Time travel

The new Star Trek film features time traveling.

sigh

Sure, time travel is a sci-fi staple. It can be used to really good effect. It is definitely, however, something for which less is more. The Trek franchise long ago used up their allowance.

In defense of attacks of opportunity

The “attack of opportunity” (AOO) rules in Wizards D&D 3e get disparaged a lot. The rules—at least in the 3.0 PHB—weren’t described well, but the rules themselves are actually pretty good.

Nigh every wargame of a certain level has “zone of control” (ZOC) rules. These are rules that attempt to compensate for the turned-based nature and other artifacts of the game. If you don’t realize that the AOO rules are ZOC rules, then they can often not make a lot of sense. Like much of the combat system, they’re an abstraction, so they can’t be taken too literally.

AOO have a couple of advantages as ZOC rules. One, they are actually pretty simple in play for their “payoff” compared to other ZOC rules. Secondly, they are not as “hard”. A character willing to take a chance at being hit, can effectively ignore the AOO. Or one PC can draw an AOO from an opponent preventing that opponent from getting an AOO against another PC later that round. (Provided the opponent lacks the Combat Reflexes Feat, of course.) Some ZOC rules never allow for circumventing them.

Personally, while I like the AOO rules, I don’t think they are appropriate as default rules for the flagship role-playing game. For a skirmish wargame or for an optional set of advanced combat rules for a role-playing game, sure. It’s the context I don’t like about them more than the actual rules themselves.

Indie elves and old-school dwarves

Ken Hite:

I’ll have more to say on the storied rivalries—and eerie similarities—between indie elves and old-school dwarves in later columns

When—around 2004—I found that the two role-playing games I wanted to play most were classic Traveller and Expert D&D, this was the thing I had noticed. These games from c. 1981 seemed to have a lot in common with current indie games. I’m looking forward to reading Ken’s thoughts about that.

Microsoft and e-book research

Speaking of e-books... When Microsoft first came out with Microsoft Reader—their e-book technology—I had the opportunity to go to Redmond and learn about it first-hand.

They talked for a long time in detail about research that had studied the experience of reading. They talked about the findings of those studies. They talked about how the features of their e-book technology had been based on those findings.

So I asked if there was any research confirming that their technology had in fact reproduced the same things that the original studies had found.

I suppose I was actually rather impressed that the lead Microsoft guy there didn’t completely side-step the question. He knew that there wasn’t. He stated so plainly. He actually used the word “anecdotal” to qualify what “evidence” they did have.

I mean...it was an honest question. I’d just come to expect that questions like that get answered with a “yes”, a “don’t know”, or a lot of blather to cover up a “don’t know”. A rather straightforward, informed “no” was a bit of a surprise.

A dim future for p-books?

Josh Marshall wrote:

Finally, only a few months ago, I purged a decent chunk of my collection. And most are now in storage. But in our living room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.

I’ve never been one to predict the death of paper books. I’ve experienced the same thing he has, though.

When I actually tried the Rocket eBook, I soon found myself reading it more than paper books. When I actually tried reading books on my Palm, likewise. I recently bought electronic copies for Stanza of most of the books that had been piling up on my nightstand and returned the paper copies to their owners. If I was OK with reading on the screen of my Palm V, how could I not be OK with the iPhone’s screen?

No matter how much the “experts” pontificated about the deficiencies of all these devices for reading, none of their arguments has held up for me in practice.

Maybe p-books are doomed in the long run, but I expect they’ll always have a place in my home. Indeed, I’ve got a duplex printer and a saddle stapler because I enjoy making booklets from PDFs.

What I really want is all my books to be digital but with the equipment and the freedom to create hard-copies of those I want hard-copies of.

Doubly linked lists

I found it funny that I happened to read these two pages within days of each other.

A better way, developed by Bernard Greenberg in Multics EMACS and used in ZWEI, is to represent the buffer as a doubly-linked list containing pointers to strings, one for each line. Newline characters are not actually present, but implicitly appear after each line except the last.

—Richard Stallman
“EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor”

On only one occasion have I used doubly linked lists, and it soon became clear that this was a mistake. This was when I tried to implement a simple text editor, with each line of text being a list item. This is the wrong approach because text is composed of characters, and newline characters should be treated, for most purposes, like any other character. Lists, doubly or singly linked, are not the right data structure here.

—Donald Fisk
“Doubly Linked Lists”

The generic unified RPG unsystem

Once Dungeons & Dragons was published and was really taking off, it became clear that the game—the booklets themselves—wasn’t very accessible. I’m sure whilst writing them, Gary never dreamed the game would end up on the shelves of a mall bookstore. He was writing to fellow wargamers. Along came Dr. John Eric Holmes with a proposal to do remedy that. Thus, the first Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.

Dr. Holmes brought some of his own ideas about how the game should work. Later, as the successor to his Basic Set was coming out, he wrote an article for Dragon magazine in which he discussed some of the changes to the game he wanted to make that Gary veto’d. Also, TSR decided that first Basic Set should include bits of and advertising for the forthcoming Advanced D&D game.

I never had the Holmes Basic Set—though I bought the PDF and have it around somewhere—so I don’t know it very well. Jeff posted the following quote from it (emphasis mine):

A final word to the Dungeon Master from the authors. These rules are intended as guidelines. No two Dungeon Masters run their dungeons quite the same way, as anyone who has learned the game with one group and then transferred to another can easily attest. You are sure to encounter situations not covered by these rules. Improvise. Agree on a probability that an event will occur and convert it into a die roll — roll the number and see what happens! The game is intended to be fun and the rules modified if the players desire. Do not hesitate to invent, create and experiment with new ideas. Imagination is the key to a good game. Enjoy!

That pretty much lays out the “generic unified unsystem” that I try to use with any system. I think it is a subtext in many early role-playing games. (And now I know it’s a part of the text of at least one as well.) I particularly like that he used the word “agree”.