Does this mean it will become trendy among New England yuppie suburbanites to have a personal site that was "hand crafted by local Amish webmasters?":)
I once read that the Amish (or one sect of them anyway) were allowed to "opt out" of social security. They agreed to commit to never collect Social Security, in exchange for not having to pay into it.
Kind of makes me want to start my own cult... with no religious dogma in common among the members, other than the firm belief that participating in Social Security is horribly, horribly sinful, so opting out is an expression of religious freedom.:)
The answer to that is obvious: The parent post was completely incorrect. Social Security is not, and never was, and anti-poverty program. If you are a multi-millionare, you still collect "your" Social Security benefits when you get old enough. If you are trying to get by on a minimum-wage job as a grocery bagger, you still pay into it for most of your adult life. If anything, it's a program which promotes poverty.
The meme that Social Security can be described as a Ponzi scheme appears to originate from an article written by P.J. O'Rourke for Rolling Stone in 1999, when congress was passing an act to preserve Social Security. You can read it here.
Four years later, it's still the best article I've ever read on the topic.
True, although all the X-Box Live games suck, except maybe Mechwarrior.
Were it not for HALO, DOA3 and DOAX, my X-Box would already be in my server closet running apache right now. In fact, I'm considering buying a second X-Box for just that... and maybe even a third one for a stand-alone firewall box. I've seen used X-Boxen around town for about $150 each. Thanks to the 007 hack which saves the trouble of mod-chipping, it's the best deal out there for a lightweight server.
More accurately, dd sounds like "the" (with a silent e, as in "lathe"), not "th" as in "bath." You need to vocalize slightly as you pronounce it.
That kind of reminds me: Re-watching the season 1 "Angel" DVD's there was a great bit where the character Doyle had to read a spell that was in latin, but didn't know how to speak it. Angel, in a hurry to explain it, simply said "v sounds like w and say all the vowels." Not bad for a 1-second lesson in latin enunciation.
Steering back on topic... When I play RPG's I like to steal character names from anime, but only if I'm one of the first people in the game, because "ruri" is about as in-demand as "mister black" was in "Resevior Dogs."
My back-up choice is to name my characters after Foreign players in the NBA. I never get a name conflict when I call my warriors "Rasho Nesterovic," and it sounds nice and bad-assed. Game moderators never call me on it, either, because anybody who spends his days enforcing naming conventions probably doesn't follow a lot of sports, and has no idea who Rasho is IRL.
I (and the late Carl Sagan) would argue that any civilzation advanced much beyond our own would have to also be more peaceful, otherwise they simply wouldn't have made it that far.
Yea, that Pierce Brosnon character from "Mars Attacks" thinks so to. The problem with that theory becoming more peaceful is not the only way, or even the most effective way, for a species to thrive and advance.
As for the mod who slapped "Troll" on my post... I guess it just goes to show that humor is still utterly wasted on many who hold moderation privileges.
By the way, SETI LISTENS for radio broadcasts, it doesn't send them!
SETI is currently only in listen mode, but I was always told that broadcasting was also part of the project. After all, it's hard to get a pong if you don't ping. What if the hyper-intelligent beings near Proxima are also listening without sending, while we do the same as the centuries go by, not hearing from each other?
I think it's probably humanity's worst idea since the atomic bomb.
Here is what SETI is: We are broadcasting a signal all over space, shouting to whoever might be out there, "over here is a livable planet, rich in natural resources and populated by a primitive indigenous species which can barely manage to send you a radio signal. Please come conquer us. We might even taste good!"
Given the near-universal nature of all evolved life to compete for survival and prosperity, while valuing other species less than its own, if there is nobody out there to hear the signal, I would call that a best-case scenario.
Paladins, IMC (and, AFAIK, in the games at WotC) can run away, sneak around, hoard wealth for powerful weapons and armor, set ambushes, and wait for reinforcements before charging into battle.
I just peeked at the player handbook. From the code itself (comments in italics added by me):
"Additionally, a paladin's code requires that she respect local authority (which obviously would include paying all tithes and taxes,) act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, etc.), help those who need help (oops, I guess you can't wait for reinforcements, if they won't get here in time to save the princess) (provided they do not use the help for evil or chaotic ends), and punish those that harm or threaten innocents. (Note: nothing there about punishing those who harm or threaten innocents who you think you can handle. If an evil 40 HD death-god kicks a helpless child down a well, guess who you are honor-bound to punish? Good luck recruiting others to help you attack them.)
Even in 2nd Edition, when Paladins were considerably tougher than the fighters in many ways, they had a tougher time surviving in the big, bad world than your garden-variety fighter... and that's as it should be. They walk a path of sacrifice, serving the greater good before their own interests. However, older versions of D&D rewarded such faithfulness with divine power that set them apart. Now they feature the same divine power, but must not only stay on the straight-and-narrow, but pass on all those extra feats they would be getting if they were leveling as fighters.
In fact, at least under 3.0, it makes a lot of sense for a half-elf or human who's not interested in mounted combat to just pick up three levels of Paladin, and take fighter levels from then on. They don't get spells or undead turning that way, but they get most of the really impressive paladin powers, plus they can pick up weapon specialization (which is not available to the paladin.)
Handy for spotting the spy in the royal court. When crawling through catacombs filled with undead... you can pretty much assume all the zombies, mummies, vampires, etc., are evil. Also, while "detect evil" helps a Paladin maintain his moral codes, it has no real combat value to a neutral or evil fighter, who attacks based on situations, rather than the aura of an encounter's karma.
* Gets at least a +2 to all saves
Very handy.
* Can heal at least 24 hp per day
When you consider that a cleric at that level can heal 20d8+178 from cure spells alone, plus Healing Circle three times and Heal twice (all assuming that the domain spells are not healing spells, too,) those 24 points are not much.
Also, since a warrior will have put his second-best stat into Constitution, while a Paladin would have put it in Charisma, there's a good chance that the fighter has 24 HP more than the Paladin at level 12.
* Is immune to all diseases
Something which comes up maybe once per campaign at most in the vast majority of games I've witnessed.
* Is immune to magical fear
Ah-ha! This is a perfect example of why paladins die faster. The party encounters an ancient black dragon holding the princess hostage. Everybody except the Paladin flees in terror due to the magical fear. Now the immune-to-fear paladin is facing the dragon alone, and is honor-bound to try to save the princess anyway, even though he's got a snowball's chance in hell of survival. This is why I was saying the paladin's meager advantages do not really offset the rigid code of ethics that a good role-playing paladin will likely follow.
* Can smite evil once per day, at least +2 to attack and +12 to damage.
Uh-huh. Meanwhile, the fighter's pile-o-feats allow things like Weapon Specialization and Greater Cleave, which are available, not just once a day, and can be used against any opponent, not just those deemed by the powers-that-be to be "evil."
* Can remove disease 4 times a week
See above: Doesn't come up much. Even if it does, all this "power" means is that it saves the clerics the trouble of having Cure Disease spells ready.
* Can turn undead at 9th level
As a cleric of two levels lower, meaning that any time you encounter an undead being who is strong enough to be an actual threat to the party, your turning ability will be no help whatsoever.
Now consider the warrior, who by now could have, in addition to the usuall feat-per-three-levels they share with Paladins, can do something like the following:
Weapon Focus (+1 to hit) Weapon Specialization (+2 damage) Expertise (great for when you care more about staying alive than dishing out pain) Dodge (+1 AC) Power Attack, Cleve, Great Cleave. (Mulch through them monsters!)
If a DM stretches the paladin's code to require giving away wealth or bar discretion in combat, then he's got a bias against paladins (or he's stick in 2nd edition.) They essentially just need to be Lawful Good, emphasis on the Good. Paladins, IMC (and, AFAIK, in the games at WotC) can run away, sneak around, hoard wealth for powerful weapons and armor, set ambushes, and wait for reinforcements before charging into battle. (Plus, even if the Paladin's code bans sneaking around or setting an ambush, only "gross violations" have any ill effect--and a 9th level cleric can clear up the ill effect.)
Sure, with careful rules-lawering, you can have a Paladin who acts pretty much the same as any Good-aligned fighter... but then why bother having Paladins? The whole point of the character, from an RPG perspective, is that they are Holy Protectors, beacons of nobility, truth, virtue, and purity. Play them as a mere fighter/cleric hybrid, and you might as well throw your D&D books away and log on to EverQuest.
You're ignoring the stuff in the middle. What's the chance of rolling an 11 on a d20? 5%. What's the chance of rolling 11 on 3d6? One in twelve. Significantly higher.
I'm not ignoring it, it's just that in d20, where damage is rolled separately, it doesn't matter. What's the chance of rolling 11 or better on d20? 45%. What's the chance of rolling 11 or better on 3d6? Somewhere just under 50%.
Bell-curve distributions can make some things a little more predictable, but if you don't like randomness and the unexpected, why use dice? Just assume you score 10 every time. (By the way, that's an option for many of the skill rolls in 3rd Ed. It's called "taking ten," and it's a way to guarantee modest success in situations where you are doing something that your character finds relatively easy.)
or that the darn bard is a spellcaster, not a front-line fighter?
Yes, I do realize that the bard is a spellcaster. He's not a very effective one, but he is a spell-caster.
ut of the sorceror's seven class skills in 3.0, three are used in spellcasting (Concentration, Scry, Spellcraft), two are general skills (Craft & Profession), and two are "all magic-users get these" (Knowledge (arcana) and Alchemy.)
In other words, skills that would require intellectual rigor and study to master, which were not supposed to be what a sorcerer is all about. Researching ancient tomes, studying history, and struggling to comprehend the very nature of magic itself is what wizzards do. The Sorcerer in D&D summons magic from his own essence, "blood of dragons" and all that. They are charisma-based spell casters, without the jack-of-all-trades inquisitiveness found in bards. Doesn't it make sense that their skills would reflect, not a life of booklearnin' (knowledge skills, spellcraft, alchemy) but a life of relying on force of personality? Skills such as diplomacy make much more sense. The king-maker sorcerer is something you can build an interesting campaign around. With the current skill-set, sorcerers do pretty much the same things as wizards, only not as well (because they are not likely to be as intelligent).
A 3e Paladin with the 2e minimum stats has a better save bonus mechanic, can lay on hands for more hp each day, gets spellcasting five levels earlier, and has a shiney new Smite Evil ability.
Comparing the Pally to the 2nd Ed version is not really all that valid. Almost all of the characters from second edition have been munchkined up, stat-wise. But compare a level 12 paladin to a level 12 fighter, and the problem becomes obvious. Yes, the paladin can heal a little, turn undead a little, do some priest stuff, and has that fancy Smite ability... but stack it up against the 7 additional feats that the fighter of the same level will have acquired at that point, and the paladin benefits are no longer much of an edge. Paladins have that code of honor which under a strict DM makes them "first to the field" in a crisis while fighters have more latitude about choosing how and wen to fight; avoiding sneaky tactics, when fighters will gladly raid that cove of sleeping brigands; giving a lot of their wealth away while the fighters shop for better armor and weapons. These restrictions should be rewarded with a knight who is the epitome of excellence, not a weaker fighter who also casts a few spells.
A brief comparison of a typical 1evel 14 bard against a level 14 monk, rogue, or fighter will show you just how radically out-of-balance the classes are. Sure, the bard can raise the spirits of an army on the eve of battle... how often does that come up in a 6-player dungeon crawl?
Also, the sorcerer, while a good idea, was not very well thought-out. If sorcerers are natural users of magic, and do not rely on studying, then why are all of their class skills academic and intelligence-based?
Paladins, once the shining heroes of the old AD&D game, now have the life expectancy of a fruit-fly in most of the campaigns I've either played in or watched.
So no, it's not a very balanced game system. A good DM, along with the right mix of players (no munchkins or rules lawyers,) can make it so, but that's true of any game system.
Bah. I don't need a.5 release to fix what's wrong with 3.0. Here goes:
1. Allow skewed flanking (the three squares opposite you are all considered flanks.)
2. Cut the XP rewards to about one-fifth where they are in 3rd Ed. It's supposed to be D&D, not NWN.
3. Allow magic bows to penetrate DR just as well as magic arrows.
4. Give the sorcerer some charisma-based skills.
5. Increase the Bard's skill points, and come up with some more interesting song effects at high levels.
6. Burn all the munchkin books, and play out of the core rules only.
7. Create a "Combat Aim" feat, similar to Combat Casting, to allow the use of ranged weapons without provoking attacks of opportunity, at a -4 penalty to hit.
8. Pull out the old 2nd Edition Legends and Lore book, and re-introduce "granted powers" to clerics who dedicate themselves to a specific god, perhaps at the cost of other feats. It was a feature of 2nd Edition that made clerics a lot more colorful and interesting.
9. The moment a player in your campaign pursues a "prestige class," beat them senseless.
I love GURPS, but you are exaggerating the importance of the bell curve. Rolling a 3 is a critical failure, rolling an 18 is a critical success... the odds for each of these is, what? About 3.5%? (I don't feel like calculating it at the moment). With the d20 system, 1 is a critical failure, and 20 is a critical success. Chance for each of those rolls? 5%. Slightly higher, but not enough to completely destroy the game balance.
The d20 system was carefully weighted so that you have about a 50% chance of doing almost everything. As your "combat modifier" goes up, so does the AC of the monsters you face. It actually works fairly well.
Where GURPS really kicks ass all over d20 is the character point system, complete with advantages and disadvantages. In D&D 3, there are a lot of skills (tracking) which are classified as "feats," with little rhyme or reason beyond the desire to shoe-horn the old D&D class models into their new system. It's still not quite as nice as the skills & advantages model of GURPS.
When 3rd Edition first came out, one reviewer praised it for "finally dragging D&D, kicking and screaming, into the 1980s." That was probably the best summary of d20 I've heard to date.
The most startling change in 3rd Edition is that they moved to a square grid instead of hex (allowing for 8 attackers to surround you instead of 6,) and to be considered "flanking" in your attack, you must be in the square exactly opposite another attacker (in other words, right and left flanks functionally no longer exist.) Also, when you stand on opposite sides of an enemy from an ally, you are both considered to be making a flanking attack.
This didn't seem like such a strange idea, until we started using miniatures, and almost every battle eventually turned into "The Melee Conga Line" as a result of player characters and NPC's all shifting to flank each other for the +2 bonus (or +4, if you took the Improved Teamwork feat.)
I just figured they knew they could afford to sell the original core books at a low, almost break-even point, because they stood to make a fortune on the $25 pamphlets known as the expansion books, some of which contained content which probably should have been in the core rules, others of which contained "munchkin" enhancements that foolish players would snap up for the purpose of making their characters more '1337.
Personally, after playing 3.0 a whole bunch, and seeing this review, I'm not inclined to spend another penny on D&D for now. I'll still join in games with friends... After all, you can have fun with any RPG system, but I think I'll be going back to GURPS whenever I GM again.
Funny you should say that. A halfling barbarian was the first d20 character I played when 3rd Ed. came out. He rode around on a dogsled and mostly used throwing-axes and a warhammer... Then retired to a life of agriculture after hitting about 6th level (which took no time at all under the über-munchkin rules of 3rd Edition.)
MMORPGs have bleed into D&D a little too much. We old-school gamers found ourselves nerfing the hell out of the XP pay-offs, because we were finding that our characters were ascending to god-like high levels before we even managed to establish a story arc for them.
Cracking WEP encryption is something that can be done in the privacy of your own home.
Really? I'll tell you what. I live in Bloomington, MN and have an encrypted 802.11b network with a range of about 150 feet (actually a little smaller because it's indoors) in a single-dwelling home with a yard that goes beyond the practical range of my antenna. The hardware address is 0cdea8. Why don't you try to hack it "from the privacy of your own home," and let me know how that goes for you.
Humour aside, probabky won't be long before we have spam wagons. Spammers in converted trucks crusing the highways to find wireless access points for spamming.
That would be awesome! It would mean that once in a while, an actual spammer would be parked out in front of my house, so they would be in close enough proximity for me to run out and beat the living shit out of them.
Please spammers, I'm begging you. Try this tactic.
I don't know if you are trolling, or have simply been in a cave for the last 10 years, but I'll explain it to you anyway. Here is how electronic sound cancellation works:
Sound is a wave of pressure variations in the air. If you play an identical sound wave which is exactly one-half of a wave-length off from the original wave, they cancel one another out, and result in constant pressure. Illustrating with ASCII graphics (hopefully the lameness filter will allow this...)
-^-v-^-v would be the original wave, -v-^-v-^ would be the cancellation wave, and therefore ------ would be the result.
You can buy headphones that do this from several manufacturers, and if you are riding on a jet or in a noisy room they work fantastically well at shutting out the din. Even noise that you barely notice, like the air rushing from your furnace/AC vent in your house can be cancelled by this technology, creating an almost eerie quiet, apart from the sounds which are not sustained noise. If you live near an Apple Store, they usually have at least one set of headphones like this on display by their iPods, otherwise just go to any "yuppie" stereo store and they probably have a floor model to show off to you.
Uh, no, gas is $1.60-1.90 / gallon and clean water comes out of the sink.
Quite correct. In almost every city in America, clean drinking water is available from your city water tank almost for free.
The reason bottled water is so expensive in the US is because almost nobody pays for ordinary drinking water unless their local supply was contaminated by a flood or something.
At local convenience stores, you can buy distilled water such as Aquafina (bottled by the Coca-cola company) for about a dollar for 20 ounces or imported mineral water like Evian for about the same price. When an American says "bottled water," they are usually talking about that sort of thing... And yes, it is more expensive than gasoline. Drinking bottled water is looked upon by many Americans with a certain amount of scorn for lack of thrift, and perhaps a little bit of class-envy.
Some people in some parts of the US buy distilled water out of fears about chlorides or other additives in the municipal water (for a humorous reference, watch the movie "Dr. Strangelove,") but most Americans just drink what comes out of their tap, leaving very little demand for $0.25 gallon jugs of water from the store.
Use a VIA EDEN 5000 and a 60 Watt DC-DC power supply... get that with attractive case for $160/each...
Dang. Now you've got me thinking of actually doing a project like this. Even after figuring in the cost of the server, some old monitors, and the network, we're talking about putting up MP3 stations the living room, rec room, bedroom, garage, and maybe one bathroom, all for under $2000.
Do any of the Linux audio players support AAC yet? If not, I've got a lot of stuff I would need to re-rip to either MP3 or ogg vorbis before going that route.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean it will become trendy among New England yuppie suburbanites to have a personal site that was "hand crafted by local Amish webmasters?" :)
Kind of makes me want to start my own cult... with no religious dogma in common among the members, other than the firm belief that participating in Social Security is horribly, horribly sinful, so opting out is an expression of religious freedom. :)
The actual O'Rourke column can be read in its entirety here, among other places.
The meme that Social Security can be described as a Ponzi scheme appears to originate from an article written by P.J. O'Rourke for Rolling Stone in 1999, when congress was passing an act to preserve Social Security. You can read it here.
Four years later, it's still the best article I've ever read on the topic.
Were it not for HALO, DOA3 and DOAX, my X-Box would already be in my server closet running apache right now. In fact, I'm considering buying a second X-Box for just that... and maybe even a third one for a stand-alone firewall box. I've seen used X-Boxen around town for about $150 each. Thanks to the 007 hack which saves the trouble of mod-chipping, it's the best deal out there for a lightweight server.
That kind of reminds me: Re-watching the season 1 "Angel" DVD's there was a great bit where the character Doyle had to read a spell that was in latin, but didn't know how to speak it. Angel, in a hurry to explain it, simply said "v sounds like w and say all the vowels." Not bad for a 1-second lesson in latin enunciation.
Steering back on topic... When I play RPG's I like to steal character names from anime, but only if I'm one of the first people in the game, because "ruri" is about as in-demand as "mister black" was in "Resevior Dogs."
My back-up choice is to name my characters after Foreign players in the NBA. I never get a name conflict when I call my warriors "Rasho Nesterovic," and it sounds nice and bad-assed. Game moderators never call me on it, either, because anybody who spends his days enforcing naming conventions probably doesn't follow a lot of sports, and has no idea who Rasho is IRL.
Yea, that Pierce Brosnon character from "Mars Attacks" thinks so to. The problem with that theory becoming more peaceful is not the only way, or even the most effective way, for a species to thrive and advance.
As for the mod who slapped "Troll" on my post... I guess it just goes to show that humor is still utterly wasted on many who hold moderation privileges.
By the way, SETI LISTENS for radio broadcasts, it doesn't send them!
SETI is currently only in listen mode, but I was always told that broadcasting was also part of the project. After all, it's hard to get a pong if you don't ping. What if the hyper-intelligent beings near Proxima are also listening without sending, while we do the same as the centuries go by, not hearing from each other?
I think it's probably humanity's worst idea since the atomic bomb.
Here is what SETI is: We are broadcasting a signal all over space, shouting to whoever might be out there, "over here is a livable planet, rich in natural resources and populated by a primitive indigenous species which can barely manage to send you a radio signal. Please come conquer us. We might even taste good!"
Given the near-universal nature of all evolved life to compete for survival and prosperity, while valuing other species less than its own, if there is nobody out there to hear the signal, I would call that a best-case scenario.
Paladins, IMC (and, AFAIK, in the games at WotC) can run away, sneak around, hoard wealth for powerful weapons and armor, set ambushes, and wait for reinforcements before charging into battle.
I just peeked at the player handbook. From the code itself (comments in italics added by me):
"Additionally, a paladin's code requires that she respect local authority (which obviously would include paying all tithes and taxes,) act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, etc.), help those who need help (oops, I guess you can't wait for reinforcements, if they won't get here in time to save the princess) (provided they do not use the help for evil or chaotic ends), and punish those that harm or threaten innocents. (Note: nothing there about punishing those who harm or threaten innocents who you think you can handle. If an evil 40 HD death-god kicks a helpless child down a well, guess who you are honor-bound to punish? Good luck recruiting others to help you attack them.)
Even in 2nd Edition, when Paladins were considerably tougher than the fighters in many ways, they had a tougher time surviving in the big, bad world than your garden-variety fighter... and that's as it should be. They walk a path of sacrifice, serving the greater good before their own interests. However, older versions of D&D rewarded such faithfulness with divine power that set them apart. Now they feature the same divine power, but must not only stay on the straight-and-narrow, but pass on all those extra feats they would be getting if they were leveling as fighters.
In fact, at least under 3.0, it makes a lot of sense for a half-elf or human who's not interested in mounted combat to just pick up three levels of Paladin, and take fighter levels from then on. They don't get spells or undead turning that way, but they get most of the really impressive paladin powers, plus they can pick up weapon specialization (which is not available to the paladin.)
Handy for spotting the spy in the royal court. When crawling through catacombs filled with undead... you can pretty much assume all the zombies, mummies, vampires, etc., are evil. Also, while "detect evil" helps a Paladin maintain his moral codes, it has no real combat value to a neutral or evil fighter, who attacks based on situations, rather than the aura of an encounter's karma.
* Gets at least a +2 to all saves
Very handy.
* Can heal at least 24 hp per day
When you consider that a cleric at that level can heal 20d8+178 from cure spells alone, plus Healing Circle three times and Heal twice (all assuming that the domain spells are not healing spells, too,) those 24 points are not much.
Also, since a warrior will have put his second-best stat into Constitution, while a Paladin would have put it in Charisma, there's a good chance that the fighter has 24 HP more than the Paladin at level 12.
* Is immune to all diseases
Something which comes up maybe once per campaign at most in the vast majority of games I've witnessed.
* Is immune to magical fear
Ah-ha! This is a perfect example of why paladins die faster. The party encounters an ancient black dragon holding the princess hostage. Everybody except the Paladin flees in terror due to the magical fear. Now the immune-to-fear paladin is facing the dragon alone, and is honor-bound to try to save the princess anyway, even though he's got a snowball's chance in hell of survival. This is why I was saying the paladin's meager advantages do not really offset the rigid code of ethics that a good role-playing paladin will likely follow.
* Can smite evil once per day, at least +2 to attack and +12 to damage.
Uh-huh. Meanwhile, the fighter's pile-o-feats allow things like Weapon Specialization and Greater Cleave, which are available, not just once a day, and can be used against any opponent, not just those deemed by the powers-that-be to be "evil."
* Can remove disease 4 times a week
See above: Doesn't come up much. Even if it does, all this "power" means is that it saves the clerics the trouble of having Cure Disease spells ready.
* Can turn undead at 9th level
As a cleric of two levels lower, meaning that any time you encounter an undead being who is strong enough to be an actual threat to the party, your turning ability will be no help whatsoever.
Now consider the warrior, who by now could have, in addition to the usuall feat-per-three-levels they share with Paladins, can do something like the following:
Weapon Focus (+1 to hit)
Weapon Specialization (+2 damage)
Expertise (great for when you care more about staying alive than dishing out pain)
Dodge (+1 AC)
Power Attack, Cleve, Great Cleave. (Mulch through them monsters!)
If a DM stretches the paladin's code to require giving away wealth or bar discretion in combat, then he's got a bias against paladins (or he's stick in 2nd edition.) They essentially just need to be Lawful Good, emphasis on the Good. Paladins, IMC (and, AFAIK, in the games at WotC) can run away, sneak around, hoard wealth for powerful weapons and armor, set ambushes, and wait for reinforcements before charging into battle. (Plus, even if the Paladin's code bans sneaking around or setting an ambush, only "gross violations" have any ill effect--and a 9th level cleric can clear up the ill effect.)
Sure, with careful rules-lawering, you can have a Paladin who acts pretty much the same as any Good-aligned fighter... but then why bother having Paladins? The whole point of the character, from an RPG perspective, is that they are Holy Protectors, beacons of nobility, truth, virtue, and purity. Play them as a mere fighter/cleric hybrid, and you might as well throw your D&D books away and log on to EverQuest.
I'm not ignoring it, it's just that in d20, where damage is rolled separately, it doesn't matter. What's the chance of rolling 11 or better on d20? 45%. What's the chance of rolling 11 or better on 3d6? Somewhere just under 50%.
Bell-curve distributions can make some things a little more predictable, but if you don't like randomness and the unexpected, why use dice? Just assume you score 10 every time. (By the way, that's an option for many of the skill rolls in 3rd Ed. It's called "taking ten," and it's a way to guarantee modest success in situations where you are doing something that your character finds relatively easy.)
Yes, I do realize that the bard is a spellcaster. He's not a very effective one, but he is a spell-caster.
ut of the sorceror's seven class skills in 3.0, three are used in spellcasting (Concentration, Scry, Spellcraft), two are general skills (Craft & Profession), and two are "all magic-users get these" (Knowledge (arcana) and Alchemy.)
In other words, skills that would require intellectual rigor and study to master, which were not supposed to be what a sorcerer is all about. Researching ancient tomes, studying history, and struggling to comprehend the very nature of magic itself is what wizzards do. The Sorcerer in D&D summons magic from his own essence, "blood of dragons" and all that. They are charisma-based spell casters, without the jack-of-all-trades inquisitiveness found in bards. Doesn't it make sense that their skills would reflect, not a life of booklearnin' (knowledge skills, spellcraft, alchemy) but a life of relying on force of personality? Skills such as diplomacy make much more sense. The king-maker sorcerer is something you can build an interesting campaign around. With the current skill-set, sorcerers do pretty much the same things as wizards, only not as well (because they are not likely to be as intelligent).
A 3e Paladin with the 2e minimum stats has a better save bonus mechanic, can lay on hands for more hp each day, gets spellcasting five levels earlier, and has a shiney new Smite Evil ability.
Comparing the Pally to the 2nd Ed version is not really all that valid. Almost all of the characters from second edition have been munchkined up, stat-wise. But compare a level 12 paladin to a level 12 fighter, and the problem becomes obvious. Yes, the paladin can heal a little, turn undead a little, do some priest stuff, and has that fancy Smite ability... but stack it up against the 7 additional feats that the fighter of the same level will have acquired at that point, and the paladin benefits are no longer much of an edge. Paladins have that code of honor which under a strict DM makes them "first to the field" in a crisis while fighters have more latitude about choosing how and wen to fight; avoiding sneaky tactics, when fighters will gladly raid that cove of sleeping brigands; giving a lot of their wealth away while the fighters shop for better armor and weapons. These restrictions should be rewarded with a knight who is the epitome of excellence, not a weaker fighter who also casts a few spells.
Also, the sorcerer, while a good idea, was not very well thought-out. If sorcerers are natural users of magic, and do not rely on studying, then why are all of their class skills academic and intelligence-based?
Paladins, once the shining heroes of the old AD&D game, now have the life expectancy of a fruit-fly in most of the campaigns I've either played in or watched.
So no, it's not a very balanced game system. A good DM, along with the right mix of players (no munchkins or rules lawyers,) can make it so, but that's true of any game system.
1. Allow skewed flanking (the three squares opposite you are all considered flanks.)
2. Cut the XP rewards to about one-fifth where they are in 3rd Ed. It's supposed to be D&D, not NWN.
3. Allow magic bows to penetrate DR just as well as magic arrows.
4. Give the sorcerer some charisma-based skills.
5. Increase the Bard's skill points, and come up with some more interesting song effects at high levels.
6. Burn all the munchkin books, and play out of the core rules only.
7. Create a "Combat Aim" feat, similar to Combat Casting, to allow the use of ranged weapons without provoking attacks of opportunity, at a -4 penalty to hit.
8. Pull out the old 2nd Edition Legends and Lore book, and re-introduce "granted powers" to clerics who dedicate themselves to a specific god, perhaps at the cost of other feats. It was a feature of 2nd Edition that made clerics a lot more colorful and interesting.
9. The moment a player in your campaign pursues a "prestige class," beat them senseless.
The d20 system was carefully weighted so that you have about a 50% chance of doing almost everything. As your "combat modifier" goes up, so does the AC of the monsters you face. It actually works fairly well.
Where GURPS really kicks ass all over d20 is the character point system, complete with advantages and disadvantages. In D&D 3, there are a lot of skills (tracking) which are classified as "feats," with little rhyme or reason beyond the desire to shoe-horn the old D&D class models into their new system. It's still not quite as nice as the skills & advantages model of GURPS.
When 3rd Edition first came out, one reviewer praised it for "finally dragging D&D, kicking and screaming, into the 1980s." That was probably the best summary of d20 I've heard to date.
This didn't seem like such a strange idea, until we started using miniatures, and almost every battle eventually turned into "The Melee Conga Line" as a result of player characters and NPC's all shifting to flank each other for the +2 bonus (or +4, if you took the Improved Teamwork feat.)
Personally, after playing 3.0 a whole bunch, and seeing this review, I'm not inclined to spend another penny on D&D for now. I'll still join in games with friends... After all, you can have fun with any RPG system, but I think I'll be going back to GURPS whenever I GM again.
I think you meant to say "contract" killer. Unless Jack is a poison which is absorbed by the skin.
MMORPGs have bleed into D&D a little too much. We old-school gamers found ourselves nerfing the hell out of the XP pay-offs, because we were finding that our characters were ascending to god-like high levels before we even managed to establish a story arc for them.
Really? I'll tell you what. I live in Bloomington, MN and have an encrypted 802.11b network with a range of about 150 feet (actually a little smaller because it's indoors) in a single-dwelling home with a yard that goes beyond the practical range of my antenna. The hardware address is 0cdea8. Why don't you try to hack it "from the privacy of your own home," and let me know how that goes for you.
That would be awesome! It would mean that once in a while, an actual spammer would be parked out in front of my house, so they would be in close enough proximity for me to run out and beat the living shit out of them.
Please spammers, I'm begging you. Try this tactic.
Yes, and inverted wave is a more correct way to describe it, because not all sounds are nice and symmetrical. Thank you for the clarification, AC.
Sound is a wave of pressure variations in the air. If you play an identical sound wave which is exactly one-half of a wave-length off from the original wave, they cancel one another out, and result in constant pressure. Illustrating with ASCII graphics (hopefully the lameness filter will allow this...)
-^-v-^-v would be the original wave,
-v-^-v-^ would be the cancellation wave, and therefore
------ would be the result.
You can buy headphones that do this from several manufacturers, and if you are riding on a jet or in a noisy room they work fantastically well at shutting out the din. Even noise that you barely notice, like the air rushing from your furnace/AC vent in your house can be cancelled by this technology, creating an almost eerie quiet, apart from the sounds which are not sustained noise. If you live near an Apple Store, they usually have at least one set of headphones like this on display by their iPods, otherwise just go to any "yuppie" stereo store and they probably have a floor model to show off to you.
Quite correct. In almost every city in America, clean drinking water is available from your city water tank almost for free.
The reason bottled water is so expensive in the US is because almost nobody pays for ordinary drinking water unless their local supply was contaminated by a flood or something.
At local convenience stores, you can buy distilled water such as Aquafina (bottled by the Coca-cola company) for about a dollar for 20 ounces or imported mineral water like Evian for about the same price. When an American says "bottled water," they are usually talking about that sort of thing... And yes, it is more expensive than gasoline. Drinking bottled water is looked upon by many Americans with a certain amount of scorn for lack of thrift, and perhaps a little bit of class-envy.
Some people in some parts of the US buy distilled water out of fears about chlorides or other additives in the municipal water (for a humorous reference, watch the movie "Dr. Strangelove,") but most Americans just drink what comes out of their tap, leaving very little demand for $0.25 gallon jugs of water from the store.
Dang. Now you've got me thinking of actually doing a project like this. Even after figuring in the cost of the server, some old monitors, and the network, we're talking about putting up MP3 stations the living room, rec room, bedroom, garage, and maybe one bathroom, all for under $2000.
Do any of the Linux audio players support AAC yet? If not, I've got a lot of stuff I would need to re-rip to either MP3 or ogg vorbis before going that route.