Humans have always awarded acolades to their leaders. Well, popular ones, anyway.
USA naming ships after presidents is a national tradition... and as far as cults of personality, we pale even in comparison to the UK. You DO know what "HMS" stands for, right?
Of course their is also the point that he probably should have been impeached for Iran-Contra but had enough loyal soldiers to fall on their own swords, aka Oliver North.
Let's assume that Regan set up Iran-Contra, with full knowledge of his underling's actions and a good warning that he was essentially giving arms for hostages.
What about that is an impeachable offense, exactly? (We've had exactly one president who should have been impeached, and he quit. The two who were impeached beat the rap because Congress was just trying to upset the balance of power.)
A lot of DMs are stuck in 2E. The whole alignment concept is crap [unless you actually enjoy rules lawyering] and should have been tossed.
Alingment can be tossed (Monte Cook has done so in a few of his projects) but it changes the game more than any other single change.
Like I've said elsewhere, Alingment is white-hat/black-hat/grey-hat, and should not be stretched to cover anything but that. (And it shouldn't be construed to mean that white hats and black hats will never work like their opposites given the right circumstances... A CE wizard could save your life, and a LG paladin could very violently end it.)
Nope. Aside from the "dying guys anonymous", he only uses Tyler Durden. Maybe if his boss, his g/f (name slipping me), and the whole dang Project Mayhem didn't know him as "Tyler Durden," you'd have a case.
it 'might be' Jack (all those stories written in _first-person_ in the basement...)
Those are, actually, real stories written in exactly the kind of magazine you'd find in an old abandoned house.
That's what these DRMs remind me of. They're *supposed* to be a gentle reminder for you to not break the law yet allow fair use. The idea that you can circumvent a DRM and get in trouble is ludicrous, to me.
"Fair Use", as taught in law classes, doesn't require an exact copy. Fair Use is quoting from a book, reading a book--maybe even writing a parody of said book. It's not, necessarily, copying the book onto your PDA so you can read it wherever you want to.
DRM systems aren't supposed to be a gentle reminder--part of the education of someone using a PC is to ignore most gentle reminders. DRM is supposed to let the copyright holder trust that the song/book/movie they sell you isn't going to be copied to the computers of all of your friends and their friends, and their friends...
Should DRM be given extra-special protection, beyond a lock and key or copyright law? Maybe, maybe no. Should DRM/DMCA be stretched to cover commercial uses that have nothing to do with copyright? (Think: ink tanks.) Heck no.
I don't understand how fair use got so screwed up like this. Hey, shouldn't this article be on yro.slashdot.org?
Napster and KaZaa. Given the chance to make free perfect copies, the public makes the free perfect copies.
While it's possible that a post-DRM infrastructure that included a working compensation mechanism could arrive, it's not going to show up without capital--and no investor or "artist" is going to trust a system that doesn't even allow them to enforce their federal rights.
Hmm... a nice alternative to DRM would be direct licensing and tracking. Generate unique IDs for all electronic IP sales, and direct-bill the original purcheser for copies that show up on P2P systems...
If an evil 40 HD death-god kicks a helpless child down a well, guess who you are honor-bound to punish?
If attacking evil doesn't help anyone, and it doesn't even stop the evil, then a Paladin would be foolish to charge head-in and throw their life away.
Paladins aren't required to be stupid, and an interpretation of their oath (or manerisms) to require them so is asinine.
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.)
I agree, actually. Paladins are a bit too front-loaded.
3.5 spaces out their powers a bit better, and IMC I've tweaked the paladin to be more of a fighter/spellcaster than a "fighter with some spellcasting." Works out fairly well so far.
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.
So drop the Code of Conduct from the Paladin, or give them some bonus feats. It's a RP characteristc, not a rules-based balancing act.
In 3e, a Paladin is supposed to be "about equal" to a LG fighter, not better. I'm all for changing them so that they are better--a PrC version of the Paladin, for example, is a fairly common variant.
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,
Ok.
A 12th level Paladin:
* Detect Evil at will * Gets at least a +2 to all saves * Can heal at least 24 hp per day * Is immune to all diseases * Is immune to magical fear * Can smite evil once per day, at least +2 to attack and +12 to damage. * Can remove disease 4 times a week * Can turn undead at 9th level * has an intelligent horse with 6 extra hit dice, +8 natural armor, some minor "familiar" abilities, and the ability to command other horses. * Casts spells as a 6th level caster, including access to 3rd level spells that are approximatly as powerful as 3rd level cleric spells.
I think the paladin's nine "abilities", each of which is far more powerful than a feat, balances out the fighter's 7 more bonus feats. Especially when it comes to survivability.
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.
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.)
I'll post the same thing here I did on the WOTC forums. In fact... I'll cut and paste!
WHY IS THERE NO REBATE POLICY?!?!?!
Two reasons, I suspect.
1: The pricing for books in America is so skewed that rebates for printed paper simply aren't workable.
2: You can get every last changed rule in the SRD. Think of it as "the mother of all eratta."
Don't pirate the books--just get the rules, honestly, from the source: www.wizards.com/d20
(Oh, and there IS a rules-conversion guide, which you'll only really need if you play in a mixed system. 3.0 is still the exact same game it ever was, after all...)
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?
You DO realize that a 6-player adventuring party counts as a an "army" for the bardic abilities, right? And at 14th level, that bard can take six seconds to "inspire greatness" in the dungeon-crawler's front line fighters, giving them +2 atk and +2d10 hp? (or that the darn bard is a spellcaster, not a front-line fighter?)
(This is probably a good point to say that classes are supposed to compliment each other, not all be interchangeable. Clerics, druids, and bards are support characters, fighters, rangers, barbarians, and paladins are front-line combatants, monks and rogues are special-purpose characters, and wizards & sorcerors are artillery pieces.)
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?
Out 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 3.5, Alchemy becomes just another craft skill, Scry goes away--and Sorcerors get a bunch more Cha. based skills.
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.
This comment makes me think that you're trolling. 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. (Not to mention all of the spiffy Paladin-only spells.)
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.
I do play with munchkin and rules-lawyer players on occasion, and the game handles them just fine.
A DM who changes rules willy-nilly, or who doesn't like an option in the system, or just doesn't know how to cope when things go awry can throw off the game balance--but, like you said, that's true of any game system.
Comparing the two, to use your analogy, is comparing the millions of Linux manpages to Windows Blah for Dummies.
Have you actually looked at the SRD files, in comparison to the book?
To use your analogy, it's comparing MAN pages for a single program with a book that's essentialy just the MAN pages and some structure and flavor text.
*sigh* Ah, well. Try and larn some folks, and they wind up bitching anyway.
In either edition, a first level fighter needs to roll a 10 to hit the naked guy, a 15 for that naked guy in chainmail, or a 17 if that naked guy invests in platemail. 90% of the weapons and items in 3/3.5 have the same effect as they did in 1/2 ed (long sword does 1d8, mace does 1d6) So the framework is the same.
That's a fair bit of an oversimplification. I never said that they weren't related--but they aren't "drop-in and use." (pre-3.0 didn't have critical threat info or reach, for example.)
My first reaction to that statment is that you were trying to insult me. Perhaps you just haven't played the game enough to know all the ins and outs.
I have. I find it fairly balanced (compared to, say, Storyteller with its "the guy with clerity rules combat" system.), if a bit bloodthirsty.
You would end up with a super tank melee guy, that in order to challenge them, you need to throw things out that could ahniliate the other characters instantly
Like a *charm* spell?
By and large, the core rules are "balanced" as-is. Once the players know enough to play their characters, just about any combination two characters pick is "effectivly balanced." (All this is in quotes because, really, game balance is a hotly debated term--and what fits the games in Renton doesn't necessarily fit my game in Albany.)
I could go on more, and get into a bit-for-bit discussion, but you're obviously not interested. Shame, really. RPGs and/. get a chance to mingle so rarely.;)
Further - being attached to something that's generally disposed after receipt - the technology doesn't raise the same level of privacy issues as it does when used for consumer/retail purposes.
How many bar codes are you wearing right now?
If done intelligently, RFID tags will be added in all of the same places that bar codes are now--heck, smart manufacturers will probably embed the RFID tag beneath the bar code.
While an RFID tag _can_ be put into a shirt, so can a bar code--but I still don't see folk runing around with black lines on their clothes.
D&D has been, since 3.0 came out, the lead-runner in "Open Gaming."
Go to this page on WotC's website, and you can get quite nearly every rule in the core 3.0 books--soon to be quite nearly every rule from the core 3.5 books.
The only rule that's really missing is awarding XP--and there are easily a half-dozen ways to find that on the web.
(So, everyone who's complaining about a 3 year turnaround for a revision--do you complain about how quickly Linux gets a new kernal, or how swiftly Mozilla moves from 1.0 through 1.4?)
Honestly though, anyone familiar with the system can adapt any edition into any other edition. While cosmetically 3rd edition changed a lot for 1st and 2nd edition, deep down they are the same game with very similar mechanics.
Not really. The differences between 3.5 / 3.0 and the bulk of the precessor versions are easily as noticable as the differences between D&D and any other RPG.
As a DM I liked what they tried too do with 3rd, but there was just too little balance and way to many opportunities for players to create super-characters, while others who were more creative and less concerned with min/maxing were left only passive roles when it came to combat. I never trust the books anyway, I change most of the rules and my players still have a great time.
Call it semi-professional interest, but what exactly are you finding "unbalanced" about the game? Sure you're reading the rules right?
Pick up (I think) either Unearthed Arcana, DLA, or a few of the modules.
THAC0 did appear firstly in 1e AD&D.
Re:Here's an interesting quote
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Open Source Law
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Has anyone come up with a way to actually test if this is currently the case. (Even though it may have been the case a couple of hundred years ago.) It's not exactly hard to find examples of current copyright law acting to discourage creation and publication.
Well, capitalism works for that.
Do you read books, listen to music, or play video games?
OK, now--are the free ones better than the for-pay ones?
In general, the answer is "no." And, more to the point, when someone's good enough to make art that we like, shouldn't they be able to do that full-time?
Its the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty --- unless the *accuser* has proof that I stole something, they shouldn't be allowed to harass me about it.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. (Unless you're being accused by the government.)
In civil law, you AREN'T "innocent until proven guilty." Your just charged with a tort--not "guilty", but neither culpable nor free from cost until a jury decides the truth on the preponderance of the evidence.
Now, if the accuser has no reasonable suspicion that you've committed a tort, and they sue you anyway, you can probably countersue for the tort of harassment / fradulent litigation.
As for RIAA's alleged illegal acts--catch them in the act and turn them in for it. But until there's proof, they're "innocent until proven guilty" of any crime. (I suppose that you could take them to civil court...)
Why should the RIAA get to demand proof that you've paid them whenever they desire, but the clothing store not be granted the same right?
Because of the preponderance of "file-sharing?"
Proof should be easy--a CD or membership in a legit online sale service should do it. If further information is required, subponea the sales records for the online service.
'course, for most of us, the cost of RIAA having a PI / Lawyer track us down and interview us vastly outweighs any potential return. If you're one of those nuts with 60 GB of pirated MP3s, then you're out of luck anyway.
*sigh*. You're obviously implying that the USA is like that. So, let me think...
Yeah, because we don't have governments that try to watch what we're doing all the time
No. We have a government that wants to be able to look for patterns of behavior that can indicate terrorist activities. As long as nothing worse than an FBI investigation happens, it's all good. (Remember--it's been against the law to plot and illegal act with someone else and then go out and take even legal steps towards that crime since Rockefeller. It's called consipracy.)
We don't have governments that change allegience with foreign governments, or dictatorships, on a whim.
That's politics. And, really, it's not "whim"--it's "politics." The enemy of our enemy is a friend--but once our enemy is gone, their enemies may become our enemies.
We don't have people being whisked away to imprisonment and torture without being charged with a crime or given due process.
Torture? Well, if you consider being held without certainity of your future "torture." Though I suspect that those who have really been tortured won't agree with you.
And we certainly don't have governments that lie to us or make false claims to justify their actions. Ha ha ha! Big brother is ridiculous!
The government can lie. The government can be wrong. The government can even put out its own revised history.
Big Brother doesn't happen until the government starts putting words in the mouths of those who are not the government, or silences those who speak out against it. Military PR is one thing and tyranny is something else entirely.
Besides which, if Big Brother was on the way,/. would be first on the chopping block.
The movie also confirms the precog abilities by and large, but claims that there are sometimes "minority reports" wherein the precogs disagree.
What was the "Minority Report" in the short story, then?
And while I've got your attention--what word are you talking about in your sig?
Get your SciFi right
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Science Faction
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Big Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect.
Minority Report (no "the") is a semi-distopia wherein predictive science has become exact and law enforcement is able to convict people before they commit their crimes. It's more a tale of the overzealousnes of technology than a horror report about the advance of technology--hell, even 1984 was about 'tech.
The "total awareness" of Minority Report wasn't even that bad--I mean, the main character was able to move about fairly easy given that an APB was out for him, and he even managed to foil the entire system, too.
Don't worry about Big Brother or Future Crime, though--they'd both be government programs, which, at least in America, are both amazingly conservative in design and embarissingly inefficient in implementation. (Note that, even though we have a brand-new national alert level, there are no laws or funding programs for local response to the increased level.)
Slashdot Mirror
Humans have always awarded acolades to their leaders. Well, popular ones, anyway.
USA naming ships after presidents is a national tradition... and as far as cults of personality, we pale even in comparison to the UK. You DO know what "HMS" stands for, right?
Of course their is also the point that he probably should have been impeached for Iran-Contra but had enough loyal soldiers to fall on their own swords, aka Oliver North.
Let's assume that Regan set up Iran-Contra, with full knowledge of his underling's actions and a good warning that he was essentially giving arms for hostages.
What about that is an impeachable offense, exactly? (We've had exactly one president who should have been impeached, and he quit. The two who were impeached beat the rap because Congress was just trying to upset the balance of power.)
So, what's the deal? Why are we honoring a man who destroyed America by naming the most expensive carrier ever built after him?
He was a president, and whatever his domestic failings, he does get the credit for ending the Cold War without WWIII.
Plus, I suspect that the darn things are just named after the president when they were first proposed.
A lot of DMs are stuck in 2E. The whole alignment concept is crap [unless you actually enjoy rules lawyering] and should have been tossed.
Alingment can be tossed (Monte Cook has done so in a few of his projects) but it changes the game more than any other single change.
Like I've said elsewhere, Alingment is white-hat/black-hat/grey-hat, and should not be stretched to cover anything but that. (And it shouldn't be construed to mean that white hats and black hats will never work like their opposites given the right circumstances... A CE wizard could save your life, and a LG paladin could very violently end it.)
Tyler is just _one_ of the names he uses
Nope. Aside from the "dying guys anonymous", he only uses Tyler Durden. Maybe if his boss, his g/f (name slipping me), and the whole dang Project Mayhem didn't know him as "Tyler Durden," you'd have a case.
it 'might be' Jack (all those stories written in _first-person_ in the basement...)
Those are, actually, real stories written in exactly the kind of magazine you'd find in an old abandoned house.
His legal name may be Tyler, or it may not be.
No, Jack is Tyler. Everyone who calls him a name, save for Bob & the other pain-addicts, calls him "Tyler."
Want proof? The plane tickets, issued to him by his place of employment, where he's worked since before he went nuts.
That's what these DRMs remind me of. They're *supposed* to be a gentle reminder for you to not break the law yet allow fair use. The idea that you can circumvent a DRM and get in trouble is ludicrous, to me.
"Fair Use", as taught in law classes, doesn't require an exact copy. Fair Use is quoting from a book, reading a book--maybe even writing a parody of said book. It's not, necessarily, copying the book onto your PDA so you can read it wherever you want to.
DRM systems aren't supposed to be a gentle reminder--part of the education of someone using a PC is to ignore most gentle reminders. DRM is supposed to let the copyright holder trust that the song/book/movie they sell you isn't going to be copied to the computers of all of your friends and their friends, and their friends...
Should DRM be given extra-special protection, beyond a lock and key or copyright law? Maybe, maybe no. Should DRM/DMCA be stretched to cover commercial uses that have nothing to do with copyright? (Think: ink tanks.) Heck no.
I don't understand how fair use got so screwed up like this. Hey, shouldn't this article be on yro.slashdot.org?
Napster and KaZaa. Given the chance to make free perfect copies, the public makes the free perfect copies.
While it's possible that a post-DRM infrastructure that included a working compensation mechanism could arrive, it's not going to show up without capital--and no investor or "artist" is going to trust a system that doesn't even allow them to enforce their federal rights.
Hmm... a nice alternative to DRM would be direct licensing and tracking. Generate unique IDs for all electronic IP sales, and direct-bill the original purcheser for copies that show up on P2P systems...
If an evil 40 HD death-god kicks a helpless child down a well, guess who you are honor-bound to punish?
If attacking evil doesn't help anyone, and it doesn't even stop the evil, then a Paladin would be foolish to charge head-in and throw their life away.
Paladins aren't required to be stupid, and an interpretation of their oath (or manerisms) to require them so is asinine.
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.)
I agree, actually. Paladins are a bit too front-loaded.
3.5 spaces out their powers a bit better, and IMC I've tweaked the paladin to be more of a fighter/spellcaster than a "fighter with some spellcasting." Works out fairly well so far.
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.
So drop the Code of Conduct from the Paladin, or give them some bonus feats. It's a RP characteristc, not a rules-based balancing act.
In 3e, a Paladin is supposed to be "about equal" to a LG fighter, not better. I'm all for changing them so that they are better--a PrC version of the Paladin, for example, is a fairly common variant.
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,
Ok.
A 12th level Paladin:
* Detect Evil at will
* Gets at least a +2 to all saves
* Can heal at least 24 hp per day
* Is immune to all diseases
* Is immune to magical fear
* Can smite evil once per day, at least +2 to attack and +12 to damage.
* Can remove disease 4 times a week
* Can turn undead at 9th level
* has an intelligent horse with 6 extra hit dice, +8 natural armor, some minor "familiar" abilities, and the ability to command other horses.
* Casts spells as a 6th level caster, including access to 3rd level spells that are approximatly as powerful as 3rd level cleric spells.
I think the paladin's nine "abilities", each of which is far more powerful than a feat, balances out the fighter's 7 more bonus feats. Especially when it comes to survivability.
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.
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.)
I'll post the same thing here I did on the WOTC forums. In fact ... I'll cut and paste!
WHY IS THERE NO REBATE POLICY?!?!?!
Two reasons, I suspect.
1: The pricing for books in America is so skewed that rebates for printed paper simply aren't workable.
2: You can get every last changed rule in the SRD. Think of it as "the mother of all eratta."
Don't pirate the books--just get the rules, honestly, from the source: www.wizards.com/d20
(Oh, and there IS a rules-conversion guide, which you'll only really need if you play in a mixed system. 3.0 is still the exact same game it ever was, after all...)
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?
You DO realize that a 6-player adventuring party counts as a an "army" for the bardic abilities, right? And at 14th level, that bard can take six seconds to "inspire greatness" in the dungeon-crawler's front line fighters, giving them +2 atk and +2d10 hp? (or that the darn bard is a spellcaster, not a front-line fighter?)
(This is probably a good point to say that classes are supposed to compliment each other, not all be interchangeable. Clerics, druids, and bards are support characters, fighters, rangers, barbarians, and paladins are front-line combatants, monks and rogues are special-purpose characters, and wizards & sorcerors are artillery pieces.)
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?
Out 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 3.5, Alchemy becomes just another craft skill, Scry goes away--and Sorcerors get a bunch more Cha. based skills.
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.
This comment makes me think that you're trolling. 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. (Not to mention all of the spiffy Paladin-only spells.)
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.
I do play with munchkin and rules-lawyer players on occasion, and the game handles them just fine.
A DM who changes rules willy-nilly, or who doesn't like an option in the system, or just doesn't know how to cope when things go awry can throw off the game balance--but, like you said, that's true of any game system.
Comparing the two, to use your analogy, is comparing the millions of Linux manpages to Windows Blah for Dummies.
Have you actually looked at the SRD files, in comparison to the book?
To use your analogy, it's comparing MAN pages for a single program with a book that's essentialy just the MAN pages and some structure and flavor text.
*sigh* Ah, well. Try and larn some folks, and they wind up bitching anyway.
In either edition, a first level fighter needs to roll a 10 to hit the naked guy, a 15 for that naked guy in chainmail, or a 17 if that naked guy invests in platemail. 90% of the weapons and items in 3/3.5 have the same effect as they did in 1/2 ed (long sword does 1d8, mace does 1d6) So the framework is the same.
/. get a chance to mingle so rarely. ;)
That's a fair bit of an oversimplification. I never said that they weren't related--but they aren't "drop-in and use." (pre-3.0 didn't have critical threat info or reach, for example.)
My first reaction to that statment is that you were trying to insult me. Perhaps you just haven't played the game enough to know all the ins and outs.
I have. I find it fairly balanced (compared to, say, Storyteller with its "the guy with clerity rules combat" system.), if a bit bloodthirsty.
You would end up with a super tank melee guy, that in order to challenge them, you need to throw things out that could ahniliate the other characters instantly
Like a *charm* spell?
By and large, the core rules are "balanced" as-is. Once the players know enough to play their characters, just about any combination two characters pick is "effectivly balanced." (All this is in quotes because, really, game balance is a hotly debated term--and what fits the games in Renton doesn't necessarily fit my game in Albany.)
I could go on more, and get into a bit-for-bit discussion, but you're obviously not interested. Shame, really. RPGs and
Further - being attached to something that's generally disposed after receipt - the technology doesn't raise the same level of privacy issues as it does when used for consumer/retail purposes.
How many bar codes are you wearing right now?
If done intelligently, RFID tags will be added in all of the same places that bar codes are now--heck, smart manufacturers will probably embed the RFID tag beneath the bar code.
While an RFID tag _can_ be put into a shirt, so can a bar code--but I still don't see folk runing around with black lines on their clothes.
Wait... you're claiming that GURPS allows for _less_ bookkeeping?
The game with point-based play, per-bullet counting, one-second rounds, et cetera?
Maybe you're thinking of Storyteller... or just about any game where the ref. says "don't worry about that bookkeeping, we'll just fudge it."
(I'm always amazed by how much /. ignores this.)
D&D has been, since 3.0 came out, the lead-runner in "Open Gaming."
Go to this page on WotC's website, and you can get quite nearly every rule in the core 3.0 books--soon to be quite nearly every rule from the core 3.5 books.
The only rule that's really missing is awarding XP--and there are easily a half-dozen ways to find that on the web.
(So, everyone who's complaining about a 3 year turnaround for a revision--do you complain about how quickly Linux gets a new kernal, or how swiftly Mozilla moves from 1.0 through 1.4?)
Honestly though, anyone familiar with the system can adapt any edition into any other edition. While cosmetically 3rd edition changed a lot for 1st and 2nd edition, deep down they are the same game with very similar mechanics.
Not really. The differences between 3.5 / 3.0 and the bulk of the precessor versions are easily as noticable as the differences between D&D and any other RPG.
As a DM I liked what they tried too do with 3rd, but there was just too little balance and way to many opportunities for players to create super-characters, while others who were more creative and less concerned with min/maxing were left only passive roles when it came to combat. I never trust the books anyway, I change most of the rules and my players still have a great time.
Call it semi-professional interest, but what exactly are you finding "unbalanced" about the game? Sure you're reading the rules right?
(damnit, I'm pureblood geek now... ah, well.)
Pick up (I think) either Unearthed Arcana, DLA, or a few of the modules.
THAC0 did appear firstly in 1e AD&D.
Has anyone come up with a way to actually test if this is currently the case. (Even though it may have been the case a couple of hundred years ago.) It's not exactly hard to find examples of current copyright law acting to discourage creation and publication.
Well, capitalism works for that.
Do you read books, listen to music, or play video games?
OK, now--are the free ones better than the for-pay ones?
In general, the answer is "no." And, more to the point, when someone's good enough to make art that we like, shouldn't they be able to do that full-time?
Its the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty --- unless the *accuser* has proof that I stole something, they shouldn't be allowed to harass me about it.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. (Unless you're being accused by the government.)
In civil law, you AREN'T "innocent until proven guilty." Your just charged with a tort--not "guilty", but neither culpable nor free from cost until a jury decides the truth on the preponderance of the evidence.
Now, if the accuser has no reasonable suspicion that you've committed a tort, and they sue you anyway, you can probably countersue for the tort of harassment / fradulent litigation.
As for RIAA's alleged illegal acts--catch them in the act and turn them in for it. But until there's proof, they're "innocent until proven guilty" of any crime. (I suppose that you could take them to civil court...)
(Oh, and to be clear: IANAL.)
Why should the RIAA get to demand proof that you've paid them whenever they desire, but the clothing store not be granted the same right?
Because of the preponderance of "file-sharing?"
Proof should be easy--a CD or membership in a legit online sale service should do it. If further information is required, subponea the sales records for the online service.
'course, for most of us, the cost of RIAA having a PI / Lawyer track us down and interview us vastly outweighs any potential return. If you're one of those nuts with 60 GB of pirated MP3s, then you're out of luck anyway.
*sigh*. You're obviously implying that the USA is like that. So, let me think...
/. would be first on the chopping block.
Yeah, because we don't have governments that try to watch what we're doing all the time
No. We have a government that wants to be able to look for patterns of behavior that can indicate terrorist activities. As long as nothing worse than an FBI investigation happens, it's all good. (Remember--it's been against the law to plot and illegal act with someone else and then go out and take even legal steps towards that crime since Rockefeller. It's called consipracy.)
We don't have governments that change allegience with foreign governments, or dictatorships, on a whim.
That's politics. And, really, it's not "whim"--it's "politics." The enemy of our enemy is a friend--but once our enemy is gone, their enemies may become our enemies.
We don't have people being whisked away to imprisonment and torture without being charged with a crime or given due process.
Torture? Well, if you consider being held without certainity of your future "torture." Though I suspect that those who have really been tortured won't agree with you.
And we certainly don't have governments that lie to us or make false claims to justify their actions.
Ha ha ha! Big brother is ridiculous!
The government can lie. The government can be wrong. The government can even put out its own revised history.
Big Brother doesn't happen until the government starts putting words in the mouths of those who are not the government, or silences those who speak out against it. Military PR is one thing and tyranny is something else entirely.
Besides which, if Big Brother was on the way,
The movie also confirms the precog abilities by and large, but claims that there are sometimes "minority reports" wherein the precogs disagree.
What was the "Minority Report" in the short story, then?
And while I've got your attention--what word are you talking about in your sig?
Big Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect.
Minority Report (no "the") is a semi-distopia wherein predictive science has become exact and law enforcement is able to convict people before they commit their crimes. It's more a tale of the overzealousnes of technology than a horror report about the advance of technology--hell, even 1984 was about 'tech.
The "total awareness" of Minority Report wasn't even that bad--I mean, the main character was able to move about fairly easy given that an APB was out for him, and he even managed to foil the entire system, too.
Don't worry about Big Brother or Future Crime, though--they'd both be government programs, which, at least in America, are both amazingly conservative in design and embarissingly inefficient in implementation. (Note that, even though we have a brand-new national alert level, there are no laws or funding programs for local response to the increased level.)
When its used over an exported X session to a client with a 608kbps DSL upstream.
For this reason I still prefer Pine w/ PineGPG.
Ouch.
FWIW, that's probably more the sysadmin/ISP's pain, not Moz's. There are oodles of programs that suck when done over an X session.
Exactly... I use Mozilla at work for browsing, but use Pine for e-mail. Mozilla's e-mail app is painfully bad. At home its Safari and Apple's Mail.
Painfully? (Obviously you haven't experienced Outlook in newbie hands. But I digress.)
How is Mozilla Mail painful?