And how do you measure relative power of characters?
The rule of thumb for me is what they've been able to accomplish in the past. Or, as others said, have them tally the experience you dole out.
they're not automatically superior to level-based games
Right, they're superior because of the reasons that I listed.:-)
they're certainly not faster
Dice rollers are available for palm pilot, and I allowed them if the app could show a history of dice rolled. The same can be said of 3e as well, naturally.
Don't get me wrong, I still like 2nd ed. ad&d. But it's not for the engine, it's for the content (most of what I liked was discontinued by the time 3e came out -- ravenloft, planescape, darksun).
The learning curve for d6 is also less steep. A group of 7 played Star Wars for 2 years, and we only purchased two books. But in the case of 3e, show me a player that doesn't have a book, and I'll show you a player that always has to borrow the book.
Memorize a few simple math formulas, and you don't even need the tables anymore
Right, but therein lies my frustration with the rules-heavy systems like d20 3e. With d6, memorize "your roll is higher than the other=good" and you're done.
And I haven't even started griping about the nonsense of classes and hit points...
Anyway, if you want to continue this exchange, feel free to email me at overbom at yahoo dot com.
No, that sounds about right to my experience. The entire thing was agonizingly slow. If memory serves me well,it was one of those games where the GM would check the chart, roll some dice, and say something like this:
"okay, your flechette round punctures his..." *rolls more dice* "thyroid gland, at a rate of..." *rolls more dice* "2459 feet per second, causing him to" *frenzied rolling* "be knocked backwards, with legs splayed out as per diagram #4 (holds up book)," *rolls more dice* "killing him twice over..." ad nauseum.
Once I discovered West End Games' d6 systems (now called d6 legend and d6 classic, not that I currently understand the difference), I ditched D&D like a bad habit.
I don't really care how much better the 3rd ed. rules were better than the 2nd ed. rules. I had all that junk memorized, and it was tossed out like an old glove.
Skill incrementing systems are faster, easier and better than levelling systems. Systems where one doesn't need to use a table and just need to add numbers end up being faster, and it opens up my gaming groups to people that aren't prone to memorizing tables. And it puts the GM power in my hands, not the hands of some g**d**ned chart.
Even the Victory Point system for Fading Suns is better than the d20 systems. Heck, even Shadowrun's system is faster than d20 systems. While I'm at it, even Traveller lends itself better to faster-paced roleplaying than... okay, I'm done./jesse ventura voice There, I said it, it must be true.
I usually don't play the game as much. With me, it ends up being an issue of time management. I'll ask myself, "do I want to spend 40 hours on this game? Do I even want to spend more than 10?
I don't buy a lot of games. But the ones that I buy and keep, if they're good enough that I bought them, they're also good enough that I can get addicted to them. Cheating allows me to prioritize the use of my time more effectively. So when I can't cheat (I'm looking at you, civilization 3 for mac), I'm more likely to stop playing the game altogether, because there's no way that I can proactively manage potential addiction to the game.
I think that apple's software update and sun's pprosvc are both better than windowsupdate (which reports patches as installed when they're not, and requires IE to run), which is in turn better than Redhat's up2date, which is in turn better than FreeBSD's cvsup. I long for binary package updating from FreeBSD, and the day that I can install patches without a compiler.
The game has a EULA that he probably clicked through to agree with their policies. Granted, this is slashdot, and we hate EULAs, but he agreed to their terms of service. It might suck, it might not be fair, etc., they may not be legal based on various local, state, federal, international, or galactic laws, but that's the current state of affairs.
Oh, and it's not analogous, because important email is important, and online game characters are not.;P
the console windows shouldn't pop up. If your gf has a.xinitrc. or an xdefaults file, trash it, and the quartzwm should show up in aqua goodness.
and you won't have to run x11 in panther -- it will have a compatibility lib to display x11 via aqua.
as a last point, not many people complain about the lack of a native port for mozilla -- it still uses its own xul interfaces instead of aqua goodness. with x11 libs in aqua, a native port isn't as necessary.
As a low voltage technician licensed in the state of MN, who has taken 220 volts of love in the course of duty due to a faulty stove, I hereby advise you to call a master electrician to fix your probelm.
it's the same attitude that most folks have about apple -- they only have littleX% of the market, down from bigX%, so they must be dying. Never mind that they post a profit, have die-hard loyalist customers, and have X billion in the bank. They're well known for the design and work they put in to their products, which is legendary on a few accounts.
I think every OSS/FS developer ought to have access to a copy of Windows.
I disagree entirely. The more oss/fs is comparable to Windows, the more oss/fs is susceptible to look and feel lawsuits. I also think there's sometimes a better way to do it than the way windows does it, and I'd be happy to see linux go it's own direction.
The last thing we need is some whizkid saying "what windows needs is a registry... and ActiveX controls...."
$1999 for an entry level G5? I love Macs, but Jesus tapdancing Christ...
$1999 for an entry-level high powered unix workstation that would otherwise cost twice as much for roughly the same performance? Jesus tapdancing christ, what does it take to please some people?
This may be true. At the same time, though, the more we learn, the more we earn. One good truism deserves another.:-)
We tend to have such an ego about ourselves.
Pretty much every culture that's left its mark on the world has had the same. We're not special in that regard.
I don't mean to troll, but you sound akin to a poster child for the Society of Creative Anachronisms. As technology progresses, there is bound to be knowledge that becomes arcane or obscure. It's always happened, it's a fact of life. People learn that there is a better or easier way to do it. People probably complained about progress on the doorsteps of the Great Library at Alexandria on its opening day.
Jordan Hubbard wrote FreeBSD's port system (based mostly off bsd.mk files, not just tcsh scripts), which was then ported to NetBSD and OpenBSD. He's never been happy with it, so he wrote the OpenDarwin port system, based off tcl scripts.
Boy, these Sun people don't seem like such friends of ours after all.
Oh, come on. NFS isn't enough? Java isn't enough? What IS enough? You realize that Sun licensed this stuff from SCO BEFORE they put the suit against IBM? BEFORE every last person here hated SCO? Do you think they would have licensed if they knew this was going to happen? Sun licensed at the beginning of the year -- way before SCO issued the 100 day deadline.
Heck, they're probably kicking themselves that they wasted the money at this point. The money that Sun spent on licensing is going to be useless PDQ, IBM will see to that.
Microsoft is starting to loose (sic) a lot of key battles
This is true. The funny thing is, their main "victory" is self-reinforcing -- the Internet Explorer/MS Office/Windows OS battle.
As one of them gets dragged down, the others get inexorably dragged down with it. You can't run I.E. on anything but windows (ignoring the discontinued ports for MacOS and Solaris). You can't run Office on anything but Windows and MacOS. If linux gets 30% of the OS market, they've lost 30% of the browser and productivity suite markets too.
I may be hated for saying this, but I think the one thing that can keep MS in decent shape in the long run is to port Office to linux. Porting I.E. would help too. I can't see how they can compete long-term in the OS market without legal intervention, which will potentially be ignored in Europe. They still will eventually lose dominance in that area.
Seriously, there are days that I wonder if it will even take ten years. That's eternity in the technology world. Ten years ago, if you had a fileserver, it was probably Netware 3 or 4. What is it now?
You're not dumb, and it's not just you. I'm not as surprised by that statement, but I'm not too worried either.
Thankfully, as long as alternatives exist, then they haven't won. So, as long as Linux grows somewhere in the world, as long as NetBSD can be ported to a zillion architectures, so long as Apple has lickable interfaces and single button mice, there will be an alternative. As long as POSIX compliance means something, there will be an alternative. They can never win the platform battle.
In the areas that MS is successful (windows and office), they have pretty much reached market saturation. So... where do they go from there? There's a pretty good historical answer for that one.
Right, and how do I make two hundred clones of your monster Wintel machine in an hour and a half, without needing an assistant?
umm. let's see. cat/dev/rdsksomething | netcat... no, that's not going to work. tar -czf install.tgz / | netcat ip port, whoops, that won't work, no bootblock... scp -r / remotehost:/, wait, the other machine isn't supposed to be installed yet. damn, still no bootbock either.
Some days I wish there was a Sun-friendly slashdot.
This is an interesting tidbit. Sun's license gives them rights to all and any derivative works of Unix.
In the informationweek article, SCO calls Linux the equivalent of napster in the enterprise world, which really isn't proper at all. Is it just me, or does it sound like SCO is starting to throw really wild punches? It seems their attacks are getting pretty libelous. The informationweek view seems to be that SCO might have a case, but SCO's press behavior is very, very odd.
Oh, well, it's all FUD until IBM decides to act publicly. Like everyone else here, I'm really curious to see where they plan to go with this charge.
We have a few suns at our school, just as many as we have Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOSX. If your school has $1100 or so to spend on a Sun V100 server, and you've got the time to learn Solaris, I'd give it a shot. The V100s don't have a fast processor or anything, but they're stable, and don't require tweaking.
If you're one of those sysadmins that likes to get something working and forget about it except for patching, then you already like Sun, you just don't know it yet. If you want something to always need tweaking, Sun is not the company you want to deal with.
The only problem I have with Sun is that I always forget that I have a few on our network.
perhaps I'll get modded as a troll too. flamebait is probably more likely for me, though.
No other guy (expect perhaps Larry Ellison) causes such a stir when he talks.
You've obviously never seen his Royal Steveness the Jobs work a crowd. Face it, Gates causes about as much stir as "The Beav" from "Leave it to Beaver" compared to Jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
And how do you measure relative power of characters?
:-)
The rule of thumb for me is what they've been able to accomplish in the past. Or, as others said, have them tally the experience you dole out.
they're not automatically superior to level-based games
Right, they're superior because of the reasons that I listed.
they're certainly not faster
Dice rollers are available for palm pilot, and I allowed them if the app could show a history of dice rolled. The same can be said of 3e as well, naturally.
Don't get me wrong, I still like 2nd ed. ad&d. But it's not for the engine, it's for the content (most of what I liked was discontinued by the time 3e came out -- ravenloft, planescape, darksun).
The learning curve for d6 is also less steep. A group of 7 played Star Wars for 2 years, and we only purchased two books. But in the case of 3e, show me a player that doesn't have a book, and I'll show you a player that always has to borrow the book.
Memorize a few simple math formulas, and you don't even need the tables anymore
Right, but therein lies my frustration with the rules-heavy systems like d20 3e. With d6, memorize "your roll is higher than the other=good" and you're done.
And I haven't even started griping about the nonsense of classes and hit points...
Anyway, if you want to continue this exchange, feel free to email me at overbom at yahoo dot com.
No, that sounds about right to my experience. The entire thing was agonizingly slow. If memory serves me well,it was one of those games where the GM would check the chart, roll some dice, and say something like this:
"okay, your flechette round punctures his..."
*rolls more dice*
"thyroid gland, at a rate of..."
*rolls more dice*
"2459 feet per second, causing him to"
*frenzied rolling*
"be knocked backwards, with legs splayed out as per diagram #4 (holds up book),"
*rolls more dice*
"killing him twice over..." ad nauseum.
Once I discovered West End Games' d6 systems (now called d6 legend and d6 classic, not that I currently understand the difference), I ditched D&D like a bad habit.
/jesse ventura voice
I don't really care how much better the 3rd ed. rules were better than the 2nd ed. rules. I had all that junk memorized, and it was tossed out like an old glove.
Skill incrementing systems are faster, easier and better than levelling systems. Systems where one doesn't need to use a table and just need to add numbers end up being faster, and it opens up my gaming groups to people that aren't prone to memorizing tables. And it puts the GM power in my hands, not the hands of some g**d**ned chart.
Even the Victory Point system for Fading Suns is better than the d20 systems. Heck, even Shadowrun's system is faster than d20 systems. While I'm at it, even Traveller lends itself better to faster-paced roleplaying than... okay, I'm done.
There, I said it, it must be true.
I usually don't play the game as much. With me, it ends up being an issue of time management. I'll ask myself, "do I want to spend 40 hours on this game? Do I even want to spend more than 10?
I don't buy a lot of games. But the ones that I buy and keep, if they're good enough that I bought them, they're also good enough that I can get addicted to them. Cheating allows me to prioritize the use of my time more effectively. So when I can't cheat (I'm looking at you, civilization 3 for mac), I'm more likely to stop playing the game altogether, because there's no way that I can proactively manage potential addiction to the game.
the user will realise ... maybe i should make the tutorial that pops up, or look at some documentation!!
*snicker*
you've obviously never worked in any sort of support position or help desk.
I wish I had mod points for you.
I think that apple's software update and sun's pprosvc are both better than windowsupdate (which reports patches as installed when they're not, and requires IE to run), which is in turn better than Redhat's up2date, which is in turn better than FreeBSD's cvsup. I long for binary package updating from FreeBSD, and the day that I can install patches without a compiler.
Not necessarily.
;P
The game has a EULA that he probably clicked through to agree with their policies. Granted, this is slashdot, and we hate EULAs, but he agreed to their terms of service. It might suck, it might not be fair, etc., they may not be legal based on various local, state, federal, international, or galactic laws, but that's the current state of affairs.
Oh, and it's not analogous, because important email is important, and online game characters are not.
the console windows shouldn't pop up. If your gf has a .xinitrc. or an xdefaults file, trash it, and the quartzwm should show up in aqua goodness.
and you won't have to run x11 in panther -- it will have a compatibility lib to display x11 via aqua.
as a last point, not many people complain about the lack of a native port for mozilla -- it still uses its own xul interfaces instead of aqua goodness. with x11 libs in aqua, a native port isn't as necessary.
As a low voltage technician licensed in the state of MN, who has taken 220 volts of love in the course of duty due to a faulty stove, I hereby advise you to call a master electrician to fix your probelm.
stay alive,
mike overbo
it's the same attitude that most folks have about apple -- they only have littleX% of the market, down from bigX%, so they must be dying. Never mind that they post a profit, have die-hard loyalist customers, and have X billion in the bank. They're well known for the design and work they put in to their products, which is legendary on a few accounts.
Really, same sh*t different company.
I spent about 30 mins going through the ropes, and I liked it enough to donate $20. Not bad, you earned money by posting to slashdot.
;P
As for me, a sucker is born every minute, I guess.
I came to carnageblender to kick butt and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum.
I think every OSS/FS developer ought to have access to a copy of Windows.
I disagree entirely. The more oss/fs is comparable to Windows, the more oss/fs is susceptible to look and feel lawsuits. I also think there's sometimes a better way to do it than the way windows does it, and I'd be happy to see linux go it's own direction.
The last thing we need is some whizkid saying "what windows needs is a registry... and ActiveX controls...."
> What were they thinking when they named their project after a bug?
they were probably thinking about how Dragonflies eat other bugs.
$1999 for an entry level G5? I love Macs, but Jesus tapdancing Christ...
$1999 for an entry-level high powered unix workstation that would otherwise cost twice as much for roughly the same performance? Jesus tapdancing christ, what does it take to please some people?
The more we learn, the more we forget.
:-)
This may be true. At the same time, though, the more we learn, the more we earn. One good truism deserves another.
We tend to have such an ego about ourselves.
Pretty much every culture that's left its mark on the world has had the same. We're not special in that regard.
I don't mean to troll, but you sound akin to a poster child for the Society of Creative Anachronisms. As technology progresses, there is bound to be knowledge that becomes arcane or obscure. It's always happened, it's a fact of life. People learn that there is a better or easier way to do it. People probably complained about progress on the doorsteps of the Great Library at Alexandria on its opening day.
Jordan Hubbard wrote FreeBSD's port system (based mostly off bsd .mk files, not just tcsh scripts), which was then ported to NetBSD and OpenBSD. He's never been happy with it, so he wrote the OpenDarwin port system, based off tcl scripts.
:-)
Just nitpicking.
AssFace, you are a champion amongst mortals.
Boy, these Sun people don't seem like such friends of ours after all.
Oh, come on. NFS isn't enough? Java isn't enough? What IS enough? You realize that Sun licensed this stuff from SCO BEFORE they put the suit against IBM? BEFORE every last person here hated SCO? Do you think they would have licensed if they knew this was going to happen? Sun licensed at the beginning of the year -- way before SCO issued the 100 day deadline.
Heck, they're probably kicking themselves that they wasted the money at this point. The money that Sun spent on licensing is going to be useless PDQ, IBM will see to that.
Microsoft is starting to loose (sic) a lot of key battles
This is true. The funny thing is, their main "victory" is self-reinforcing -- the Internet Explorer/MS Office/Windows OS battle.
As one of them gets dragged down, the others get inexorably dragged down with it. You can't run I.E. on anything but windows (ignoring the discontinued ports for MacOS and Solaris). You can't run Office on anything but Windows and MacOS. If linux gets 30% of the OS market, they've lost 30% of the browser and productivity suite markets too.
I may be hated for saying this, but I think the one thing that can keep MS in decent shape in the long run is to port Office to linux. Porting I.E. would help too. I can't see how they can compete long-term in the OS market without legal intervention, which will potentially be ignored in Europe. They still will eventually lose dominance in that area.
Seriously, there are days that I wonder if it will even take ten years. That's eternity in the technology world. Ten years ago, if you had a fileserver, it was probably Netware 3 or 4. What is it now?
You're not dumb, and it's not just you. I'm not as surprised by that statement, but I'm not too worried either.
Thankfully, as long as alternatives exist, then they haven't won. So, as long as Linux grows somewhere in the world, as long as NetBSD can be ported to a zillion architectures, so long as Apple has lickable interfaces and single button mice, there will be an alternative. As long as POSIX compliance means something, there will be an alternative. They can never win the platform battle.
In the areas that MS is successful (windows and office), they have pretty much reached market saturation. So... where do they go from there? There's a pretty good historical answer for that one.
Down.
Right, and how do I make two hundred clones of your monster Wintel machine in an hour and a half, without needing an assistant?
/dev/rdsksomething | netcat ... no, that's not going to work. tar -czf install.tgz / | netcat ip port, whoops, that won't work, no bootblock... scp -r / remotehost:/, wait, the other machine isn't supposed to be installed yet. damn, still no bootbock either.
umm. let's see. cat
Some days I wish there was a Sun-friendly slashdot.
Holy crap, it's up to $11. Last I checked it was about $8. I wonder how much it will dive when IBM makes its next statement...
This is an interesting tidbit. Sun's license gives them rights to all and any derivative works of Unix.
In the informationweek article, SCO calls Linux the equivalent of napster in the enterprise world, which really isn't proper at all. Is it just me, or does it sound like SCO is starting to throw really wild punches? It seems their attacks are getting pretty libelous. The informationweek view seems to be that SCO might have a case, but SCO's press behavior is very, very odd.
Oh, well, it's all FUD until IBM decides to act publicly. Like everyone else here, I'm really curious to see where they plan to go with this charge.
We have a few suns at our school, just as many as we have Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOSX. If your school has $1100 or so to spend on a Sun V100 server, and you've got the time to learn Solaris, I'd give it a shot. The V100s don't have a fast processor or anything, but they're stable, and don't require tweaking.
If you're one of those sysadmins that likes to get something working and forget about it except for patching, then you already like Sun, you just don't know it yet. If you want something to always need tweaking, Sun is not the company you want to deal with.
The only problem I have with Sun is that I always forget that I have a few on our network.
perhaps I'll get modded as a troll too. flamebait is probably more likely for me, though.
No other guy (expect perhaps Larry Ellison) causes such a stir when he talks.
You've obviously never seen his Royal Steveness the Jobs work a crowd. Face it, Gates causes about as much stir as "The Beav" from "Leave it to Beaver" compared to Jobs.