Albert Collins Telecaster

Another Telecaster with the same S-H (single-coil/humbucker) configuration as Trixie: Fender Custom Artist Series Albert Collins Tribute Telecaster

D&D 4th edition, second impressions

I know I promised to post about things I liked about 4e, but I’ve got some more dislikes first.

Second wind My general philosophy is that players don’t need to know the rules. They just tell the DM what they want their character to do, and it’s up to the DM to translate that into mechanics and then translate the results back into plain terms. This is an ideal that we perhaps can’t actually fully make it to, but I’d rather move towards it rather than away.

Second wind is not an action a player would ever think of his character wanting to take unless the player knew about the rule. Well, maybe. “I spend this turn catching my breath.” But you get the point, right?

Healing surges These seem like a completely unnecessary extra layer of abstraction on top of hit points.

The 15 minute adventuring day One of the things 4e sought to fix was that adventuring parties would often stop to take a full 8-hour rest and replenish “per day” resources. This didn’t seem to work, since our party did the same thing.

Too many subsystems? Powers, feats, skills, and rituals. Does the system really need and make the most of these subsystems? Feats in particular seem a bit redundant now that there are powers.

Unreliable magic One of the things I really liked about D&D is that magic spells tend to just work. Yeah, if a spell is cast on a creature, it might get a saving throw or magic resistance. And yeah, more and more spells that didn’t allow saving throws would in a new edition. Now, however, most spells are essentially attack rolls. I didn’t like having to roll to cast spells in any of the non-D&D RPGs I’ve played. I don’t like doing it in 4e either.

Parent survey

What frustrates your child?

I’m not sure, but what frustrates me is these questionnaires full of questions I don’t know how to answer that his teachers alway send home.

A guitar amp idea

I imagine: A guitar combo amp with an embedded computer that can run an embedded version of ReValver. It can drive a second cabinet (for stereo) and has stereo line-outs. It’ll need a bank of foot-switches to switch pre-sets and enable/disable individual effects.

At first I was going to say that it and the extension cabinet should each have a single 12” speaker. Since ReValver does speaker simulation, however, we want high-fidelity speakers rather than typical guitar amp speakers.

Of course, you’d use a desktop/laptop with ReValver to create pre-sets to load into the amp.

And while I’m dreaming, let’s include a compartment in the amp that the foot-switch and it’s cable can be stowed in. And a place to stow the power cord.

A huge amount of tone flexibility in an easy-to-tote package. Suitable for practice, recording, and just about any gig.

You can get pretty close to this today, but not quite.

Vaguely related, the OpenStomp project is interesting.

Yeah, yeah. All you need is a good tube amp. I can enjoy that, but I could also enjoy this.

Goldfish Guitars

I found the story of Goldfish Guitars interesting.

RPG development and releases

So, with D&D “fourth edition”, Wizards is planning on putting out a new Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual each year. These will be expansions rather than replacements. They’re considering them, however, “core” rather than supplements.

The distinction is a bit subtle. They typically avoid using a lot of stuff from supplements in adventures, preferring to stick to the core rules. Also, calling these expansions “core” make it easier for them to choose to delay certain things—e.g. gnomes, half-orcs, and druids—that they would normally consider something that should be “core”.

As I said, the distinction is subtle.

I actually think, to some extent, this isn’t a bad idea. It is quite a task to develop a game as involved and with the scope of Wizards’ brand of D&D. It seems daunting and risky to try to fully develop and playtest it before releasing anything.

They did test some parts of “fourth edition” as “third edition” supplements and in the Saga edition of their Star Wars RPG. But I’ll put that aside for now.

I think, however, that I'd go a more classic D&D BECMI→RC path.

The quick explanation: Classic D&D was released in a series of boxed sets: Beginner, Expert, Companion, Master, & Immortal. These were later compiled into a single Rules Cyclopedia.

The first year books would’ve been the Heroic PHB, Heroic DMG, and Heroic MM. They would cover only levels 1–10. (Which “fourth edition” calls the “heroic tier”.) In exchange, they would’ve covered more classes and races.

The second year would see the Paragon versions of the three core books. The third year, the Epic versions.

Then, once the game is fully developed, the fourth year would see all three tiers compiled into the Complete PHB, Complete DMG, & Complete MM triple along with errata and any other fixes that developed over the years.

I think it would be easier to develop and test more classes/races over a single tier than fewer classes/races over all three tiers.

You can be anything

In the comments to Steve Yegge’s post on Business Requirements, entaroadun asked...

The problem with everyone eating their own dogfood is that there will always be some class of people with product needs that cannot make dogfood.

I’m not so sure. I think most of us are much more capable than we give ourselves credit for. If another person can do it, there’s a good chance you can too.

Obviously there are some extraordinary people that can do things very few others can, but that’s where the “good chance” comes in. Most of the things people do are things that most other people can do.

Which works the other way too. This isn’t a “problem” because the “some class” of people who can’t do what most other people can do are on the opposite side of the bell-curve from those extraordinaries.

Besides, people seldom accomplish things alone. You don’t have to be entirely capable of making dogfood in order to make dogfood. You can get help.