Thanks for your interesting post; if I had mod points right now, some would be going your way.
What paperwork/bureaucracy is involved when you use a Taser? I know that in many jurisdictions, any use of a sidearm requires the officer to fill out forms & reports, etc. Are there similar reporting & tracking requirements for Taser usage?
I note that one objection raised in the article is that since the focal length of this thing is measured in kilometres, the instruments would have to be borne on a separate spacecraft to the focussing sheet, and that keeping the two aligned when changing the orientation of the instrument would require a lot of fuel.
This seems like it would be a perfect use for the solar sail technique; hopefully it would allow you to keep the instrument craft on a pretty much ballistic course (just changing attitude) and use the solar sail to move the focussing sheet from place to place.
Quite possibly this doesn't make any sense; I don't know any orbital mechanics or the details of solar sailcraft theory. But it seems like it could be good deal.
It looks like launching one of these babies would require solutions to the same technical problems as solar sails, ie stowing & unfolding once in orbit.
Would it be possible to have the sheet do double duty, acting as both a Fresnel "lens" and a means of propulsion for the spacecraft? That might be a neat way of getting the instruments to a good location.
Luckily for you, the d6 System's IP has passed from hand to hand since West End Games' fall. As of 2003 it was available in three flavours: d6 Adventure for pulp & modern games, d6 Space for sci-fi (eg Star Wars), and d6 Fantasy which I assume does what it says on the box.
I believe it's now published by a company called Purgatory Publishing. I'm not 100% sure if it's still in print but you should be able to dig it up without too much trouble, and if you can't get hardcopy, there's always www.drivethrurpg.com.
You're exactly right. I'm afraid that I can't see sckeener's point at all; in 3E a fighter who didn't wear armour was crazy, unless you started getting into Prestige Classes. And 3E rogues *did* get trap related class features automatically, although you could choose to not exploit them by neglecting the Search and Disable Device skills.
And Prestige Classes was basically WotC's way of developing a list of several thousand Approved Character Concepts. And if you didn't like the way they'd statted your concept, or it was missing... well, sucks to be you.
That's why I prefer systems with weakly-typed characters. I'm ok with having a few archetypes (no more than a half-dozen) as long as they're very flexible and easy to customize. In that respect, I think I'll like 4E better than 3.x (at least for a while); the focus will be back on customizing a relatively small toolkit to fit your concept, rather than searching through the books for a pre-gen concept that you want to play. The D&D tradition, however, is for strongly-typed characters. I hope they move away from that.
Also, it looks like there are no more "no choice" classes like the 3.x Monk, Paladin, or Ranger. Good riddance, I say; no matter what class I play, I want to be distinct from other characters of that class.
Finally: limited-use powers for everyone, not just the wizard? Awesome! Finally classes other than wizards have tactical decisions to make!
There are things that about 4E that I don't like the look of. The tactical combat mechanics and related class features aren't one of them.
I have found over the years that a system which fits the setting is a thing of beauty. Generic rules... well, they never do seem to sit quite right.
Right now I have an idea for a setting that I think is awesome, and I'm trying to find a set of rules that covers most of what I want. I don't want to have to write a large rules system just to support the game elements I want to use.
Well, over the last few years, I haven't played any D&D (although a lot of it has been played *around* me).
What have I played?
Exalted is probably the big one. It's got the fantasy feel of D&D, but with a fresh and interesting setting that combines some aspects of Asian myth & pop culture (Celestial bureaucracy, Shinto-esque animism, oversized swords and mecha) with the tropes of Western & Mesopotamian classical epics. World-striding heroes, wars between the Titans and the Gods, and curses that worm into the hearts of heroes to slowly destroy the world. It's truly an awesome setting. Unfortunately we started to encounter mechanical problems at higher levels of experience. What does it offer that D&D doesn't? Plenty. Like most WW games, only about 20%-30% of the character "crunch" is combat related; Exalted concentrates a lot on out-of-combat abilities and (melo)drama. The D&D4E buzz has been, to me, conspicuously silent on the parts of roleplaying that aren't tactical monster-slaying exercises.
I've also played a fair bit of Alternity, specifically a space opera campaign in an original setting. Now there's a system that didn't deserve to die. I still enjoy it now. Obviously, compared to D&D, it has tech-ey flavour and interstellar scale. Mechanically, it has a relatively arithmetic-light core mechanic and very, very flexible character archetypes, heavily customized via the extensive skill list.
Things I've played a little bit of, here and there, include: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I played this for longer than I should have. I'm not impressed by it; the setting would be pretty cool with a great GM (which I didn't have) but the rules are simply awful. The only virtue they have is simplicity, but, in the name of all that's holy, random character generation was old hat in the eighties.
Mutants & Masterminds. d20 superheroes. Not bad, but character creation needs to be supervised with an iron hand by the GM in my opinion.
Starship Troopers. (Also d20). Entertaining within its seemingly limited scope; some quality control issues with the mechanical design & book editing but nothing that really ruined the game. A bit of a beer-and-pretzels game in my opinion.
Burning Empires. Based on the same mechanics as Burning Wheel, I particularly enjoyed this game due to the collaborative approach to world creation. It's great to get that sense of setting ownership that BE provides. However, something about the campaign just didn't quite gel and it fizzled out. Pretty great game though; I have it on my shelf. The production of the book is fantastic!
Werewolf: The Forsaken, one of the World of Darkness game line. I ran the introductory campaign pretty successfully, and then tried to run a homebrew campaign for a few sessions. My game wasn't a huge hit but I blame myself. I really like the thematics of Werewolf, although I would describe the mechanical quality of the Gifts (magical Werewolf powers) as "patchy" - about on a par with feat balance in the 3E d20 core (ie some very good, some very very weak).
I've also played Stargate: SG-1, which is d20. A pretty solid mechanical core (based on first ed Spycraft) but it doesn't emulate the TV show all that well combat-wise. It's incredibly hard to put down Jaffa and a lot of Earth weapons are disappointingly ineffective, particularly grenades.
I've got a copy of Shadowrun 4th Edition and most of the supplements, but haven't had/made an opportunity to play it yet. The rules look pretty slick but I am intimidated by the character generation. (But that's always been the way for me and SR). I'd love to play this, but only in a group that had similar expectations to me about what Shadowrun should be like.
Another game I've read but never played is Blue Planet. Now out of print, it has (in my opinion) quite a neat core mechanic, especially for damage, but more importantly it's an imaginative *hard SF* sci-fi setting. There's not enough hard SF in the world.
So what do you see as the core values of D&D that 4E fails to respect? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm not sure what you mean by "so-called" class; the classes still seem very distinct to me *even though* each one is designed to fill one of four tactical roles in a combat situation.
But considering how much the DVD market is worth, it's probably a double edged sword - which, in the 3d version, will no doubt be pointed directly at the viewer for "drama". Sigh.
That would indeed be interesting. Wil Wheaton, too, I guess. I wonder if any of them play anything but D&D? There's so many more interesting games out there.
I'm pretty sure that only Shatner would have 13-sided dice; they're an exotic particle that has to be made by retuning the deflector dish and rerouting the emissions to the Enterprise's replicator banks.
Ok. Two problems here. Firstly, these are so very far from being character sheets. They'd be useless stat blocks for an NPC, let alone a decent character sheet. Sadly inferior to the Onion article.
Secondly, AD&D. WTF? That was 2.5 editions ago. I thought Wired was supposed to be about the cutting edge!
And, now that I've completely overreacted, I'll switch out of Comic Book Guy mode and return to you to your regular programming.
An excellent point! But, as you say, this doesn't really come with much increased hardware requirements, and since FOSS software upgrades are typically free, it's not so much of a treadmill as a downhill ski slope.
The point being that the increase in hardware capability is not (very much) opening new areas of software capability, and the developments in software capability are not (as much) driving repeated short life-cycle sales of hardware.
Hopefully there will be some new breakthroughs in the next few years to prove me wrong...:)
You're right, the figure is bad. The number I was thinking of was actually in Australian dollars, based on my experience of the laptop market when I bought my Vista PC, which was about 8-10 months ago now. So yeah, things have probably come down some since then, plus the AUD has climbed a lot against the USD. I remember when the Aussie was worth less than half a US dollar; now it's over 90%. Anyway, my bad for not being clearer.
Still: the (AUD) $1000 price comparison was more intended to contrast a "full featured" Vista Premium capable notebook (why would you bother with Vista Basic?) against something like the Eee PC or bargain notebook which I suspect would not be blazing fast with Vista even today.
Hmm. It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Vista is often criticized for its lack of killer features to justify its increased greediness. I personally think the UI's improvements are handy, but if I could have them in XP, I'd be just as happy. And I certainly couldn't justify spending $1000 more on a document handling laptop just so I can run Vista vs XP. Linux resource requirements seem to be relatively stable compared to MS operating systems. Really, only media-intensive work (eg transcoding) and "blockbuster" games are even capable of significantly loading a modern machine. For many tasks, people are now preferring to take their Moore's Law profits in money rather than performance.
Another factor might be that the GHz wall and relative difficulty of parallel programming means that there's just no perceived performance benefit to typical tasks from the newest hardware, and the benefits can be cancelled out by suboptimal software design (see again Vista benchmark results). Due to this lack of progress, people are choosing (for the first time since the eighties?) that cheaper hardware running less inefficient software is a better use of their resources.
AVG Free is free only for personal use. To deploy it across an entire network of computers belonging to a budgeted organisation, rather than purchase a license, is abusing Grisoft's generosity. It's not really excused by the fact that this is an educational organisation rather than commercial. I quote:
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is for private, non-commercial, single computer use only. The use of AVG Free within any organization (including non-profit organizations) or for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited.
If you don't want to pay for your AV, why not go with ClamAV rather than leech off Grisoft's update servers? The restrictions of AVG Free (won't run on server OSes, won't scan network drives, etc) probably mean it's not optimal for the school network anyway.
That said... I use AVG Free myself for my personal computer. It really is good, and I'm grateful to Grisoft for it. Oh: one other thing. AVG Free is free as in beer, but it's not open source. I suppose some people might care about that.
Easy enough to fix. If the campaigns are publicly funded, then the amount of money handed out is known in advance. Then, demand that the candidates hand over invoices & receipts for the monies spent on the campaign, and all remaining monies. There: no living off the campaign funds.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me!
Actually, in Australia, I believe the bulk of campaign funds are public in origin. Unfortunately, we also permit private & corporate donations, which means we still have a certain amount of undue influence (more's the pity). However, Australian politics do not appear to be (quite) as corrupt as American. For instance, I have a great deal of faith in our electoral administration; our elections are run by an NGO called the Australian Electoral Commission. Elections are strictly paper-and-pencil affairs, with counting done by hand, by volunteers, with scrutineers from any political party that wishes to attend. I would be shocked to the core if we had the same sort of shenanigans that seem to surround American electronic vote-rigging machines.
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Thanks for your interesting post; if I had mod points right now, some would be going your way.
What paperwork/bureaucracy is involved when you use a Taser? I know that in many jurisdictions, any use of a sidearm requires the officer to fill out forms & reports, etc. Are there similar reporting & tracking requirements for Taser usage?
Hmm, bad form to reply to my own post.
I note that one objection raised in the article is that since the focal length of this thing is measured in kilometres, the instruments would have to be borne on a separate spacecraft to the focussing sheet, and that keeping the two aligned when changing the orientation of the instrument would require a lot of fuel.
This seems like it would be a perfect use for the solar sail technique; hopefully it would allow you to keep the instrument craft on a pretty much ballistic course (just changing attitude) and use the solar sail to move the focussing sheet from place to place.
Quite possibly this doesn't make any sense; I don't know any orbital mechanics or the details of solar sailcraft theory. But it seems like it could be good deal.
Hmm, a large flat surface with holes in it.
It looks like launching one of these babies would require solutions to the same technical problems as solar sails, ie stowing & unfolding once in orbit.
Would it be possible to have the sheet do double duty, acting as both a Fresnel "lens" and a means of propulsion for the spacecraft? That might be a neat way of getting the instruments to a good location.
Luckily for you, the d6 System's IP has passed from hand to hand since West End Games' fall. As of 2003 it was available in three flavours: d6 Adventure for pulp & modern games, d6 Space for sci-fi (eg Star Wars), and d6 Fantasy which I assume does what it says on the box.
I believe it's now published by a company called Purgatory Publishing. I'm not 100% sure if it's still in print but you should be able to dig it up without too much trouble, and if you can't get hardcopy, there's always www.drivethrurpg.com.
You're exactly right. I'm afraid that I can't see sckeener's point at all; in 3E a fighter who didn't wear armour was crazy, unless you started getting into Prestige Classes. And 3E rogues *did* get trap related class features automatically, although you could choose to not exploit them by neglecting the Search and Disable Device skills.
And Prestige Classes was basically WotC's way of developing a list of several thousand Approved Character Concepts. And if you didn't like the way they'd statted your concept, or it was missing... well, sucks to be you.
That's why I prefer systems with weakly-typed characters. I'm ok with having a few archetypes (no more than a half-dozen) as long as they're very flexible and easy to customize. In that respect, I think I'll like 4E better than 3.x (at least for a while); the focus will be back on customizing a relatively small toolkit to fit your concept, rather than searching through the books for a pre-gen concept that you want to play. The D&D tradition, however, is for strongly-typed characters. I hope they move away from that.
Also, it looks like there are no more "no choice" classes like the 3.x Monk, Paladin, or Ranger. Good riddance, I say; no matter what class I play, I want to be distinct from other characters of that class.
Finally: limited-use powers for everyone, not just the wizard? Awesome! Finally classes other than wizards have tactical decisions to make!
There are things that about 4E that I don't like the look of. The tactical combat mechanics and related class features aren't one of them.
Hmm. I have the opposite problem.
I have found over the years that a system which fits the setting is a thing of beauty. Generic rules... well, they never do seem to sit quite right.
Right now I have an idea for a setting that I think is awesome, and I'm trying to find a set of rules that covers most of what I want. I don't want to have to write a large rules system just to support the game elements I want to use.
Well, over the last few years, I haven't played any D&D (although a lot of it has been played *around* me).
What have I played?
Exalted is probably the big one. It's got the fantasy feel of D&D, but with a fresh and interesting setting that combines some aspects of Asian myth & pop culture (Celestial bureaucracy, Shinto-esque animism, oversized swords and mecha) with the tropes of Western & Mesopotamian classical epics. World-striding heroes, wars between the Titans and the Gods, and curses that worm into the hearts of heroes to slowly destroy the world. It's truly an awesome setting. Unfortunately we started to encounter mechanical problems at higher levels of experience. What does it offer that D&D doesn't? Plenty. Like most WW games, only about 20%-30% of the character "crunch" is combat related; Exalted concentrates a lot on out-of-combat abilities and (melo)drama. The D&D4E buzz has been, to me, conspicuously silent on the parts of roleplaying that aren't tactical monster-slaying exercises.
I've also played a fair bit of Alternity, specifically a space opera campaign in an original setting. Now there's a system that didn't deserve to die. I still enjoy it now. Obviously, compared to D&D, it has tech-ey flavour and interstellar scale. Mechanically, it has a relatively arithmetic-light core mechanic and very, very flexible character archetypes, heavily customized via the extensive skill list.
Things I've played a little bit of, here and there, include:
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I played this for longer than I should have. I'm not impressed by it; the setting would be pretty cool with a great GM (which I didn't have) but the rules are simply awful. The only virtue they have is simplicity, but, in the name of all that's holy, random character generation was old hat in the eighties.
Mutants & Masterminds. d20 superheroes. Not bad, but character creation needs to be supervised with an iron hand by the GM in my opinion.
Starship Troopers. (Also d20). Entertaining within its seemingly limited scope; some quality control issues with the mechanical design & book editing but nothing that really ruined the game. A bit of a beer-and-pretzels game in my opinion.
Burning Empires. Based on the same mechanics as Burning Wheel, I particularly enjoyed this game due to the collaborative approach to world creation. It's great to get that sense of setting ownership that BE provides. However, something about the campaign just didn't quite gel and it fizzled out. Pretty great game though; I have it on my shelf. The production of the book is fantastic!
Werewolf: The Forsaken, one of the World of Darkness game line. I ran the introductory campaign pretty successfully, and then tried to run a homebrew campaign for a few sessions. My game wasn't a huge hit but I blame myself. I really like the thematics of Werewolf, although I would describe the mechanical quality of the Gifts (magical Werewolf powers) as "patchy" - about on a par with feat balance in the 3E d20 core (ie some very good, some very very weak).
I've also played Stargate: SG-1, which is d20. A pretty solid mechanical core (based on first ed Spycraft) but it doesn't emulate the TV show all that well combat-wise. It's incredibly hard to put down Jaffa and a lot of Earth weapons are disappointingly ineffective, particularly grenades.
I've got a copy of Shadowrun 4th Edition and most of the supplements, but haven't had/made an opportunity to play it yet. The rules look pretty slick but I am intimidated by the character generation. (But that's always been the way for me and SR). I'd love to play this, but only in a group that had similar expectations to me about what Shadowrun should be like.
Another game I've read but never played is Blue Planet. Now out of print, it has (in my opinion) quite a neat core mechanic, especially for damage, but more importantly it's an imaginative *hard SF* sci-fi setting. There's not enough hard SF in the world.
I've also tried to
So what do you see as the core values of D&D that 4E fails to respect? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm not sure what you mean by "so-called" class; the classes still seem very distinct to me *even though* each one is designed to fill one of four tactical roles in a combat situation.
Which Baxter are you referring to? Wikipedia suggests "Charles Baxter" may be who you have in mind.
I'm just curious because the set of words you've chosen reminds me of the writing style I've seen used in another context.
I assumed it was a high-falutin' version of "birds of a feather". The kind of thing I would say... :)
Well, I would say Safari, but I remember that Pwn To Own competition's result...
But considering how much the DVD market is worth, it's probably a double edged sword - which, in the 3d version, will no doubt be pointed directly at the viewer for "drama". Sigh.
Parent is not a troll. It is, in fact, informative.
That would indeed be interesting. Wil Wheaton, too, I guess. I wonder if any of them play anything but D&D? There's so many more interesting games out there.
I'm pretty sure that only Shatner would have 13-sided dice; they're an exotic particle that has to be made by retuning the deflector dish and rerouting the emissions to the Enterprise's replicator banks.
That article is so much better than Wired's version.
Ok. Two problems here. Firstly, these are so very far from being character sheets. They'd be useless stat blocks for an NPC, let alone a decent character sheet. Sadly inferior to the Onion article.
Secondly, AD&D. WTF? That was 2.5 editions ago. I thought Wired was supposed to be about the cutting edge!
And, now that I've completely overreacted, I'll switch out of Comic Book Guy mode and return to you to your regular programming.
An excellent point! But, as you say, this doesn't really come with much increased hardware requirements, and since FOSS software upgrades are typically free, it's not so much of a treadmill as a downhill ski slope.
:)
The point being that the increase in hardware capability is not (very much) opening new areas of software capability, and the developments in software capability are not (as much) driving repeated short life-cycle sales of hardware.
Hopefully there will be some new breakthroughs in the next few years to prove me wrong...
You're right, the figure is bad. The number I was thinking of was actually in Australian dollars, based on my experience of the laptop market when I bought my Vista PC, which was about 8-10 months ago now. So yeah, things have probably come down some since then, plus the AUD has climbed a lot against the USD. I remember when the Aussie was worth less than half a US dollar; now it's over 90%. Anyway, my bad for not being clearer.
:)
Still: the (AUD) $1000 price comparison was more intended to contrast a "full featured" Vista Premium capable notebook (why would you bother with Vista Basic?) against something like the Eee PC or bargain notebook which I suspect would not be blazing fast with Vista even today.
And yeah, I don't get the DRM hype either.
Hmm. It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Vista is often criticized for its lack of killer features to justify its increased greediness. I personally think the UI's improvements are handy, but if I could have them in XP, I'd be just as happy. And I certainly couldn't justify spending $1000 more on a document handling laptop just so I can run Vista vs XP. Linux resource requirements seem to be relatively stable compared to MS operating systems. Really, only media-intensive work (eg transcoding) and "blockbuster" games are even capable of significantly loading a modern machine. For many tasks, people are now preferring to take their Moore's Law profits in money rather than performance.
Another factor might be that the GHz wall and relative difficulty of parallel programming means that there's just no perceived performance benefit to typical tasks from the newest hardware, and the benefits can be cancelled out by suboptimal software design (see again Vista benchmark results). Due to this lack of progress, people are choosing (for the first time since the eighties?) that cheaper hardware running less inefficient software is a better use of their resources.
I feel obliged to point out that this article concerns New York City Lawyers, not NewYorkCountryLawyer. ;)
AVG Free is free only for personal use. To deploy it across an entire network of computers belonging to a budgeted organisation, rather than purchase a license, is abusing Grisoft's generosity. It's not really excused by the fact that this is an educational organisation rather than commercial. I quote:
If you don't want to pay for your AV, why not go with ClamAV rather than leech off Grisoft's update servers? The restrictions of AVG Free (won't run on server OSes, won't scan network drives, etc) probably mean it's not optimal for the school network anyway.
That said... I use AVG Free myself for my personal computer. It really is good, and I'm grateful to Grisoft for it. Oh: one other thing. AVG Free is free as in beer, but it's not open source. I suppose some people might care about that.
Easy enough to fix. If the campaigns are publicly funded, then the amount of money handed out is known in advance. Then, demand that the candidates hand over invoices & receipts for the monies spent on the campaign, and all remaining monies. There: no living off the campaign funds. Sounds pretty reasonable to me!
Actually, in Australia, I believe the bulk of campaign funds are public in origin. Unfortunately, we also permit private & corporate donations, which means we still have a certain amount of undue influence (more's the pity). However, Australian politics do not appear to be (quite) as corrupt as American. For instance, I have a great deal of faith in our electoral administration; our elections are run by an NGO called the Australian Electoral Commission. Elections are strictly paper-and-pencil affairs, with counting done by hand, by volunteers, with scrutineers from any political party that wishes to attend. I would be shocked to the core if we had the same sort of shenanigans that seem to surround American electronic vote-rigging machines.