Having made a 4e character and played through the combat system, and having played and DMed 3.0/3.5 since it was released, I think this is the best way of summing up my thoughts:
4e is like getting a meal at a chain restaurant - it might taste good and always be consistent, but it won't have the unique attributes that can be given by a good cook at home. 3.5e is the home-cooked food - it can be good or bad depending on the cook, but the flavors can vary more widely.
4e thus far is alost cookie-cutter in character generation. All first level characters of a particular class are practically identical. Skill-wize, almost anyone of a given level is identical. At least with the old skills system you could have, say, a specialist in something like knowledge(cartogaphy) or other random skill and were utterly clueless when it came to other skills. This actually came up in a campaign a while back - the party needed to figure out where we were going and make a map, and my wife's character had ranks in knowledge(cartography). This almost dumbfounded the DM, who had not expected that, and the map was created much easier than he expected.
Also, I can't see any reason why a 4e 10th lvl wizard should be better than a lower-level trained fighter at athletic skills. Tying everything to level is just power inflation. Characters with weaknesses are the most fun to play, and no one should be uber at everything.
Reminds me of a story I heard recently where someone here was trying to purchase a firearm but they needed two forms of ID. They only had a drivers license. The solution? Walking across the store to the fishing department counter and buying a fishing license, which was acceptable as secondary ID back at the gun counter.
I don't remember when I first registered exactly, but I held off because I never really posted much. Still don't, really. Once the days of being able to get through a whole comment page without straining my old 486 were over I had to get an account to filter the comments pages.
Yes, I still used a 486 then as my desktop, and I didn't finally replace it until 2003.
The only person I've ever seen wear a pocket protector is my dad, and he's a retired auto mechanic. It made sense for him since he kept small tools in his shirt pocket, and they often were greasy.
He's very non-geek as far as electronics go. He doesn't even know how to operate the microwave. I guess you could consider him a mechanical/engine geek though.
By your logic, a man who doesn't wear a shirt at the beach should be arrested for indecent exposure.
No, it should go the other way. A man won't get arrested for indecent exposure for being topless on the beach, so women should be afforded that as well. Equal protection under the law and all that.
I haven't played Silent Hill, but Silent Hill 2 creeps me right the f@(% out. The sounds you hear in certain parts of the game that sound like footsteps near you, or other weird unnatural sounds are incredibly creepy - even if you KNOW there is nothing there. Playing on "Beginner" mode, where you can't actually die, is still scary from the atmosphere and not the threat of Game Over. The music in Silent Hill 2 (and I imagine the other games in the series, as the music is all done by Akira Yamaoka) can really put you on edge with the scrapey and creaky industrial noises.
There is one room in the apartments near the beginning of the game that has nothing in it, but the music that plays in there is enough to make me want to get out of there as quickly as possible.
The harmless "prisoner" monsters in the jail that you can't actually see (they are just noises coming from outside the camera's view) scared the bejesus out of me and I wasted a few rounds of ammo just to make the sounds go away. Another open area in the jail has noting in it monster-wise, but the intermittent sounds of what appears to be running steps or muffled horse gallops coming from somewhere behind you is freaky. The scariest part of the game isn't really the monsters you have to fight or avoid, it's the whole damn town itself.
Then there is Pyramid Head. He won't die from anything you inflict on him, and all you can do is just hope he will go away.
Acids make good sanitizers. A common sanitizer used by homebrewers called StarSan is primarily phosphoric acid with a foaming agent added. When diluted in water to create a solution with about a pH of 3 it can kill just about anything that matters as far as beer goes (excepting maybe Brettomyces, which is near impossible to get rid of once it infects something).
It's not necessarily always true, though. Yes, D&D characters tend to be heroes, as that's really the point of the game. However, as a counterexample, I've been involved in a campaign for two years where the two main PCs aren't the Conan the Barbarian type. One is a fairly ugly half-elf with a real ego problem and the other one is a dim-witted cleric who loves his god a little too much to the point of making everyone around him think he's a weirdo. Both of them held low rank in the worst company in their country's military for years in game time, and a lot of their "adventures" were doing really crappy jobs for their superiors. Once you put a player through that for a long time, any glimpse at being better than the average Joe Schmoe NPC is an awesome experience. It makes it feel like they really have "paid their dues" and as such their getting stronger is not a result of just killing random monsters for XP.
Granted, this is an unorthodox campaign, heavy on RP and low on combat (although it does happen, and we did once have a combat that covered three sessions as there were 30 soldiers + catapults vs. 50 soldiers across two battlemats in an all-out battle scenario). We don't do XP either, the characters advance by DM fiat when it appears that they have learned enough to progress or when story considerations demand it. They started at level 1 (effectively level 0 as peasants, that level got traded in for a real class), and after 2 years real time they are finally to level 10 and are adventuring on their own. They had a lot of help along the way as there are only two players in the campaign so there are a ton of NPCs that have been effective party members over the two years. Heck, some of the NPCs have as much stake in the story as the PCs and pthe players switch off playing them at times as secondary characters. One of the original PCs died and the player took over playing one of the more interesting NPCs at that point and still uses him as his primary. You know it's a big deal when even the NPCs have their own character sheets and backstories. None of the NPCs are heroes, either, most of them were from the same military unit or in one case was a town guard captain of the dinky town by the military post that got burned to the ground after the combo of a war, orc attacks, and undead rampages took it out. He was kind of a Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry guy who had his whole life thrown upside down and has now become very bitter.
It's a fun, different take on D&D. There are very few monsters involved, and the worst thing the players have had to confront in combat was a human army. They spend more time geting screwed over by politicians and dealing with their own personlity flaws that get them into trouble. Creativity does play a large role in it, as the players actions often determine where the story is going next. We are constrained by the world that the campaign is set in (Forgotten Realms), but that gives a good springboard for story events to occur. Somehow everything, even spontaneous stuff, always manages to mesh with the world as it exists in game materials (even the ones that hadn't come out at the time - that's the weird part, some of the stuff we thought we "invented" for the campaign has shown up in newer FR books, so we're inadvertently keeping canon). Granted all of us know FR pretty well so it would make sense that we'd take it in a similar direction as the game material writers.
Not necessarily. Different strains of brewer's yeast have varying alcohol tolerences; some can survive in a solution that is over 10% alcohol. Champagne yeast is incredibly tolerant and neutral, and is used sometimes to bottle condition high ABV beers.
Be careful with the pizza. Garlic and onions are toxic to dogs in large enough quantity. Probably not a real issue with a huge dog and one slice of pizza, but I believe two whole onions is enough to kill a large dog.
In the campaign I'm running that started over a year ago, the characters started effectively as level 0 (level 1 commoner that was exchanged for a "real" level once they were recruited into the local town guard). Their base stats were better than your average commoner since they were meant to eventually become heroes, and one is actually a lot older than he thinks he is (his memory was magically erased before the start of the campaign timeline). One of the original characters died in a plot incident and his player took over playing a low ranking noble NPC (one with virtually no political power or ambition), and he will eventually become the unwitting key in a god war. However, the players don't know the details of any of that, so they play them as regular joes in mostly regular circumstances since they have never been adventurers and have always been in a military setting.
D&D isn't always about epic battles. They're fun, and something good to build up to eventually, but you can have fun low-level adventures with a lot of RP as well.
I live in Henrico County, VA, the home of the iBook riot. I'd like to do away with this waste of money altogether - there is no reason to burn 6 million dollars of taxpayer money a year to give every student a laptop. Want to use a computer? Buy your own or go to a library, or use a school computer lab. I'm running for Board of Supervisors next year, and I'd like to cut this from the school budget completely.
There's actually other reasons to not eat dogs or cats. I don't even like dogs, and I wouldn't eat one. Supposedly, the meat from vertebrate carnivores isn't particularly tasty, although some people do eat them. Compare herbivore ducks vs. the fish-eating species. The meat from fish-eating ducks tastes pretty vile. In general, the best meat comes from herbivores. Most animals that are still hunted for food (rabbits, deer, squirrels, etc.) are herbivores.
Granted, this doesn't take into account that factory-farm-raised herbivore animals are often fed meal made partially from the unusable scraps of other animals and not just vegetable material, which is where the whole Mad Cow scare came from with cows consuming brain material from infected sheep and cattle.
Back when I was in school, I occasionally would have an incident where someone would pop me in the back of the head with a book or something, but it was usually untargeted violence - I just happened to be a convenient target at the time. In general, I didn't have many issues probably because of several reasons:
I was a top-tier student but was a slacker that didn't flaunt my being a top-tier student and didn't really give a rat's ass about school
I was friends with some black guys who were also friends of some of the toughs (this is in the South, so there was a good deal of black-white animosity that came out in fights occasionally); as a white kid you wouldn't fit in with them but they at least knew you were on the level and not some hateful redneck
I hung out with some average students and some that were borderline psychotic (several would fit the D&D classification of neutral evil, and at least one was very clearly chaotic evil - couldn't trust him with a quarter, but people stayed away from him because he was an unstable wacko); this had the advantage of making me a lesser desirable target since if anyone stood out it was one of them and not me
Didn't do anything to cross the bully types - I was generally friendly with everyone
I still felt like I was in a war zone sometimes, but at least the flak wasn't being targeted specifically at me. Hell, the person who gave me the most beatings was my best friend from 4th grade (not in a "bully" way, more of a "I want to see what he does if I hit him really hard" and it made him look tough since he got picked on more than me), and I still hang out with him whenever I'm back home; I fixed him up good in 5th grade by knocking the snot out of him to get him back and he never tried that again. We still talk about it, and it's actually quite funny to remember back to it. Man, we were some stupid kids back then.
Some school admins were good too, though. One in particular (dead now, sadly) was pretty well respected even by the tough guys since he would be straight with you and not just dole out zero-tolerance BS. He was a really nice guy, but he could be a bulldog if you crossed the line and would scare the crap out of you. Luckily I was never in a position to be on the receiving end of that.
It's really kind of funny in a sad way to see what happened to some of the more evil kids I hung around with for "insurance". Many of them now have rap sheets a mile long and have been in prison. At least one has been in a mental institution.
I used to be apolitical, but got involved in politics a few years ago. I always leaned libertarian anyway, and didn't see what difference it would make. However, if no one does anything, nothing will be accomplished. Even if you can't roll back bad legislation, you can at least stall or bring down bad proposals before they potentially become law. Since then, I have spoken at the state house on issues, and even run as a candidate for said house last year on the LP ticket. I got 27.4% of the vote in the election, which doesn't win the office but it does send a message. Plus, now folks have heard of me, and I'm running for a local office next year.
I do something very similar myself, except with businesses that prohibit lawful open or concealed carry. They don't get my money. Occasionally the same "political" bit comes up in converations as well, but I stand by my boycott. If a business doesn't trust its cuatomers or provides crappy service othwwise they don't deserve the customers' money.
My one exception is movie theaters, as Regal is pretty much the only game in town around here if you want to see a new movie. It's not technically illegal to ignore their prohibition (although they can get you for trespassing if they notice and ask you to leave and you refuse), so I keep it discreet and carry anyway. There really needs to be some theater competition around here that isn't boneheaded since there is no actual choice if you want to avoid Regal. I don't go to movies often, anyway.
I'm a little younger (1978), but one of the greatest toys ever was the old yellow "big hunk of metal" Tonka dump truck. Man, I loved mine. It's sad that they don't make it like they used to anymore. I also had some other metal vehicles including some that had been my dad's toys (born 1943) that were smaller, probably 1:24 scale or so. They had paint chipped and scratched everywhere and dings all over them but they didn't need electronic parts to be fun.
My current favorite toys are Transformers Alternators - they look like real cars with details but go back to one of my favorite toys from 20 years ago, the original Transfomers. The original Transformers are pretty clunky looking in comparison, but I got many an hour out of playing with those.
Does this remind anyome of "aura" in Sim City? You can see a map of the happier and unhappier parts of your city so you can figure out what to build where.
Turkeys can fly, just not well. I've seen turkeys up in the tops of trees and almost had one crash through a windshield once when it decided to fly across the road. Of course, I'm referring to the wild variety.
Slashdot Mirror
Having made a 4e character and played through the combat system, and having played and DMed 3.0/3.5 since it was released, I think this is the best way of summing up my thoughts:
4e is like getting a meal at a chain restaurant - it might taste good and always be consistent, but it won't have the unique attributes that can be given by a good cook at home. 3.5e is the home-cooked food - it can be good or bad depending on the cook, but the flavors can vary more widely.
4e thus far is alost cookie-cutter in character generation. All first level characters of a particular class are practically identical. Skill-wize, almost anyone of a given level is identical. At least with the old skills system you could have, say, a specialist in something like knowledge(cartogaphy) or other random skill and were utterly clueless when it came to other skills. This actually came up in a campaign a while back - the party needed to figure out where we were going and make a map, and my wife's character had ranks in knowledge(cartography). This almost dumbfounded the DM, who had not expected that, and the map was created much easier than he expected.
Also, I can't see any reason why a 4e 10th lvl wizard should be better than a lower-level trained fighter at athletic skills. Tying everything to level is just power inflation. Characters with weaknesses are the most fun to play, and no one should be uber at everything.
"Wrong" and "illegal" are not the same thing.
Reminds me of a story I heard recently where someone here was trying to purchase a firearm but they needed two forms of ID. They only had a drivers license. The solution? Walking across the store to the fishing department counter and buying a fishing license, which was acceptable as secondary ID back at the gun counter.
He's working with Mike Nelson and Bill Corbett on RiffTrax and The Film Crew.
I don't remember when I first registered exactly, but I held off because I never really posted much. Still don't, really. Once the days of being able to get through a whole comment page without straining my old 486 were over I had to get an account to filter the comments pages.
Yes, I still used a 486 then as my desktop, and I didn't finally replace it until 2003.
The only person I've ever seen wear a pocket protector is my dad, and he's a retired auto mechanic. It made sense for him since he kept small tools in his shirt pocket, and they often were greasy.
/engine geek though.
He's very non-geek as far as electronics go. He doesn't even know how to operate the microwave. I guess you could consider him a mechanical
By your logic, a man who doesn't wear a shirt at the beach should be arrested for indecent exposure.
No, it should go the other way. A man won't get arrested for indecent exposure for being topless on the beach, so women should be afforded that as well. Equal protection under the law and all that.
I haven't played Silent Hill, but Silent Hill 2 creeps me right the f@(% out. The sounds you hear in certain parts of the game that sound like footsteps near you, or other weird unnatural sounds are incredibly creepy - even if you KNOW there is nothing there. Playing on "Beginner" mode, where you can't actually die, is still scary from the atmosphere and not the threat of Game Over. The music in Silent Hill 2 (and I imagine the other games in the series, as the music is all done by Akira Yamaoka) can really put you on edge with the scrapey and creaky industrial noises.
There is one room in the apartments near the beginning of the game that has nothing in it, but the music that plays in there is enough to make me want to get out of there as quickly as possible.
The harmless "prisoner" monsters in the jail that you can't actually see (they are just noises coming from outside the camera's view) scared the bejesus out of me and I wasted a few rounds of ammo just to make the sounds go away. Another open area in the jail has noting in it monster-wise, but the intermittent sounds of what appears to be running steps or muffled horse gallops coming from somewhere behind you is freaky. The scariest part of the game isn't really the monsters you have to fight or avoid, it's the whole damn town itself.
Then there is Pyramid Head. He won't die from anything you inflict on him, and all you can do is just hope he will go away.
Acids make good sanitizers. A common sanitizer used by homebrewers called StarSan is primarily phosphoric acid with a foaming agent added. When diluted in water to create a solution with about a pH of 3 it can kill just about anything that matters as far as beer goes (excepting maybe Brettomyces, which is near impossible to get rid of once it infects something).
It's not necessarily always true, though. Yes, D&D characters tend to be heroes, as that's really the point of the game. However, as a counterexample, I've been involved in a campaign for two years where the two main PCs aren't the Conan the Barbarian type. One is a fairly ugly half-elf with a real ego problem and the other one is a dim-witted cleric who loves his god a little too much to the point of making everyone around him think he's a weirdo. Both of them held low rank in the worst company in their country's military for years in game time, and a lot of their "adventures" were doing really crappy jobs for their superiors. Once you put a player through that for a long time, any glimpse at being better than the average Joe Schmoe NPC is an awesome experience. It makes it feel like they really have "paid their dues" and as such their getting stronger is not a result of just killing random monsters for XP.
Granted, this is an unorthodox campaign, heavy on RP and low on combat (although it does happen, and we did once have a combat that covered three sessions as there were 30 soldiers + catapults vs. 50 soldiers across two battlemats in an all-out battle scenario). We don't do XP either, the characters advance by DM fiat when it appears that they have learned enough to progress or when story considerations demand it. They started at level 1 (effectively level 0 as peasants, that level got traded in for a real class), and after 2 years real time they are finally to level 10 and are adventuring on their own. They had a lot of help along the way as there are only two players in the campaign so there are a ton of NPCs that have been effective party members over the two years. Heck, some of the NPCs have as much stake in the story as the PCs and pthe players switch off playing them at times as secondary characters. One of the original PCs died and the player took over playing one of the more interesting NPCs at that point and still uses him as his primary. You know it's a big deal when even the NPCs have their own character sheets and backstories. None of the NPCs are heroes, either, most of them were from the same military unit or in one case was a town guard captain of the dinky town by the military post that got burned to the ground after the combo of a war, orc attacks, and undead rampages took it out. He was kind of a Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry guy who had his whole life thrown upside down and has now become very bitter.
It's a fun, different take on D&D. There are very few monsters involved, and the worst thing the players have had to confront in combat was a human army. They spend more time geting screwed over by politicians and dealing with their own personlity flaws that get them into trouble. Creativity does play a large role in it, as the players actions often determine where the story is going next. We are constrained by the world that the campaign is set in (Forgotten Realms), but that gives a good springboard for story events to occur. Somehow everything, even spontaneous stuff, always manages to mesh with the world as it exists in game materials (even the ones that hadn't come out at the time - that's the weird part, some of the stuff we thought we "invented" for the campaign has shown up in newer FR books, so we're inadvertently keeping canon). Granted all of us know FR pretty well so it would make sense that we'd take it in a similar direction as the game material writers.
Not necessarily. Different strains of brewer's yeast have varying alcohol tolerences; some can survive in a solution that is over 10% alcohol. Champagne yeast is incredibly tolerant and neutral, and is used sometimes to bottle condition high ABV beers.
In fact, I consume a good quantity of it on a regular basis. This is assuming that bottle-conditioned unfiltered beer counts.
Man, live yeast really gives you gas of doom, though.
Be careful with the pizza. Garlic and onions are toxic to dogs in large enough quantity. Probably not a real issue with a huge dog and one slice of pizza, but I believe two whole onions is enough to kill a large dog.
FWIW, the 2nd is the one Amendment that the ACLU doesn't give a rat's ass about, other than wishing it wasn't there.
In the campaign I'm running that started over a year ago, the characters started effectively as level 0 (level 1 commoner that was exchanged for a "real" level once they were recruited into the local town guard). Their base stats were better than your average commoner since they were meant to eventually become heroes, and one is actually a lot older than he thinks he is (his memory was magically erased before the start of the campaign timeline). One of the original characters died in a plot incident and his player took over playing a low ranking noble NPC (one with virtually no political power or ambition), and he will eventually become the unwitting key in a god war. However, the players don't know the details of any of that, so they play them as regular joes in mostly regular circumstances since they have never been adventurers and have always been in a military setting.
D&D isn't always about epic battles. They're fun, and something good to build up to eventually, but you can have fun low-level adventures with a lot of RP as well.
I live in Henrico County, VA, the home of the iBook riot. I'd like to do away with this waste of money altogether - there is no reason to burn 6 million dollars of taxpayer money a year to give every student a laptop. Want to use a computer? Buy your own or go to a library, or use a school computer lab. I'm running for Board of Supervisors next year, and I'd like to cut this from the school budget completely.
There's actually other reasons to not eat dogs or cats. I don't even like dogs, and I wouldn't eat one. Supposedly, the meat from vertebrate carnivores isn't particularly tasty, although some people do eat them. Compare herbivore ducks vs. the fish-eating species. The meat from fish-eating ducks tastes pretty vile. In general, the best meat comes from herbivores. Most animals that are still hunted for food (rabbits, deer, squirrels, etc.) are herbivores.
Granted, this doesn't take into account that factory-farm-raised herbivore animals are often fed meal made partially from the unusable scraps of other animals and not just vegetable material, which is where the whole Mad Cow scare came from with cows consuming brain material from infected sheep and cattle.
Back when I was in school, I occasionally would have an incident where someone would pop me in the back of the head with a book or something, but it was usually untargeted violence - I just happened to be a convenient target at the time. In general, I didn't have many issues probably because of several reasons:
I still felt like I was in a war zone sometimes, but at least the flak wasn't being targeted specifically at me. Hell, the person who gave me the most beatings was my best friend from 4th grade (not in a "bully" way, more of a "I want to see what he does if I hit him really hard" and it made him look tough since he got picked on more than me), and I still hang out with him whenever I'm back home; I fixed him up good in 5th grade by knocking the snot out of him to get him back and he never tried that again. We still talk about it, and it's actually quite funny to remember back to it. Man, we were some stupid kids back then.
Some school admins were good too, though. One in particular (dead now, sadly) was pretty well respected even by the tough guys since he would be straight with you and not just dole out zero-tolerance BS. He was a really nice guy, but he could be a bulldog if you crossed the line and would scare the crap out of you. Luckily I was never in a position to be on the receiving end of that.
It's really kind of funny in a sad way to see what happened to some of the more evil kids I hung around with for "insurance". Many of them now have rap sheets a mile long and have been in prison. At least one has been in a mental institution.
Generation 2 Laser Prime had an extended front in vehicle mode.
I used to be apolitical, but got involved in politics a few years ago. I always leaned libertarian anyway, and didn't see what difference it would make. However, if no one does anything, nothing will be accomplished. Even if you can't roll back bad legislation, you can at least stall or bring down bad proposals before they potentially become law. Since then, I have spoken at the state house on issues, and even run as a candidate for said house last year on the LP ticket. I got 27.4% of the vote in the election, which doesn't win the office but it does send a message. Plus, now folks have heard of me, and I'm running for a local office next year.
I do something very similar myself, except with businesses that prohibit lawful open or concealed carry. They don't get my money. Occasionally the same "political" bit comes up in converations as well, but I stand by my boycott. If a business doesn't trust its cuatomers or provides crappy service othwwise they don't deserve the customers' money.
My one exception is movie theaters, as Regal is pretty much the only game in town around here if you want to see a new movie. It's not technically illegal to ignore their prohibition (although they can get you for trespassing if they notice and ask you to leave and you refuse), so I keep it discreet and carry anyway. There really needs to be some theater competition around here that isn't boneheaded since there is no actual choice if you want to avoid Regal. I don't go to movies often, anyway.
I'm a little younger (1978), but one of the greatest toys ever was the old yellow "big hunk of metal" Tonka dump truck. Man, I loved mine. It's sad that they don't make it like they used to anymore. I also had some other metal vehicles including some that had been my dad's toys (born 1943) that were smaller, probably 1:24 scale or so. They had paint chipped and scratched everywhere and dings all over them but they didn't need electronic parts to be fun.
My current favorite toys are Transformers Alternators - they look like real cars with details but go back to one of my favorite toys from 20 years ago, the original Transfomers. The original Transformers are pretty clunky looking in comparison, but I got many an hour out of playing with those.
Does this remind anyome of "aura" in Sim City? You can see a map of the happier and unhappier parts of your city so you can figure out what to build where.
Is an octopius a pope with 8 heads?
Turkeys can fly, just not well. I've seen turkeys up in the tops of trees and almost had one crash through a windshield once when it decided to fly across the road. Of course, I'm referring to the wild variety.