Why should it be easy to hit? Look, I won't ever use 4th edition rules, I want to play something else, but this doesn't seem like a good objection to the game system. In fact, it's my experience that starting characters in 4th ed feel incredibly overpowered. Original AD&D also had a 50% chance to hit a guy in chain mail at first level, if you weren't a fighter.
So much of 4th ed seems focused on combat mechanics that in a way, I applaud them for making combat hard for the players. There's already great danger that it will become a fight simulator and not a role-playing game.
Oh yeah, why are there TWO 300+ page player handbooks then, whose primary focus is on discussing the combat mechanics of various classes? The way the old game encouraged roleplaying is that it defined the character classes by social roles, which everyone who knows history intuitively understood. Players easily understood 1st ed roleplaying principles because the game world sort of looked like the Middle Ages in which all the middle-age superstitions were actually true. Anyone who knows something about history can definitely picture that in great detail. So the actual rules were more terse and yet more filled in at the same time, because D&D used to be modeled on social relations (and myths) in actual history.
I thought that the first edition of AD&D was pretty good for roleplaying. I loved the feel, and I still use it. I'm glad that WotC don't own the trademarks to chess or monopoly or go or some other classic game. If they did and tried to make an "updated edition" of the rules, I bet some people would play by them, but nobody would think it's strange if you just wanted to play "real" unWotc'd chess or go. It's not like the old rules get overwritten. 4th edition D&D is its own game, a very different game than 1st ed. There's room in the world for both.
It's not like the older editions are made obsolete when there's a new flavor of the week.
At my table I use certain "house rules" that simplify annoying things like to-hit modifiers for armor type, but yeah, it's 1st ed all the way for me.
Back then, the game world looked recognizably like the Middle Ages, and character classes were defined by social roles, not by combat system mechanics.
4th edition is a game, and it feels like one. To complain about its realism would be akin to complaining that actual knights and bishops act nothing like their corresponding chess pieces. They can make them do whatever they want.
What Gary Gygax did for D&D is what Tolkien also did in his fiction: He made the world seem recognizably like history. He had an appendix on polearm heads. Among the rules were straight up history lessons. His D&D was history with a tweak. In addition to actual history there was this extra element - the gods, the primal elements, the outer planes... things that ordinary people in that world have superstitions about but almost never encounter openly. Even those things match the actual superstitions of history in their most important elements.
I guess I insist on playing campaigns that capture this spirit, and for this, 1st ed is perfect. As far as the mechanics go: they're maybe not optimal, but nothing is, and with wise house rules and good roleplaying, you can make any system work at the complexity level you need. What's most important is to have the system pull you into the right spirit of the setting, and to get out of your way when you want to role play a character. I don't see any reason to abandon the "cannonical" D&D - 1st ed - for the flavor of the week. It's not like the previous game somehow vanishes when the new flavor comes out, and I support people playing and hosting whatever rule system makes the most sense to them. I recently ran a 1st ed game in a rather small con, and I thought it worked just fine. I'd love to see more of that.
There are many smart people who predict the waning importance of states in the new global order, and I'm sure they'll be very excited to hear this. Already, criminal gangs are formidable competitors to many states (for example: Afghanistan, Columbia and Mexico - but the full list would be far longer).
Open source methods of terrorism will mean that the state will probably no longer be the most effective source of personal security in the future, and global financial breakdowns might further encourage something like a new tribalism. In a situation like that, armed criminal gangs might in effect become the government in many regions. Witness, for example, that the Taliban just took over a huge swath of Pakistan and imposed their own crazy law. Pockets like these will be immune to reach of international diplomacy, and they'll probably host stuff like this (and maybe the next Pirate Bay, if they can make money doing it). It's gonna be a crazy future!
Why is that ironic? Because they don't have red tape and they're Chinese?
Re:Digital broadcast
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Right - I agree. And it's just a matter of time till Tivo or some company like them will make a Tivo that doesn't actually record anything but just downloads it. Then you can cancel your cable bill and pay more for your Tivo subscription, but what you'll get is a huge Tivo full of the sort of stuff you like, in HD. Every time you plop down in front of "the tube" it will look just like TV, except with micro-targeted ads. It will even have a "personal broadcast" mode so that you can flip channels between various arrangements of the stuff on your Tivo. It's like "custom channels made specifically for you."
That stuff will be interspersed with "breaking news" and local shit that the Tivo algorithm suspects you will find relevant.
OK, that was amazing. I thought I was tough because I was able to not crash my rental car in Greece. What struck me about that clip is that nobody got hurt. It reminds me of Napoli, where cars don't seem to respect marked lanes or sings, but they are keenly aware of what everyone else is doing and they leave them space to do it. (But not an inch more.) I thought the Neapolitans were some of the best and most attentive drivers I've ever come across, even if it's a scary place to be on a road. This clip from India made me think that it might be similar there.
I almost like this idea. The one computing device that's always on in my house is my router. It's got Linux and a great UI that I can control from anywhere in the world (Tomato). If this thing had four more Ethernet sockets and a wireless antenna, we'd be talking! Even better: Throw in a SATA2 socket so I could hook up a hard drive for the Torrents! I know that would up the power usage, but the hard drive would only spin up when in use. Most of the time it wouldn't be. I like the sound of 5W of power usage.
You want to see an archive of my angry rants which spewed out when I was trying to do something simple with Linux? Actually, you don't need mine - the internet is full of them.
No doubt that Windows has many dumb design elements that are rude to the end-user, but Linux is surely the champion in this category. And I say this out of love.
I've just played a pretty grueling PnP campaign using the Hackmaster rules (IMO superior design to D&D). Seeing these blocks gave me many ideas for how some of the tedious features of tabletop roleplaying are ripe to be outsourced to a computer. I initially pictured each player having a touchpad that displays relevant information, like a map of explored territory, "what they see" and their character sheet. The real payoff (and this is definitely needed) would be in large combat situations. All it would take would be some positionally-aware dice that could transmit their rest-after-roll position, a tracking system for keeping track of who is where (substituting for miniatures), etc. I briefly considered that these blocks could play the role of characters and NPCs, so you could spatially represent their configuration. But I think these give you too much freedom.
My (very realistic) dream is to have a company like Bioware get a contract to come up with very intuitive area creation tools for GMs, and when combat begins, the tabletop game would revert into essentially a turn-based CRPG. Since combat rules in these game systems are rather rigid, they don't allow for much "free" roleplaying anyway; the players basically choose their weapons, movements and other strategies in a way that would translate well into a computer game. But of course, instead of dumb AI enemies, they'd be fighting opponents animated by the intelligence and judgment of the GM, who could sure use some help rolling and figuring things out.
Another place where the GM could use lots of help is in creating locations. I would love to work on an algo that auto-generates "functional" villages within a broad range of constraints. I know that there's amateurish stuff like this online, but I know we can do better. The idea is that the digital creation can audit itself for physical, social and economic coherence, so that you don't have a village that's all soldiers and eight farmers, or a "normal" village with no children, for example.
Yeah, if the government starts to take all the money from all the people who made money from holding or flipping real estate, then sure, it will have money to give to people who invested badly. But the former is not going to happen. Of course, something even less fair did happen, as you mention: The banks who made terrible investments did get paid off. I don't think that was right, but compounding wrongs won't make it right.
I should mention that I have some sympathies for Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, but in the US we have a different system. We sacrificed financial safety for the potential for massive personal profit. Now we're complaining about how we took a risk and didn't profit, as though we were entitled to always profit.
Let me add that your $600,000 house is no less functional now that its market value is lower, so you still got what you paid for. Some things depreciate, like processors, phones and this year, California houses.
I'm also not exactly interested in their reference design, although... almost maybe. What they should add: Four more ethernet ports and a chip and external antenna. Then the thing could be an always-on router and file server that lives in the livingroom and can play back any media files on the network (gigabit ethernet is good enough for HD, right?).
So while you are right that they're aiming at a very targeted market, they don't have to be. They could make of this platform what iTV should have been. And that brings me to another point: Wouldn't this be a very attractive new base platform for a better and cheaper iTV? The way I'm picturing it, it would be a router and a media computer, sort of the boss of the home's computer systems. The router software could be Tomato, which already runs on a *nix kernel and is open source. I bet that this device, if left to act as a router-only, would not use more power than a regular router, but it would be far more capable and versatile. But then it could also be a file server, the home's ftp and http server, p2p downloader (with smart technology that would throttle p2p traffic when other computers need data) and who knows what else.
The point is, in any home, there should only be one computing device that's always on - and it should use power very sparingly. It should also effortlessly do all the functions that we want to be always-available, like filesharing, IP routing and firewall, wireless access point, web- and ftp serving, and maybe also TV recording and playback. A device based on this platform could do all that while drawing just a few watts. And then I'd definitely be interested - as in, buying!
I've seen some of that research as well. The prototypes have had some design flaws, sodium leaks and other problems. But you know what? EVERY large-scale clean source of energy is difficult to implement. Solar power is woefully inefficient, wind is very difficult to scale, massacres birds, and is prone to mechanical failures.
What's needed to overcome these difficulties? Research. Other clean technologies have had the benefit of research, huge government subsidies and all sort of propaganda. I would say they are all far less promising than AFR/IFR for large scale, sustainable base-load production. I think we should still pursue them, but not as a substitute for fast breeders.
In a time of oil wars, fuel shortages, mountaintop removal, coal mine catastrophes, coal ash catastrophes and global warming, it's incredibly irresponsible to get in the way of AFR/IFR research. But we do anyway, because we're idiots. No, it's not ready for mass deployment. We need a generation of test reactors before we are there. But we could have, and should have, long been there by now, if we didn't cancel this research in the 90's.
... "real" "warm" light seems to matter to consumers more than saving the environment...
Damn right that it matters. The lighting in my house is a part of my environment, and one of the most important parts. If it feels harsh, cold and unnatural to me, that affects me quite noticably. I imagine it's the same with others as well, maybe more than they themselves realize. If I had a choice between global warming by some fraction of a degree, or psychologically soothing but less efficient lighting for everyone, I would pick the second in a heartbeat. Seriously, this some fluorescent lighting I've seen is so depressing that it saps people's will to live.
Quite seriously now, good lighting is as important to the domestic environment adequate temperature control. Frankly, if we want to save energy, we should be investing in passive solutions like triple-glazed argon windows and better insulation. Much more resources go to inefficiencies in heating and air conditioning anyway. With the energy we save, let's power up some attractive lights, and let them double as indoor heating units if they must. That energy is not wasted either.
How many people sit under an ugly fluorescent bulb and use an electric space heater? It's stupid.
I have QoS set up on my home router, and I love it. I do a lot of VoIP calling. When I do P2P, I always try to upload at least three times what I download. It feels like the moral thing to do. All this uploading used to interfere with my VoIP quality until I installed Tomato firmware on my Buffalo router and configured my QoS. Since then, I've been uploading at 80% of my bandwidth cap and VoIP sounds great.
The point is that I upload more since I installed QoS, and it annoys me less. I honestly wouldn't mind if my ISP installed something similar, especially if this led them to give up the frightening idea of charging by gigabytes for "heavy users" like me.
Thank you for that sincere response. The best way for it to blow over is to keep improving KDE at this rate. You guys are awesome, and I've long since forgiven you for the 4.0. (Actually, what I remember thinking was "How could Fedora put this in a "stable" release?")
I think what really generated the anger is that too many distributions, whose administrators certainly can read and should know better, included KDE 4.0. I think it was a self-serving move to generate downloads, because people like the "shiny." In that instance, the distribution system has failed us, and deserve at least as much of the blame for unrealistic 4.0 expectations as the KDE naming team.
Inaccurate. We can easily test this on Earth by seeing if it's possible to get an erection while upside down, with blood rushing to your head. It is. You too can try it at home. I have a feeling you're making this up. I know there has been sex in space.
Slashdot Mirror
So much of 4th ed seems focused on combat mechanics that in a way, I applaud them for making combat hard for the players. There's already great danger that it will become a fight simulator and not a role-playing game.
Oh yeah, why are there TWO 300+ page player handbooks then, whose primary focus is on discussing the combat mechanics of various classes? The way the old game encouraged roleplaying is that it defined the character classes by social roles, which everyone who knows history intuitively understood. Players easily understood 1st ed roleplaying principles because the game world sort of looked like the Middle Ages in which all the middle-age superstitions were actually true. Anyone who knows something about history can definitely picture that in great detail. So the actual rules were more terse and yet more filled in at the same time, because D&D used to be modeled on social relations (and myths) in actual history.
I thought that the first edition of AD&D was pretty good for roleplaying. I loved the feel, and I still use it. I'm glad that WotC don't own the trademarks to chess or monopoly or go or some other classic game. If they did and tried to make an "updated edition" of the rules, I bet some people would play by them, but nobody would think it's strange if you just wanted to play "real" unWotc'd chess or go. It's not like the old rules get overwritten. 4th edition D&D is its own game, a very different game than 1st ed. There's room in the world for both.
It's not like the older editions are made obsolete when there's a new flavor of the week.
Back then, the game world looked recognizably like the Middle Ages, and character classes were defined by social roles, not by combat system mechanics.
4th edition is a game, and it feels like one. To complain about its realism would be akin to complaining that actual knights and bishops act nothing like their corresponding chess pieces. They can make them do whatever they want.
What Gary Gygax did for D&D is what Tolkien also did in his fiction: He made the world seem recognizably like history. He had an appendix on polearm heads. Among the rules were straight up history lessons. His D&D was history with a tweak. In addition to actual history there was this extra element - the gods, the primal elements, the outer planes... things that ordinary people in that world have superstitions about but almost never encounter openly. Even those things match the actual superstitions of history in their most important elements.
I guess I insist on playing campaigns that capture this spirit, and for this, 1st ed is perfect. As far as the mechanics go: they're maybe not optimal, but nothing is, and with wise house rules and good roleplaying, you can make any system work at the complexity level you need. What's most important is to have the system pull you into the right spirit of the setting, and to get out of your way when you want to role play a character. I don't see any reason to abandon the "cannonical" D&D - 1st ed - for the flavor of the week. It's not like the previous game somehow vanishes when the new flavor comes out, and I support people playing and hosting whatever rule system makes the most sense to them. I recently ran a 1st ed game in a rather small con, and I thought it worked just fine. I'd love to see more of that.
There are many smart people who predict the waning importance of states in the new global order, and I'm sure they'll be very excited to hear this. Already, criminal gangs are formidable competitors to many states (for example: Afghanistan, Columbia and Mexico - but the full list would be far longer).
Open source methods of terrorism will mean that the state will probably no longer be the most effective source of personal security in the future, and global financial breakdowns might further encourage something like a new tribalism. In a situation like that, armed criminal gangs might in effect become the government in many regions. Witness, for example, that the Taliban just took over a huge swath of Pakistan and imposed their own crazy law. Pockets like these will be immune to reach of international diplomacy, and they'll probably host stuff like this (and maybe the next Pirate Bay, if they can make money doing it). It's gonna be a crazy future!
Why is that ironic? Because they don't have red tape and they're Chinese?
Right - I agree. And it's just a matter of time till Tivo or some company like them will make a Tivo that doesn't actually record anything but just downloads it. Then you can cancel your cable bill and pay more for your Tivo subscription, but what you'll get is a huge Tivo full of the sort of stuff you like, in HD. Every time you plop down in front of "the tube" it will look just like TV, except with micro-targeted ads. It will even have a "personal broadcast" mode so that you can flip channels between various arrangements of the stuff on your Tivo. It's like "custom channels made specifically for you."
That stuff will be interspersed with "breaking news" and local shit that the Tivo algorithm suspects you will find relevant.
OK, that was amazing. I thought I was tough because I was able to not crash my rental car in Greece. What struck me about that clip is that nobody got hurt. It reminds me of Napoli, where cars don't seem to respect marked lanes or sings, but they are keenly aware of what everyone else is doing and they leave them space to do it. (But not an inch more.) I thought the Neapolitans were some of the best and most attentive drivers I've ever come across, even if it's a scary place to be on a road. This clip from India made me think that it might be similar there.
I almost like this idea. The one computing device that's always on in my house is my router. It's got Linux and a great UI that I can control from anywhere in the world (Tomato). If this thing had four more Ethernet sockets and a wireless antenna, we'd be talking! Even better: Throw in a SATA2 socket so I could hook up a hard drive for the Torrents! I know that would up the power usage, but the hard drive would only spin up when in use. Most of the time it wouldn't be. I like the sound of 5W of power usage.
You want to see an archive of my angry rants which spewed out when I was trying to do something simple with Linux? Actually, you don't need mine - the internet is full of them.
No doubt that Windows has many dumb design elements that are rude to the end-user, but Linux is surely the champion in this category. And I say this out of love.
And the battery industry would kick-start the stalled auto industry?
Doh, why didn't someone tell me that "inheritable" means "heritable"?
I've just played a pretty grueling PnP campaign using the Hackmaster rules (IMO superior design to D&D). Seeing these blocks gave me many ideas for how some of the tedious features of tabletop roleplaying are ripe to be outsourced to a computer. I initially pictured each player having a touchpad that displays relevant information, like a map of explored territory, "what they see" and their character sheet. The real payoff (and this is definitely needed) would be in large combat situations. All it would take would be some positionally-aware dice that could transmit their rest-after-roll position, a tracking system for keeping track of who is where (substituting for miniatures), etc. I briefly considered that these blocks could play the role of characters and NPCs, so you could spatially represent their configuration. But I think these give you too much freedom.
My (very realistic) dream is to have a company like Bioware get a contract to come up with very intuitive area creation tools for GMs, and when combat begins, the tabletop game would revert into essentially a turn-based CRPG. Since combat rules in these game systems are rather rigid, they don't allow for much "free" roleplaying anyway; the players basically choose their weapons, movements and other strategies in a way that would translate well into a computer game. But of course, instead of dumb AI enemies, they'd be fighting opponents animated by the intelligence and judgment of the GM, who could sure use some help rolling and figuring things out.
Another place where the GM could use lots of help is in creating locations. I would love to work on an algo that auto-generates "functional" villages within a broad range of constraints. I know that there's amateurish stuff like this online, but I know we can do better. The idea is that the digital creation can audit itself for physical, social and economic coherence, so that you don't have a village that's all soldiers and eight farmers, or a "normal" village with no children, for example.
Yeah, if the government starts to take all the money from all the people who made money from holding or flipping real estate, then sure, it will have money to give to people who invested badly. But the former is not going to happen. Of course, something even less fair did happen, as you mention: The banks who made terrible investments did get paid off. I don't think that was right, but compounding wrongs won't make it right.
I should mention that I have some sympathies for Scandinavian-style democratic socialism, but in the US we have a different system. We sacrificed financial safety for the potential for massive personal profit. Now we're complaining about how we took a risk and didn't profit, as though we were entitled to always profit.
Let me add that your $600,000 house is no less functional now that its market value is lower, so you still got what you paid for. Some things depreciate, like processors, phones and this year, California houses.
So while you are right that they're aiming at a very targeted market, they don't have to be. They could make of this platform what iTV should have been. And that brings me to another point: Wouldn't this be a very attractive new base platform for a better and cheaper iTV? The way I'm picturing it, it would be a router and a media computer, sort of the boss of the home's computer systems. The router software could be Tomato, which already runs on a *nix kernel and is open source. I bet that this device, if left to act as a router-only, would not use more power than a regular router, but it would be far more capable and versatile. But then it could also be a file server, the home's ftp and http server, p2p downloader (with smart technology that would throttle p2p traffic when other computers need data) and who knows what else.
The point is, in any home, there should only be one computing device that's always on - and it should use power very sparingly. It should also effortlessly do all the functions that we want to be always-available, like filesharing, IP routing and firewall, wireless access point, web- and ftp serving, and maybe also TV recording and playback. A device based on this platform could do all that while drawing just a few watts. And then I'd definitely be interested - as in, buying!
I've seen some of that research as well. The prototypes have had some design flaws, sodium leaks and other problems. But you know what? EVERY large-scale clean source of energy is difficult to implement. Solar power is woefully inefficient, wind is very difficult to scale, massacres birds, and is prone to mechanical failures.
What's needed to overcome these difficulties? Research. Other clean technologies have had the benefit of research, huge government subsidies and all sort of propaganda. I would say they are all far less promising than AFR/IFR for large scale, sustainable base-load production. I think we should still pursue them, but not as a substitute for fast breeders.
In a time of oil wars, fuel shortages, mountaintop removal, coal mine catastrophes, coal ash catastrophes and global warming, it's incredibly irresponsible to get in the way of AFR/IFR research. But we do anyway, because we're idiots. No, it's not ready for mass deployment. We need a generation of test reactors before we are there. But we could have, and should have, long been there by now, if we didn't cancel this research in the 90's.
... "real" "warm" light seems to matter to consumers more than saving the environment...
Damn right that it matters. The lighting in my house is a part of my environment, and one of the most important parts. If it feels harsh, cold and unnatural to me, that affects me quite noticably. I imagine it's the same with others as well, maybe more than they themselves realize. If I had a choice between global warming by some fraction of a degree, or psychologically soothing but less efficient lighting for everyone, I would pick the second in a heartbeat. Seriously, this some fluorescent lighting I've seen is so depressing that it saps people's will to live.
Quite seriously now, good lighting is as important to the domestic environment adequate temperature control. Frankly, if we want to save energy, we should be investing in passive solutions like triple-glazed argon windows and better insulation. Much more resources go to inefficiencies in heating and air conditioning anyway. With the energy we save, let's power up some attractive lights, and let them double as indoor heating units if they must. That energy is not wasted either.
How many people sit under an ugly fluorescent bulb and use an electric space heater? It's stupid.
I have QoS set up on my home router, and I love it. I do a lot of VoIP calling. When I do P2P, I always try to upload at least three times what I download. It feels like the moral thing to do. All this uploading used to interfere with my VoIP quality until I installed Tomato firmware on my Buffalo router and configured my QoS. Since then, I've been uploading at 80% of my bandwidth cap and VoIP sounds great.
The point is that I upload more since I installed QoS, and it annoys me less. I honestly wouldn't mind if my ISP installed something similar, especially if this led them to give up the frightening idea of charging by gigabytes for "heavy users" like me.
Thank you for that sincere response. The best way for it to blow over is to keep improving KDE at this rate. You guys are awesome, and I've long since forgiven you for the 4.0. (Actually, what I remember thinking was "How could Fedora put this in a "stable" release?")
Thank you for your work.
I think what really generated the anger is that too many distributions, whose administrators certainly can read and should know better, included KDE 4.0. I think it was a self-serving move to generate downloads, because people like the "shiny." In that instance, the distribution system has failed us, and deserve at least as much of the blame for unrealistic 4.0 expectations as the KDE naming team.
You may enjoy your 26 seconds of pretending that "this is not really happening" - most other people don't.
Why yes, I do enjoy that very much. I call it "sex".
Hey, sorry about not getting a good nick, but I approve of the ideas you're tossing around.
Inaccurate. We can easily test this on Earth by seeing if it's possible to get an erection while upside down, with blood rushing to your head. It is. You too can try it at home. I have a feeling you're making this up. I know there has been sex in space.
I'd ask how she managed to stay married to a douchebag Republican politician from Ohio, who tried to drag her through various swinger bathhouses.
I never thought that the Firefly form factor would ever actually fly, but look at the picture of the Skylon and tell me you don't see the resemblance!