I wonder if there are any articles out there describing key aspects of different dice systems and why some are popular and others are not. For example, despite the statistical shittiness of d20, it's extremely popular. The epic-feel roll-and-keep of 7th Sea (and L5R) are less so.
What are key things to keep in mind when designing a homebrew pen and paper system?
Research into manned space exploration (especially of the sustainable ilk) will produce technologies that benefit us here on earth, much like what's happened over the past 50 years with lubricants, manufacturing materials, jet engines, and so on and so forth.
Which also explains its minimum system requirements of a 2.0ghz core duo. Seriously - wtf? I can watch hulu videos through my web browser on a 3ghz p4.... barely. I blame it on flash.
I think our inherent laziness is key to our innovative abilities. We want to be as special as possible with doing the least amount of work possible.
This causes us to develop tools to accomplish menial tasks easier. Instead of tracking and hunting a hard to find animal, we lay traps. Instead of walking over uneven terrain, we lay roads. Instead of traveling and talking to someone in person, we hire someone to carry a bunch of different peoples conversations this distance so we don't have to. We instate governments so we don't have to think about things like where our water is going to come from and whether or not we are safe from bodily harm.
This couples nicely with our inherently curious mind. Some of us collect information that nobody else has, others use that information to make tools that nobody else has and makes our life more lazy, and still others are employed to build the tools. And then there are the parasites which try and orchestrate things without outputting any real net worth. And then there are the parasites which are simply too lazy to actually do anything to produce anything - even imaginary net worth. They usually end up in hammocks in trailer parks, though.
That's your imperative meta-program that simply overcomes the inherent and basal instincts. You don't want to go jogging because your body isn't stressed - in that it doesn't "need" anything. You do it anyway because you know that if you don't, you'll become overweight, have health problems, and probably will have more difficulty attracting a mate.
Actually, according to this benchmark, the atom bests the 1.13ghz pentium 3 (tualatin), and is 62% of the 2.4ghz pentium 4. Assuming that the pentium 4 performance scales linearly (which it doesn't, not really) with clock speed, this would give it the performance of about a 1.5ghz p4.
All of these newfangled AJAXy 'enhancements' look like they were coded by a braindead codemonkey who just found jQuery.
Explains why it's slow, incompatible, and so forth. (jQuery has many cross-browser issues, though not as many as Prototype. Because of the 'powerful' chaining style, though, it's nigh impossible to debug. jQuery and Prototype make JavaScript a write-only language - much like perl)
Prince of persia would ask you e.g. 'The first letter of the third word in the fourth paragraph on page 55.' They must have had a rather large hash table - I played through the game more times than I can count, and don't recall it asking the same one twice.
Using javascript to record certain events: random clicks on the page, scroll actions, and snapshots of the mouse x/y position every 5 seconds or so.
Using xmlhttprequest to send this data to a server that determines whether the behavior fits, within a margin of error, to a markov model built via previous human interaction in the page.
Of course, if the automated blogspam bot ever got ahold of the markov model, it would be able to generate 'believable' interaction with the page by creating a markov chain.
No epic-level CRPG that actually works and is interesting? I suppose Planescape:Torment wasn't quite epic levels, but it's pretty damn close - even going up against entities that the Lady of Pain had mazed. Yeah, you weren't level 40 with 400hp and massive destructive power... but really, when you're godlike, nothing is interesting..... except meddling in the lives of mortals.
ECMAScript is a prototypal functional programming language. You don't just set members of an object by defining its prototype in an object literal.
You can also, by the power of closures, have private functions, private variables, and protected functions. (ECMAScript is interesting in that public member functions cannot access private variables, but protected functions can. Downside is that protected functions (defining them as this.foo = function() {}; in the constructor) are created new for each instance of the object, unlike the prototype (public) members.
And this is missing an oft-overlooked niche in the field: Interaction. Has a lot to do with IA, a little to do with design, and some to do with coding.
It's possible to design it all out with a spreadsheet where the rows are interactable elements and the columns are interactions, with the intersections being results. But people won't typically take you serious as an interaction designer unless you have some graphic design or developer skills.
While I call myself an Interaction Engineer (A little bit of IA, a little bit of graphic design, a lot of usability and ease of use, a lot of JavaScript, a little server-side development, a little SEO, a lot of putting out semantic fires), my title has been everything from Software Engineer to Front End Developer.
Your ears you keep and I'll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, 'Dear God! What is that thing,' will echo in your perfect ears. That is what to the pain means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.
It's a drug where the best thing that happens is fever reduction, reduced swelling, and the general affects of a NSAID (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug).
And the worst thing that can happen is stomach bleeding. (Unless you take it constantly in much higher doses than your doctor says you should, in which case it can cause liver issues)
Oh, yeah, and some people are allergic to it.
It's not like ibuprofen is freakin' hydrocodone or something.
As someone who went to high school during the Columbine event, and saw the heavy-handed knee-jerk reactions from administrators,
Yay, Columbine-era anecdote time!
It was December, 2000. It was the first cold day of winter - about 20 degrees outside, if memory serves. The warmest coat I had was a trench. I'd had this trench for about two years at that point. I hadn't yet worn it that year, and we had a new vice principal.
Little did I know the trouble it would get me into.
During my second period class, the vice principal came on the intercom of my classroom and requested my presence in his office. Of course, knowing what going to the vice principal's office means, the rest of the class ridiculed me for getting in trouble. I had no idea why I was getting called down. It was on the other campus (we had an east and a west campus, separated by a ~250 foot covered walkway), so I wore my coat.
When I got there, there was rage in his eyes. It was fairly frightening, actually. He demanded I take the coat off, and give it to him. I asked him what I was going to wear between classes for the rest of the day - since I had to walk the breezeway several times. He told me that, "Little snots like [me] should think about things like that before you wear crap like this to school." I talked him into allowing me to try and contact my parents to bring me a "more suitable" coat. Unfortunately, neither could be reached.
By the time my father was raised on the phone, he was so infuriated with me that he had me suspended for three days, with in-school suspension for a week after that.
Just for wearing a black trenchcoat to school.
And maybe pointing out logical fallacies in the administrator's points.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough!
I wonder if there are any articles out there describing key aspects of different dice systems and why some are popular and others are not. For example, despite the statistical shittiness of d20, it's extremely popular. The epic-feel roll-and-keep of 7th Sea (and L5R) are less so.
What are key things to keep in mind when designing a homebrew pen and paper system?
Inquiring minds want to know...
Research into manned space exploration (especially of the sustainable ilk) will produce technologies that benefit us here on earth, much like what's happened over the past 50 years with lubricants, manufacturing materials, jet engines, and so on and so forth.
There are asteroids out there that would provide 2004's level of iron production for over a million years.
Keep in mind that up until a short time ago, jQuery itself used ugly user agent hacks. (It's also slow - just look at /. ....)
Which also explains its minimum system requirements of a 2.0ghz core duo. Seriously - wtf? I can watch hulu videos through my web browser on a 3ghz p4.... barely. I blame it on flash.
4GB. And I typically have a couple very large photoshop documents open, visual studio, firefox, and several other applications open.
The only thing that really pages is Photoshop...
No - Lynx is!
I think our inherent laziness is key to our innovative abilities. We want to be as special as possible with doing the least amount of work possible.
This causes us to develop tools to accomplish menial tasks easier. Instead of tracking and hunting a hard to find animal, we lay traps. Instead of walking over uneven terrain, we lay roads. Instead of traveling and talking to someone in person, we hire someone to carry a bunch of different peoples conversations this distance so we don't have to. We instate governments so we don't have to think about things like where our water is going to come from and whether or not we are safe from bodily harm.
This couples nicely with our inherently curious mind. Some of us collect information that nobody else has, others use that information to make tools that nobody else has and makes our life more lazy, and still others are employed to build the tools. And then there are the parasites which try and orchestrate things without outputting any real net worth. And then there are the parasites which are simply too lazy to actually do anything to produce anything - even imaginary net worth. They usually end up in hammocks in trailer parks, though.
That's your imperative meta-program that simply overcomes the inherent and basal instincts. You don't want to go jogging because your body isn't stressed - in that it doesn't "need" anything. You do it anyway because you know that if you don't, you'll become overweight, have health problems, and probably will have more difficulty attracting a mate.
So, you're saying that being in the coding 'zone' is comparable to Enlightenment?
I can dig that.
But-but... it's so...BAD!
And even before that, there was Track & Field for the NES.
Actually, according to this benchmark, the atom bests the 1.13ghz pentium 3 (tualatin), and is 62% of the 2.4ghz pentium 4. Assuming that the pentium 4 performance scales linearly (which it doesn't, not really) with clock speed, this would give it the performance of about a 1.5ghz p4.
All of these newfangled AJAXy 'enhancements' look like they were coded by a braindead codemonkey who just found jQuery.
Explains why it's slow, incompatible, and so forth. (jQuery has many cross-browser issues, though not as many as Prototype. Because of the 'powerful' chaining style, though, it's nigh impossible to debug. jQuery and Prototype make JavaScript a write-only language - much like perl)
Don't believe me?
Go look at the markup and code...
Prince of persia would ask you e.g. 'The first letter of the third word in the fourth paragraph on page 55.' They must have had a rather large hash table - I played through the game more times than I can count, and don't recall it asking the same one twice.
Using javascript to record certain events: random clicks on the page, scroll actions, and snapshots of the mouse x/y position every 5 seconds or so.
Using xmlhttprequest to send this data to a server that determines whether the behavior fits, within a margin of error, to a markov model built via previous human interaction in the page.
Of course, if the automated blogspam bot ever got ahold of the markov model, it would be able to generate 'believable' interaction with the page by creating a markov chain.
No epic-level CRPG that actually works and is interesting? I suppose Planescape:Torment wasn't quite epic levels, but it's pretty damn close - even going up against entities that the Lady of Pain had mazed. Yeah, you weren't level 40 with 400hp and massive destructive power... but really, when you're godlike, nothing is interesting..... except meddling in the lives of mortals.
ECMAScript is a prototypal functional programming language. You don't just set members of an object by defining its prototype in an object literal.
You can also, by the power of closures, have private functions, private variables, and protected functions. (ECMAScript is interesting in that public member functions cannot access private variables, but protected functions can. Downside is that protected functions (defining them as this.foo = function() {}; in the constructor) are created new for each instance of the object, unlike the prototype (public) members.
While ECMAScript isn't built to enhance tail recursion, it's actually possible. For example, a continuous passing style fibonacci sequence calculator.
Not quite as readable as haskell or lisp, but still - proves that JavaScript is a true functional programming language.
And this is missing an oft-overlooked niche in the field: Interaction. Has a lot to do with IA, a little to do with design, and some to do with coding.
It's possible to design it all out with a spreadsheet where the rows are interactable elements and the columns are interactions, with the intersections being results. But people won't typically take you serious as an interaction designer unless you have some graphic design or developer skills.
Don't people use rollout scripts to take care of that...? ;)
While I call myself an Interaction Engineer (A little bit of IA, a little bit of graphic design, a lot of usability and ease of use, a lot of JavaScript, a little server-side development, a little SEO, a lot of putting out semantic fires), my title has been everything from Software Engineer to Front End Developer.
And AEGIS / Domain/OS.
It's a drug where the best thing that happens is fever reduction, reduced swelling, and the general affects of a NSAID (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug).
And the worst thing that can happen is stomach bleeding. (Unless you take it constantly in much higher doses than your doctor says you should, in which case it can cause liver issues)
Oh, yeah, and some people are allergic to it.
It's not like ibuprofen is freakin' hydrocodone or something.
Yay, Columbine-era anecdote time!
It was December, 2000. It was the first cold day of winter - about 20 degrees outside, if memory serves. The warmest coat I had was a trench. I'd had this trench for about two years at that point. I hadn't yet worn it that year, and we had a new vice principal.
Little did I know the trouble it would get me into.
During my second period class, the vice principal came on the intercom of my classroom and requested my presence in his office. Of course, knowing what going to the vice principal's office means, the rest of the class ridiculed me for getting in trouble. I had no idea why I was getting called down. It was on the other campus (we had an east and a west campus, separated by a ~250 foot covered walkway), so I wore my coat.
When I got there, there was rage in his eyes. It was fairly frightening, actually. He demanded I take the coat off, and give it to him. I asked him what I was going to wear between classes for the rest of the day - since I had to walk the breezeway several times. He told me that, "Little snots like [me] should think about things like that before you wear crap like this to school." I talked him into allowing me to try and contact my parents to bring me a "more suitable" coat. Unfortunately, neither could be reached.
By the time my father was raised on the phone, he was so infuriated with me that he had me suspended for three days, with in-school suspension for a week after that.
Just for wearing a black trenchcoat to school.
And maybe pointing out logical fallacies in the administrator's points.