Honestly, most of your post shows that you don't know anything about 4e and are just having a gut reaction based on opinions you've heard. But, I'll go ahead and refute a few of your more blatantly wrong points...
Spells are called "powers" (goodbye psionics?) and are detailed in the class section; there is no other"magic" area in the book. Great for a person only playing a wizard, ever, but wtf for people making classes. Horrible.
Psionics will be in the PHB2. If you're making your own class, you can either steal the wizard's power list (which is what everybody did in 3rd ed) or make your own. No problems there, that's exactly how it's always been -- the only difference is that the wizard's abilities are listed with him rather than in their own chapter.
- No confirm criticals, criticals are just max damage on a 20. Goodbye dramatic tension as you bunch over the faded die, figuring out if you got a 7 or 17 on that confirm roll. Goodbye variability. Goodbye fight-ending strike.
I'm really sorry if the most exciting part of your game is trying to figure out whether you rolled a 7 or 17. Also, you might be interested to know that this was something that was new in 3rd ed, anyway.
- Most rolls 1d20+1/2 character level+other. Wow, that means that high level people will be able to do everything better than 1st level players! Horrible. - No ranks in skills. So much for making a detailed and unique character, huh? Cookie-cutter it is then.
High level characters are already capable of doing everything better than low-level characters, if they put their minds to it. Also, proficiency and skill focus still factor into your die rolls, so it'll take a very significant difference in levels before a high-level character who focuses on a skill will be able to easily beat a low-level character who focuses on it. Besides, since when have skill ranks made anybody unique? Unless you were intentionally crippling yourself for roleplaying flavor, every class basically had a few skills that they'd keep maxed out and never put points in any others. Dropping skill ranks and making rolls 1d20 + 1/2 level + other effectively produces the same results and eliminates one of the most tedious parts of writing up the stats for a new character.
- Attackers roll saves instead of defenders. Stupid. It takes the fate out of your hands and into mine, not to mention I have to look up the bonus a cliff gets to its reflex attack. wtf?
All they're doing is making things consistent. In 3rd ed, when you make a melee attack, you roll, add your attack bonus, and if you beat the opponent's AC, you hit them. When you made a magical attack, though, the DM got to roll, add the attack bonus (the monster's save), and compare it to the target AC (your save DC). Now it works exactly the same way for spells, too; the attacker is in control of the "fate" of their attacks.
- No strategy. Instead of having to rest and pray (or study) to gain spells back, they have the equivalent of "cooldown" (which I can forgive in an MMO, but makes no real-world sense). Basically your players can use their best spells every fight. No strategy, no need for lower-level spells at all. Why do they even exist once you pass 5th level (or whatever level it is you get fireball now)?
This is so completely wrong that I won't even bother, other than saying that you need to read the book.
-"There are fewer types of action, standard, move, minor and free." Given that that's about the same as 3.5 core (full-round, standard, move and free), I wonder about this guy's mental health exclaiming its virtues.
3rd ed had full round, standard, move, free, swift, and immediate actions. Further complicating things was the fact that you had to combine your standard and move for a full round, and you could trade your standard down for a move action, but couldn't trade anything down for a swift action. 4e removed the full round action and renam
it would have been bashed for being a lame, dark, monster-closet-using FPS that didn't compare to HL2 First, I think the number of other people posting here who feel that Doom 3 was a decent game proves that wrong.
But besides that -- what does compare to HL2? Saying that a FPS is bad because it's not as good as HL2 is a pointless statement. It's like going out to a restaurant and ordering a steak, then complaining that it's horrible because it's not the best steak you've ever eaten.
In a nutshell: people are upset because their hopes were too high. The original Doom revolutionized the genre; they were expecting Doom 3 to do the same, and instead it ended up just being a pretty good game, but nothing revolutionary. If it had been given a different name and produced by some company people had never heard of, people would've heaped praise upon it for being a surprisingly good game from a new company.
Re:Sigh, I was hoping for a free WM devel platform
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But SWT does make the applications look Windows Mobile native, and adds in some great widgets for small screened devices like the ExpandBar. J9 is also pretty much a full Java implementation, so you aren't limited to J2ME. Out of curiosity, is it possible to write apps with SWT/J9 that actually feel like native applications? I admit that I'm not too familiar with Java on Windows Mobile, but on my phone, at least, I have to first run the "Java" program in order to run any Java application, and then I can only have one Java application running at a time; moving a running application to the background and executing "Java" again just brings the old application to the foreground. So, maybe a better question is: is it possible to write an application that runs exactly like a native application, as far as end users are concerned?
Re:Sigh, I was hoping for a free WM devel platform
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It's not Qts fault - the Express Edition can't make Windows Mobile applications full stop.
It is a limitation added by Microsoft not Trolltech. That doesn't make any sense. I don't need to use Visual Studio and the Win32 API to make apps for desktop Windows. Windows Mobile applications aren't signed or locked in any way. There's no reason why it should be technically impossible to make WM applications without Microsoft's toolchain. It just so happens that Trolltech decided to have Qt use the Windows Mobile SDK.
Sigh, I was hoping for a free WM devel platform...
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I was pretty excited about the Windows Mobile support in this, until I downloaded it, read the FAQ, and discovered that you have to have the Windows Mobile SDK installed to use it. While the SDK is free to download, you must have Visual Studio (not an Express version) to install it, so developing mobile applications is still going to cost you at least a few hundred dollars.
So, just a heads up to anybody else who's interested: Don't bother with it unless you have Visual Studio Professional 2005 or later.
Well, I would generally define most as "a majority", and so I was assuming that you were saying that a majority of the people who would consider themselves "geeks" don't drink (not that they never have -- just that they don't now). I don't have any empirical data, just the observations I've made in college and, after graduating, at my job.
Based on what I've seen in college and among my non-geek friends, pretty much everybody who's not a geek drinks, and telling them that I don't is met by "What? Why not?" On the other hand, among the geeks I know (and virtually all of my coworkers are computer scientists or electrical engineers), I'd say that between 10 to 20 percent of them don't drink. I haven't gone around polling them, but we sometimes have things like end-of-project parties that have 40 or 50 people invited, and it's pretty easy to observe who drinks and who doesn't. Furthermore, telling them that I don't drink alcohol is usually met with something more like, "Oh, ok, want a root beer?"
I see a lot of posts here that amount to "get everybody drunk," which makes for a lame party, because everybody can get drunk on their own if they really feel like it. Nobody is going to remember a party like that.
- Speaking of wine, don't bring beer. Beer is boring...ask people to bring something small, tasty, and interesting. Most geeks don't drink, but if the do, they tend to want to experience something original.
As a geek who doesn't drink, I wouldn't say that most geeks don't drink, but there is a significant number who don't. I've been to a few parties where they were obviously just an excuse for everybody to get drunk, and I immediately left. That's no fun at all. So, make sure you get a good selection of non-alcoholic drinks, too.
What's really funny is how you talk about how you can post anything you want on your own web site, and then you censor yourself when you say "ass" here on Slashdot. Seriously... it's not really even that bad a word. Ass ass ass. You're only making yourself look silly.
We don't tend to use skills all that much except in the case of Rogue characters, and we tend to resolve most fights verbally rather than by rolling dice. First, why are you playing Dungeons & Dragons at all? No, seriously -- the rules for tactical combat and skill usage are the largest parts of the game mechanics. There aren't very many mechanics other than that, except for maybe non-combat spells. If you don't want to use them, why don't you play a different system whose default rules align with what you really want to play?
If you want the new content, you need to switch, which makes your old books useless in terms of rules data.... I mainly buy books for ideas and setting information, So your complaint is that a new rules system makes the rules in your old books useless, and next you say that you buy books for ideas and setting information, not rules. On top of that, you've already said that you throw out the most complex sections of the rules, anyway. So what's the problem? Your books haven't become useless to you at all. All of the settings and ideas are still there. Let your power gamer friend deal with his own problems.
I am getting sick of constant version updates from WoTC and White Wolf. And finally, how do you define "constant"? 3rd ed came out 8 years ago. 3.5 was 5 years ago, if you count that, but it was mostly just a balance update for 3rd ed; you could refer to the updated rules in the SRD for free and just keep all the old fluff. 2nd ed came out 11 years before 3rd ed. Exactly how long do they have to wait between major revisions of the rules before it's no longer "constant"? 15 years?
Does Windows have a GUI for configuring all the buttons of a multi-button mouse, or a GUI for configuring touchpads?
Uh, yes. Well, it can only handle up to three button mice and it's not very powerful, but that's still better than what you can do in Linux by default.
That's also ignoring the fact that third-party applications are available in Windows. Please show me where I can get any GUI application for Linux that will let me customize the action of every button on my 10-button Bluetooth Logitech mouse. I'd be willing to pay for a good one, even. At least the mouse more or less works with Windows out of the box; to set it up under Linux, I have to drop to the command line to use hcitool to pair it with the computer, then spend hours hacking xorg.conf to get it to load the proper driver and to make it recognize all of the buttons, then spend a few more hours tweaking KDE's autostart scripts to use xmodmap/xev/etc to actually make all of the buttons do something. And I have to restart X every time I want to change something. And that's after the days of research it took me to figure out how to do it all in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it both at work and at home, but the state of mouse and multiple display support and configuration is still several years behind Windows.
I recently interviewed a candidate graduating this month with a CS major and a mathematics minor (3.03 GPA). He could not come anywhere close to describing the difference between TCP and UDP. I think that you might misunderstand what "Computer Science" is. The popular idea is that CS is all about programming -- and it is true that any good computer scientist can program -- but CS is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes. He probably never had any classes that went into the differences between TCP and UDP, if he did indeed have any networking classes at all. I personally only had two classes that touched on TCP/IP, and they were both electives -- and I haven't had to worry about it since then, either, as all of the networking I've needed has been handled by some kind of middleware. You might have had better luck if you asked him to tell you what a finite state machine is, or maybe what Backus-Naur form is.
You might try concentrating on looking for people who have Software Engineering or MIS degrees.
He only serves his own desires, which are neither good nor evil.
I think this is worth nitpicking: somebody who serves only their own desires is practically the definition of evil. A good person will willingly put themselves in danger or make sacrifices to help others; a neutral person will help other people as long as there's not too much risk involved. An evil person will only help other people when it serves his own best interests; they're perfectly willing to let other people come to harm when it doesn't affect them.
Personally, I'd agree that House is CN, but bordering on CE. He completely disregards authority and procedure, and for the most part, he only does his work because it benefits him in the end; however, he does recognize that in the long term, your life will be better if other people don't hate you.
And no, there's nothing wrong with being CE -- too many people think that if you're "evil" that means you're a blood-hungry monster who goes out of his way to harm others. Sure, people like that are evil, but there are also perfectly normal people who only care about themselves. Only comic book villains hurt other people just for the sake of hurting other people. That's a rant for another time, though...
Every card they've made past that point has been utter shit. Horrible support, atrocious Windows drivers, awful audio quality, and so on. Many hardware review sites have continually stated that fact. I dunno, I've seen good reviews for their cards. One, two, three, four. Those are just a few of the top hits off of Google. Maybe not super-stellar, but more than good enough if you're looking for an alternative to Creative Labs. While poor Windows drivers may be a concern, the original poster did say he was using Linux.
Onboard audio is pretty horrible too; hope you like bus noise! See, now it's just obvious that you're either trolling or your an "audiophile" who has more money than sense. There are cheapo onboard systems out there, and there are also perfectly decent quality onboard audio chipsets that sound just fine.
You might take a look at Turtle Beach's sound cards. I'm not up-to-date on how well their current offerings work with Linux, but many years ago I got a card from them that beat the pants off of the equivalently-priced SB Live! Value.
Well, if you think about it, a healthy cat can live over 15 years. Their cheapest is $7,900, so that comes out to about $526 per year. Still pricey, but if I was allergic to cats, I think the price would be worth it (but I do love cats). Buying and feeding a hypoallergenic kitten is still much cheaper than getting a human baby.
And yet you say "I have three cats", and not "three cats live with me" or something of the sort.
So? Nobody has any issue with somebody who says "I have three children," so I don't see how there's a problem when that phrase is applied to cats as well.
1) The book says you can do this, but NO WHERE does it actually detail the rules for it. Like how long it takes to prepare a single spell. I've tried before, to do the math on it taking "an hour" to prepare all your spells, and basing the numbers off that, but you end up with huge charts. PHB page 178. See the section titled "Spell Preparation Time". It's very clear; preparing all of your spells takes an hour, preparing a small number takes an amount of time proportional to how many you prepare, but at least 15 minutes. It's not as clear as a lot of things in the book, but that's still high school algebra -- the amount of time is equal to (number of spells you want to prepare) / (total number of spells you can prepare) in hours, with a minimum of 15 minutes. No chart necessary.
2)It's REALLY stupid to make magic items. Even scrolls. They not only cost XP which only the wizard pays, even though they benefit the ENTIRE parte, but they also cost a CRAZY amount of gold for "magical materials". And that's never explained or defined anywhere, either. This is true in a lot of situations, unless you're playing a class that specializes in making magical items (see Artificer). But scrolls are cheap. Look at how much it costs to make a scroll compared to character wealth by level. It's a little pricey if you're cranking out scrolls of the highest level you can cast, but the cost of scrolls a level or two lower is a pittance. The GP cost is simply part of being a well-rounded wizard -- do you refuse to buy a new axe when you're playing a barbarian or more ammunition when you're playing a ranger? Do you complain about buying new armor because you being a better tank "benefits the entire party"? The XP cost is practically little more than a rounding error -- a 9th level scroll costs only 153 XP! By the time you can cast 9th level spells, you can sneeze on something and get that much XP back. If you don't mind a little bit of cheese, take a look at the Complete Adventurers' Thought Bottle, and all of your XP problems are gone.
But that's not the only way to end your "running out of spells per day" problem. Be a specialist, get a few Rings of Spell Storing or Pearls of Power, and get a Headband of Intellect for more bonus spells.
Sure, you can say it's all up to the DM, but that's always rule 0. Something that integral to the viability of a class should be clearly spelled out in the rules. It's not all up to the DM. Aside from the specifics of "magical materials" -- which I admit is a bit vague, but can easily be explained away as the cost of specially prepared paper, magical ink, etc., all available from your corner adventurers' market -- all of that is pretty clearly spelled out.
I won't even get into the issue of being able to lose your spellbook First, you know that a typical spellbook has 100 pages, and it takes one page per spell level to scribe a spell in it, right? You're probably going to be hauling around several spellbooks. Losing one will suck, but it's not the end of the world. You can also re-scribe any spells you had in memory at the time it was gone into a new book. Second, any DM who destroys a spellbook is a cruel bastard. Yes, it's a viable tactic, but it's no different from making all of the fighter-types fight waves of rust monsters. All it does is piss off players.
Of course, a respectably high-level wizard will have a couple of Boccob's Blessed Books with copies of his favorite spells in all of them. One of them will probably be in a Leomund's Secret Chest, too. Yeah, it sucks if you lose one, but you've lost less than a fighter whose magic sword got sundered.
and the concept of "learning" a spell, even though you need special feats to prepare it without the spellbook. Wizards don't "learn" spells, they copy new ones into their spellbooks. I think you need to re-read the chapter on magic.
I'm going to guess that you aren't actually that familiar with the rules. There are two very important things to know about playing a good wizard: 1) You don't have to prepare all of your spell slots at once. At the beginning of the day, just prepare a few good combat spells of various levels that you'd want to have if somebody got the drop on you, and leave the rest of your slots open. You can sit down for a few minutes at any time later that day and prepare spells in those slots. 2) Find magic scrolls? You get Scribe Scroll at first level. Making scrolls is cheap. Use it. You should go ahead and make multiple scrolls of every utility spell you know -- especially the specialized ones, so that you never need to spend a slot preparing them -- and it's also a good idea to prepare scrolls of combat spells that don't rely heavily on caster level, so that you can use them in combat when you run out of prepared spells.
Also, there are lots of spells that seem specialized until you actually put your mind to thinking of alternate uses for them. Just out of the level five spells you derided -- teleport, transmute rock to mud, telekinesis, overland flight, baleful polymorph, shadow evocation, persistent image, wall of force, prying eyes, summon monster 5, major creation... all of those spells are very powerful and can quickly disarm many different situations if used creatively. And none of them are direct damage spells (at least, that's not their intended use). Or were you just setting up a strawman argument that you didn't actually want anybody to disprove?
I'm not saying that the wizard class is perfect, mind you -- I welcome the addition of at-will powers (perhaps like the reserve feats in some of the recent splat books) so that you wizards don't have to pull out a crossbow when they've run out of their daily spells. But I am saying that you don't know how to play a wizard correctly, and it's not the class' fault that you suck.
I suppose the real lessons are to be a pc gamer, and to not trust a thing microsoft says. Yes, instead of playing games on an Xbox 360, you should play them on Windows instead. That'll show Microsoft!
They don't even try to balance things like Psionics, and creating a character using the book Savage Species is a pretty quick way to create an overpowered character. Psionics was broken in 2e, and broken again in 3e, but the 3.5 psionics presented in the Expanded Psionics Handbook is actually one of the more balanced systems in the game. Psions are certainly less broken than clerics, druids, and wizards. If you disagree, it's because you don't understand how the system works. Go to the Psionics message board on WotC's site and post any concerns you have there -- those guys can prove to you mathematically how psions are less powerful than much of the default core material.
Likewise, a lot of the options in Savage Species seem overpowered at first glance, but you're just having a gut reaction without looking too closely at any of it. The guys at the Character Optimization board will gladly show you how most monsters that have a level adjustment actually suck compared to just playing a human with more class levels.
Granted, that's not to say that all of the supplements are good. Complete Champion is a pile of crap. All of the old 3e supplements (Sword & Fist, etc.) were fairly bad. Another book that gets a bum rap, though, is the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords, which also provokes a lot of "OMG overpowered!" gut reactions, but again, it's been mathematically shown to be more balanced that plenty of stuff in the core rulebooks.
seriously there is a reason sterotypes exist - because most of the time they are true.
walk past a D&D shop and you'll see i'm right. That's strange, every guy in my D&D group has a girlfriend or is married, with the exception of the guy who just got divorced after being married for ten years...
As hard as it may be to believe, most people who play D&D are perfectly normal people. Walk into a D&D shop and talk to them rather than just walking past it and you'll see I'm right.
Yeah, HP levels are getting inflated again. It happened during the move from 2nd to 3rd ed, so it's no surprise they're doing it again. Remember when elder dragons had on the order of 80 HP or so?
I find the super high magic level of standard 3rd Edition to be sickening.
3e has serious balance issues -- possibly even more than 2e at very high levels -- but you're kidding yourself if you don't think that 2e had super high magic. Are you familiar with the Forgotten Realms setting? Netheril? 10th-level spells? 3e toned it down in a lot of ways.
The class books that came out after 3rd Edition released were literally tripe. The books had formatting errors, not to mention the complete and utter rubbish that was actually in them.
First, you don't know what the word "literally" means. Second, you're not forced to buy them. Third, many 2e books had formatting errors, too. And fourth, yeah, I agree that the class books that came out right after the release of 3e were garbage, but most of the books that have come out since the release of 3.5 were pretty good, and some (Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords) are the best thing that has happened to D&D in many years.
I found the skills were broken in a different way than 2nd Edition, the combat system was different and more tactical, which is both good and bad. The Attack of Opportunity stuff was neat but messy. Overall, the system was much more open to abuse by munchkins, power gamers and "roleplayers". But overall, I found it less fun than 2nd Edition had been.
2e's skill system was a shallow shell compared to 3e's. 3e has problems, yes, but in 2e, you were either had a non-weapon proficiency in something or you didn't; my 1st level character could be just as good an armorsmith as some guy who had been doing it for 20 years. The heavier emphasis on tactical combat can be ignored if you don't like it -- my group ignored it and handled combats 2e-style for a few years -- and just because you enjoy combat doesn't mean you can't also enjoy roleplaying. (and I think the derogatory term you were looking for is "rollplayers")
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Spells are called "powers" (goodbye psionics?) and are detailed in the class section; there is no other"magic" area in the book. Great for a person only playing a wizard, ever, but wtf for people making classes. Horrible.
Psionics will be in the PHB2. If you're making your own class, you can either steal the wizard's power list (which is what everybody did in 3rd ed) or make your own. No problems there, that's exactly how it's always been -- the only difference is that the wizard's abilities are listed with him rather than in their own chapter.
- No confirm criticals, criticals are just max damage on a 20. Goodbye dramatic tension as you bunch over the faded die, figuring out if you got a 7 or 17 on that confirm roll. Goodbye variability. Goodbye fight-ending strike.
I'm really sorry if the most exciting part of your game is trying to figure out whether you rolled a 7 or 17. Also, you might be interested to know that this was something that was new in 3rd ed, anyway.
- Most rolls 1d20+1/2 character level+other. Wow, that means that high level people will be able to do everything better than 1st level players! Horrible.
- No ranks in skills. So much for making a detailed and unique character, huh? Cookie-cutter it is then.
High level characters are already capable of doing everything better than low-level characters, if they put their minds to it. Also, proficiency and skill focus still factor into your die rolls, so it'll take a very significant difference in levels before a high-level character who focuses on a skill will be able to easily beat a low-level character who focuses on it. Besides, since when have skill ranks made anybody unique? Unless you were intentionally crippling yourself for roleplaying flavor, every class basically had a few skills that they'd keep maxed out and never put points in any others. Dropping skill ranks and making rolls 1d20 + 1/2 level + other effectively produces the same results and eliminates one of the most tedious parts of writing up the stats for a new character.
- Attackers roll saves instead of defenders. Stupid. It takes the fate out of your hands and into mine, not to mention I have to look up the bonus a cliff gets to its reflex attack. wtf?
All they're doing is making things consistent. In 3rd ed, when you make a melee attack, you roll, add your attack bonus, and if you beat the opponent's AC, you hit them. When you made a magical attack, though, the DM got to roll, add the attack bonus (the monster's save), and compare it to the target AC (your save DC). Now it works exactly the same way for spells, too; the attacker is in control of the "fate" of their attacks.
- No strategy. Instead of having to rest and pray (or study) to gain spells back, they have the equivalent of "cooldown" (which I can forgive in an MMO, but makes no real-world sense). Basically your players can use their best spells every fight. No strategy, no need for lower-level spells at all. Why do they even exist once you pass 5th level (or whatever level it is you get fireball now)?
This is so completely wrong that I won't even bother, other than saying that you need to read the book.
-"There are fewer types of action, standard, move, minor and free." Given that that's about the same as 3.5 core (full-round, standard, move and free), I wonder about this guy's mental health exclaiming its virtues.
3rd ed had full round, standard, move, free, swift, and immediate actions. Further complicating things was the fact that you had to combine your standard and move for a full round, and you could trade your standard down for a move action, but couldn't trade anything down for a swift action. 4e removed the full round action and renam
But besides that -- what does compare to HL2? Saying that a FPS is bad because it's not as good as HL2 is a pointless statement. It's like going out to a restaurant and ordering a steak, then complaining that it's horrible because it's not the best steak you've ever eaten.
In a nutshell: people are upset because their hopes were too high. The original Doom revolutionized the genre; they were expecting Doom 3 to do the same, and instead it ended up just being a pretty good game, but nothing revolutionary. If it had been given a different name and produced by some company people had never heard of, people would've heaped praise upon it for being a surprisingly good game from a new company.
It is a limitation added by Microsoft not Trolltech. That doesn't make any sense. I don't need to use Visual Studio and the Win32 API to make apps for desktop Windows. Windows Mobile applications aren't signed or locked in any way. There's no reason why it should be technically impossible to make WM applications without Microsoft's toolchain. It just so happens that Trolltech decided to have Qt use the Windows Mobile SDK.
I was pretty excited about the Windows Mobile support in this, until I downloaded it, read the FAQ, and discovered that you have to have the Windows Mobile SDK installed to use it. While the SDK is free to download, you must have Visual Studio (not an Express version) to install it, so developing mobile applications is still going to cost you at least a few hundred dollars.
So, just a heads up to anybody else who's interested: Don't bother with it unless you have Visual Studio Professional 2005 or later.
Well, I would generally define most as "a majority", and so I was assuming that you were saying that a majority of the people who would consider themselves "geeks" don't drink (not that they never have -- just that they don't now). I don't have any empirical data, just the observations I've made in college and, after graduating, at my job.
Based on what I've seen in college and among my non-geek friends, pretty much everybody who's not a geek drinks, and telling them that I don't is met by "What? Why not?" On the other hand, among the geeks I know (and virtually all of my coworkers are computer scientists or electrical engineers), I'd say that between 10 to 20 percent of them don't drink. I haven't gone around polling them, but we sometimes have things like end-of-project parties that have 40 or 50 people invited, and it's pretty easy to observe who drinks and who doesn't. Furthermore, telling them that I don't drink alcohol is usually met with something more like, "Oh, ok, want a root beer?"
I see a lot of posts here that amount to "get everybody drunk," which makes for a lame party, because everybody can get drunk on their own if they really feel like it. Nobody is going to remember a party like that.
- Speaking of wine, don't bring beer. Beer is boring...ask people to bring something small, tasty, and interesting. Most geeks don't drink, but if the do, they tend to want to experience something original.
As a geek who doesn't drink, I wouldn't say that most geeks don't drink, but there is a significant number who don't. I've been to a few parties where they were obviously just an excuse for everybody to get drunk, and I immediately left. That's no fun at all. So, make sure you get a good selection of non-alcoholic drinks, too.
What's really funny is how you talk about how you can post anything you want on your own web site, and then you censor yourself when you say "ass" here on Slashdot. Seriously... it's not really even that bad a word. Ass ass ass. You're only making yourself look silly.
Does Windows have a GUI for configuring all the buttons of a multi-button mouse, or a GUI for configuring touchpads?
Uh, yes. Well, it can only handle up to three button mice and it's not very powerful, but that's still better than what you can do in Linux by default.
That's also ignoring the fact that third-party applications are available in Windows. Please show me where I can get any GUI application for Linux that will let me customize the action of every button on my 10-button Bluetooth Logitech mouse. I'd be willing to pay for a good one, even. At least the mouse more or less works with Windows out of the box; to set it up under Linux, I have to drop to the command line to use hcitool to pair it with the computer, then spend hours hacking xorg.conf to get it to load the proper driver and to make it recognize all of the buttons, then spend a few more hours tweaking KDE's autostart scripts to use xmodmap/xev/etc to actually make all of the buttons do something. And I have to restart X every time I want to change something. And that's after the days of research it took me to figure out how to do it all in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it both at work and at home, but the state of mouse and multiple display support and configuration is still several years behind Windows.
You might try concentrating on looking for people who have Software Engineering or MIS degrees.
He only serves his own desires, which are neither good nor evil.
I think this is worth nitpicking: somebody who serves only their own desires is practically the definition of evil. A good person will willingly put themselves in danger or make sacrifices to help others; a neutral person will help other people as long as there's not too much risk involved. An evil person will only help other people when it serves his own best interests; they're perfectly willing to let other people come to harm when it doesn't affect them.
Personally, I'd agree that House is CN, but bordering on CE. He completely disregards authority and procedure, and for the most part, he only does his work because it benefits him in the end; however, he does recognize that in the long term, your life will be better if other people don't hate you.
And no, there's nothing wrong with being CE -- too many people think that if you're "evil" that means you're a blood-hungry monster who goes out of his way to harm others. Sure, people like that are evil, but there are also perfectly normal people who only care about themselves. Only comic book villains hurt other people just for the sake of hurting other people. That's a rant for another time, though...
You might take a look at Turtle Beach's sound cards. I'm not up-to-date on how well their current offerings work with Linux, but many years ago I got a card from them that beat the pants off of the equivalently-priced SB Live! Value.
Well, if you think about it, a healthy cat can live over 15 years. Their cheapest is $7,900, so that comes out to about $526 per year. Still pricey, but if I was allergic to cats, I think the price would be worth it (but I do love cats). Buying and feeding a hypoallergenic kitten is still much cheaper than getting a human baby.
And yet you say "I have three cats", and not "three cats live with me" or something of the sort.
So? Nobody has any issue with somebody who says "I have three children," so I don't see how there's a problem when that phrase is applied to cats as well.
But that's not the only way to end your "running out of spells per day" problem. Be a specialist, get a few Rings of Spell Storing or Pearls of Power, and get a Headband of Intellect for more bonus spells. Sure, you can say it's all up to the DM, but that's always rule 0. Something that integral to the viability of a class should be clearly spelled out in the rules. It's not all up to the DM. Aside from the specifics of "magical materials" -- which I admit is a bit vague, but can easily be explained away as the cost of specially prepared paper, magical ink, etc., all available from your corner adventurers' market -- all of that is pretty clearly spelled out. I won't even get into the issue of being able to lose your spellbook First, you know that a typical spellbook has 100 pages, and it takes one page per spell level to scribe a spell in it, right? You're probably going to be hauling around several spellbooks. Losing one will suck, but it's not the end of the world. You can also re-scribe any spells you had in memory at the time it was gone into a new book. Second, any DM who destroys a spellbook is a cruel bastard. Yes, it's a viable tactic, but it's no different from making all of the fighter-types fight waves of rust monsters. All it does is piss off players.
Of course, a respectably high-level wizard will have a couple of Boccob's Blessed Books with copies of his favorite spells in all of them. One of them will probably be in a Leomund's Secret Chest, too. Yeah, it sucks if you lose one, but you've lost less than a fighter whose magic sword got sundered. and the concept of "learning" a spell, even though you need special feats to prepare it without the spellbook. Wizards don't "learn" spells, they copy new ones into their spellbooks. I think you need to re-read the chapter on magic.
I'm going to guess that you aren't actually that familiar with the rules. There are two very important things to know about playing a good wizard:
1) You don't have to prepare all of your spell slots at once. At the beginning of the day, just prepare a few good combat spells of various levels that you'd want to have if somebody got the drop on you, and leave the rest of your slots open. You can sit down for a few minutes at any time later that day and prepare spells in those slots.
2) Find magic scrolls? You get Scribe Scroll at first level. Making scrolls is cheap. Use it. You should go ahead and make multiple scrolls of every utility spell you know -- especially the specialized ones, so that you never need to spend a slot preparing them -- and it's also a good idea to prepare scrolls of combat spells that don't rely heavily on caster level, so that you can use them in combat when you run out of prepared spells.
Also, there are lots of spells that seem specialized until you actually put your mind to thinking of alternate uses for them. Just out of the level five spells you derided -- teleport, transmute rock to mud, telekinesis, overland flight, baleful polymorph, shadow evocation, persistent image, wall of force, prying eyes, summon monster 5, major creation... all of those spells are very powerful and can quickly disarm many different situations if used creatively. And none of them are direct damage spells (at least, that's not their intended use). Or were you just setting up a strawman argument that you didn't actually want anybody to disprove?
I'm not saying that the wizard class is perfect, mind you -- I welcome the addition of at-will powers (perhaps like the reserve feats in some of the recent splat books) so that you wizards don't have to pull out a crossbow when they've run out of their daily spells. But I am saying that you don't know how to play a wizard correctly, and it's not the class' fault that you suck.
It's almost as amazing as all of the other times it's been done in D&D articles.
Seriously, though, the mods here must be new, because this is oooold.
Likewise, a lot of the options in Savage Species seem overpowered at first glance, but you're just having a gut reaction without looking too closely at any of it. The guys at the Character Optimization board will gladly show you how most monsters that have a level adjustment actually suck compared to just playing a human with more class levels.
Granted, that's not to say that all of the supplements are good. Complete Champion is a pile of crap. All of the old 3e supplements (Sword & Fist, etc.) were fairly bad. Another book that gets a bum rap, though, is the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords, which also provokes a lot of "OMG overpowered!" gut reactions, but again, it's been mathematically shown to be more balanced that plenty of stuff in the core rulebooks.
walk past a D&D shop and you'll see i'm right. That's strange, every guy in my D&D group has a girlfriend or is married, with the exception of the guy who just got divorced after being married for ten years...
As hard as it may be to believe, most people who play D&D are perfectly normal people. Walk into a D&D shop and talk to them rather than just walking past it and you'll see I'm right.
Yeah, HP levels are getting inflated again. It happened during the move from 2nd to 3rd ed, so it's no surprise they're doing it again. Remember when elder dragons had on the order of 80 HP or so?
I find the super high magic level of standard 3rd Edition to be sickening.
3e has serious balance issues -- possibly even more than 2e at very high levels -- but you're kidding yourself if you don't think that 2e had super high magic. Are you familiar with the Forgotten Realms setting? Netheril? 10th-level spells? 3e toned it down in a lot of ways.
The class books that came out after 3rd Edition released were literally tripe. The books had formatting errors, not to mention the complete and utter rubbish that was actually in them.
First, you don't know what the word "literally" means. Second, you're not forced to buy them. Third, many 2e books had formatting errors, too. And fourth, yeah, I agree that the class books that came out right after the release of 3e were garbage, but most of the books that have come out since the release of 3.5 were pretty good, and some (Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords) are the best thing that has happened to D&D in many years.
I found the skills were broken in a different way than 2nd Edition, the combat system was different and more tactical, which is both good and bad. The Attack of Opportunity stuff was neat but messy. Overall, the system was much more open to abuse by munchkins, power gamers and "roleplayers". But overall, I found it less fun than 2nd Edition had been.
2e's skill system was a shallow shell compared to 3e's. 3e has problems, yes, but in 2e, you were either had a non-weapon proficiency in something or you didn't; my 1st level character could be just as good an armorsmith as some guy who had been doing it for 20 years. The heavier emphasis on tactical combat can be ignored if you don't like it -- my group ignored it and handled combats 2e-style for a few years -- and just because you enjoy combat doesn't mean you can't also enjoy roleplaying. (and I think the derogatory term you were looking for is "rollplayers")