Hacking and Slashing

Why Eclipse, as an IDE, makes me all "Hulk Smash!"

2008-12-11T16:50:00.004-05:00

I still dislike PHP as a language. It's inelegant, clunky and baroque. However, my two biggest problems with PHP are these: the IDE and the community.

First, the IDE. IDE, for the non-technical crowd, means Integrated Development Environment. It's the tool that your web developer geeks and other computer programmers use to write those programs. It consists of an editor, a compiler, and a debugger. Generally, IDE's also group files together into one project (or some other vaguely defined term, like solution, based on your particular programming language). For MS stuff, the IDE is Visual Studio. It compiles your code, gives you neat line-by-line debugging, and a really swank editor that not only doesn't get in your way, but actually shows you such diverse things as the arguments for a method or function so that you don't have to remember them all or look them up. It has some problems, I'll grant you. The collaboration/versioning software that's designed for it really sucks (Visual Source Safe is just awful). It takes a ton of memory to run. It's not free, or even cheap. However, when it comes to rapid application development, it rocks.

PHP doesn't have an IDE of its own. Manly open source programmers use vi. Less manly ones use Emacs. If you must have an IDE, because you are a little sissy girl who can't work a compiler all on your own, then fine. I guess you can use Eclipse. The problem is that Eclipse sucks. It's written for Java, and it might be great for Java development. But for PHP, you have to get a plug-in to handle syntax comprehension and highlighting. You have to get a different plug in, which is fiddly to configure, to do debugging. You have to get yet another plug-in to handle connection to CVS for versioning and collaboration. It's slow. If you configure your project as a CVS project (and why do you have to do that ever!) you can't run the PHP debugging against it. If you want to make your project a PHP project, it can be a pain to get the CVS plug in to be happy. And it's always in your way. You have to switch "perspectives" to debug, and the default debugging perspective doesn't show variable values in the pane. You can't get any sort of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editing, because manly open source types don't need it. I spend at least as much time arguing with Eclipse as I do actually getting useful work done in a given day.

The other problem PHP has is the community. On the back of Learning PHP 5 by David Sklar, the first 2 sentences are these: "PHP has gained a following among nontechnical web designers who need to add interactive aspects to their sites. Offering a gentle learning curve, PHP is an accessible yet powerful language for creating dynamic web pages." That sums up the problem in as pretty a way as could be done. PHP was written so someone could put a little dynamic content on a personal home-page, hence the acronym. Yes, it's the most popular web application language in the world. More people use PHP than any other web language. But here's the thing, it's not the most popular language for scalable, enterprise business applications, and for good reason. But the popularity thing is what PHP really has going for it. So they can't really rebuild from the ground up like MS did when they launched ASP.Net and killed off classic ASP. Too many people would stop using PHP for their fantasy football league stat pages.

Why is the general amateur nature of the PHP community a problem? Two reasons. First, the advice you get on how to do something in PHP may be awful. Do a Google search on PHP File Upload. You'll get back all sorts of scripts to do this, but the problem is that few of them check the file type in a safe way, if they check it at all. There's no explanation for why you should check more than just the browser supplied mime type. There's just a whole bunch of "copy this and it'll work." There's more free PHP scripts on the web than there are for any other language, and 90% of them are just bad. Secondly, the casual nature of the PHP community means that there's no pressure to make PHP a better language, just an easier one. There's no incentive to do anything that will alienate all those casual users. Remember, popularity is PHP's selling point here. So doing things like fixing crap like deployment, creating a separation of logic from presentation, and namespaces, all things that you need in a large, collaborative website, are held back in favor of making sure that those fantasy football stats web pages aren't broken.

And so he did...

2008-11-05T14:18:00.004-05:00

Been a while since I posted. A few thoughts on the recent election.

First, Barack Obama's election is a redemption of America's Original Sin. Our country was, paradoxically, founded on the idea that all men are equal and it that creation was fueled by the blood, sweat and tears of African American slaves. That's why you should be ecstatic regardless of political persuasion. We've tried before to eliminate the stain of slavery on our country, and we've failed. This moment shows that, even though it may take a while, we can and will finally make good on our rhetoric.

However, there has been a strong undercurrent of an attitude that, even if you're happy about Obama's victory, you think that this is a sad day in American politics. This attitude is summed up in posts like this one (culled from the comments on Wil Wheton Dot Net In Exile):

I never fight on teh Internets, but I will state my POV. Besides - look at this place - it could use little ying to all this yang!
If anything this is an indictment certainly on the GOP - both parties have swung far away from a true constitutional republic respecting freedom, property, limited government and minimal taxation.

However may the indictment stand, the GOP is FAR closer to the original American ideals than the DNC - but still much too far.

Four years of Obama could very well usher in a true conservative (i.e., classic liberal) government that is the embodiment of the true America as described in the second paragraph.

First, the founding fathers weren't paragons of perfection. They compromised on issues as important as anything we face today. Northerners bowed to the pressures of the southern representatives. The southern representatives put basic human dignity subservient to their own economic interests. Don't forget that the property that this poster so proudly cites our original constitutional republic respecting included slaves.

Secondly, there's no clear evidence that the founders were big fans of minimal taxation. The newly born republic did not represent some sort of libertarian utopia. They were rebelling against the idea of being taxed without having a say in the matter. A constitutional republic, as a form of government, doesn't have anything to say about taxation or anything like that. It's about representation of the people according to a set of written rules.

Thirdly, the idea that Obama represents some radical departure, in the political sense, from any who came before him is just wrong. American political discourse is largely homogeneous. The differences between the views that are taken seriously in America are really quite small. Politicians who step too far outside of that narrow margin are ignored. Look at Dennis Kucinich, for example. The most extreme policies that Obama has suggested are to try to find a way to use the free market to expand health care! That's not socialism. If it were, all doctors would be employees of the government, which would set the prices they may charge and even how many doctors of each specialization could graduate from med school each year.

Finally, there's nothing holy about the idea of a classically liberal economic theory. Even if there were, the founder of that economic theory, old Adam "Invisible Hand" Smith, was a fan of the rich paying more taxes. But remember, these are ideas that were promoted in response to a rapidly industrializing economic landscape in Britain. Those conditions no longer prevail. America's economy is largely based on the service sector. We're not a nation of factory workers and farm workers any more. We're a nation of merchants, programmers, writers and administrators as well as those factory and farm workers.

Another in my increasingly semi-regular PHP annoys me posts

2008-10-01T12:13:00.002-04:00

So, I have been ordered to come up with a list of pros and cons for both a .Net based content management system* (CMS) implementation and a PHP based CMS implementation. Now, this makes as much sense, in terms of decision making, as trying to decide whether or not to buy a piece of software programmed in C or in (to pull something out of the air) pascal. It's irrelivant. If the software provides solutions to your problems and works with the environment you're in, buy it. Otherwise, don't. Personally, I can't see how PHP can be used to create a large-scale application, but apparently, it runs Yahoo!. Of course, that being said, it runs Yahoo!. Meh.

*For those of you who don't have to deal with the wooly IT world, I'll explain what a content management system is. Websites are display HTML. Often, the person writing code (like me) isn't the one you want writing press-releases or other content that the public will read. Otherwise, you get stuff like this blog. Lots of rants, with an excessive amount of cruelty to grammer, spelling, and rational thought. The solution is to have the programmers write something to let the non-technical folk update the content, ideally, as easily as they might use a word processor.

PHP continues to suck...

2008-09-25T10:29:00.002-04:00

I have a new project. I have to allow uploaded academic articles to be cataloged by author and, basically, keyword. With my years of experience doing the exact same thing for a large organization for whom that was their raison d'etre, you'd think it would be no problem. Heck, it's probably even a chance for some quick code recycling. With a deadline of December 31, I could have it knocked out in a week or so (with judicious code reuse) and look like a hero.

That's where you'd be wrong. See, I'd love to do this in ASP.Net. Like I said, I've got the code already. It's just a matter of editing the presentation layer, and writing a little bit to handle pdf uploads. But, they want it to exist in the existing design, which is going to be replaced within a year anyway. Again, no problem, I'll just use Master Pages and CSS to seamlessly change from one layout to another. Yeah. That's not what's going to happen.

It has been mandated that this will be done in PHP. Not just in PHP, but in the craptastic* content management system that already exists. This means that I have to wade through this utter dreck to figure out how to do it via the CMS that will be replaced within a year, or I have to edit the home-brewed CMS cruft and try to make that work. In any case, everything I do will be superceeded and need to be rewritten within a year. On top of that, the fact that I am supposed to do this in PHP rather than .Net suggests to me that my boss has little optimism that the IIS server will be ready by the New Year. It's that, or she wants me to practice my PHP skills. In either case, it's truly disappointing.

* Firefox recognizes "craptastic" as a word, but Blogger's spell check doesn't. Interesting.

Lich, what lich?

2008-09-22T09:38:00.004-04:00

The grim destroyers of the undead hordes of Borgravia are down to the penultimate of foes, the Lich Queen, Lilia. They've found that her phylactry is housed in the body of an Iron Golem. They know where she is, they know where her phylactry is, they're all ready to go, right? No. The party have come up with multiple plans for this. They're convinced that they can't fight both at the same time, or even one after the other. They need a cunning plan, and they've developed several. Unfortunately, all of them require start-up capital. Therefore, the party, with their steely-eyed gaze on destroying the lich, destroying the vampire, and ending the curse that has crushed their lands, decided that now was the time to go to a city they hadn't been to, and rob them blind.

So, they sat and plotted, and gathered some intelligence. They visited Lord Meserole, spymaster of Borgavia, and asked him for intelligence about which mercantile houses and families would make good targets. They secured passage aboard a ship, and sailed to Hestia, now the primary commercial port for Borgravia. They sailed in, gathered a little local intel, and proceeded to create a plan. Dagnall would steal some of the local undead, used for various unpleasant and difficult chores on the docks and use them to start fires to cover their escape. Emerykul decided to track down one of the local clergy, and use the Ghoul Guantlet spell to transform him into a ghoul under his command, and Korr worked to secure contacts amongst the church of Suzerial and to track where the money that the merchants secured went.

Emerykul enchanted a trade bar with arcane mark, to allow him to track it later through the Locate Object spell. Dagnal went in to purchase something, and Korr hid, so that he could watch the building and follow the money if it had to leave. Fortunately, the Lightsails Mechantile Company used their offices as remote banks. A captain could get enough money to pay his sailors, but take the rest as a credit. That way, if a ship was lost, they wouldn't loose too much profit. The trade bar stayed where it was.

In the interim, the thought that they'd scope out the local opposition, in the form of the clerics of the god of death, Oberlin. With the decimation of so many of the higher level clerics in the land, this church had one of the more powerful priests of death left. The Ghoul Lord of the Shadow Lands wasn't taking any chances though. He set one of his more powerful minions, a nightwing, to guard both the high priest and his cathedral. When the characters explored the cathedral, under the guise of worshipers, they discovered the nightwing, secure in the rafters of the church. A nightwing, like all night shades, has some useful abilities against magically inclined foes. They are spell immune. Furthermore, their attacks actually drain magic from items. However, they are slightly weaker in daylight. Therefore, the plan was altered to strike at noon.

On the appointed day, they made their move. They attacked the ware house, killed the middling level guards, and stole lots of cash. 9 of the 18 skeletons that Dagnall had appropriated were destroyed in the process. They opted to grab whatever was light and obviously valuable, eschewing the priceless crates of spices. And they fled. On the way out, they ordered the skeletons to light the docks (because what heist on the waterfront is complete without burning the docks). And then, through the cloud of smoke, as they rushed to the ship, the Nightwing emerged.

Coolest thing since 3 Dead Trolls Internet Helpdesk

2008-09-19T08:48:00.001-04:00

This is totally not safe for work, but it is also totally the coolest thing since the 3 Dead Trolls in a Baggie's Internet Helpdesk video.

The Website Is Down

PHP: The Rusting Yugo of Languages

2008-09-18T11:36:00.002-04:00

Once, in the dawn of time (the late 1990's) I did a lot of programming in Perl. Perl is a fun language, and if one were to compare it to a car, it would be a lot like an old Mustang. It was fast, you could tinker under the hood, and it was powerful. Sure, there were some drawbacks. The fact that it is an interpreted language, rather than a compiled one, means that generally, you can't use it for big, commercial applications. If you had to write a GUI in it, you were sunk. Overall though, Perl is a nice, if somewhat persnickety, programming language.

Around the same time, I was writing web applications in Cold Fusion. CF was originally owned by a company called Allair, then bought by Macromedia, who in turn was swallowed up by Adobe. CF is a very straight-forward web language. It beats CGI by a long bit. It has a very simple, tag-based structure. If Microsoft ASP 3.0 was the Ford Taurus of web programming, CF was, for a long time, the Saab 93. It's nicer, a bit faster, a bit safer, and almost no one used it because the other option was pretty much ubiquitous.

After that, I moved into the exciting world of .Net development. Microsoft's .Net framework is a fantastic programming environment, especially for the web. It's a compiled language, which means your web apps run faster. It separates logic from design, which means that you can have programmers writing code, and graphic artists designing pages, and not have to worry about one getting in the way of the other. It's object oriented, and I really didn't know what I was missing back in the late 90's when I didn't work in an OO environment. On the down-side, it is such a high level language that many of the basic concepts are completely obscured from you. All in all, it's like a Ferrari. It's fast and powerful, but sometimes, I do miss the days of poking around under the hood.

Then, I came to have to do some work in PHP. Lord save us from PHP. First, it's an outgrowth (like a tumor) that developed from an effort to program web pages with Perl. It's an interpreted language. Perl's motto is "There's more than one way to do it." PHP appends that with these words: "and they're all wrong." The entire language feels like a kludge. It's not typed, at all, so you constantly have to check user input to see if it's a valid type for whatever you want to do with it. That's irritating on the web, where user input can be anything. What's worse is this: "(string)"false" == (int)0." In a weakly typed language, the number 0 = the boolean logic value false. As a rule, in a weakly typed language, something is false if it is 0 characters in length (""), if it's a number equal to 0 or if it is a boolean value of false. However, in PHP, if I want to see if a user has typed anything into a text field, and they type "false" then it will say that they haven't. Parents, I advise you to name your children something like "'; drop table customers" as a first name, "false" as a middle name, with "null" as a last name.

On top of all of that, PHP requires you to write extensive amounts of Javascript to do most things. For example, let's say that you want to forward someone to a different page. You can use the "header()" function to do it, but there's a bit of a worry there. If at any point your programming produces output before your header(), you'll get an error. Therefore, your options are to write a bit of javascript to bounce people to a new page (which breaks if they've disabled javascript on their browser), or you have to use meta refresh tags (which usually work). There's nothing within the language to handle that stuff.

Finally, PHP requires you to work hard at making sure your content is end user friendly. You have a couple choices. Option one, adhere to standards. The problem here is that no browser currently on the market follows the standard, so this, while technically correct, will never work properly. Second, write to a specific browser. You're going to get better results for that browser, but you've just bent the rest of your customer base. Lastly, try to detect what browser someone is using, and serve appropriately written HTML/javascript/css. You're sunk. First, browser's don't always identify as themselves. Opera can be set to ID as whatever you want. Secondly, as the recent issues with new CSS needing to be written for the new version of IE so as to avoid breaking the work arounds people put in place for old IE illustrates, you're always going to be rewriting your pages. That's just no good. In short, PHP is the rusting Yugo of programming languages. It's always about to fall apart, you're always working to hold it together, and you never know when that unexpected bump in the road is going to make your transmission fly across three lanes of on-coming traffic.

For more, see here: I'm sorry, but PHP sucks!

Campaign Idea

2008-09-16T10:24:00.003-04:00

Given the way that our group works GM duties, it will be a while before I'm back up after the current D&D campaign ends (something I expect to happen in 5-8 more sessions). However, I have a really cool idea for a new campaign. I'm not sure of the system I want to use yet. I may even opt for something home-brewed since I'll have a fair chunk of time before I'm running a new game, but here's my thought, inspired by the world fluff of 4th Edition (though it won't be 4th ed).

Lastsun
The gods themselves have abandoned us, or so it seems to most. The world is overrun by fell creatures, and the silent plague has left only the small town of Lastsun. Here, the last survivors of the dying races of light gather to try to eke out an existence. They farm, they work metal from the mine, they try to nurture the tiny spark of light that is left in this dark world. And then, the dreams started.

At first, no one knew what to make of them. Everyone in the village shared the same dream: a glowing woman in white, standing in a cave, calling for help and then engulfed by the darkness. Soon after that, it was a dream of a couple, carrying a small child, running from the dread-wolves, but in a forest that none here recognized. Other dreams followed: an old man, hiding under a fallen tree from a pair of the twisted fair ones; a young man waiting in a tree, armed with an axe, watching as a blightwarped bear walked below. None of us knew what they meant at first, but eventually, we knew where it would lead. Someone would have to go and find these souls and others.

Swag and 3.X D&D

2008-09-09T13:40:00.005-04:00

If there is one systemic flaw in the 3.x version of D&D, I think this is it: magical items are so ubiquitous and so unbalance the game that they had to account for their presence when working out the challenge rating of monsters and creating their abilities. This has two effects, first, characters are always going to want a few very specific magical items (rings of protection, cloaks of resistance). Secondly, it precludes the option of running a low-magic campaign.

Every two or three levels, characters have bumped up a grade to new and more powerful monsters. This requires the characters to, every two or three levels, engage in that most enjoyable of all gaming activities: role-play a shopping expedition. Now, granted, for lower levels, this can be some fun. The PC's can meet new and exciting NPC's, a few town-based encounters can be slipped in for a bit of a thrill, and it's a decent way to incorporate new adventure threads. However, at higher levels, chances are that the PC's just want to swag off some unwanted gear, and maybe sweet-talk the wizard or cleric into making something better. So, what was a nice change of pace at lower levels seems to grind into players sitting for 10 or 20 minutes, leafing through the DMG and other books, looking to make sure that they have what they want, and then saying, "Yep, I'm gonna bump my cloak of resistance from a +2 to a +3."

Of course, the common argument is that if you dislike the reliance on magic then you should limit magical availablilty. But how do you do that when the game has rules for making magic items built into it? How do you handle that with the delicate balancing act that is high-level monster CR?

These monsters are generally balanced on the assumption of certain magic items. For example, an Iron Golem, with it's 50/+3 damage reduction in 3.0, and even with it's 15/adamantine DR in 3.5, basically requires a 13th level party to carry some sort of adamantine weapons. Similarly, other monsters that have save or die effects generally require a certain level of cloak or vest of resistance to give your PC a better than 50% chance of living. In short, the pat answer of "Run a lower-magic campaign" argument quickly degenerates into never using the Monster Manual at all since you can't use monsters of a relevant challenge rating. All enemies quickly become statted NPC characters. Also, you really hose fighter types. Wizards are less hurt by low-magic in general. Sure, they benefit from magical swag, but even if you disallow crafting rules (which seems harsh, especially since wizards get a craft feat for free at first level in order to balance the class against sorcerers), they sill have the advantage that fighter's can't do much against their magic at higher levels except save.

Final thought: is this problem endemic to class and leveled systems? I've played more classless systems (Shadowrun, World of Darkness, etc.), and this doesn't seem to crop up as much. Sure, there's always a cool gun somewhere out there in Shadowrun, but it's rarely something that I have to find to keep my Street Samaurai on par with his challenges. However, I haven't played the d20 version of Star Wars, so I'm not sure. Is this a flaw in D20, D&D, or just the CR system?

One down, 2 to go...

2008-09-09T09:26:00.005-04:00

In this installment, the party began in the middle of Bierston, where they had finally stopped the threat of the Blue Wizards. They gathered up the swag, burned whatever governmental documents they could find, and fled to Castilan by way of a teleport spell. Unfortunately, this proved somewhat unreliable, and they found themselves on the road, a quarter day's travel from the city. Exhausted from battle, they set off, and it was at this moment that their nemisis choose to teleport in a pair of slaughter wights to attack the party. Fortunately, Korr's skill at slaying the undead, and a well-targeted shot from Dagnall's mace of disruption, ended the battle quite quickly, and they continued on their way.

Once there, they embarked on that periodic refitting and restocking shopping spree that adventurers often have to go through. When they had satisfied themselves, the decided it was time to get back on track to ending the curse that caused their countrymen to rise from their graves. They set off to destroy Queen Phaeton, the Dread Wrath. They teleported to her tower, which they had seen before. Their first problem was that the tower had long ago been bricked off. There was no way to enter it. In fact, there weren't even windows. So, they used Dimension Door to leap straight to the top floor, which happened to be the Queen's throne room.

Their first discovery was that Phaeton had been driven quite mad. She was surrounded by the bodies of the laborers who had sealed off her tower, but they were all sitting, as though attending court. The room itself was filled with the trappings of excess, but they were cheap, gaudy versions of opulance. Plaster and brass substituted for gold and ivory, pewter for silver, and simple circlets of tin for the royal crown of Borgravia. The adventurers began a desparate fight with the Queen and 4 of her loyal wraith minions. However, the wraiths began to drink the life force of Korr, and Dagnal was unprepared to provide the restoration that he needed. However, Dagnal's ghost trap spell that rendered the wraiths coporeal, along with concentric rings of fire provided by Emerykul, served to turn the tide.

After gathering the piece and what loot they could, they fled back to Ft. Starden. There, Brother Monroe restored Korr's vitality, and Dagnall was reminded of a junk-kicking long overdue. Long ago, King Tarkin, reduced to the lowly status of vampire spawn, had nearly ended the adventurer's career before they started. It was time for revenge, and the next day, the had it. They returned to the burt-out husk that once was the town of Ashton. They went to Tarkin's grave, and entered. Emerykul shattered the lid to his coffin, and Korr, almost languidly, decapitated him with his swords, reducing Tarkin to gaseous form. Dagnall commanded Tarkin's skeletal minions, now under his sway, to carry Tarkin's casket out into the sunlight, thus ending his miserable existance.

They returned home, and begain to research their next target, Lilia, the litch. Unfortunately, what they've found is that her phylactry is sealed within the body of her Iron Golem bodyguard. The next trip should be interesting indeed.

The troubling double-edged sword that is Magic Circle Against Evil

2008-08-26T10:07:00.003-04:00

The party fled Myrston immediately, and went to Jerond's Fall, the village that is believed to be the center of the resistance movement in Borogravia, but which is currently deserted. While there, they recuperated from their recent battles, and planned their next step. Dagnall, perhaps seeking some peace and tranquility, perhaps seeking to offer some sort of payment to their absent hosts for their hospitality, decided to plant an herb garden with the aid of Korr. As they patiently worked to tend the earth, Emerykul busied himself with the efforts of preparing a scroll and planning ahead. Suddenly, a terrifying figure in a black cloak, armed with a scythe that crackled with black energy, appeared.

He attacked Dagnall and Korr. Dagnall identified him as an entropic reaper, an undead being of power whose scythe not only rent flesh, but cursed the victim's living form to writhe and transform, as if his body were made of wax under the hot sun. It was a terrifying fight, fraught with uncertainty. If either Korr or Emerykul were hit, it would be a challenge to save them. Fortunately, only Dagnall sustained wounds, and his undead flesh was safe from the scythe's curse.

After this, they prepared their next step. They found that the twins were secreted in the, thus far unvisited, town of Bierstone. They teleported to a nearby village that they'd previously visited as the result of a teleportation error, and prepared to go to Bierstone. As they trekked through the swamps near the unnamed village that they'd used as a waypoint, they were set upon by the Blue Wizard's minions: a gelugon and his summoned hatamatula horde. Emerykul, with great presence of mind, used a scroll he had to create a magic circle against evil. Unfortunately, this meant that Dagnall was hedged by the circle. Since he was already within it when it was cast, he was merely uncomfortable, but he knew that if he stepped away, he'd be unable to re-enter. Furthermore, he was unable to touch either of his companions, which meant he couldn't deliver curative spells to them.

The fight began to turn sour. A couple of the hamataulas were able to cross the circle, and the gelugon began to deliver blasts of cold to those within. There was little hope, and Emerykul, greviously wounded, teleported his companions to the relative safety of Ft. Starden. There, they visited Brother Monroe, who healed them. The next day, Brother Monroe showed them the city of Bierstone in an image in a baptismal font. They teleported to the neat and tidy city, prepared to find the wizards and end this devilish threat before it ended them.

They arrived in an alley, and after a few minutes, saw a large patrol of guards. They didn't know where the wizards were, but they knew that the guards might. It was crucial that they question the guard captain and see what he knew. Emerykul called up a storm of fire and ice. It killed 8 of the 9 normal guards, and clouded them in steamy fog. A singularly impressive shot from Korr's bow slew the reaming guard, and they immediately demanded that the captain surrender. He did, and, after a quick interrogation, they det off for the wizards.

On the way, the other city guards discovered the blasted section of town, and sounded the alarm. The party hurried to the mayor's home that the wizards had commandeered. When they arrived, they successfully snuck into the home. They eventually found the wizards in the basement, along with an Eyrines. After a very dangerous battle, they eliminated the threat. They searched the rest of the mansion, and returned to Castalen, secure in the knowledge that the contract with the Wizards had been eliminated and that the wizards would be unlikely to ally again with Borogravia.

Gilrean, we hardley knew you

2008-08-22T16:36:00.004-04:00

Yeah, I know, it's a late update (since we played this session about 2 weeks ago).

OK. The party of destruction began to plot their assault on the blue mages. Unfortunately, enemy wizards are just as capable of using scry and teleport (or more so) than the PC's. So, while they were in an extended planning and intelligence gathering session, two of the enemy's mages, the Imp and the dwarf, teleported just outside of Castelan. They infiltrated the city, and then, when all was quiet, they used the dwarf's knowledge of architecture, and the imps knowledge of disintegrate, to drop the tower that Gilraen lived in on Duke Reed's estate. The PC's ran to the scene from their quarters, and a battle ensued. When it was over, they'd defeated the blighters who killed their liege lord's advisor. Duke Reed declared that, for the safety of his family and servants, he could no longer house the PC's at his manor. Some of the party are wondering if this means that they're released from vassalage, but none brought it up with the duke.

The party set forth to try and end this devilish incursion by destroying the remaining blue wizards. They journeyed to their favorite Borogravian town, Myrston. They arrived at the gate, and the guards, realizing who stood before them, fled in terror. The party reacted quickly and prevented them from raising enough of an alarm to draw the entire city guard to their location immediately, but the end result was a desparate dash towards the location of the two wizards in the town: an extravagant mansion near the edge of the city.

The party charged across the lush lawns of the mansion, towards the wizards, evading lighting bolts and crossbow fire. They quickly subdued one, an alienist, but the other, one of the twins, escaped, but not before delivering a parting fireball that, in conjunction with a spell unleashed by the party that caused flaming hot shards of rock to burst from the ground, lit the mansion on fire. The party gathered the loot and prepared to leave Myrston, once again cloaked in a hazy pall of woodsmoke.

D&D Insider

2008-08-22T16:29:00.003-04:00

Wizards have announced their pricing structure for D&D insider, the on-line supplement to the 4th Edition. To access web content only (i.e., the stuff that you used to be able to get via the System Reference Document for free), it's $7.95 month to month, $19.95 for three months, or $59.30 per year. If you want access to the other tools, like the character builder and the game table, it's $119.40 for a year or $14.95 per month. The yearly fee works out to $9.95 a month.

Given the indescribable awesomeness that was e-Tools (and I say that with all due sarcasm), I can't believe that access to their character generator is really going to be worth $120 a year. It's just not. PCGen was awesome, before the Hasbro legal team neutered it. Even after that, it's still better than e-Tools. So, all in all, I can't say that I'm thrilled with D&DI, but then, I'm probably not their target audience.

First day at the new job

2008-08-11T11:22:00.001-04:00

It's my first day at the College of Business here, and already, I have something that I've never had before: an office with a door. Looks like this gig might be alright!

Marcon 44

2008-08-08T13:53:00.003-04:00

For those who may be interested, even though it's 9 months off, I've decided to (at least attempt to) sign up to run 3 games for the 44th Marcon convention. Two will be Elfs games, and one will be Og: Unearthed Edition. Hopefully, in the next 9 months, I can get a cool British Invasion theme for at least the Elfs games, and I have an idea for Og as well. As more info becomes known, more will be posted.

Bittersweet Last Day

2008-08-08T10:22:00.003-04:00

Today is my last day at The Ohio Resource Center. It's really a cool place to work, and their mission is a good one. Unfortunately, politics and economics are making it harder every day for them to keep doing their work. Basically, they collect and peer-review and hand-calibrate resources to state and federal educational standards and then offer that collection up to teachers free of charge. They do lots more, but that's the core of what they do. ORC's been a great place to work. For one thing, it's the first place where I felt like the administrators knew something about me, and valued my work. I've had my differences with some decisions made here, but I rarely felt like they asked for my advice and then ignored it (at least, not on technical issues).

Unfortunately, since my wife is trying to leave the Columbus Public School system for something a little less soul crushing, and since no other school district in central Ohio pays anything like they do, I needed to make more money. ORC can't really make up the difference, so that means, as of Monday, I'm off to the Fisher College of Business on the main Columbus campus of The Ohio State University. It'll be interesting. I'm sure it will be a change of pace. ORC's really quite relaxed about almost everything. Fisher probably won't be like working in a corporate office, but I suspect they won't be quite as up for a 3:30 game of Brainball, Porkins in a Cup, or Suduko.

Anyway, if you're a teacher, and you read this, I highly recommend ORC for anything to help your teaching, and if you're a politician, I highly recommend funneling a project or three their way. They do good work.

UPDATE: They just had their cake and sendoff gathering for me, and I got the most awesome card ever. It's a round card, with red edging, and it looks like a slice of bologna. The front says, "MY BOLOGNA HAS A MIDDLE NAME. IT'S MARIE." Inside, it says NOTHING! Very cool.

Gleemax goes bye bye.

2008-07-30T14:55:00.002-04:00

Gleemax.com was WoTC's social-networking site. It was envisioned to be an adjunct, in some ways, to the 4th Edition on-line tools. Basically, it was meant to be a place where you could go and find people who wanted to play, and get together and run an adventure, either at home, or through their on-line stuff. However, given that the D&D Insider (their on-line suite of tools) still isn't up, they've decided to shut down Gleemax in order to focus their resources on DDI.

To recap what DDI is supposed to offer, here's a list of the "features" that should be available:

On-Line Dragon: This exists and is currently free! Good for them. Of course, I don't see how they're making a profit on it, and they just shut down a free web-service that was far more crucial to their business. After all, if you can't find someone to play the game with, why buy it?
On-Line Dungeon: This also exists and is currently free! Yay. See above.
Character Visualizer: Still not up and running. 2 months after the 4th coming, their character visualizer, which ought to be pretty easy to do, isn't there. Just steal it from any of a bunch of different games already! License it, whatever. The demo pictures that I've seen that it can crank out look almost as good as the character customization for Morrowind. Morrowind was released in 2002.
Character Builder: Still not up. This is their on-line character generation piece. PCGen offered all the same features that they're working on, in 3.0 and 3.5, at least as early as 2003. The new "streamlined" rules that they've had access to for months still have yet to have a character generation tool.
The Game Table: Arguably, their most ambitious offering, the Game Table is meant to be a virtual, 3D environment that can be manipulated to run adventures. Given that they can't give me a character builder yet, I have little hope here. It includes such advanced features as "The Lobby" where you can chat up players and recruit them for your game, "The Die Roller" which can even store hot keys for frequently used rolls, and enough environmental effects that you'll never want to use minis again! In short, it's a turn based WoW environment, but without the expense of writers or AI coding.
The D&D Compendium: Existant and free for the moment! This is a searchable, AJAX enabled on-line rules reference, much like the SRD, but without the irritating clunkiness of being able to read the whole thing at once and browse through it. You type in a search term, and it spits back everywhere that terms was found, broken up into categories of Races, Classes, Powers, Feats, Items, Skills, Rituals, Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies. It's nice to know now that I can pull up information about whatever I want at the drop of a hat. It woudl be nicer if I could browse through to easily compare different rules and options, but that's a pretty minor gripe.

WoTC hopes to have all these tools available to you, Real Soon Now®, for the low, low price of $15.00 a month. In fact, they're betting the farm on it from a certain perspective. If DDI fails, 4th Edition will, by the suits who count the beans at Hasbro, be considered a flop. They really want a constant revenue stream. I can't see people shelling out $15.00 a month for this, but I've been wrong before.

Some ideas that I want to try in the near future...

2008-07-28T15:57:00.003-04:00

I always have some ideas that I want to try, but they usually involve a new character or a new campaign, so they rarely make it to the table before I forget about them completely. So, as a persistent memory aid, I'm going to jot a few down here.

A campaign with players taking the role of the nameless, low level beasties that often get slaughtered by PC's in normal campaigns. Something along the lines of Goblins, but I'm willing to look into kobolds or any other > 1 CR race. I'd like the party to all be of one race. So often my players are more interested in exploring the nasty side, and I'd really like to have actual heroes for once, and I think this might be a way to do both at once.
A modern era campaign where the PC's are all part of a detective agency, probably specializing in lost kids. An interesting take on this would be as a World of Darkness campaign with the "detectives" being supernatural creatures. Is this a line to preservation of humanity, morality, clarity or whatever, or is it a constant temptation for exploitation? If it's a Vampire campaign, it would have one strange flavor, but for a Changeling campaign, it would be entirely different.

As I think of more, I'll add them here or in a new post.

Rocs fall, (almost) everyone dies!

2008-07-27T23:46:00.002-04:00

The party was trimmed down this week to the two casters, Emerykul and Dagnal. They'd been planning to hunt down the mysterious leaders of the Blue Magi, who have been summoning devils to plague the war torn Castelin. So, after a few divinations to ensure that killing the leaders of the Blue wizards would end the devilish raids, they set out to do just that.

They've known that the Blue magi were near Myrston, a crossroads town in the heart of Borgrovia. They'd been there before, when they burned down the best inn in the city while destroying a Mohrg who had one of the chess pieces. In fact, it was here that they first started to gain some real noteriety in Borgravia. However, Emerykul, wisely, didn't want to risk just teleporting into a town where they had since done some construction, and where he didn't really have any solid landmarks. So, they opted to teleport to the cliffside summer home of the Borgravian royalty, Cliffside. Cliffside is the ruins of a once beautiful chateau that overlooks the sea, and stands in the foothills of some mountains. In recent days, it's been overseeing a route that many a poor refugee has been taking to escape the devilish hordes in Borgrovia.

This constant supply of refugees had attracted a Roc. She would occasionally swoop down to take a pony, horse or refugee to feed to her three chicks. Normally, a Roc is content to take something to feed itself and it's chicks and be done. The Roc swooped down on a stream of refugees, and the casters lept into action. Unfortunately, most of their spells were geared towards dealing with wizards, which meant that they intended to target Fortitude saves. After a few rounds of largely ineffectual plinking, that totaled in the low 100's of hit points of damage, the Roc flew back up to it's nest.

Normally, a Roc encounted follows roughly this pattern:

Roc swoops down while party fires on it.
Roc grabs (usually) a horse while party fires on it.
Roc flies off with horse while party fires on it.
Roc gets away, with some serious damage, and eats a tasty horse. At this point, if the PC's really want to chase it, they can, but it's difficult to do, and the Roc is no longer a threat.

Having secured food for it's chicks, I thought that they'd probably leave it alone. Their spells weren't geared for this fight, and the beast still had around half it's hit points, and they'd used many of their better spells on it. Naturally, that's when they opted to poke it some more. It reacted to this attack on its young by fighting to the death. Emerykul let loose a force blast, which dealt some damage to the beast. It started down towards the party from it's perch, but it wasn't able to cover the entire distance and still have an opportunity to attack, so it was 40 feet up, descending, when Dagnall repeated Emerykul's tactic. Force blast, as a spell, deals damage, and on a failed save (with bonuses for size and stability) knocks the opponent down. However, at that moment, another one of those double-edged blessings of natural 1 saves cropped up. The Roc failed, and plummeted towards the earth. I let the PC's roll reflexes to avoid being splatted. Dagnal, barely, managed. Emerykul didn't, nor did the commoners around them, nor did Dagnal's horse. The horse was left dying, the commoners were, more or less crushed, and Emerykul was a bit wounded. However, the Roc was nearly dead, and a few spells later, it was defeated.

The destructive duo then opted to help out thepoor refugees by ensuring that none of the chicks would grow up to become threats. They used Spider Climb to go up to the nest. Emerykul looked at the nest, and in his (in)expert opinion, it was quite securely rooted. They opted to dig out some scrolls of shatter that they'd been carting around, and use them to loosen the nest and send it and the three chicks falling to their death. They did have the brilliant idea to step away from the nest. In the great tradition of GM's making up results on the spot, I rolled some dice and interpreted the results. After the first shatter spell, the nest broke free, and slid down the cliffside towards the ocean in a roc-slide.

They rested for the night in an abandoned village. They'd been there before, and it had been run by a paladin. It was a refuge of safety in Bogrovia for peasants, and an extremely orderly place. When they found it, it was completely deserted. There was no sign of a struggle, nor of looting. All the doors were locked and barred. In short, it appeared that they left as soon as they saw the first signs of the gates being opened to the south.

The party continued on the next day, this time disguised, with the help of a little magic, as urchins. They were accosted by a band of fighters who were gathering up peasants to feed to the devils. I'd been thinking that this might be one option for stealthy information gathering, or it might inflame the characters to battle against an oppressive and deadly foe. In the manner of their apparent spiritual leader, Captain Hammer, They took the second option. The guards came up to them, and were preparing to search them for any valuables or contraband. The guard reached out to touch Emerykul, and succeeded at his will save to disbelieve the illusion once he interacted with it. Immediately, Dagnal called for the Black Tentacles. By a strange quirk of die rolls, most of the guards horses got free. Of the three guards in range, one took, at one point 5 grapple attacks, while the other, until he died, only took a few each. Emerykul blasted down the guard nearest to them, and, after being reduced to 1 hit point, he surrendered to the cacaphony of agonized screams of his comrades.

The two extracted the crumbs of information that he had. Emerykul began to offer a proposition whereby he'd flip a coin (looted from the guard), and decide his fate based on its results. As he tossed the coin, Dagnall brained the guard with his mace. Dagnall used Death Knell on the dying guard, and they rused off towards Myrston to start to deal with the summoners.

At the Inn of the Pheonix, a new inn just built on the site of the one they destroyed and where they found that the mage they believed to be in charge was staying, they spoke to the inn keeper, who was sitting alone in his common room. He offered a sign, to see if they were a part of a rebel underground, but they failed to pick up on it. They admitted to being from Castelan, and said that they were here to stop the devils, and asked if they could buy a key to the elven mage's room. He basically demanded 500 gold. It was what he'd dumped into rebuilding the inn, now in stone rather than wood. He took the money, and then dove into the cellar, and double barred and locked the door behind him.

They went up, opened the door, and immediately killed the elf using Night's Caress (or, as I like to call it, Emerykul's Handshake). To their surprise, the Imp that they'd seen flying into the room from the outside wasn't a familiar, but a powerful wizard. A real battle ensued, and the Imp eventally escaped, but not before lighting the only remaining flammable part of the inn, the thatch roof, on fire.

Liberal = Socialist = Fascist

2008-07-15T11:09:00.003-04:00

I love the argument that liberal = socialist = fascist. Clearly, neither history nor logic are important aspects of study for anyone who would make the argument. However, if we're going to have any sort of debate on public policy, it would be nice if Americans at least understood the terms, and didn't just use them as snarl words.

Liberalism grew out of the rise of a new, middle class in the early industrialization of Britain. It was due to the increasing power of the British middle class, the history of decentralized government in Britain (started with Magna Carta and British common law) and the increasing demand for industrially produced goods and revenue to support the growth of the empire. The basic goals of liberalism are that the people paying taxes ought to have some say in how those taxes are spent. Their credo was liberty, equality, property. The seeds of representative government sprouted from the soil of liberalism. In fact, the American War of Independence was fought because the American colonists viewed the British government as in violation of the basic tenants of liberalism.

Socialism grew out of the increasingly dangerous conditions in early industrial factories. Their basic view was that since they factory owners were making money from their pain, they ought to see a greater proportion of the profits. Ultimately, their goals might be described as a united, pan-national labor class overthrowing the newly wealthy middle class in a violent revolution. Their enemies were things like labor unions, who worked within the system to improve the lot of workers, and thus defuse the power-keg that would lead to violent revolution. Clearly, socialism was defined in opposition to liberalism, on the left. It really did reach it's pinnacle in the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, and has never found much purchase on American ground, even at the height of the excesses of the unrestrained capitalism on the 1890's in the U.S.

Later, in the early 1900's, fascism was formed as a sort of attack on the right side towards liberalism. Their view was that government should be aligned with it's primary source of power, i.e., this wealthy middle class, and specifically, the corporations that they created. Rather than the workers or the government seizing control of the means of production, they would have the owners of those means of production seize control of government. They would then install an authoritarian regime that would crush any revolution on the part of socialists, and would also break the backs of the unions.

Incidentally, fascism is the form of government preferred by Germany and Italy in World War II, both of whom were violently opposed to the U.S.S.R. Granted, Hitler and Stalin did make an alliance, but it was unarguably an alliance of convenience. Hitler didn't want to have to worry about the eastern front, and Stalin needed time to equip his army before fighting Hitler. And yes, Nazi's were called "National Socialists." However, that's because then didn't understand terms any better than people do now. Socialism was popular in depression era Europe. When you're starving to death, attacking some rich guy riding around in a limo is a pretty easy sell. Anyone with real political ambitions at the time would have happily labeled his party as "socialist" since the uneducated guy on the street wouldn't have known any better.

Hopefully, this will demonstrate the the term "Islamo-fascist" is just dumb. Fascism is generally opposed to religion, and Islam isn't the most business friendly religion to begin with. Terrorists are best described as Fundamentalist Theocrats. They want to establish a rule of law based on their religious beliefs. They may be tyrants, dictators and demagogues, but they're not fascists.

War approaches for Kastalin

2008-07-07T10:22:00.004-04:00

So, last night, the PC's moved the plot forward in a big way. A couple of weeks ago, they'd discovered that the border town of Starkvale had been completely attacked and destroyed by a fiendish assault. The found a few survivors, and herded them off to the relative safety of Ft. Starden, and then set out to rescue the prisoners that the devils had taken. Captain Korr easily tracked them to a part of the Dark Forest, a forest that straddles the borders of Kastalin and Borgravia. The devils had stopped there, and erected a corral for the survivors at the bidding of the mage that had summoned them.

The party, hesitant to just leap in after having faced a Wheep in the forest, decided to watch and strike at dawn. They carefully made their battle plan, and then, just before dawn, they attacked. Emerykul started the fight with a lightning bolt sent at the wizard, in the hopes of attracting his attention for a bit of a mages' duel. He was more successful that he could have hoped. His dastardly foe rolled a natural 1 on his reflex save, and Emerykul rolled some nice damage. This forced me to roll saves for all his items.

Now, I had given some though as to how a wizard could be a true threat to a town, while only having 4th and 5th level spells, at best, available. My thought was that he would have a necklace of fireballs. He could break off bits and give them to summoned imps, who could then fly over the town and toss them at villagers. Not a huge threat to a party of powerful PC's, but given the area effect and the relative low hit points of villagers, this would result in some nice damage to a town. So, I though, "Let's get this out of the way and roll for that first." I rolled a 2. That meant that the necklace failed. Kabloom!

Emerykul's foe took the lightning bolt directly in the chest, and then exploded! His tent, and 4 townsfolk in the nearby corral, were engulfed in flames. Much of what the wizard was carrying, including the notes that would have pushed our heroes forward, were consumed in a fireball. The party handily defeated the remaining devils, but my climactic battle with useful exposition for the plot were swallowed by a pair of unlucky die rolls. That led to a certain amount of improvisation for the next session.

So last night, I started wondering what the party might do. They rounded up the survivors and led them back to Ft. Starden. When they got there, they discovered that the fort was in the middle of a serious logistical crisis. They had an extra 40 mouths to feed, and those mouths came from the very source of grain and foodstuffs for the fort. The Baron, being the pragmatic lawful neutral bastard that he is, wanted to just give them 10 gold and cut them loose on the capital. His advisor, Brother Monroe, being the neutral good embodiment of charity and mercy, thought that this would be, at best, completely failing in his role as liege lord to these people, and at worst, would be compounding their misery. The party offered to help some, by providing 600 gold out of party swag. This was some help, but the heart of the problem was food, not gold, so it still meant that it would be some time before they saw relief.

Now, most of Emerykul's plans revolve around a central concept of "Let's go kick Borgravia in the junk!" Across the border was Ft. Staliban, a small outpost that essentially mirrored Ft. Starden. He decided that an excellent plan would be to go there, kill whoever was in charge, set the place on fire where they could, and steal as much grain, via teleport, as they could. The rest of the party latched on to this for their own reasons. Dagnal liked it because it meant inflicting suffering on the same forces that had harmed the townsfolk of Starkvale. Korr liked it because it meant that the refugees would get fed. So they set off.

At the border, they discovered that Baron Starden's scouts had been hapered by a hulking corpse that patrolled the lands. So the party decided to commandeer it via a Control Undead spell. Now, there's no good rules for how Control Undead works when someone else has already cast that spell on the undead you're attempting to comandeer. So, I resolved it with a caster level check, similar to Dispell Magic. Dagnall got lucky, and took the beast for his own. They took the beast with them to the fortress, and there, they ordered it to attack the gates, and then kill anyone inside. As soon as it was off, they used dimension door to pop into the tower room that they knew, from previous experience, was where the fortress's commander generally resided.

Inside, they battled a dwarf mage of the Blue Magi and an old friend, Ziggund, the troll rogue that they had previous used to destroy Bok's temple in Oto. He had thrown himself on the mercy of the Dark Lord of Borgravia, and been transformed into a hooded pupil. They eventally subdued both of them, but not withous some serious damage. Outside, the hulking corpse was doing serious damage, but the grizzled veterans of the fort had started a plan to roll casks of brandy at it, then hit them with a flaming ballista bolt. That would have bypassed the damage reduction of the beast. So, our heros, from their safe vantage, sent a fireball down at the casks before they could be rolled at the monster.

Eventally, the soldiers fled. The group had taken the dwarf alive. They teleported the grain away, and set the hulk to destroying the tower. None of them had any sort of knowledge architecture, so I rolled randomly to see how long it would be before he tore down something load bearing inside. I rolled really low, so they were just starting to get set to leave when the tower fell on the beast. I had them make a reflex save to avoid falling rocks (I actually could have had a "Rocks fall, everyone dies" moment!). They all made them, and fled. As they escaped, the soldiers launched a series of signal flares. Ominously, the next day, the party saw a flock of dark, apaprently birds, swarming down over the collapsed tower. Korr recognized that they were bats, and that they shouldn't have been out in the day. They hurried back to Ft. Starden, and that's pretty much where we left off.

Some 4th Edition House Rule Ideas....

2008-06-24T12:05:00.002-04:00

Yeah, I'm on record as disliking 4th edition because it feels too much like a video game to me. However, whining and moaning isn't really productive, and you shouldn't listen to someone who just complains with no alternative. In that spirit, here are my suggested house rule ideas as well as some alternatives to 4th edition.

Milestones and Action Points - Getting a new action point every 2 encounters is just dumb. It says, "Hey, you should be out kicking butt, and that means killing stuff. Leave wussy character development as something that doesn't do anything mechanically." My suggestion is this: define specific goals and philosophical ideals for your character, and when you think you've fulfilled one, tell the GM (or the GM should notice and just give you the action point for achieving your milestone). For example, if I'm playing a heroic knight who lives by a strict code to always deal honestly with anyone, then I should be considered to have achieved a milestone when I tell the truth to someone, even when a lie would be easier.
Healing Surges - These just suck. It's such an obvious video-game mechanic that is so disconnected with reality that it completely destroys any immersion. Plus, you get a ton of them. I'm not entirely sure what to do here about them, especially with the nebulous definition of hit points. They've always been an abstraction, the idea being that they were a combination of injuries and how well you could basically defend yourself in a fight. I think there should be some definition of how a healing surge works. Maybe you stop, and apply a oitment or chug a flask of willow-bark tea for the more cerebral classes. Maybe the martial classes bite the edge of their shield and fly into a berserk rage, or they refocus their concentration to ignore pain. I'll keep working on this.
Skills - On the one hand, the simplification of the skills system is a good thing. On the other, it means, effectively, that you are now always going to be really good at a few things, and ok at the rest. However, it doesn't allow for non-combative skills. Craft and perform, for example, have been removed completely. I suggest that each character be allowed a certain number of hobbies, like woodworking, singing, or something else entirely of the player's design. As a general rule, these are just flavor. However, if a skill check crops up and a player has a really brilliant way to use one of their hobbies, then I say let them make the check against it as if it were a trained skill. Then, if they succeed, give them an extra 500 XP or something. If your inn-keeping dragonborn warlord brilliantly saves the day by figuring out where to hit stack of ale casks on the back of a cart to deposit them in the path of the city guards chasing him, he deserves some sort of bonus.
Disallow Dragonborn - Just because. They may well replace elves as my new most hated race.
Ditch alignment - That's right. It's no longer mechanically infused into the game, and it's become just lame. It's time to drop it completely.

These are just some ideas for now. I'll keep working and see what else I can think of.

4th Ed. Player's Handbook

2008-06-09T15:52:00.004-04:00

While at the session, one of my players showed off his shiny new 4th edition handbook. I have seriously mixed feelings on it. On the one hand, it's not a horrible game. There are some things that are really quite well done. All of the classes are quite well balanced against each other. They all contribute equally. Based on what I could tell from skimming through, they all look like they might be a valuable member of the party throughout all 30 levels of play. On the other hand, the price for achieving this balance was that the game they created wasn't really D&D anymore.

The game feels like D&D miniatures to me. Every class has a wide variety of powers, slightly modified by race and feat selections. These powers all have less than intuitive names, so until you really get familiar, I can see that there will be a lot of careful reading to keep in mind the difference between "Cleave" and "Reaping Strike." One deals damage to an adjacent foe, the other deals 3 points of damage on a miss. Otherwise, they're the same. That's not a big issue, really. After all, White Wolf's games all have strange titles for powers of various types in their World of Darkness line. Touch of Shadows and Cloak of Night are examples. These names would fit right in with 4th Edition powers and feats.

They've clearly read through the Wizard's forums where people whined, at length, about how wizards and clerics were all that mattered at high levels, and responded to that when they made this version. Now, fighters get cool attacks other than just "I swing my sword," that do special things. I've never really had trouble finding someone to play a fighter in a game before, and I doubted those three thousand word paeans to the glory of spell casters, and their reverse tracts about the folly of ever deigning to play a character that took up the sword. And really, I can understand that point of view. It gets boring to say "I swing my sword." When the spell casters have a multitude of options available, built into the class. I think that this weakness may be more on the part of the player of the fighter, than the class, but it does take much more work to find the different options for fighters.

The alignment system has been seriously changed. If you liked the simplicity of the continuum in the old basic D&D sets, well, you'll find lots to like here. You can be Lawful Good, Good, Neutral, Evil or Chaotic Evil. That's right. There's no room here for the scoundrel with the heart of gold, unless he's neutral, I guess. There's no room for the evil, but honorable, adversary. Of course, given that the poster children for chaotic good and lawful evil were Han Solo and Darth Vader respectively, and that Wizards of the Coast has the license to make Star Wars role-playing games, I have to wonder at their exclusion of these iconic alignments. Of course, this redefinition of alignments does conform to many people's idea of alignment. Somehow, chaotic good was always seen as the lesser good. Lawful evil was always seen as evil lite. I've always thought that Lawful Evil opponents were extremely dangerous. They'd made evil into a systematic way of life that was efficient and organized. However, I can see the influence here of the Wizards forums where there were endless flame wars about alignment, and what Lawful meant as opposed to Chaotic. It's much simpler to have a simple spectrum of alignments than to have people wondering about this. My preferred solution would have been to completely remove alignment, but I'm not a WOTC developer.

In short, it's seems like a decent enough game to introduce people into tabletop gaming. It's fairly simple and it uses a model they might be familiar with, the video game, as an analogy to get new players up and running right off the bat.

The problem is that it doesn't feel like D&D. It feels like the Warhammer RPG, or like trying to get down into the view point of one of the minis in a D&D Miniature's game. It's D&D, re-envisioned as a supers game. "I'm Fighter Man! Flee my Reaping Strike, evildoer!" I guess, at the end of the day, simple can be good. I love QAGS, Elfs, and other simplistic games. I don't think it's wrong to borrow design ideas from a wide variety of sources either. However, this system seems so rigid that it feels like a MMORPG. I know that the goal was, in part, to get new players into the game. I get that. But if you give people an option of playing World of Warcraft or the new D&D, and they're already playing WoW, then I don't see them stepping away from their glowing monitors to try the new tabletop game. I hate that missing is now a way to do damage. I can't stand the fact that there are now non-damaging spells. Hell, I even miss the bard!

"A bard....fireball."

And now, we wrap up a loose end...

2008-06-09T15:43:00.002-04:00

As I've mentioned before, my D&D players are an unpredictable lot. When last we left our band of looters, they had just disrupted the public ceremony of an evil church, killed the high priest, and generally set off such a commotion that they were in grave peril. Unfortunately, Dagnall, the cleric/wizard/true necromancer wasn't there, and Emerikyl and Korr were seriously wounded. They searched the Priest, Bok, for his keys, and used them to open his room and search it. Emerikyl resisted the curse on his footlocker, and found a suit of plate, emblazoned with the Oberlin's, God of the Undead, symbol on it. He also found an evil looking heavy mace, the piece they needed, and some potions. They searched his apprentice's room, and he was less fortunate here. The Glyph of Warding smacked him around. They took her stuff, and teleported immediately back to the fort of Baron Starden.

The fort was in bad shape. The devilish horde they had passed by had assaulted with a small strike force. Even though the Baron's men outnumbered them, a few imps with damage reduction can really ruin the day for a bunch of 1st and 2nd level warriors. It wasn't a complete slaughter, but it was clear that they were hammered quite hard. They chatted with them for a while, and healed a few of his troops as well as Korr could. They found out that his scouts, sent to Starkvale, hadn't returned. So they set off to see what had happened. It turns out that the scouts were drawn off the road by Stanzia, a few wights, and a nasty phantom ghast. It was a tough fight, but they survived. They then fled to Castilan to deposit the bishop's piece in a safe place. While there, they converted some gold into new equipment and raised Stanzia.

The unpredictable thing about them was that I had no idea where they would go or what they were going to do. Now that the party has access to teleportation, they flit all over the map. Trying to guess what loose end they'll tie up next is an exercise in futility. I see that I'm going to need to set aside a couple of hours and work out everything that's going on with various antagonists all at once here in the near future.

An IT Fairytale

2008-05-27T12:34:00.004-04:00

Gather round children, and let me tell you a little bed time story about a little company that we'll call EC Incorporated, and their big, nasty, web redesign.

Once upon a time, EC Incorporated, a hip, cool company with a huge web presence, decided that their old, clunky, web site was a bit dated, and not fitting the flashy, awesome attitude of their dynamic and exciting synergistic might. And so it was that Mr. Johnson, the director of the company went to the graphic designers and the IT department and said, "Redesign the web page to show how cool and hip we are. We want it to be easy to use, flashy, and we want it done fast."

The web developers all looked at each other and the graphic designers, and said, "This is great! We've been waiting to do this for ages." And they sat around and carefully outlined a new proposed design. They mocked it up, talked about navigation elements, personalization, and how their new web site would demonstrate how with-it their company was. And they took the proposal to the director and the various managers, and they said, "Here's what we've got. It'll be truly awesome. It uses AJAX, Flash, and an intuitive navigational system to adaptively learn from what the user searches for to redesign itself and offer other parts of the site that might be useful to the user. It will also allow users to personalize the page, and is designed around segmented and selective marketing so that users see our products and services that apply to them and will convince them to pay us for them. We can make it in 5 months, and it will be a wonder to behold."

And the mangers all looked, and said, "That doesn't sound very user-friendly. Besides, we've been paid by XYZ Corp to highlight our partnership with them. XYZ makes sprockets, and if a customer doesn't use sprockets, then he won't ever see the XYZ logo and link. Besides, if a user only wants widgets, he won't see all of the cogs, and the cog department has some pull. Their head is the son of the CEO. We can't upset them. Let's call a consultant to look at the site and come up with a redesign, and we'll have you implement it."

And the web design team was dispirited and demoralized and began to re-write their resumes and browser Monster.com. And ABC Consulting was called about the web site. They looked at it, and thought, and took tens of thousands of dollars from EC Inc., and returned a report suggesting that EC needed a site that used AJAX, Flash, and an intuitive navigational system to adaptively market products and services to users, based on what the user searched for on the site. They further suggested that the site should use personalization to encourage selective advertising to users.

And the managers looked at it, and said, "But then people won't see our valuable partnership with XYZ corp. Also, users might not see everything that the Cog department is doing. We don't want to do that. Can't anyone just do what we asked? What's wrong with all of you?" And the managers, using MS Paint, and a 64 pack of crayons, mocked up a site. It was a nightmare that completely ignored relevant technologies and the principles of information architecture. It would be nearly impossible for anyone to find what they were looking for in the laundry list of products and services offered. All the products were listed by their internally referenced part numbers, and no one outside the company would ever have any clue what these numbers meant, and so would never be able to find anything they were looking for.

And the web design team wept bitter tears, and made the crock that had been designed by the managers. And web sales dropped, the site languished, and no one ever visited more than once. And EC collapsed, and the executives deployed their parachutes of silver and gold. The managers plummeted to their death, and the web design team, after weeks of pain and suffering, saw their posts to Monster.com pay off as they found new jobs with ABC Consulting.

The moral is this: if you're paying someone for their expertise and knowledge about an issue, then listen to them when they give you their opinion. Otherwise, don't employ them at all.

A little advice for the coming elections...

2008-05-22T10:49:00.002-04:00

Whether you prefer the Elephant, the Donkey or some other mythical political animal, I have a little advice for you all.

First, any time someone in the media says that a poll or race is "a statistical dead heat," read this and remember, the media and politicians made up that phrase, not statisticians.
Whenever someone dismisses and argument by calling the person making it a racist, misogynist, ageist or an antisemite, remember that poisoning the well isn't the same as refuting the argument.
Finally, and most importantly, the media has certain scripts that it uses to frame issues, and they will ignore facts that don't fit those scripts. Look at facts, not opinions, being reported, and remember, pundits of all stripes (Tim Russert, Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly) don't really do a lot of research and aren't reporting facts. They're simply there to get ratings.

D&D Campaign - It's a double, triple, quadruple cross!

2008-05-21T13:36:00.006-04:00

My general philosophy behind preparing to GM a session is this: I can't really predict what my players will do, so it's better to spend more time fleshing out the personalities of my NPCs so that I can react in character when I need to than it is to prepare an elaborate plot. Basically, I only work out a general outline of the plans of major antagonists, and spend much more time working on the personalities of those characters and other NPCs. Once you know their motives, it's pretty easy to decide, on the fly, how your NPCs will react to things. This allows my players to have total freedom to do whatever they want, without me feeling like I'm wasting a huge bit of "plot" that I'd previously created. The benefit is that this generally invites more creativity from my players, puts them in control of the world, and, on good nights, leads to genuinely memorable adventures.

So, in our last D&D session, the party (less the cleric of the goddess of chance) were waiting outside a large city, preparing to infiltrate the city and ultimately, acquire one more piece of the magic McGuffin that will allow them to remove the curse that hangs over fair Castelan. The city had two distinct power structures. On the one hand, it had the church of Oberlin, god of the undead, led by Bok. On the other hand, it had a political structure that was ruled by Phaton, a dread wraith who had been queen when the country was overtaken by Staliban. The two parties are somewhat antagonistic towards each other, but haven't degenerated into all out war, at least in part due to their fear of Staliban. One piece of the magic McGuffin was held by each of these parties. The city is a large, cosmopolitan, port city, with a number of smaller temples and shrines to various gods and goddesses, even those that might be opposed to Oberlin.

The party, after guiding a group of refugees through the town to secure passage on a ship, settled in to a seedy inn near the docks that catered to non-humans, primarily to goblinoids. They settled in, and discussed their options. One wanted to seek out help from the seedy, criminal underbelly of the city. Another wanted to go find a temple to Suzaerial, goddess of the sun, and see if they could get support from them. The last had the beginnings of a plan forming that required a trip to an apothecary, to see if he could acquire large quantities of drow sleep poison.

They decided to try for the seedy criminals first, assuming that they goblinoids of the inn would be a good place to start. So, they asked the goblins for some advice on contacting the criminals. I'd decided that the inn would be a place for the dock-workers to hang out, so, after a little prank played on the party by the goblins, but no real leads, they started looking for an apothecary. They found one that was quite well disposed to the dispensing of poisons, and they arranged to have 30 doses, a huge quantity, produced. They also made contact with the troll leader of a criminal gang, Ziggund, this way. They paid off Ziggund to attack the temple in an effort to steal the collection from the main, evening service in 5 nights.

They then went looking for intelligence about Bok and his temple amongst the religious of the city. They found a temple to Suzaerial whose cleric was sympathetic towards the idea of deposing Bok, and got some good information. They found out that Bok's lieutenant, a woman named Alean, was ambitious, and that her ambitions may well be used against Bok. They also got a general run down on how the services were conducted, and what sort of forces were likely to be on hand at the Cathedral to Oberlin. The last bit of information that they found was that, due to their ongoing campaign of destruction and destabilization, there was a bounty of 10,000 gold pieces on their head.

They donned disguises and sought out Alean and informed her of the planned attack by an unidentified group of rogues, and pointed out that this would be an opportune time to stage a coup. Then, they went to an evening service, and, through the agency of a message spell, alerted Bok to Alean's plans to overthrow him on the night in question.

The party's plan was to break into the church while the fight was going on between Ziggund, Bok and Alean, and steal the gewgaw. They waited for Ziggund and his crew to attack. Bok's first action was to obliterate Alean with a destruction spell, immediately making an example to all of her potential followers of what would happen to traitors. At that point, the party missed the rest of the combat, because they decided to go down the bell tower to start their theft. The quick bursts from the levitation wand, and they were on their way down to burgle the rooms. Unfortunately, the bell tower was 300 feet tall, and levitation only allows for 20 feet of movement per 6 second round. It took 15 rounds for them to get down, by which point the battle was over, and Ziggund, the only survivor, had hastily agreed to sign on with Bok, in the hopes of either getting a slice of the bounty, or getting a bit of Bok's loot when the party killed him.

They party met Bok in the large, mostly open sleeping area of the numerous acolytes (who Alean had arranged to be out on some assignment, so she could more easily depose her master). After the first round and an impressive pair of critical hits from Korr's bow, Ziggund decided that he had no chance of manipulating this fight to his own advantage, and he fled. Bok and the party slugged it out, and eventually, they managed to take down the depleted lord of the Cathedral (although all three were almost slain). That's pretty much where it left off. I'm looking forward to next time.

Ways to piss off your IT staff

2008-05-20T14:20:00.000-04:00

In real life, I'm a web programmer for a decent sized non-profit organization. This is a personal plea to anyone who works with any sort of IT person. You job is present us with some sort of specification on what features your project requires, and what would be nice. Get together, hash it out amongst yourselves, and get it all written down. Then, give us the specs. We'll go over them and figure out what's possible, given the time we have to do it. Then, we'll all have a meeting together where we'll discuss the matter, work out the details. At that point, leave us alone. It's too late to start tossing in other ideas. Giving us bits of the project piecemeal will result in piss-poor work because we won't have a big picture to work from. In short, don't keep picking at things while they are being written, asking for features that aren't in the original, and trying to change the model that we're creating. Figure out what you want first, then give it to us. Don't do it the other way around.

UPDATE
The issue that ignited this little diatribe is this: I was in what is occasionally called the flow state of mind, working on a project that has been a real pain in the neck. In the middle of this period where I was doing really good work, a co-worker just dropped in to ask a question about a different section of the work completely, that had been effected by an entirely unrelated project. I don't know how it is, but this co-worker must have some magical sense that tells her when I'm in flow state, and that she must immediately interrupt then, as opposed to when I'm stuck, and an interruption would prove useful. The bottom line is this:

If you have an issue for your IT staff, and when you walk by their office, they are focused on the screen, typing like mad, and seem completely absorbed, don't interrupt them. They're in the zone, so to speak, and an interruption at that moment will probably derail them.
If they seem to be slightly irritated, dazed, or listless, then chances are they're stuck and an interruption would be useful at that point. They're stuck, and a distraction may well be the most productive thing they could experience.

My D&D Campaign

2008-05-19T16:03:00.001-04:00

I'm running a (more or less) bi-weekly D&D campaign. It's a homebrew world that's primarily focused on a battle between 2 kingdoms. One, Borgravia, is a kingdom run by a powerful vampire, named Lord Khael Staliban. The other is a kingdom called Castilan. Staliban rose to power nearly a century ago. After he did, he began a war with Castilan, hoping to expand his power base. The clerics of Suzerial, the Invicible Lady of the Sun, worked with the mages of the white tower to create a series of statues, called the Guardians, along the border. The Guardians were enchanted to act in the manner of clerics, and turn undead at the border with. They were empowered with greater turning, and, in combination with a lack of decent harbors and powerful neighbors, acted as an insurmountable border to the Borgravian forces.

Staliban wasn't entirely deterred though, and given immortality, he spent the next 40 years, in concert with his litch mistress, seeking a way to circumvent the Guardians. Their solution was a powerful curse that subtly turned the magic of the Guardians upon the kingdom they protected. Undead couldn't enter Castilan, but the life-force of the departed couldn't leave the kingdom either, and any who died within its borders were, upon the next midnight, raised as undead. Most became mindless zombies or skeletons, but the more powerful figures of the realm rose as other, more powerful, undead. The priests of Suzerial have found a few ways to prevent this. The first is the complete destruction of the corporeal remains. If the deceased is too weak to return as a ghost, specter or other incorporeal undead, they will rest in peace. The second is a religious ritual, that anyone with sufficient training can perform (i.e., a DC 15 knowledge - religion check) if they have a flask of holy water to anoint the body with.

After 60 years, the infrastructure of the kingdom is slowly dying. So many resources have to be spent training religious acolytes to keep the dead from rising that it is beginning to take a toll. In addition, if a village's acolyte dies unexpectedly, or if there is a sudden disaster and the dead cannot be properly laid to rest, then the situation can snowball. That night, the dead will rise and destroy the rest of the village. Then, they will march off and slay anyone they meet. The cities are relatively safe, but in the country, packs of unruly dead ravage the land. There is an uneasy peace between the two as Castalin looks for some way to break the curse, and Borgravia waits for them to fall into rot and ruin.

Into all of this, my players' characters have been forced. The principles are:

Dagnall - Originally a cleric of Solenos, he fell in an attack on his village and was raised by Isterial, the Dark Lady as a necropolitan. Isterial is the demi-goddess of natural death, and she has promised Dagnall a restful end to his days should he succeed in her plans for him to aid in overthrowing the curse. Dagnall is a rather strange true necromancer, who is religiously prohibited from actually animating dead by his religion. Dagnall is extremely lawful, and neutral with with a decidedly pragmatic approach to things.
Emarikul - A master specialist wizard of the school of Necromancy, Emarikul is a strange figure. His father, the Magus Blackhand, is a harsh man, and trained Emarikul himself rather than letting the White Tower teach him. Emarikul is a charismatic and pragmatic figure, who rarely misses an opportunity to whip his fellow Castalinians into a nationalistic fervor. Emarikul is the embodiment of chaotic neutral, always looking for a wild tactic that his foes won't expect.
Capt. Korr - Korr is a ranger and captain of the Watchers' Brood, a small strike force dedicated to protecting the border between Castilan and Borgravia. He is directly under the command of the Baron Starden, who originally started the PC's on their quest. Korr is the moral backbone of the troop, and his lawful-good principles generally curb the excesses of his comrades.
Ame - Ame is a fairly optomistic, but clumsy, priestss of Ulto, the Laughing Goddess of fortune and trade. Ame's preference is to arrange for others to fight for her, whenever possible, and is exceptionally fond of summoning spells.