This is one of the good reasons to build a network throughout your career. (Of people, such as developers/etc. that you know, not like the intarwebs.)
Over the years you've probably met or worked with some people who either:
A) Work somewhere else, in a business with some needs similar to yours or B) Work somewhere else, with either the technology you're considering replacing or considering replacing that technology with.
Talk to some of those people, explain what your situation roughly is, the problems you're having, and why you're thinking of switching. Asking one person can be hit or miss, but across several qualified colleagues you'll at the very least understand what several of the wrong answers to your question would be. Maybe one developer you know will have done a very similar transition last year and can warn you of the gotchas they encountered on the way.
Of course Silverlight would still have to deliver and at the moment I don't think there's much chance of that.
You know, now that I think about it, I'm not even so sure of that.
The people I know who have spent a lot more time playing with Silverlight than I have say that it's already very good for doing interesting things with video files, and that it's most other areas where it still has a lot of catching up to Flash to do.
As long as Microsoft Office runs on Windows and doesn't run on Linux, Microsoft will be able to compete.
Maybe in ten years that won't be true. After all, I didn't really expect Word to overtake WordPerfect and other alternatives in the market the way it did back in the 90's... but even in that case, it's because something has happened to Office, not because of Moore's Law.
Maybe that complexity will not scale as characters rise in levels, but I see no reason to believe that is the case.
At least as of the beta tests, it didn't really scale -- at least, not anywhere near as much as complexity did by level in 3E. A mid-level wizard would basically be doing the same 3-4 things in every combat whereas that wasn't very true in 3E.
I didn't go to D&D Experience and haven't talked to anyone who did yet though, so no idea if it's any different based on feedback they received.
What I know of 4th edition is that it simplifies a lot vs. 3E, at least.
(Although that being said, the introduction of spontaneous casters in 3E makes those kinds of classes much more accessible to new players than in previous editions.)
Even 3/3.5E, though (which I think I can fairly say is the most tactically complex version of D&D so far) really can play pretty simply for normal players. A friend of mine DMs a regular game where I guarantee you that at nearly every session (with a few exceptions where one of his more knowledgeable friends have sat in), he is the only person at the table who knows jack about the rules.
If you want to try to force the troll you're fighting back ten feet to knock him into a pit, there aren't very good rules for that in 1st edition, and the DM is making something up on the spot. In 3rd edition, there are good rules for that. The question in your case is, from the perspective of your kids, when one of them tries to do that to a troll, does it really matter whether:
A) You're playing 1st edition, and you the DM are making up the rule, B) You're playing 3rd edition (or whatever), and you the DM know the rule and just tell the player what they need to roll or C) You're playing 3rd edition (or whatever), and there is a rule but you don't know it, so you make it up on the fly as you would in 1E?
My original question above: "Is there any concern that you've eliminated the most tactically interesting/complex characters from the game?" Meaning, none of the classes we've seen to this point for 4E are on the strategy/forethought/complexity level of any of the "prepared" casters in 1-3E.
The response, paraphrased: We realize that all of the characters in the new base game are middle of the road complexity-wise, none of them as complex as 3E wizard and none of them as simple as 3E fighter. Later material will introduce some more complex choices.
Assuming this is true, I'm happy with this response and for the first time I'm actually hopeful about 4E. I know a ton of people (mostly current or former convention-circuit gamers) who strongly prefer the more complex characters (even when they're not necessarily more powerful), and I have hope that they won't be alienated from the game. When you're looking at playing the same character for literally thousands of hours of play, a character that isn't going to be doing the same 5 things in 99% of combats becomes a lot more appealing than it otherwise might.
I'm sure I won't ever play again the way I did during my 'con' years, but I'm at least interested in giving the 4E rules a shot now.
"Healthcare for everyone". This can only translate into more of my labor going towards strangers.
Probably, but not necessarily. You're already paying for healthcare for everyone (if you spend anything on healthcare) in the form of high costs that have built in the assumption that something like 40% of the patients will never pay. Don't even get me started on emergency rooms.
It's not impossible that a universal healthcare solution could actually reduce the amount of money most people spend on healthcare.
Uh... McCain has enough delegates to win even if he doesn't get any further.
Add to that, realistically, candidates that already dropped out that asked their delegates to support McCain.
Be realistic here. At this point, [i]even if John McCain dies today[/i], Ron Paul has zero chance to be the Republican nominee this year. I don't know who all those delegates would pick in that case, but I'm sure it's not Ron Paul.
We will now see McCain attacking Obama, Clinton attacking Obama, and republicans voting for Clinton all at once.
I think you're assuming that voters, overall, think a bit more strategically than they do.
Not that what you're saying isn't happening, but as often I've heard Republicans say that they were going to vote in the Democratic primaries for Obama because it's "anyone but Clinton" for them.
Misperceptions and odd prejudices cast more votes (for anyone) than real logic or issues.
Really, in these respects, it's little different from any other hobby or distraction.
I know dozens upon dozens of healthy, well-adjusted adults who, shockingly, have good jobs, function normally in society, have regular consentual sex with other people, and game.
People who "piss away" their future playing D&D aren't doing it because D&D is just that addictive or compelling. They're doing it because they're so unhappy with the real life they're avoiding. What you're seeing is the symptom, not the problem.
To be completely fair, I sure wouldn't want people to judge me or make assumptions about me based on the leader that we (Americans) elected and the actions of the current administration.
First, that page is several years and versions of each browser old.
Second, it's an uptime kind of thing in my experience. If I'm working on an older machine, I typically need to close Firefox every few hours because it's hogging a few hundred meg of memory. IE doesn't, in my experience, bloat over time as bad.
If you're not prone to leaving a browser open for days of browsing at a time, you might not ever notice it. This doesn't invalidate the many good points of Firefox, it's just a little annoying.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable request, except when you consider how bad airlines are with checked luggage. And I'll be honest, fuck if I can figure out why they are so bad. What the airlines should really be doing to improve turnaround time is get their baggage system in order, enabling me to check my luggage, enabling everyone to spend less time waiting for me to jam my suitcase in the overhead bin.
The last time I checked luggage on an airline, by the time I got my suitcase back it looked like a herd of rhinoceros had gang-fucked it for days, resulting in the suitcase being too damaged to ever use again and around $500 of damage to the contents. The airline refused to take any responsibility for any of the damage and it wasn't really worth my time to try to battle it out in small claims court.
The trip immediately preceeding that one, the airline lost my suitcase for about a week. Where did it go? Who knows!
Companies like FedEx and UPS deal with immensely more complicated sortation automation problems in their hubs every day, with a lot less shit getting lost and a lot less shit getting seriously brutalized. It baffles me that airlines/airports can't get the job done, and the consequence of pathologically doing it wrong for a generation or more is that half the plane is trying like hell to avoid checking any luggage, to the detriment of everyone else on board.
I'm pretty sure they are NOT the only profitable airline.
I'm not positive this is still true today, but for a few years it definitely was.
There's a reason all the other airlines were falling all over themselves to try to mimic Southwest for a while. E.g. United's Ted line was supposed to be their experiment in trying to copy Southwest, Delta's Song was theirs, and so on.
While I don't doubt that this is true for you and a number of Slashdot folks, I'd be seriously surprised if over 1% of Yahoo!'s userbase would jump ship over it.
(Now, if Microsoft changed a bunch of stuff that they liked about Yahoo! thereafter, that's another story.)
What does this tell us? Most of Europe doesn't allow software patents, and the U.S. didn't prior to 1981, so clearly patents were not a necessary incentive for companies to innovate in the software space. Q.E.D.
The problem with that proof is that it doesn't demonstrate that an equal amount of software innovation took place with software patents in play vs. without.
I mean, if we get rid of drug patents, AIDS research isn't going to go away, but there's sure going to be a lot less of it. Is that the case with software? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not convinced that it is. Anyone who's 100% positive either way is simplifying too much reality out of the problem, much as an introductory physics class may decide that wind resistance and friction are unimportant in predicting the motion of an object.
Slashdot Mirror
Do those life expectancy figures include people dying from acute lead poisoning?
Wait, are those the Cubans, or American kids with toys made in China? I'm confused.
This is one of the good reasons to build a network throughout your career. (Of people, such as developers/etc. that you know, not like the intarwebs.)
Over the years you've probably met or worked with some people who either:
A) Work somewhere else, in a business with some needs similar to yours or
B) Work somewhere else, with either the technology you're considering replacing or considering replacing that technology with.
Talk to some of those people, explain what your situation roughly is, the problems you're having, and why you're thinking of switching. Asking one person can be hit or miss, but across several qualified colleagues you'll at the very least understand what several of the wrong answers to your question would be. Maybe one developer you know will have done a very similar transition last year and can warn you of the gotchas they encountered on the way.
Of course Silverlight would still have to deliver and at the moment I don't think there's much chance of that.
You know, now that I think about it, I'm not even so sure of that.
The people I know who have spent a lot more time playing with Silverlight than I have say that it's already very good for doing interesting things with video files, and that it's most other areas where it still has a lot of catching up to Flash to do.
As long as Microsoft Office runs on Windows and doesn't run on Linux, Microsoft will be able to compete.
Maybe in ten years that won't be true. After all, I didn't really expect Word to overtake WordPerfect and other alternatives in the market the way it did back in the 90's... but even in that case, it's because something has happened to Office, not because of Moore's Law.
Flash can't do the job on the iPhone? Sounds like a job for Silverlight!
*crickets*
On the plus side, I hope to see a bunch of nice mini's released for the collectible game there trying to turn DnD into.
Just in case you weren't being sarcastic -- there's been a D&D Miniatures collectable game out for the last 5 years or so.
Well, right. "You'll pay more money for this later." is standard with WotC. I assumed everyone knew that. :)
Maybe that complexity will not scale as characters rise in levels, but I see no reason to believe that is the case.
At least as of the beta tests, it didn't really scale -- at least, not anywhere near as much as complexity did by level in 3E. A mid-level wizard would basically be doing the same 3-4 things in every combat whereas that wasn't very true in 3E.
I didn't go to D&D Experience and haven't talked to anyone who did yet though, so no idea if it's any different based on feedback they received.
What I know of 4th edition is that it simplifies a lot vs. 3E, at least.
(Although that being said, the introduction of spontaneous casters in 3E makes those kinds of classes much more accessible to new players than in previous editions.)
Even 3/3.5E, though (which I think I can fairly say is the most tactically complex version of D&D so far) really can play pretty simply for normal players. A friend of mine DMs a regular game where I guarantee you that at nearly every session (with a few exceptions where one of his more knowledgeable friends have sat in), he is the only person at the table who knows jack about the rules.
If you want to try to force the troll you're fighting back ten feet to knock him into a pit, there aren't very good rules for that in 1st edition, and the DM is making something up on the spot. In 3rd edition, there are good rules for that. The question in your case is, from the perspective of your kids, when one of them tries to do that to a troll, does it really matter whether:
A) You're playing 1st edition, and you the DM are making up the rule,
B) You're playing 3rd edition (or whatever), and you the DM know the rule and just tell the player what they need to roll or
C) You're playing 3rd edition (or whatever), and there is a rule but you don't know it, so you make it up on the fly as you would in 1E?
I'd think no. Playing whatever is probably fine.
I agree. I'm glad the video is here, but a transcript posted also would have been really nice.
Summary:
My original question above: "Is there any concern that you've eliminated the most tactically interesting/complex characters from the game?" Meaning, none of the classes we've seen to this point for 4E are on the strategy/forethought/complexity level of any of the "prepared" casters in 1-3E.
The response, paraphrased: We realize that all of the characters in the new base game are middle of the road complexity-wise, none of them as complex as 3E wizard and none of them as simple as 3E fighter. Later material will introduce some more complex choices.
Assuming this is true, I'm happy with this response and for the first time I'm actually hopeful about 4E. I know a ton of people (mostly current or former convention-circuit gamers) who strongly prefer the more complex characters (even when they're not necessarily more powerful), and I have hope that they won't be alienated from the game. When you're looking at playing the same character for literally thousands of hours of play, a character that isn't going to be doing the same 5 things in 99% of combats becomes a lot more appealing than it otherwise might.
I'm sure I won't ever play again the way I did during my 'con' years, but I'm at least interested in giving the 4E rules a shot now.
You're probably right.
Ron Paul on slashdot though, man. You know there's a dozen people reading this who actually still think he has a shot this year.
"Healthcare for everyone". This can only translate into more of my labor going towards strangers.
Probably, but not necessarily. You're already paying for healthcare for everyone (if you spend anything on healthcare) in the form of high costs that have built in the assumption that something like 40% of the patients will never pay. Don't even get me started on emergency rooms.
It's not impossible that a universal healthcare solution could actually reduce the amount of money most people spend on healthcare.
Uh... McCain has enough delegates to win even if he doesn't get any further.
Add to that, realistically, candidates that already dropped out that asked their delegates to support McCain.
Be realistic here. At this point, [i]even if John McCain dies today[/i], Ron Paul has zero chance to be the Republican nominee this year. I don't know who all those delegates would pick in that case, but I'm sure it's not Ron Paul.
We will now see McCain attacking Obama, Clinton attacking Obama, and republicans voting for Clinton all at once.
I think you're assuming that voters, overall, think a bit more strategically than they do.
Not that what you're saying isn't happening, but as often I've heard Republicans say that they were going to vote in the Democratic primaries for Obama because it's "anyone but Clinton" for them.
Misperceptions and odd prejudices cast more votes (for anyone) than real logic or issues.
Really, in these respects, it's little different from any other hobby or distraction.
I know dozens upon dozens of healthy, well-adjusted adults who, shockingly, have good jobs, function normally in society, have regular consentual sex with other people, and game.
People who "piss away" their future playing D&D aren't doing it because D&D is just that addictive or compelling. They're doing it because they're so unhappy with the real life they're avoiding. What you're seeing is the symptom, not the problem.
I met the woman who would later be (and still is, to be clear) my wife through my gaming friends.
Other friends of mine have changed careers and gotten much better jobs through friends they met gaming.
Clearly D&D is a gift to the world that's touched a lot of lives, and not just those of parents'-basement-dwelling pasty teenagers.
Since you ask, much less offensive to me.
To be completely fair, I sure wouldn't want people to judge me or make assumptions about me based on the leader that we (Americans) elected and the actions of the current administration.
I'll have to check, but I'd bet I'm still running Firefox 2 on the couple of older machines that I've used it on with problems.
If the 3 beta is fairly stable I'll have to give it a try.
Okay, I'll bite.
First, that page is several years and versions of each browser old.
Second, it's an uptime kind of thing in my experience. If I'm working on an older machine, I typically need to close Firefox every few hours because it's hogging a few hundred meg of memory. IE doesn't, in my experience, bloat over time as bad.
If you're not prone to leaving a browser open for days of browsing at a time, you might not ever notice it. This doesn't invalidate the many good points of Firefox, it's just a little annoying.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable request, except when you consider how bad airlines are with checked luggage. And I'll be honest, fuck if I can figure out why they are so bad. What the airlines should really be doing to improve turnaround time is get their baggage system in order, enabling me to check my luggage, enabling everyone to spend less time waiting for me to jam my suitcase in the overhead bin.
The last time I checked luggage on an airline, by the time I got my suitcase back it looked like a herd of rhinoceros had gang-fucked it for days, resulting in the suitcase being too damaged to ever use again and around $500 of damage to the contents. The airline refused to take any responsibility for any of the damage and it wasn't really worth my time to try to battle it out in small claims court.
The trip immediately preceeding that one, the airline lost my suitcase for about a week. Where did it go? Who knows!
Companies like FedEx and UPS deal with immensely more complicated sortation automation problems in their hubs every day, with a lot less shit getting lost and a lot less shit getting seriously brutalized. It baffles me that airlines/airports can't get the job done, and the consequence of pathologically doing it wrong for a generation or more is that half the plane is trying like hell to avoid checking any luggage, to the detriment of everyone else on board.
I'm pretty sure they are NOT the only profitable airline.
I'm not positive this is still true today, but for a few years it definitely was.
There's a reason all the other airlines were falling all over themselves to try to mimic Southwest for a while. E.g. United's Ted line was supposed to be their experiment in trying to copy Southwest, Delta's Song was theirs, and so on.
While I don't doubt that this is true for you and a number of Slashdot folks, I'd be seriously surprised if over 1% of Yahoo!'s userbase would jump ship over it.
(Now, if Microsoft changed a bunch of stuff that they liked about Yahoo! thereafter, that's another story.)
What does this tell us? Most of Europe doesn't allow software patents, and the U.S. didn't prior to 1981, so clearly patents were not a necessary incentive for companies to innovate in the software space. Q.E.D.
The problem with that proof is that it doesn't demonstrate that an equal amount of software innovation took place with software patents in play vs. without.
I mean, if we get rid of drug patents, AIDS research isn't going to go away, but there's sure going to be a lot less of it. Is that the case with software? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not convinced that it is. Anyone who's 100% positive either way is simplifying too much reality out of the problem, much as an introductory physics class may decide that wind resistance and friction are unimportant in predicting the motion of an object.