies either. Even when I tried to configure a static proxy through the Linux command shell (after rooting it)—following instructions others had gotten to work—I couldn’t get it to work.

Tapping and interaction in general doesn’t feel as direct as on the iPad. In fact, whenever you tap, the system gives feedback through a ripple effect. This is needed because the response of apps to taps lags. Worse, the ripple really makes you notice the amount of error in tapping that you don’t notice on iOS.

The keyboard can’t keep up with fast typing.

I could pair the Touchpad with my Bluetooth keyboard, but I couldn’t change the layout to Dvorak.

Remember when web browsers on phones and game systems and such felt so clunky? That’s how the webOS web browser feels. Strange for an OS that is built so much on web technologies that they named it “webOS”.

While the card UI is cool, it means that I have to manage cards. I have to make sure that I explicitly push cards off the screen to dismiss them. If I don’t, I’ll hit the limit—which happened sooner than I expected—and the system will tell me that I have to go toss some cards before I can do what I’m trying to do.

The Kindle app doesn’t work. I just get a blank page. It’s labelled beta, but this is bad even for a beta. Sure, that might be 100% Amazon’s fault, but I’m listing things I dislike about the Touchpad no matter whose fault it may be.

The Facebook app has issues too. I can’t post comments, and it doesn’t even give me an error message to know that it failed.

I can only get video on a Skype call (in the built-in Phone & Video Calls app) if I initiate the call.

Quickoffice pales in comparison to iWork. It is free, though. When I opened a document I created in it on my Mac, the formatting was badly messed up.

I couldn’t figure out how to rename the file I created with Quickoffice.

Copy, paste, and text selection is frustrating. It took many tries to do a “select all”, and I’m not at all confident that I could repeat the steps that did it.

In Quickoffice, I had to save the file manually like on pre-Lion Macs. It seems strange to me that the successor of Palm OS would work that way.

When I first got the Touchpad, it didn’t come with any apps to use with its camera. Well, the Phone & Video Calls app uses it, but nothing to just take a picture. This was remedied in a system update, though.

THE END

I could certainly go on, but I hope that gives some feel of my experience with the Touchpad. As I’ve said before, I find it very frustrating because there are many things to like, but too much gets in the way.

Touchpad: Summary

2011-12-14T22:00:00.001-06:00

People have asked why I was disappointed with the HP Touchpad. I have a list of specifics that I’ll may post later, but while outlining them, this is the pattern that emerges.

While the Touchpad may have launched with features that the iPad lacked at launch. Those features are buggy and incomplete. It lacks polish and has usability issues. It feels like a beta product...at best. I haven’t used any of the webOS phones, but it’s hard to believe they were shipping phones with this OS for two years before the Touchpad.

While the iPhone and the iPad may have launched with fewer features, the features they had were—on day one—solid, reasonably complete, and reasonably polished and usable. That weasel word, “reasonable”, is there because they haven’t been perfect. In a comparison against webOS, though, they clearly come out ahead in those areas. Then, each year, Apple has added new features...once they were solid, reasonably complete, and reasonable polished and usable.

The result is that the iPad is a joy to use, and the Touchpad is frustrating. Frustrating because there is so much to like about it...if only it worked well enough.

Infogami archive fixed

2011-11-30T21:30:00.001-06:00

Somehow the archive of my infogami site broke. It’s fixed now. As a bonus, I also fixed it so that the server will tell browsers the proper charset to use (UTF-8), so characters like quote marks (“”) and em-dashes (—) will show up properly. Let me know if anything still seems to be broken or if the fix breaks something on the rest of my web site.

(Of course, the infogami features—modification times, commenting, &c.—won’t work as this is just a static archive of the infogami site.)

One and a half versus the square root of two

2011-08-05T17:00:00.000-05:00

After looking at diagonal movement on a square grid, I started wondering how far a figure would need to move before the difference between ³⁄₂ and the √2 square root of two became significant. (Simple curiosity here. Nothing more.)

What amount of error is significant? ¹⁄₂? 1? ³⁄₂?

Let’s go with 1. Check my math: (sqrt(2) * x) + 1 = 1.5 * x

It turns out x is about 12. Here’s my check: (1.5 * x) - (sqrt(2) * x); x = 12 which yields a result just a little over 1.

That’s smaller than I was expecting. Though it is still reasonable for most games. A twelve square per turn movement rate will start to get problematic for other reasons.

More zero dice

2011-08-04T17:00:00.014-05:00

So, this was written last year. (16 June 2010) as a follow-up to “My favorite die”. Seems I never got around to publishing it...

I have some six-sided dice marked zero to five.

I believe I got these out of the bin of dice at Kaleidoscope Toys.

The only game I know of that uses such dice is a “WWII space combat” game called Hard Vacuum. (Which I haven’t played.)

They create some nice ranges. Two yields 0–10. Three, 0–15. Four, 0–20. (Keeping in mind, of course, that summing multiple dice doesn’t give linear results.) Use one which a d10 (or d20+) to emulate a d60.

Dice with a zero are also nice for open-ended rolls, as it means you don’t have numbers that can’t be rolled.

And, if you don’t have any 0–5 dice, just roll a normal d6 and read 6 as zero.

Diagonal movement on a square grid

2011-08-03T17:00:00.021-05:00

In games, how do you handle diagonal movement on a square grid?

One of the easiest methods is to simply not allow diagonal movement. In the image below, the circle in the lower left indicates a figure to be moved. Red shows which squares it could move to with one move. Orange, two; yellow, three; green, four; blue, five; & violet, six.

(I only drew the northeast quadrant, but the other four quadrants would look the same.)

Another easy option is to simply allow a diagonal movement to cost the same as orthogonal movement. Which looks like this:

Neither of those are very satisfactory, though.

The d20 system (WotC 3e D&D) has the cost of diagonal movement alternate between 1 and 2. Thus it averages out to 1.5, which is close enough to the real distance of a diagonal move. (The square root of 2.) It ends up looking like this:

This year at the North Texas RPG Con, I picked up another way to handle it from Jeff Dee. Diagonals cost the same as orthogonals but cannot be consecutive. You have to have at least one orthogonal move between two diagonal moves. At first, I thought this was equivalent to the d20 system rule, but it is a bit less accurate. As shown here:

I also recently picked up a rule for estimating the distance to a flying target, though I forget where I found it. Considering the horizontal and vertical distances, add half the shorter to the longer. e.g. A flying monkey is 40' away and 20' up. So, use (20 / 2) + 40 = 50' as the range.

AoO & Move & Run

2011-08-02T17:00:00.000-05:00

In the 3.5 version of the d20 system, there is some possible confusion around the Run and Move actions and Attacks of Opportuny (AoO).

(For those readers who don’t like the d20 system or AoOs, I suggest you stop reading now.)

First, there is a general rule: Leaving a threatened square draws an AoO with two exceptions. The first exception is if your only movement that round is a 5 foot “step”. The second is if you are using the Withdraw action.

Second, there are tables that indicate whether an action itself draws an AoO. Here it is indicated that both the Run and Move actions provoke AoOs.

This can be interpreted to mean that entering a threatened square during a Run or Move action draws an AoO. Because, if the first rule covers the leaving case, there’d be no need for the second rule.

On the Wizards’ web site, however, can be found this clarification:

The move and run actions are worth a special note. According to Table 8-2, both these actions provoke attacks of opportunity; however, the basic rule for movement and attacks of opportunity still applies. When you move from one square to another in combat, you provoke an attack of opportunity when you leave a threatened square—not when you enter a threatened square.

(Thanks to Von for finding that.)

So, for me, that makes it clear that Run and Move are in no way exceptions to the basic rule. The “Yes” in their AoO column merely distinguishes them from Withdraw. Just stick to the basic rule. Mostly...

There is, however, at least one exception to the basic rule: Crawling (which is covered by the Move action). Crawling is only a 5 foot move, and it provokes an AoO for both leaving a threatened square and entering a threatened square.

Zones of control & attacks of opportunity

2011-08-01T17:00:00.003-05:00

(If you aren’t a fan of the d20 system, you may want to bail now.)

The d20 system justifies attacks of opportunity (AoO) thusly:

Sometimes a combatant in a melee lets her guard down. In this case, combatants near her can take advantage of her lapse in defense to attack her for free. These free attacks are called attacks of opportunity.

Hogwash! Yes, this is a role-playing game, and that’s not a bad way to rationalize it “in character”. The truth, however, is that this is primarily a game mechanic. It’s better—in my opinion—to understand the real reason AoO exist and that the description above is simply a façade.

The AoO rules are really a form of zone of control (ZoC) rules that were used in war-games long before role-playing games. Many role-playing games have included such rules as well, but they are often simplified enough that they don’t stand out the way that they do in the d20 system.

Indeed, within classic D&D can be found the origins of the d20 system’s Withdraw action, five foot step rule, and five foot threat range. (Also note that, in classic D&D, missile weapons cannot be used while in melee.)

Now, back to the d20 system. Let’s say we’re playing a d20 game without ZoC or AoO rules. An orc stands in the middle of a 15 foot wide corridor. Ten feet away stands a fighter, and a mage stands behind the fighter. The orc wins initiative and can move past the fighter, past the mage, and attack the mage. Even worse, if you’re using the optional facing rules (from Unearthed Arcana), the orc would be attacking the mage from the rear.

(Click on images for a bigger version.)

If this were “real life” (replace the orc with a generic bad guy), the fighter and the mage aren’t going to let the orc walk past them to attack from the rear.

With typical ZoC rules, the orc would have to stop his movement for that round once he moved into melee range of the fighter. (In fact, the first d20 Star Wars rules worked this way.)

The d20 designers wanted to replace restrictions with consequences. (That is a common theme in the d20 system.) So, instead of a simple ZoC that stopped an opponent’s movement, they needed a consequence for violating a ZoC. The consequence they choose was the risk of suffering a free attack, an AoO.

AoO also proved useful to provide consequences instead of restrictions in other cases. Many games simply say that you can’t fire a ranged weapon when in melee range of an opponent. The d20 system, however, makes it draw an AoO.

Now, I’m not going to say that AoO was the best choice. I might have preferred that instead of AoOs, actions be restricted with skill checks being able to overcome the restrictions. Similar to how the Tumble skill allows characters to move through an opponent’s square. But then, the way I prefer to run combat, I generally don’t need ZoC rules. Anyway, my point is that the AoO rules should be understood as a kind of ZoC rather than a lapse in defense.

ZoC and AoO rules only go so far, however. Put the orc, fighter, and mage in an open area; and now the orc can avoid the fighter’s threatened squares to attack the mage.

This can be mitigated—to an extent—if the fighter previously readied a move triggered by the orc’s movement, but it’s—in my opinion—a needlessly complicated affair.

d20+ redux

2011-07-31T17:00:00.001-05:00

I was a little surprised when I realized how few dice I’ve had out for the current WotC D&D 3e campaign.

With more d20+ dice, I’ve put my ten-siders, my “tens” dice (ten-siders numbered 00–90), and regular twenty-siders in storage. That really lightens up my “in use” bag and the number of dice on the table.

I’ve also swapped all my Gamescience six-siders in favor of my casino-style sixers.

Now I’m thinking that I want to acquire some of those d30s numbered -0 to -9, 0 to 9, and +0 to +9. (d30±) Like these from Kevin Cook’s collection.

Composite long bow?

2011-07-30T17:00:00.000-05:00

AD&D lists a composite long bow. As does WotC’s 3e D&D. Which recently struck me as odd. As I understood it, longbows weren’t composite, and composite bows weren’t long. Am I wrong?

Real Monopoly

2011-07-29T23:00:00.000-05:00

The Campaign For Real Monopoly:

Somewhere along the line someone said, “Let’s just leave out that stupid auction rule; we’ll have much more fun that way.”
Now if parents want to play a crippled game of Monopoly because they’re too scared to teach their children how to deal with interpersonal conflict then fine, that’s their prerogative.
But we’re gamers; we don’t have to descend to their level.

I think there’s something different at work here. When it comes to subterfuge—and lots of games are about subterfuge, younger players are generally going to be at a disadvantage to older players. Though there are certainly exceptions. It’s less about not teaching the kids to deal with interpersonal conflict but trying to put everyone on a more equal footing.

Although, in the matter of auctions in Monopoly, I think it is something different. I think most people just don’t like the auctions themselves. Not the outcome. Not how anyone deals with the outcome. Just the actual auctioning itself. It’s seen as trouble and not fun.

For what it’s worth, I believe the last time I played Monopoly was less than two years ago and the auction rule was used.

Digital RPG books

2011-07-22T18:00:00.007-05:00

In the comments to the Grognardia post, “Books, young man. Books.”, faoladh writes:

When digital books improve considerably, I will consider going there, but for now they are too clumsy (especially for the particular sorts of use that game texts see), there are problems with issues of ownership vs. “licensing”, and they are too expensive for initial entry, among other potential problems.

I can’t say that faoladh is wrong. This is his opinion and experience, and I can’t argue with that. What I can do is look at my own experience and opinion...

I don’t bring books to sessions anymore, unless it is a book I can’t get a digital version of. I just bring my iPad.

The Hypertext d20 SRD site is, for me, better than the books. It has all the open content from several D&D 3.5 books in one location converted into easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate web pages including good hyperlinking. The licensing is clear enough and without issue. (Especially from the “I’m just playing the game” point-of-view.) And, it’s free.

I also really like the SpellbookMaster app that imports the SRD spells into a database.

I bought the Mekton Zeta and Mekton Zeta Plus books from RPGNow. Mekton Zeta Plus I actually bought, downloaded, and used in the middle of a session. They are watermarked PDFs and DRM-free. I don’t remember the prices I paid, but those PDFs are currently $10 and $12. They are pretty clumsy to use, but I have the same issue with the hardcopies. The problem is in the lay-out itself. In fact, the ability to add bookmarks to the PDF may actually make them a bit easier to use.

Not to mention the number of RPG books I can carry with me almost anywhere to read or reference at a moment’s notice.

And it really comes down to the iPad. It was the final piece of the puzzle that made this practical for me.

AD&D2e Rangers

2011-07-21T18:00:00.000-05:00

Why do rangers get two-weapon fighting in second edition AD&D (and later editions)? Well, I’ve heard reasons that claim to be informed by people from TSR, but this is why it made sense to me at the time.

When I looked at the ranger class, I primarily saw Robin Hood. (And perhaps the strongest image of Robin Hood for me then was the Disney movie starring anthropomorphic animals.) My image was of someone who wouldn’t wear heavy armor or carry a shield. Yet, under the AD&D rules (as I and my friends played or misplayed them) the advantage of heavy armor and a shield were too good to pass up. Giving the ranger class two-weapon fighting ability and restricting it to when they were wearing lighter armor gave mechanical reasons for our rangers to look more like my image of the class.

My opinions have changed these days. I have different opinions about armor. I have different opinions about two-weapon fighting. I have different opinions about the ranger class. At the time, however, it made perfect sense to me.

Operational rules in RPGs

2011-07-20T18:00:00.000-05:00

Jeffs Gameblog: LotFP vs DCC

Assuming you aren’t weirded out by the artwork then LotFP shines as pretty much the tightest version of D&D ever. This virtue comes across most clearly in the section devoted to what I call “operations”, i.e. how to open a door or check for traps or crap like that. Most reviews of most D&D descendants (and many whole games!) completely skip this stuff because it's usually boring to read, but in actual dungeoneering play these mechanics are crucial. LotFP delivers the best, most coherent set of operations rules I’ve ever seen.

Let’s consider all the rules in D&D that don’t have to do with combat or magic. Let’s call these the “operational rules”. (Which may be slightly different than what Jeff is talking about above. This is my springboarding off his post.) There’s a surprising amount of them. Even in ye olde original D&D. They are often glossed over when talking about the game, but I’ve come to see them as very important.

These operational rules are what makes D&D an exploration game rather than a combat game.

Take a look at the combat system. Excluding Chainmail and WotC D&D, the D&D combat system is enemic compared to wargames of the era. (Oh, let’s exclude AD&D too just to keep it simple.) And D&D was created by wargamers. That says to me that D&D wasn’t primarily about combat.

Of course, there’s also the fact that D&D is a role-playing game, and that role-playing doesn’t really show up in rules. Yeah, I know you might disagree with me, but whenever I see rules that claim to govern role-playing, I generally see just another mechanical game rather than role-playing. Role-playing happens in the spaces between the mechanics.

What’s right for you...

2011-07-19T18:00:00.000-05:00

Reading this review of Mutant Future, this just struck me as funny. The “to hit” tables get a bulleted mention as a negative. Levels, however, get a “might be a negative to you but not for me” in the concluding paragraph.

The benefits of standard tuning

2011-07-18T18:00:00.000-05:00

One of the reasons that I bought my Roland VG-8EX is that I broke a string.

I was trying to tune one of my guitars in major thirds. The standard tuning for guitar consists of perfect fourths except for the interval between the second and third strings, which is a major third. It would be nice if the tuning were uniform. Also, standard tuning requires shifting position to get to certain notes even on the middle strings. Tuning to straight major thirds addresses both those issues.

The Roland “virtual guitar” systems allow you to “virtually” retune each string, so you can experiment with wacky tunings without having to worry about strings breaking, being too loose, or non-uniform tension across the neck. So, I have been able to play around with major third tuning without breaking any more strings or being worried about abusing my guitars.

Major third tuning is cool. Strangely, though, it has also given me a new appreciation for standard tuning. Those challenges that standard tuning presents are also opportunities for creative solutions. (e.g. Instead of shifting to get to a note, bend to it.) Or sometimes simply pushing yourself to do something that isn’t easy. And that can spur musical creativity too.

On initiative

2011-07-17T18:00:00.011-05:00

The way that a role-playing game determines the order of actions in combat is usually called “initiative”. Some games use a dice roll, while some use a character stat or some combination. Some games determine initiative “per side” while some do it per character or some mix. Some determine initiative anew each round of combat while some keep it the same throughout a combat.

What is my favorite system for initiative? None. At least, none of those. Ideally, for me, it goes something like this:

The judge determines what the NPCs/monsters will do
The players describe what the PCs do
Actions are resolved in the order that makes the most sense based on what everyone is doing

So, a character with a readied ranged weapon is going to be able to get a shot off before his opponents close with him. If two opponents are coming towards each other, they’re going to meet in the middle—exactly where depending on their individual speeds—and the one with the longer weapon is going to get the first attack.

Generally. Extenuating circumstances might change any of those situations.

Some games do list such things as exceptions to the rule. I tend to think of it the other way. Those are the rules and the dice and/or stat method is the exception. There are still plenty of times when the situation doesn’t dictate initiative and dice/stats have a part to play. Though I might prefer an ad hoc contest rather than the generic rule most games have. And, I like a mechanism that allows for ties, because sometimes it happens. (“Jump ball!”)

Now, I’ve heard plenty of reasons why such a subjective system shouldn’t work, but—in practice—it seems to work just fine. Although...

Our Saturday group currently has nine players. We’re playing Wizards 3.5e D&D. While I may not be overly fond of 3e combat, it does handle combats of this size. I think it would be hard to run them my way. The number of PCs alone is pushing “7±2”. On the other hand, based on past experience, I’m wary of running a game with that many players anyway. Still, I might have to experiment.

Why “story games” aren’t my preference

2011-07-16T18:00:00.000-05:00

It’s the difference between being a character in a story and being the author (or a co-author) of a story.

One of the great things about RPGs

2011-07-15T18:00:00.000-05:00

The Guitar Hero & Rock Band games seem to have peaked. No more versions may be produced. Eventually, the controllers will be discontinued. New consoles will come and the old ones—along with their controllers—will get sold in garage sales, given away, etc. The controllers will also start breaking down. Thirty years from now, it may be very expensive to get a working console and working controllers to play some Rock Band with friends.

There’s a great Avalon Hill game called Magic Realm. If you’ve never played it, it will cost you a lot to get a used copy. It has so many parts, there’s a good chance a used copy will be missing some.

Thirty years after the classic, c. 1981, D&D Basic and Expert sets were published, you can download a copy of Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy for free and play pretty much the same game. In another thirty years, that should still be true. (Heck, I’ve got the rules on my phone.) Sure, you need a computer, a connection to the Internet, and—optionally—a printer; but the expense of those things are spread over lots of other uses. If polyhedral dice become hard to find, you can fall back on electronic dice simulations. (I’ve got a bunch of such apps...on my phone.)

War hammers

2011-07-14T18:00:00.000-05:00

Back in “Worst Labyrinth Lord melee weapons”, I wrote:

The war hammer. Is this something like Mjöllnir or a late medieval bec de corbin kind of thing? Is the latter subsumed within pole arm or pick? Why is it two-handed with no one-handed counterpart? Note that dwarfs can’t wield two-handed weapons, but the magical dwarven [sic] thrower war hammer has special rules when used by a dwarf. I’m beginning not to care that the mechanics are suboptimal and unlikely to be picked by a PC. ☺

So, after too little research, I jumped to this conclusion: Mjölnir wasn’t a weapon but a blacksmith’s hammer used as a weapon. Or, if it was a weapon, perhaps it was a throwing hammer. The kind of thing that became the sport of hammer throwing. Or maybe both.

(And that’s ignoring the note I saw that said sometimes Mjölnir was called a club or axe.)

So, the war hammer is your typical bec de corbin sort of thing. (Probably one of the shorter variants with the longer ones being pole arms.) The “War Hammer +2, Dwarven Thrower” is not a really a war hammer but a throwing hammer. Which makes me wonder what the stats for a non-magical throwing hammer ought to be. Same as club or hand-axe?

Characters and spreadsheets

2011-07-13T22:00:00.000-05:00

How much I like a role-playing game system is inversely proportional to how much I feel I need to use a spreadsheet for my character.

As a general thing.

North Texas RPG Con

2011-06-01T17:00:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow, Lauri & I will be headed out to the The North Texas RPG Con. It’s a con organized by Mike Badolato & Doug Rhea dedicated to “old school” role-playing games. It’s a chance to play some games, see and purchase some collectibles, meet some people whose names grace a lot of the games on my shelves, and put faces with some online friends and acquaintances.

We’re registered for...

Module design workshop with Rob Kuntz
GURPS 4/e game run by Mike Kelly
Villains & Vigilantes game run by Jeff Dee
Expert D&D game set in the Hollow World run by Steve Winter
Empire of the Petal Throne game run by Steve Winter

I hope to catch some of the charity game, where the special guests will be the players. We’ll also be attending the Artist Panel featuring Erol Otus, Paul Jaquays, Jeff Dee, and Jason Braun.

Rapture day!

2011-05-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

From “Why There Will Be No Rapture” on the Exploring Our Matrix blog:

Others understand the Bible even better, and are aware that the passages appealed to in support of the doctrine of the Rapture (such as 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) do not teach the idea of a Rapture followed by tribulation that is the mainstay of Dispensational Pre-Millennialist eschatology.

I love that. It pretty succinctly tells most of us that we really don’t have the theology chops for this subject.

Honestly, I’m not crazy about the argument that James then makes in that post.

For me, it’s pretty simple. If you’re concerned with when The Rapture will come, you’ve missed the point. Read the book again.

Pause

2011-04-14T17:00:00.000-05:00

The number one thing I want most from any iPhone app that plays audio (or video). In particular: Apple’s iPod app, Apple’s YouTube app, Matthew Gallagher’s Stream To Me, and Bottle Rocket’s NPR News app.

The biggest button on the app should be the pause button. The pause button should be separated from other buttons by as much space as possible. I should never go to hit pause and instead find only a spinner. I need to be able to pause even during the time between hitting play and when playback actually begins. (Or, as in the NPR News app, between entries in my playlist.)

Spell failure

2011-03-10T20:00:00.000-06:00

How often in (pre-D&D) literature (including myths and legends) do magic wielders fail to cast a spell or have a spell back-fire? Specific examples are especially welcome.

Readability’s Open Letter to Apple

2011-03-01T18:00:00.001-06:00

Steve Jobs:

We support two platforms at Apple: HTML5. Fully open, uncontrolled platforms forged by widely respected standards bodies. The second platform we support is the App Store. It’s a curated platform

Readability: An Open Letter to Apple

As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way…towards the web.

This seems a little strange.

We can offer you Coke or Pepsi.
An open letter to this restaurant: We don’t like Pepsi. Until you change things, we will go the other way...Coke.

Whether Apple’s policy towards subscriptions is good or not is beside the point. Apple explicitly supports the web route for anyone who doesn’t like the terms of the iOS App Store. And, hey, you were already there anyway. What was your point again?

Honestly, though, Readability’s set-up seems really screwy. Why would anyone pay those authors extra to get a readable version of their content. They ought to have worked with people who would have presented it in a readable fashion in the first place.

Anyway, I hope Apple’s policy doesn’t force Kindle off of iOS. I wouldn’t be happy about that.

All human knowledge

2011-02-28T18:00:00.000-06:00

I wish I had seen this in high school.

The Illustrated Guide To a Ph.D.

Since that circle of all human knowledge is just getting bigger and bigger, doesn’t that mean our ability to apply that knowledge is getting smaller and smaller. Sure, we specialize and operate in parallel, but it seems to me that you get to a point where even that gets overwhelmed.

Which isn't even considering knowledge we may be letting fall through the cracks and get lost.

Using 3D well

2011-02-26T18:00:00.000-06:00

In a comment to a previous post, Anonymous Dimwit wrote:

I don’t even understand what “use 3d well” is supposed to mean from a cinematic context.

I certainly understand that Anonymous Dimwit will probably never be a fan of 3D, and that’s fine. It doesn’t work for everyone.

I think that’s a valid question, though. What do I think is using 3D well?

Actually, I think it is pretty simple. You shoot with a 3D camera.

It is also best to step up to a decent frame rate, but that’s something movies need to do anyway. 3D needs a higher frame rate, but the 24 frame/second that they’re using isn’t even good for 2D. (Or has there already been progress in that area?)

Of course, simply using a 3D camera does make things a bit more difficult. You also lose some tricks that rely on the lack of depth in 2D. Still, making a good 3D movie isn’t really different from making a good 2D movie. If you change what you’re doing significantly for 3D, then you’re most likely using 3D poorly. If you are adding 3D in post-production rather than using a 3D camera, you are almost certainly using 3D poorly.

In my opinion.

AT&T not so bad after all?

2011-02-25T18:00:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the “good but not that good” sales of the Verizon iPhone merely shows that AT&T isn’t quite so awful as the pundits make them out to be?

Record sales

2011-02-24T18:00:00.004-06:00

I had a post scheduled with a comment on this chart, but since, seemingly better charts and analysis have been posted by Michael DeGusta.

The take-away seems to be that album sales are falling, single sales are rising, but single sales aren't up enough to offset the drop from albums.

Questions that come to mind:

1. Is any of this due to people having a lot more to spend money on today? e.g. mobile phone plan, mobile data plan, TV provider, ISP, among many others.

2. What about the larger music industry. Live music? Selling music to businesses rather than consumers?

AT&T and the App Store

2011-02-23T18:00:00.000-06:00

A quote from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson on the iOS App Store: (courtesy TiPb)

“You purchase an app for one operating system, and if you want it on another device or platform, you have to buy it again,” Stephenson said in a keynote speech at the world’s largest mobile-phone trade show in Barcelona, Spain. “That’s not how our customers expect to experience this environment.”

Well, here’s what experience has taught me to expect. I can choose from:

Live in a closed world where I have to buy the same things over and over again for the rest of my life
Live in an open world where my life is often made harder by companies who give lip-service to openness but don’t believe in it

There are trade-offs, and so I do a little of both.

I’m not going to hold my breath that AT&T is really going to become my champion here. Especially when I pay them every month for the same thing.

Sexist gaming art

2011-02-22T18:00:00.001-06:00

So, there’s been a lot of talk lately in certain corners of the Internet about sexism in gaming and particularly about art. While I have been aware of sexism in gaming, I’ve personally tended to steer well clear of it, so it isn’t something I encounter regularly. It doesn’t seem so pervasive that I can’t effectively avoid it. (Though, how much of it do I encounter and just not see?)

After reading a lot of the talk about art, though, I have to say that I’m much more concerned with the effect that the “war on obesity” in this country may have on my daughter’s body image than any artwork.

D&D (details & divisions)

2011-02-21T17:00:00.001-06:00

Mike Mearls has started a new column on the Wizards of the Coast website called “Legends and Lore” to talk about the history of D&D. I think that’s a great idea. From what I know of Mike, I think he’ll do a good job of that. (Personally, I’m going to be very interested in any products Mike produces after he leaves Wizards.)

I’m going to join in criticizing his first installment, however.

Whether you play the original game published in 1974, AD&D in any of its forms, 3rd Edition and its descendents, or 4th Edition, at the end of the day you’re playing D&D.

We’re talking about at least three different games here. Sometimes differences are important and glossing over them helps no one.

This is our game, and it is as healthy, vibrant and important as we make it. The rest is details. Don’t let that details drive us apart when the big picture says we should be joined together.

Rob Conley has said, “Wizards needs to take leadership.” He’s right. Preaching unity while sowing division rings hollow. I say, if Wizards of the Coast is serious about fostering a community spirit, here’s what they should do:

Pull any products that are confusing history.
Start teaching history instead of obscuring it.
Admit that the marketing of “4th edition” was over-the-line with its attacks on previous editions (including 3rd).
Admit that pulling the PDFs from sale had nothing to do with piracy.
Make all the old TSR and “3rd edition” products available.

That’s not even leadership. That’s merely acting in good faith and refraining from putting obstacles in the community’s way.

Granted, Mike’s column may be a start on #2, but it will take more than that.

If I were them, I’d do #5 by simply declaring those products to be public domain. After all, they aren’t making any money off of those products anyway. Then the community could simply share what they already having instead of Wizards having to do any work to make the historical artifacts of this hobby widely available both now and for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, if Wizards wanted to make those products available again for sale, I think that would sow some good will among the community as well. Although, at this point, they’ve created competition that is trying to fill that niche as best as they can.

And now, according to the Joesky rule, a new monster for Labyrinth Lord:

Flame Salamander Guardbeasts

No. Enc: 1, Align: N, Move: 120’ (40’), AC: 4, HD: 4, Att: 1 bite, Dam: 1d6, Save: F4, Morale: 8, Hoard Class: XX

Flame salamanders often keep these elemental beasts to serve like guard dogs. Like their keepers, these quadrupeds have a lizard-like appearance and give off an intense heat. Those within 10’ take 1d4 points of fire damage per round. Fire-based damage does not harm them. They can detect invisibility to a range of 30’.

Once brought to zero hp, the guardbeast does not die. Instead it transforms into two guardbeasts, each half the size of the original and each having 2 HD. When these are brought to zero hp, they likewise divide into two beasts each one-quarter the size of the original with 1 HD each. When these are bought to zero hp, they (finally) die.

Electric guitar: How many speakers?

2011-02-03T17:00:00.001-06:00

Here is a question about electric guitar that I’m finding it very hard to find a credible answer to. Say I have a single amp-head and I’m not doing anything stereo. In what situations should I choose a single speaker cabinet? When should I choose a cabinet with two speakers? When should I choose a cabinet with four speakers?

I understand the trade-offs between the different sizes of speakers but not the different numbers. Indeed, the only thing that seems clear is that multiple speakers cause problems with phase cancellations.

Guitar shape legal battles

2011-02-02T17:00:00.001-06:00

Craig Havighurst wrote a good piece for Premier Guitar entitled “Shapes of Things: A Brief History of the Peculiar Behind-the-Scenes War Over Guitar Designs”

In one of the cases covered, Fender wanted to prevent low-quality knock-offs from duplicating the shapes of the Stratocaster, Telecaster, and P-bass. The thing that is ironic to me is that, when CBS bought Fender, the quality of the instruments suffered. The fact that they owned the right to the Fender brand and perhaps could have—then—trademarked the outlines didn’t keep their instruments from essentially being low-quality knock-offs of pre-CBS Fenders.

Fender Tele-Bration 2011

2011-02-01T17:00:00.001-06:00

On of my favorite guitars, the Fender Telecaster, turns 60 this year. (Here’s a little video tribute from Fender’s YouTube channel.) They’re celebrating with a different limited-edition Tele every month. The Music Zoo posted some details. Three stood out to me.

I like the July Cabronita with TV Jones filtertron-style pick-ups. I’d already been thinking a Tele with filtertrons might be in my future. I’m wondering how they would sound with the Tele 4-way switching mod. (bridge—both in parallel—both in series—neck)

The August Tele is made from laminated bamboo, which seems interesting.

The October rosewood Tele recalls the one made for George Harrison. One of my favorite guitars and one of my favorite guitarists and a very distinctive look.

I don’t see myself buying any of these limited-editions, but I’m on the look-out for ideas for possibly getting a custom made Tele-style guitar someday. Hmm...rosewood cabronita?

R20

2011-01-31T17:00:00.024-06:00

As part of my struggle to focus on building a campaign rather than homebrew rule systems that I never complete, here’s another idea. R20 or “if Robert were to run a d20 system game again”...

When I first read Wizards’ third edition D&D Players Handbook, it seemed like a fairly generic game that had been skinned to look like more like D&D. It seemed to me that if they’d gone farther away from D&D (and not called it D&D), I’d probably like it more.

I thought the generic classes from the 3e Unearthed Arcana was a step in the right direction. True20 expanded on that idea, but I’m not crazy about it.

I liked a lot about the “only one class” variant in the d20 Call of Cthulhu, but I’ll put that route aside for now. I didn’t really care for the ability-based classes of d20 Modern. Anyway, back to the generic classes route...

I’m not a big fan of the Expert generic class. Let’s let everyone be an Expert. The Spellcaster and Warrior classes should gang up, kill it, and take its stuff. Spellcasters and Warriors follow the class skill and skill point rules for Experts. It’s kind of fitting that a swords & sorcery game should have two classes: Spellcasters and Warriors.

Next, I’d use “mid20” for probably most rolls other than attack rolls. That means you roll 3d20 and use the middle value. I’ve also considered the 3d6 bell curve rolls from the UA. I also like level-based skills, another UA variant.

Even with all those changes, though, I’m not sure if it becomes a game I want to run. There may still be too many little details in the feats, combat rules, and spells that I’d want to change.

Two-mechanic RPG systems

2011-01-30T17:00:00.001-06:00

I’m OK with “unified mechanic” RPGs. I don’t think lacking a unified mechanic is a flaw, but I don’t think having one is necessarily a flaw either.

There’s an interesting variant that I’ve seen pop up a few times: Using a linear distribution for combat and a normal distribution for skill checks.

e.g. Someone on the TFT mailing list used a d20 for combat rolls but kept the standard nd6 rolls for everything else.

I think the appeal of this comes from the fact that, the way most people play, combat involves lots of rolls while non-combat checks more often involve a single roll. When you use a linear mechanic for skills, the results seem too random. When you use a normal-distribution for combat, things don’t feel random enough.

Why the 3D movie case is not closed

2011-01-29T17:00:00.000-06:00

Roger Ebert posted a letter from film editor and sound designer Walter Murch. “Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.”

Munch’s main point is around convergence and focus.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues—darkness and “smallness”—are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen—say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.
But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another.

The greater the distance, the less depth perception matters. The real magic of stereoscopy happen when the convergence and focus distances are similar. When you can see the small differences in depth within the form of the focal object. Large and exaggerated depths and rapid changes of convergence aren’t where the magic is.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to “get” what the space of each shot is and adjust.

If you don’t have a lot of shifting convergence, then I guess this won’t be an issue. In any case, though, I think less rapid cuts would be a very good thing. Rapid cutting annoys me in 2D.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image.

shrug I know that I have never felt as immersed in a film as when I was when I was standing outside Baikonur Cosmodrome...when I was really sitting in an IMAX theatre with 3D glasses on.

But who am I to argue with an expert like Munch? Reading their arguments, however, I just can’t help but think that many of the people who dismiss 3D in films dismiss it based on bad and gimmicky 3D instead of on the merits of 3D when used well.

Star Wars RPG license

2010-12-16T18:00:00.003-06:00

So, Mongoose says that another company got the license for a Star Wars role-playing game.

yawn

Yet another SWRPG that will start from scratch rather than being able to build on anything from the two versions that came before. (Assuming you count the Wizards of the Coast editions as only a single version.) If it is a smaller company, then the money they have to pay for the license will limit how much they can actually spend on development. If it is a bigger company, they will likely treat it something as a hobby while keeping most of their focus on their products that are not hindered by a license agreement. Plus, we already know that they will not have the license indefinitely.

sigh

Yeah, I will be interested to see who gets it. I will be interested to see what they do with it. There is the chance I will even buy it. It is just hard to be excited about it. It seems like their ought to be a better way here.

The iOS home button

2010-12-15T18:00:00.000-06:00

I think I understand why Apple choose to go with the single home button for iOS devices. I think the argument for it is much stronger than the single button mouse. The problem is that they once again didn't live with the limitation they set for themselves. They added double-clicks.

Double-click are much worse than a second button. We’ve known this for years. A number of users have trouble executing double-clicks, so it should only be used as a short-cut. Many other users have trouble understanding the difference between single-clicks and double-clicks. So many users have been mistakenly trained to always double-click. So, we have to program defensively to recognize and ignore double-clicks even when they don’t do anything. Not to mention that some developers fail to understand how to properly use double-clicks, which just leads to more confusion among users.

I like the “recent apps” UI in iOS 4, along with its audio and other controls. What I don’t like is having to double-click to get to it. Worse, double-clicking is the only way to get to it. Though I suppose you could argue there is (almost) nothing the user could do through it they couldn’t do another way.

I think what I’d really like would be three buttons: Home, Spotlight (search), and Recent Apps. Without two more buttons, though, perhaps there’s another way to make it work better.

Consider this: When you are in an app, pressing the home button takes you to the last home screen you were on. Pressing the home button again takes you to the first home screen. Pressing home again takes you to Spotlight. These are not time-based double- or triple-clicks. These are just sequential uses of the home button in different contexts. Given a single button, I think I’d like my first press of it to take me to the recent apps. Pressing the home button again would then take me to Spotlight. A third press would take me to the home screen.

Although, I’m not entirely sure about the order of the last two. Since the recent apps only takes up a strip at the bottom of the screen, perhaps an on-screen Spotlight and Home buttons could be added to allow the user quick access to both. Then the home button becomes simply a “recent apps” button.

iOS printing

2010-12-11T18:00:00.000-06:00

I’m a bit surprised by how much I am actually printing from my iPad now. It is very convenient. I’ve even thought about printing from the iPhone a couple of times, but I haven’t upgraded it yet. Most of it has been pretty straight-forward. Print a PDF. Type up some notes in Pages and print them. But there has been one more involved process:

Take a photo with iPhone
Use Bump to transfer the photo to iPad
Create a Pages document
Add the photo and resize
Duplicate the photo a few times
Print

The early-adoption cynic in me wasn’t expecting that to work so well already.

(One thing I learned: When printing from the iPad Photos app, you can’t tell it what size to print a photo at. Also, AirPrint tries to switch to the printer’s secondary paper tray assuming it holds photo paper. Using Pages allowed resizing and printing from the primary paper tray. And, really, Pages was probably the right way to do what I wanted to do anyway.)

The biggest downside right now is needing to either have a AirPrint enabled printer or a Mac running Printopia. (Not to mention that buying Printopia ought not to be necessary.) Being able to print at friends’ houses could be very convenient too.

Traveller: the infection

2010-12-09T23:32:00.009-06:00

Recently I’ve been occasionally hosting my role-playing gaming group again. The kids are now old enough that they are really paying attention to the game now.

Sunday, after Saturday’s game, Grace (8yo) took at stab at improv’ing a Star Wars game for her brother. No rules, per se. Just imitating what she’d seen us doing.

I printed out a copy of Starter Traveller for Jake (10yo). Space, military, and the phrase “create starships” immediately got his attention. Both kids made characters. (And neither failed a survival roll!) Jake then had me walk him through world generation to give his character a home world. He’s mapping it.

(By the way, Far Future has made Starter Traveller free from DriveThruRPG and RPGNow until the end of the year!)

This week, Jake’s been taking the books to school with him. All his friends have made characters. Last night he made up a planetary system and some NPCs and took his first stab at referee’ing an actual game today. Apparently it went well, and his friends are asking where they can get their own copies of the game. Tonight, after homework and bath, we reviewed space combat since it had come up today and he’d had to improvise because he hadn’t read the rules.

One of the things I’m very impressed about is the way he seems to natural see the rules as tools to use when it suits him and to ignore when they don’t. (Or to gloss over for now and learn later.) He went ahead and improvised space combat until he could look at it later. Even as we were going over the space combat rules, he was deciding how he was going to house rule it. “I’m going to simplify this bit.” & “We’ll ignore that for now.”

Two weapon fighting in Labyrinth Lord

2010-12-08T17:30:00.016-06:00

I haven’t thoroughly read the Labyrinth Lord rules, but—to my knowledge—there is no provision for fighting with two weapons. And I’m perfectly fine with that.

Even so, there are some advantages to it without any mechanical considerations. e.g. Using a sword and a dagger means that you have a dagger ready to throw and a sword ready for melee at the same time. No time need be wasted sheathing or drawing either weapon. That, however, isn’t the reason many people fought with sword and dagger.

The Advanced Edition Companion gives the old AD&D rule. I’ve probably argued against two weapon fighting providing a second attack sufficiently. Suffice it to say, I think a second attack is generally not a good way to model anything in most D&D-derived combat systems.

I’m leaning towards this: Attacks are resolved as if the character were only wielding the primary weapon with an additional +1 “to hit”. The player may decide each round which weapon is considered the primary.

The nice thing about this is that it doesn’t discourage using more unusual combinations—e.g. two scimitars—but it doesn’t encourage them either. Most characters will probably stick to sword and dagger except for style or expediency reasons.

As others have said before me, this is also a nice foil to the -1 to AC granted by a shield.

A long time ago in a land far, far away...

2010-12-07T18:00:00.001-06:00

So, I was playing around with Hexographer...

Scabbard

2010-12-01T17:30:00.004-06:00

Between buying a new waster at TRF (from Hollow Earth Swordworks) and my look at Labyrinth Lord weapons, I’m beginning to wonder: It it possible that the thing that really made swords and daggers such popular weapons simply the scabbard? It makes them easy to carry and quick to draw.

Worst Labyrinth Lord melee weapons

2010-11-24T17:30:00.008-06:00

OK, the title of this post is sort of a tongue-in-cheek reference to my top ten LL melee weapons. The idea, though, is to look at the thirteen weapons that didn’t make that cut. Well, that was the idea. Some are going to have to wait for another post.

A two-handed sword is mechanically identical to a pole arm except for one thing: It costs more than twice as much.

You might say that pole arms should really only be good in formation fighting, but I think that only really holds for things like a pike. Poleaxes and halberds seem to have been used in similar contexts to swords.

You might say that a sword is a noble’s weapon while a pole arm is a commoner’s weapon. I’m not convinced, but that works. Some characters may be willing to spend the extra gold in order to not be seen wielding a commoner’s weapon.

How about space required? It seems to me that a two-handed sword and a pole arm are going to have similar space requirements, but I don’t know.

I have read, however, that the true two-handed swords were a specialized weapon used mainly on the battlefield. Like (and often against) pikes. So, I think I can be happy with its mechanical inferiority to the pole arm in the game.

The LL trident is a two-handed weapon. I believe retiarii—a type of Roman gladiator—would sometimes use their trident in one hand. Although it may have been most effective when used with both hands. Nice to have it available, but I’m OK with it not being an optimal choice.

The war hammer. Is this something like Mjöllnir or a late medieval bec de corbin kind of thing? Is the latter subsumed within pole arm or pick? Why is it two-handed with no one-handed counterpart? Note that dwarfs can’t wield two-handed weapons, but the magical dwarven [sic] thrower war hammer has special rules when used by a dwarf. I’m beginning not to care that the mechanics are suboptimal and unlikely to be picked by a PC. ☺

A scimitar is (again, mechanically) equivalent to a long sword except for one thing: It’s 50% more expensive. I think the scimitar is the “foreign long sword”. If the PCs travelled to another land, they might find the prices of the long sword and scimitar reversed. So, I might allow a character with a suitably foreign background to buy a scimitar during character creation at the long sword price.

I’ve always thought the spear should be used more often in role-playing games it has been in my experience. Historically, this was an important weapon. In LL, the only thing that really sets it apart is that it is explicitly cited as a weapon that can be braced against a charge for double damage. Although I have yet to see that actually occur in a game.

Why choose a spear instead of the less expensive hand axe? Length, but that doesn’t figure into LL combat except through ad hoc rulings. Although, it could double as probe outside of combat.

Both the mace and flail inflict 1d6 damage, but the mace costs 5 gp while the flail costs but 3. On the other hand, the mace weighs only 3# while the flail weighs 5. I suppose if the full encumbrance rules are being used, those couple of pounds might make a difference. As both these weapons seem unlikely to be chosen by any character but a cleric, the cleric’s specific faith might have an influence the choice.

The mighty Roman gladius, the short sword, gets overshadowed by the long sword and the hand axe. That’s probably just as well. If a campaign was geared more towards ancient times then you might want to adjust all the equipment lists appropriately. As it is, I’m glad the short sword is here, and I don’t know that it needs to be made more attractive a purchase.

The lance seems to call for some special rules, but none are given. Well, not where you might be looking. The “horse, war” entry in the Monsters chapter says that, when charging, a rider with a lance does double damage. If I dropped the light hammer from the top ten list, then perhaps I’d add the lance.

Does anyone actually ever buy a club? It’s the original improvised weapon, eh? Glad we have it listed, but it doesn’t need any differentiation to encourage character’s to buy one.

Metamorphosis Rama

2010-11-21T17:30:00.000-06:00

Having heard that Jim Ward is having some medical bills stacking up, I recently took the opportunity to grab a copy of the first edition of Metamorphosis Alpha from RPGNow. (If you ever wondered where the name “Drawmij” in AD&D came from...there you go.) Looking through it made me think...

A Mutant Future game
Set up like Metamorphosis Alpha
With a ship like Rama in place of the Warden

Maybe the hub at one end—where the control center lies—would be known as Olympus, home of “the gods”. Perhaps the “engineering section” on the other end would be called Hades.

The top 10 Labyrinth Lord melee weapons

2010-11-18T17:30:00.010-06:00

After running a couple of Basic/Expert D&D campaigns using the regular “all weapons do 1d6 damage” rule, I am considering—along with “switching” to Labyrinth Lord—switching back to variable damage by weapon. So, I want to take a closer look at the melee weapons in LL. This is going to be something of a min/maxing exercise, but I think it may be worthwhile. (Call it “min/maxing so that the players don’t have to”.) Here’s my list of the 10 best weapon choices:

Bastard sword
Pole arm
Long sword
Battle axe
Heavy flail
Hand axe
Flail
Light hammer
Dagger
Silver dagger

The bastard sword’s 2d4 when used two-handed compares well to the 1d10 of the pole arm. When used one-handed, it compares well against the long sword, doing the same damage and only being 2# heavier. The flexibility, however, comes with a price. It is the second most expensive weapon.

A pole arm is equal to the two-handed sword when it comes to damage and weight. At half the price, however, it is a bargain. I think envisioning this as a poleax or halberd is more suitable than, e.g., a pike.

There are 1d8 weapons that are cheaper than a long sword, but they all require two hands.

Although a two-handed weapon, the battle axe does the same damage as the one-handed long sword. It does have one advantage over a long sword, though. It is almost half the price.

The heavy flail is the only 1d8 weapon that a cleric can use.

Among the weapons that do 1d6 damage, the hand axe is the clear winner at only 1 gp and 3#. A quarterstaff is cheaper but requires two hands. A short sword is lighter but more than twice the price. Not to mention that the axe may be thrown as a missile weapon as well.

For the cleric who wants to use a shield, the flail packs the most bang for the buck. The mace is a second choice trading a lower weight for a higher price.

Among the 1d4 weapons, the light hammer rules the roost. It is cheap and light. Really, though, it looks to me like a tool being used as an improvised weapon. I think I’ll probably house rule it down to less damage, which would drop it from this list.

The dagger is the only weapon explicitly allowed to magic-users. It also has one advantage over the light hammer in that it can be thrown.

The silver dagger is the only silver weapon commonly available. While the most expensive weapon listed, it is invaluable when faced with a monster only affected by silver weapons.

An honorable mention goes to the lance, which will be explained further in a follow-up.

You may notice the absence of a couple of iconic weapons, such as the mace and quarterstaff. Likewise the spear, widely used historically, didn’t make the cut.

The next task will be to examine reasons why the other weapons might be chosen.

Braunstein redux

2010-11-10T17:30:00.002-06:00

One of the events we can trace the origins of role-playing games back to are the Braunstein games run by Dave Wesely. The first occurred in 1967. Here’s a description of it from Law Shick’s book, Heroic Worlds:

Some players represented advance elements of the armies just entering the town, and others represented factions from within the town itself. Each player's faction had differing goals and abilities. The players, used to set-piece battles between armies, had never encountered anything like this before, but soon they were deeply engaged in all sorts of intrigue, with their figures chasing each other around the miniature town of Braunstein. The game dissolved into apparent chaos, and the armies never did get to the town.
This undisciplined brawl violated all Wesley’s cherished theories of organized game conduct, and he thought of it as a failure. But the players loved it and were soon pestering him to run “another Braunstein”.

Now consider this PvP blog post, “The Tribunal of Erathis”, from this year (2010):

Last night’s D&D session with my group was really something special. Lucky for me, cause it could have gone either way. And to be honest, I was certain all night that most of my players were bored out of their minds. But after our session, and I apologized for the failed experiment I was met with a surprised merriment. They had a great time and one of my players said it was his favorite night of gaming so far with this group.

It closes with these words:

It was a night of pure role-play. The dice rolled only for skill checks of History, Insight, Diplomacy and Bluffing. And we had a great time.
[...]
I encourage all DMs to take at least one night out where the dice are never rolled for combat. And get your players role-playing. It was an incredible time.

The similarities are striking. Why are D&D players in 2010 repeating one of the incidents that led to D&D and being surprised by it?

(Yeah, that’s something of a rhetorical question that I plan to revisit...)

MacBook versus MacBook Air

2010-10-20T18:00:00.005-05:00

Comparing the $999 MacBook to the $999 MacBook Air:

MacBook advantages:

Faster processor (+1 gigahertz)
More storage (+186 gigabytes)
Larger display (+2 inches)
Has an optical (CD/DVD) drive

MacBook disadvantages:

Lower resolution display (-25 kilopixels)
Heavier (+1.7 pounds)
Bigger

Comparing specs certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. If I were going to buy a laptop, though, I still think I’d go with the MacBook rather than the Air.

Sony’s Google TV controller

2010-10-07T17:00:00.004-05:00

Sony’s Google TV controller outed on ABC’s Nightline

Gruber says: “Seems like a lot of buttons.”

Most of them, however, are a QWERTY keyboard. That’s a configuration of buttons that is familiar. It’s not intimidating. In fact, I think this remote is a lot less intimidating that a U-verse or DirecTV remote.

The Apple Remote, on the other hand, has always had too few buttons.

That said, I’m not convinced this Google TV remote is a win, but I’m not convinced it’s a fail either.

iTunes and iOS

2010-10-02T17:00:00.001-05:00

I don’t know how many times this happens. I want to listen to music on my iPhone or iPad. Listening to music means iTunes. (That’s what iTunes began life as: A music player.) On the iPhone and iPod, however, iTunes means merely the iTunes store. There’s a separate iPod app for playing music.

(Incidentally, this happen more on the iPad for some reason. Perhaps because the iPhone is physically closer to an iPod while the iPad is physically closer to a Mac.)

“Watch video” on my Mac means iTunes. On my iPhone it means iPod. On my iPad it means the Video app.

Returning to the iTunes store: On my Mac, I get a single iTunes store. On iOS, the App store gets segregated.

On iOS I also get the iBooks store, but only within the iBooks app. Although it does seem to be a branch of the iTunes store under the covers. The iBooks store is unavailable on my Mac. It is very nice to be able to shop from within the iBooks app. But then, it would also be nice to be able to shop for music from within the iPod app. It would be nice to shop for videos from within...the iPod app on the iPhone and the Video app on the iPad.

(Of course, Amazon can’t figure out how to let you buy Kindle books from either the Kindle app or the Amazon app. Very odd and annoying.)

The iTunes store, App store, and iBooks store on the iPad are each slightly different. And I’m not talking about differences that make sense based on their different wares. They are also some of the worst user experiences of any apps on the iPad.

This all seems very poorly thought out, which is usually something Apple excels at.

On the other hand, Apple today is also a company that constantly improves. It’s funny how I forget all the gripes I had about earlier Apple products now that they’ve been fixed.

Limited time offer

2010-10-01T17:00:00.001-05:00

It seems like Lulu always has a discount code. It stops feeling like a deal when I know that as soon as one “limited time offer” expires, there will be another to replace it. Instead, it makes me feel like their “regular” prices are artificially high. The “limited time offer” stops having the effect it was designed to create.

This isn’t something Lulu invented of course. e.g. There’s a local music store I stopped shopping at years ago for the same reason.

Gumshoe & investigation in role-playing games

2010-09-30T23:00:00.000-05:00

I keep reading about how the Gumshoe system provides a fix for investigation in role-playing games. The problem they identify is that a botched die roll can prevent players from gaining a vital clue.

My first thought is that applying mechanics to investigation is the real mistake. Then I think that for a game—like Call of Cthulhu, which is all about investigation—maybe it makes sense.

But then I think, isn’t D&D really about investigation too? You’re trying to locate the McGuffin or explore the unknown or whatever. D&D didn’t have much in the way of mechanics for investigation, and—I think—for good reason. The more such mechanics have been expanded and added to D&D, the more you see people coming up with complaints exactly like the one Gumshoe is designed to address.

Gumshoe’s answer is to provide a resource-based mechanic in place of a dice-based one. (There are still dice rolls, but overall it’s more resource-management focused.) Reading about this, I can’t help but think that I’d rather spend time at the table thinking about the mystery and the clues rather than resource management.

So, I’m back to thinking that applying mechanics to investigation doesn’t seem like such a good idea.

This all feels a little unfair since I haven’t actually read any of the Gumshoe books yet. This, however, is the reason why I haven’t bought or read any of them yet.

1 gp paid for training = 1 XP

2010-09-22T17:00:00.006-05:00

A thought inspired by a thread on the LinkedIn RPG group:

In classic D&D, instead of giving the PCs 1 XP per gp of treasure acquired, make it 1 XP per gp paid to a mentor for training.

Ignoring the word “experience” in “experience point” and “experience level”, I think this puts the horse back in front of the cart. You don’t search for treasure to earn “experience” to get better. You search for treasure in order to afford the training to get better.

Of course, you still get some gain for experience as well. This isn’t completely dumping experience for training.

It reminds me of the “wine, women, and song” rule from Dave Arneson’s First Fantasy Campaign in which PCs only got XP for treasure by spending it. It also recalls classic Traveller in which PCs spent money and time to improve their skills rather than through XP.

Although, once the PCs reach a certain level—¿ninth?—perhaps things should change so that they can mentor themselves.

Android and the carriers

2010-09-22T17:00:00.001-05:00

Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With

In theory, I’m right there with you. The thought of a truly open mobile operating system is very appealing. The problem is that in practice, that’s just simply not the reality of the situation. Maybe if Google had their way, the system would be truly open. But they don’t. Sadly, they have to deal with a very big roadblock: the carriers.

Is Google even making an effort to have their way?

An iPhone isn’t a phone. It’s a palmtop computer. The cellular provider for such a device should be much less involved that they have been with cell phones. One of the key pieces of the iPhone is that Apple has pushed AT&T more towards their rightful role for such a device. They haven’t been entirely successful, but they have been very successful.

Cheating in Sunday school

2010-09-21T17:00:00.001-05:00

After some research, I settled on the Olive Tree Bible Reader for iPad.

I really like the Tecarta app, but they didn’t have the NRSV. I really wanted a single app with—at least—the NRSV, the NIV, and the Message.

I used to just use Bible Gateway with my iPhone. It’s a fabulous site, works well with the iPhone, and is completely free. The one downside was that over 3G it was slow enough that I would still be loading when everyone else had already found the passage. Another downside was that the iPhone’s small screen was poorly suited to sharing with your neighbor.

Well, with the Olive Tree app and having the Bibles installed on the iPad, I now find passages while everyone else is still flipping pages. It felt almost like cheating. ^_^ Just four taps to get to any verse.

There is one really weird thing about the Olive Tree app. From the app store, you can buy different versions of it that come bundled with different Bibles. Then there is a sort of “generic” version that allows you to buy multiple translations via in-app purchases.

Once you log-in through one of the bundled versions of the app, Olive Tree will record that you have the bundled Bible (and other bundled books). You can then download those in the generic version of the app.

The weird part is that the versions of the app with the bundles are cheaper than buying the same books directly in the generic app via in-app purchase. So, instead of just buying the generic app and then the translations I wanted via in-app purchase, it was cheaper to buy all the individual bundled apps and then download all the books in the generic app.

It’s hard to even explain. It was confusing for me, and I suspect my background in software and e-books means it was easier for me to understand than for most of their customers.

In any case, I’m pretty happy with the final results. I have the KJV, the NRSV, the NIV, the NIrV, the TNIV, the Message, the ASV, the Vulgate, and the Bible in Esperanto all installed on my iPad in a single app. It’s quick to get to any verse. The search seems decent. And it will do split-screen to compare two versions side-by-side. I also have a couple of commentaries. (In split-screen mode, you can get the commentary for a passage next to the passage.) Plus a few other free e-books. Olive Tree seems to have a good selection of other Bibles, commentaries, and books to buy as well.

Gazelephants

2010-09-20T17:00:00.001-05:00

Gazelephants in the Wild

OK, somebody write up gazelephants for D&D.

Nokia

2010-09-19T17:00:00.004-05:00

What’s Next for Nokia?:

Nokia’s problem — and I’ve heard this same story from at least half a dozen former and present Nokia employees who read DF — is that their handset business is fundamentally based around hardware teams. When they decide to make a phone, they put together a hardware team for that model, and that team makes all decisions. That’s why they have no cohesive software strategy. Nokia sees software as one component in a hardware-based view of the industry.

The iPhone is a palmtop computer, which happens to also be a phone. I don’t think that is what everyone wants or needs. Some people are happier with a phone that is just a phone. Or perhaps a phone that does a few palmtop-like things.

It seems to me that Nokia ought to continue to focus on hardware. It needs to produce the absolute best phone rather than trying to compete directly against the iPhone.

The problem, I suppose, is that that isn’t a high-margin business. Still, I think trying to play somebody else’s game is a lousy and losing strategy.

Backlight beats e-ink (for me)

2010-09-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

The number of times I want to read an e-book in direct sunlight: Almost never. The number of times I want to read an e-book in the dark: Nearly every night.

Why selling PDFs has nothing to do with piracy

2010-09-08T17:00:00.000-05:00

Selling an electronic edition of your book makes it more more susceptible to piracy, right? No, it just means you’re sticking your head in the sand.

In the video below, the company that digitized The Macintosh Way includes a bit of footage of their book scanning machine. It demonstrates not only how that book was reborn, but how easily pirates can turn your printed book into a illicit PDF.

To me, PDF has always been a very limited e-book format. It was good for a fairly limited range of things. For good or ill, however, it is the e-book format that has had the most success.

The iPad has changed things for me, though. For PDFs, it rivals print. For role-playing game books, I now want an electronic copy. (Formats other than PDF are welcome, though PDF if the most common.) Now, I can carry my library anywhere and get to any book in a few taps. I’ll still buy the occasional paper RPG book. If I can’t get an electronic copy, however, there’s a good chance I won’t actually use it.

Keeping up appearances

2010-09-07T17:00:00.000-05:00

I have written before that I think it is important to recognize that what’s right for me isn’t right for everyone. But I do believe that there are some absolute rights and wrongs.

One such fundamental is this: It doesn’t matter what other people think.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be considerate. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek advice. It simply means that when faced with a choice, you shouldn’t make a decision based on what other people might think about your choice.

If for no other reason than that you are likely wrong about what anyone will think. In fact, I suppose this is a subset of the “don’t make a decisions based on fear” proverb.

Not that I’m perfect at practicing this bit of preaching.

Carvin & shameless waste

2010-09-06T17:00:00.002-05:00

When a Carvin guitar doesn’t meet their quality standards, they destroy it. Not only that, they throw the pieces in the dumpster. In fact, they say they do this because people have pulled guitars out of their dumpster and sold them.

When watching videos of the Carvin factory, one of the things that struck me was the waste of wood that their CNC machines create. Then, on top of that, they’re going to cut up the pieces and throw it in the dumpster if it isn’t perfect?

Surely they can find some way to keep their quality standards without this sort of wastefulness. Surely there are people in this world who could benefit from a not-perfect guitar. Why not allow restaurants to screw a quality reject to their wall for decor as so many do? Why not give it to an artist who wants to smash a guitar on stage?

But cutting it into pieces, throwing it in the dumpster, and bragging about it on YouTube?

Cardinal rules of role-playing

2010-09-05T17:00:00.000-05:00

Leonard H. Kanterman, M.D. wrote Starships & Spacemen. This game has recently been revived by Goblinoid Games.

In an article in Different Worlds magazine, “My Life and Role-Playing”, Dr. Kanterman wrote of four cardinal rules of role-playing.

1. “Firstly, an enjoyable game requires an experienced and imaginative gamemaster;”

I’m going to disagree with this...though perhaps only slightly.

Is the game better with an experienced and imaginative gamemaster? Perhaps. To suggest that the game cannot be enjoyable without this, however, is overstating things, I think. A game that is full of clichés and borrowed ideas can be just as fun. Indeed, it can be more fun because the familiar elements can make the game more accessible.

One cannot become an experienced gamemaster without starting as an inexperienced gamemaster. And many people tend to underestimate their own imagination. So, this statement tends to discourage new gamemasters. We should encourage rather than discourage jumping into the role.

2. “and secondly, the key to interesting and challenging encounters is to fit the degree of hazard to the ability of the characters to deal with it.”

I think this rule is an overly simplistic solution to the problem that inspired it.

In my experience, the game is more fun when encounters vary in difficulty. One encounter goes very easily because the cleric turns the undead or the mage puts the enemies to sleep. The characters must flee from another because they have no direct means of harming the monster. They must now either figure a way around the monster or devise a way to indirectly defeat it. Others fall somewhere between.

Problems occur when the GM doesn’t give the players a choice in what encounters they face. When there isn’t variety in the encounters the players can chose. When the GM doesn’t allow the characters chances to escape encounters. When all monsters always fight to the death. When the GM doesn’t allow creative means of dealing with an encounter from succeeding.

Likewise, nerfing character abilities because the GM never wants the players to have an easy encounter can have a negative effect as much as all encounters being too difficult.

3. “The third rule: role-playing is best among friends, with the corollary to this rule being that, among friends, all should be allowed their chance to participate.”

This one I agree with. Although, at the North Texas RPG Con, I discovered that gaming with strangers can be more fun than I expected.

4. “When playing a character, one should play his role. That is, the best play results when a player fully understands his character, and tries to act as he thinks his character might in a given situation.”

This one I mostly agree with as well. I think, however, that the doctor and I are on the same page here.

“At its best, role-play offers a challenge to our wits and our wiles, while extending the potential for insight into ourselves.”

The cautionary note for me here is that I don’t want to take playing my role so far that I become removed from the equation. I want the game to be a challenge to my wits and wiles, not a simulated challenge of my character’s wits and wiles statistics.

Ui faux pas

2010-09-04T17:00:00.000-05:00

“User Interface of the Week: Max Magic Microtuner”

I’m all for lambasting a company like Adobe for its user interface sins. A little company, however, could use constructive criticism rather than being held up for humiliation.

In fact, Gruber’s “Ronco Spray-On Usability” contains such advice. To paraphrase: Usability isn’t something you can add later. You need to start with it.

OED price

2010-09-03T17:00:00.000-05:00

From “Oxford English Dictionary ‘will not be printed again’”

Despite its worldwide reputation, the OED has never made a profit. The continuing research costs several million pounds a year. “These are the sort of long-term research projects which will never cover their costs, but are something that we choose to do,” Mr Portwood said.

Huh? So, if the price isn’t covering its costs, why price it so high? Better yet, why not price it high enough to cover the costs?

I always wished I could justify the cost of the OED. Or even a subscription to the online version. It’s kind of annoying to know a price that I can’t justify doesn’t even cover the costs.

Worthy of study?

2010-08-07T17:00:00.000-05:00

I’ve abstracted this from the context that inspired it because I think the abstract situation is more interesting that the specifics of one instance.

The Actor (in the general sense of “someone who does something”) thinks that their Activity is not worthy of study. They request that, upon their death, the Artifacts of their Activity be destroyed. An Observer, however, feels that the Activity is worthy of study. They work to try to preserve those Artifacts.

Let’s further assume that there is something significant about this particular Actor that distinguishes them from any other actors.

There are two aspects of this I wonder about: Selfishness and right versus wrong. (And what does this say about the rightness or wrongness of selfishness?)

Is the Observer’s desire to preserve those Artifacts against the Actor’s wishes selfish? Is it wrong for the Observer to take action to preserve them?

Is the Actor’s desire to have those Artifacts destroyed selfish? Is it wrong for the Actor to put into place measures that would hinder the Observer’s attempt to pursue their own activity of choice, studying the Actor’s Activity through studying those Artifacts?

“There’s no wrong way to play”

2010-07-17T17:30:00.000-05:00

Risus author S. John Ross used to often say, “There’s no wrong way to play Risus.” Today, he says, “There’s no wrong way to play.”

This is a sentiment I also heard in the words of Rob Kuntz and Tim Kask during the “early days of the hobby” round-table at the North Texas RPG Con.

I think it can be very worthwhile to discuss our approaches to role-playing games. It can be hard to remember that what works for me may not work for everyone. Often I see things as “the right way” and “the wrong way” instead of simply as preferences. I try to express my thoughts as first-person opinions. I don’t always succeed.

A bookshelf app

2010-07-16T17:00:00.002-05:00

More often than not, Kindle has a book I’m looking for and the iBook Store does not.

Unfortunately, buying Kindle books isn’t nearly as easy. It’s annoying that I can’t buy books from within the Kindle iOS app as I can from the iBooks app. It’s annoying that I can’t buy Kindle books through the Amazon iOS app. I can’t imagine why this is the case.

The other annoying thing is trying to remember whether I need to go to the iBooks or Kindle app to read a particular book. I wish I had a “bookshelf app” that would show all my iBook and Kindle books and then launch the appropriate reader. It should also have documentation to allow other e-book apps to integrate with it as well.

Pipe dream? Perhaps. It would, however, be “insanely great”.

(I’m less sure about having Good Reader integrate with such a “bookshelf app”.)

LotFP: RPG: Countdown

2010-07-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

Lamentations of the Flame Princess, “Countdown”:

I do provide cross-clone compatibility notes and plug by name “competing” companies and games and publications within my game. Even if someone unfamiliar with anything decides my game looks cool and picks it up at random, they will know that my game is but the latest that celebrates a greater tradition, and they’ll know there are other visions than mine that are producing great things. If I manage to reach new people I hope those people enjoy all of our work, not just mine.

The really sad thing is that there most likely won’t be a single mention of the name Dungeons & Dragons. For legal reasons, whether real or perceived, the original game itself won’t get a mention by name. Unless James chooses to really stick his neck out even farther than he has already.

Arial versus Helvetica versus...

2010-07-13T17:00:00.001-05:00

Thing is, Arial’s faults still don’t make me like Helvetica any better. I wouldn’t mind if both of them disappeared.

—me

There are those who rail against Arial as a poor knock-off of Helvetica. They are known to wail, tear their clothes, and gnash their teeth whenever they spot the impostor insisting that Helvetica should have been used instead.

Bruno Maag feels much the same way about Helvetica, saying that Univers should have been used instead. He has a new typeface, Aktiv Grotesk, which he is billing as the Helvetica killer.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: If Maag was serious about Aktiv Grotesk replacing Helvetica, he would give it away. That’s how Arial has gotten to where it is.† This is simple marketing hype and publicity stunt. Which is fine; let’s just be clear about it.

One commenter, Eric S., wrote, “Aktiv is to Helvetica as Weird Al Yankovic is to the late Michael Jackson.” That’s an funny observation. I’m not sure if it was meant to be a compliment or a disparaging remark. Personally, I have bought more Weird Al albums than Michael Jackson albums.

In any case, I think I can paraphrase myself here: Helvetica’s faults don’t make me like Aktiv.

Commenter gareth perhaps said it best:

no such thing as a bad type face - just poor choice of typeface
context is everything!

†Note that neither Helvetica or Arial are technically free. They are merely liberally licensed. They are only practically given away. Any Helvetica killer has to be licensed at least as liberally as Helvetica is to have any real chance.

Streaming AV UI

2010-07-12T17:00:00.000-05:00

Audio/video players can be playing or paused. Streaming AV players, however, have a third state: Waiting. Waiting is like paused in that the content isn’t being played. In the wait state, however, playing will begin as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this third state isn’t directly exposed to the user.

Often the user can’t definitively distinguish this state. If the player is waiting and the user activates the play/pause control, what should the player do? Often the user can’t move the player between the paused and waiting states, and I know at least one user who often wants to.

There’s another wrinkle. Most players don’t switch from waiting to playing as soon as possible. Instead, they use heuristics to try to ensure that they have enough content buffered to prevent having to fall back into waiting. This is a good thing, but it means that waiting is actually two new states: Waiting and buffering. When the heuristics fail, it is reasonable to allow the user to override them, forcing a transition from buffering to playing. Some players give the user this ability, while others do not.

That’s the basics of the situation. Maybe sometime I’ll put together a chart of the states and figure out what should be communicated to the user and what controls should be provided to the user.

My favorite die

2010-07-11T17:00:00.010-05:00

I like the d10. For anyone unfamiliar with the “polyhedral dice” and dice nomenclature of Dungeons & Dragons, this is a die with ten sides. I like that...

It has a zero. The sides are numbered zero to nine instead of one to ten like you might expect. (Although the zero is often treated as ten in play.)
You can use multiple d10s to simulate a d100, d1000, etc.

What I don’t care for is the shape, which is termed a pentagonal trapezohedron.

If I had to pick a favorite from among my dice, it might well be this one:

It is the d20—twenty-sided die—from my second set of polyhedral dice. Things I like about it:

It’s a precision die from Gamescience, which I find aesthetically pleasing.
Like almost all d20s, it is a regular icosahedron, one of the platonic solids, which I find aesthetically pleasing.
Unlike almost all d20s made today, it is numbered from zero to nine twice, so it can be used as a d10 and shares all the things I like about d10s.
Unlike the earliest d20s, which were numbered in the same fashion, half of the faces have a plus sign, so it can be used as a d20 without using a second die or using two different colors for the numbers.

It was unique among my dice. Well, almost. I also have a “diamond” (i.e. clear plastic) one purchased at the same time, but it is hard to read no matter what color you use for the numbers.

I’m not sure if they still make these. The newer Gamescience dice sets I have bought have come with 1–20 d20s. It turns out, however, that Gamestation does sell some of these “d20+” dice, which I suspect are NOS. So, I ordered some. My favorite die now has some competition.

Is Apple prepping a new programming language?

2010-07-10T17:00:00.000-05:00

waffle → Surpass:

It is my belief that Apple is definitely working on a new language to surpass Objective-C as their intended, primary, publicly recommended programming language...

I’ve been thinking that it seems very strange that Apple’s primary language is (still) Smalltalk grafted onto C.

If he’s right, I hope that, like the A4 processor (which is ARM based) and Safari (which is HTML, CSS, and Javascript based), it isn’t a wholly new language.

Would Smalltalk be a hard sell to developers who have accepted Objective-C?

Realms of Eternal Epic

2010-07-09T17:00:00.000-05:00

New Haven Games has announced a “remake” of second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. They’re calling it Realms of Eternal Epic. (I’m guessing the name was picked because the abbreviation they use, Ro2E, could be read as “return of 2e” or somesuch.) One of the reasons they’re calling it a “remake” instead of a “clone” is this:

...to fix some of the bad or complicated rules in the system...

Good luck getting two fans of a game to agree on what is bad. This is the reason the clones are having more success than most remakes. Make changes for legal reasons, and most people stay on-board. Make changes to make it “better”, and you lose most people. Because, while they agree some small changes could make it better, they don’t agree on the specific changes.

The bad is delicately remade with modern game theory so that only the game play improves.

This throws up another red flag for me. The vast majority of the RPG landscape was explored in the earliest years of the hobby. Find some grognards—the kind that tried every game that came out—and start talking about recent innovations, and you’ll learn about a lot of old games that trod that ground a decade or more ago. Are there still innovations to be found? Sure, but they are harder and harder to find. Is there really any “modern game theory” of any value that wasn’t known over a decade ago?

Anyway, those are just my opinions on what they’ve said so far. I wish them luck.

Podstreaming/streamcasting?

2010-07-08T17:00:00.000-05:00

I often like to listen to Morning Edition, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered on the local NPR affiliate—KUT—while driving, but then I have to listen to whatever happens to be on while at the time.

The NPR iPhone app is great because it lets me create a playlist of the stories that I’m interested in, which it will then stream on-demand. Unfortunately, cellular data reception doesn’t always coöperate.

Podcasts are good because my iPhone can download them over wi-fi while I’m at home or the office, then I can listen to them in the car without worrying about connectivity. While that works for the podcasts I listen too, it lacks the per-story granularity of the NPR app.

It would be nice to have a hybrid solution. Stories in my NPR playlist should download in the background when I’m on wi-fi. It would also be nice if the app could transparently switch to streaming when necessary.

Do one thing well or everything poorly

2010-07-07T23:45:00.001-05:00

The end of the ipod era, part II:

First, the very last impression that any company wants to give investors, financial analysts and the financial media is that a company can only do a handful of things well, and that the company is too overly dependent on any one of its product lines.

I think this is a problem. It drives businesses towards becoming large, overly-diverse corporations that tend to do nothing well. Sure, some companies—like Apple—manage to avoid it. Many more, however, become Hasbro.

GodFinger, a free app that’s making money

2010-06-21T17:00:00.001-05:00

Despite being free, GodFinger has reached #8 among the top grossing iPad apps.

How can that be? In app purchases. You can trade actual money for in-game awe points.

I haven’t bought any awe points. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing you can do through buying awe points that you can’t do without buying awe points. Buying awe points just lets you do things faster than if you didn’t. You’re buying instant gratification.

The difference of role-playing games

2010-06-18T20:30:00.000-05:00

I’ve written before that the distinguishing characteristic of a role-playing game is the judge. I was never completely comfortable with that, however, because I think there might games that do not have a judge which I would consider a role-playing game.

I think—more generally—the key difference is that, in a role-playing game, the fiction matters more than the rules. You can’t justify going against the rules in chess based on the realities of ancient warfare. You can’t justify going against the rules in Monopoly based on the realities of the real estate business. The game is the rules; the fiction is merely window dressing.

In a role-playing game, however, a rule can be overruled based on the fantasy being played out. The fiction is the game; the rules—guidelines actually—are merely play aids. Once the rules become paramount, then it ceases to be a role-playing game—in my view—and becomes a conventional game. The typical way to make this work is to appoint a judge, but there could be other ways to do it.

If you say that a game needs rules then I’m happy to concede that role-playing games—by my definition—aren’t truly games at all.