Unfortunately the tools are Windows only. That's me out, and it's also lost sales to any groups that have Mac and Linux users amongst them. Bad move on WotC's part.
Well I played 3.5, so I'll count it. I was the DM, in fact. It worked absolutely fine without miniatures. Depending on how complex the battle was, I'd sketch out a quick map but a lot of the time it was sheer description. I can certainly imagine how it would feel to a player who was used to studying a board and being able to count distances and perfectly position a fireball, etc. It would seem odd and perhaps frustrating. My players all loved it however. You have to understand that there was no doubt on the players' parts that the DM was neutral and providing accurate judgements. They'd ask how many guards could be covered by a fireball and they'd get an answer. It was all a little up in the air, but no-one cared. We had a freedom that I think would have been limited by miniatures. When I wanted to run a scenario in Sharn (the vertical city in the Eberron setting) with dozens of rope bridges between the towers, I had no problem doing so. Players were quite free to cling to one bridge throwing knives at people on another, or to drop down to a bridge that passed below them. I think when you have a board in front of you the DM is less inclined to imagine things that the board does not support and the players are less inclined to leap on tables, duck into doorways and hang their opponent from the chandelier.
I don't know if you've read the rogue and fighter powers in 4e, yet, but there is a lot that explicitly requires miniatures and a battle map. Definitely more so than 3e, imo. It's a problem, though its a feature from WotC's miniatures department.
If you want to see the best implementation of "balance without balance" that I've seen, take a look at the Shadowrun RPG. Whilst everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, in game play character power is comparable to other ways of doing things. It plays like a super-sophisticated game of Rock, Paper Scissors (if the Rock, Paper and Scissors had a massive, complex backstory) with players always seeking those little ways of altering the circumstances to their advantage.
I tend to the role-playing side but I fully agree with what you say. Ideally, however, the game should support both styles if that doesn't damage the support for either (which I think it does not as the rules are separate areas) and try to find innovative ways of reconciling more than one style if there is conflict. Sadly the designers have pretty much stated that people should take a World of Darkness style of improvised hand-waving to deal with non-combat situations.
That would be the ideal and I hope it is the case. I just worry that the designer's long, long experience hasn't blinded them to what it's like not to have that background. Although I've been playing and running games for a long time, I personally need the system to support me in non-combat situations. I'm neither good at, nor enjoy, having to wing and hand-wave it all, but my players prefer the role-playing and story to the combat itself for the most part. I'm not writing off 4e - I want to make that clear. It's great in many ways. But this and the necessity of miniatures are my two concerns.
We don't need rules for how much you can earn playing an instrument in a village of population X, there's no argument there. But not only have almost all non-combat skills been removed (incl. the generic catchalls you could use such as Profession), but most abilities aren't even defined except in the context of combat. Fey Pact warlocks can teleport after downing a foe. Can they teleport outside of combat? Under what circumstances? Do they carry round pockets full of bunnies so they can kill them if they ever need to teleport? We don't know, we're never told and there are numerous examples of the world just stopping at the edge of combat. Many players enjoy being able to say that they are a world class card player or whatever. The feeling you get from reading the books is very much that it's all about combat. The emphasis is bad.
My pre-play evaluation of 4e is that the rules are improved muchly in terms of game-play and ease of banging out encounters. There are a lot of nice ideas in it such as Minion rules to make High Level vs. Mooks a viable encounter again. Production values are fantastic. But the role-playing side seems to have been gutted both by a lack of non-combat rules and by character and monster abilities that make no sense at all except for the metagame reason of interesting combat tactics. The latter problem undermines immersion in the setting more than the designers realised, imo. But I wont say more here as I've already posted more detailed thoughts below.
Okay - funny joke, but it's not accurate. Have you checked the price of the new books? I don't know if it's just the US$ to UK£ exchange rate at the moment, but the new books bought together are actually cheaper than I paid for the same three core books years ago when 3.5 came out. WotC (Wizards of the Coast) are hoping to keep on selling further books each year, but right now, the cost to get into the game is really low.
The online tools are $15 a month which may or may not seem a lot depending on how much use they see, but they're Windows only so I wont be using them anyway. Shame, there. I'd have probably given it a try.
The new rules are very much more elegant. They play quickly in all sorts of areas, from actual combat to monster customization and NPC creation. Character classes are very well balanced with each other and the "sweet spot" that you got in the mid-levels where you were tough enough to survive with good tactics but not so powerful the game became broken... well the game plays well at all levels now. Production values are also very high and I don't think when you read the books and grok the rules, you can really disagree with any of this. There are many well-thought out refinements to the system.
However, the game, imo, seriously suffers on the role-playing side. Non-combat skills are all but gone, character abilities are designed solely for their tactical interest in combat with little thought to justifying them in the game or whether they make the remotest sense and playing with table-top miniatures is all but compulsory now. There are also serious concerns being voiced about whether the classes are now too balanced for their own good. If you can be a wizard firing off endless Magic Missiles (they're at will now), or a ranger firing off endless arrows and both have similar range and damage, you ask yourself whether everything has become a little meaningless through nothing being better than anything else.
It's a difficult one that will only be resolved through trying it out. There's much good stuff in the new game, but there's a serious worry that it's lost it's sole as an actual role-playing game. We'll have to see.
Selling like Charm Person scrolls on a Saturday night, though.
How do I go about getting this information out of the councils to find out if they've been spying on me and if so what information they have gathered? Can I apply for this under Freedom of Information? And can anyone else?
Not UK slang. We might say over here that someone is a bit of a skiver; skiving being skipping school or work (but usually school), probably with a lame excuse such as pretending to be ill.
So basically, Microsoft, listened to their customers, went with the better default mode (and it is better that they do this), and the Slashdot article ends with "But it makes more work for administrators - boo!"
No. He's just described what most politicians are best at, and what they should spend most of their time doing. It's better to have an ineffective government than an active, misguided one.
Of course the notion that Republicans would want to help Hilary helps Obama. So where did that notion come from?
Honestly, a partisan open source project? The Punch and Judy show that is Republicans vs. Democrats has done more damage to the people's ability to guard against government excess than almost anything else. Their campaigns are both financed by the same people and the flak target just gets swapped around every few years when it's getting unusable through taking the blame for too much scandal and the opposition come in to take over. Yet people fall out over who their allegiance and no-body works together to actually deal with government problems, instead just blaming each other. Don't let it start infecting the open source movement, please.
I presume you meant "making new car models", since the original assumption was that making a single physical car is essentially free.
No, the original analogy was as if reproducing the car was free. The initial one still took a large amount of resource to produce. This is an important distinction from what you surmised.
Either there is a demand for continued development for cars, in which case it's simply a matter of making a payment system which can pool payments from multiple persons, hold them in escrow, and return them if the pool doesn't reach high enough amount, and if it does reach that amount keep them safe until the new design has been completed and delivered to the payees, after which it can be paid to the designer; or there isn't, in which case no one making new car models isn't a problem since no one wants them, that being the definition of "no demand".
There are numerous problems with that model, not the least of which is your innappropriate use of the word "simply". Off the top of my head, I see the following problems:
There is no means for a product to be produced on spec unless people already pay in advance in escrow. At a stroke, you've required people to commit money to purchasing something that doesn't yet exist and they don't know if they'll like. Want to test drive the car before you buy it? Sorry, mate. The customer now takes a bigger risk.
Related to the above, comparative shopping becomes impossible, because you can't be putting the money in escrow for two cars, you can only afford to do it for one. This results in a system whereby investment is concentrated in fewer models, because the ones that people think are less likely to happen, become less likely to happen. You have now immediately trebled the power of the advertisers and those who manipulate public perception of popularity
You have near mandated a single model of purchase with a centralised system. I shouldn't need to go into the risks of that.
You are advocating a system in which people do not each pay the same amount, but where perhaps 10% pay, the product is then made freely available, and the other 90% take it for free. Hardly equitable, is it?
Following from the above, you have created a strong disincentive to be an early adopter. This is very bad.
You have reduced the available options for society, sellers and purchasers to operate on. There is nothing in law that prevents the sales model you are advocating being used now. You and anyone else are absolutely free to start selling goods using this approach if the market (customers - us) will actually support it. However, you are requesting a legal change that would reduce us to using only your model. Do I have to go into why a lack of choice is bad?
I, as a customer who purchases a fair amount of music and DVD's, don't want to have to use your model where I have to commit money in advance to a product I haven't seen, am pushed away from those projects that public perception thinks will fail and so doesn't commit money to and must operate through a central, overly-powerful distribution company. I want to be able to listen to a song on the radio or in a club, go out and buy that song. Which is what I have now.
If you have a contract stating that the other signee will buy a hundred cars from you, and they only buy one, then sue them for contract violation. And if there is no such contract, then what is this "promise" you are talking about ? Are you perhaps saying that I have an obligation to buy a car from you because you want to make a living selling them ?
No, I'm saying (quite clearly, I thought), that there is no longer a motivation for someone to invest a lot of time and money into making a car in the first place.
I'll certainly still be interested. And it's a good thing when I'm forced to justify my statements in depth. Anyway, I hope, disagreement not withstanding, that you at least no longer consider me to be talking from some particular political bias. Whether we end up disagreeing is not a big issue. I just like to have reasonable debate. I'll consider your comments about military spending more carefully.
Regards (and there are better things to spend five bucks on than Slashdot debates;),
H.
And if you spend years making a car on the promise that you'll sell a hundred of them. And then sell one to a person who makes exact copies of it... well you probably wont make any more cars, will you?
Well I seemed to have picked up an Offtopic moderation for my question, but I consider it worthwhile to have asked. It's an interesting answer and we only have to look at the Megabyes / Mebibytes fiasco to see the damage that can be done by people re-inventing the language because it gives them a chance to correct other people. (Note - not the hard drive marketers but the Well, Actualy's that cling to it).:/ As a UK resident, I've always pronounced herb with an 'h' and been occasionally puzzled by where some people picked up the 'erb version. Now I know it's an americanism.
Cheers,
H.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately the tools are Windows only. That's me out, and it's also lost sales to any groups that have Mac and Linux users amongst them. Bad move on WotC's part.
Well I played 3.5, so I'll count it. I was the DM, in fact. It worked absolutely fine without miniatures. Depending on how complex the battle was, I'd sketch out a quick map but a lot of the time it was sheer description. I can certainly imagine how it would feel to a player who was used to studying a board and being able to count distances and perfectly position a fireball, etc. It would seem odd and perhaps frustrating. My players all loved it however. You have to understand that there was no doubt on the players' parts that the DM was neutral and providing accurate judgements. They'd ask how many guards could be covered by a fireball and they'd get an answer. It was all a little up in the air, but no-one cared. We had a freedom that I think would have been limited by miniatures. When I wanted to run a scenario in Sharn (the vertical city in the Eberron setting) with dozens of rope bridges between the towers, I had no problem doing so. Players were quite free to cling to one bridge throwing knives at people on another, or to drop down to a bridge that passed below them. I think when you have a board in front of you the DM is less inclined to imagine things that the board does not support and the players are less inclined to leap on tables, duck into doorways and hang their opponent from the chandelier.
I don't know if you've read the rogue and fighter powers in 4e, yet, but there is a lot that explicitly requires miniatures and a battle map. Definitely more so than 3e, imo. It's a problem, though its a feature from WotC's miniatures department.
If you want to see the best implementation of "balance without balance" that I've seen, take a look at the Shadowrun RPG. Whilst everyone has different strengths and weaknesses, in game play character power is comparable to other ways of doing things. It plays like a super-sophisticated game of Rock, Paper Scissors (if the Rock, Paper and Scissors had a massive, complex backstory) with players always seeking those little ways of altering the circumstances to their advantage.
I tend to the role-playing side but I fully agree with what you say. Ideally, however, the game should support both styles if that doesn't damage the support for either (which I think it does not as the rules are separate areas) and try to find innovative ways of reconciling more than one style if there is conflict. Sadly the designers have pretty much stated that people should take a World of Darkness style of improvised hand-waving to deal with non-combat situations.
That would be the ideal and I hope it is the case. I just worry that the designer's long, long experience hasn't blinded them to what it's like not to have that background. Although I've been playing and running games for a long time, I personally need the system to support me in non-combat situations. I'm neither good at, nor enjoy, having to wing and hand-wave it all, but my players prefer the role-playing and story to the combat itself for the most part. I'm not writing off 4e - I want to make that clear. It's great in many ways. But this and the necessity of miniatures are my two concerns.
We don't need rules for how much you can earn playing an instrument in a village of population X, there's no argument there. But not only have almost all non-combat skills been removed (incl. the generic catchalls you could use such as Profession), but most abilities aren't even defined except in the context of combat. Fey Pact warlocks can teleport after downing a foe. Can they teleport outside of combat? Under what circumstances? Do they carry round pockets full of bunnies so they can kill them if they ever need to teleport? We don't know, we're never told and there are numerous examples of the world just stopping at the edge of combat. Many players enjoy being able to say that they are a world class card player or whatever. The feeling you get from reading the books is very much that it's all about combat. The emphasis is bad.
My pre-play evaluation of 4e is that the rules are improved muchly in terms of game-play and ease of banging out encounters. There are a lot of nice ideas in it such as Minion rules to make High Level vs. Mooks a viable encounter again. Production values are fantastic. But the role-playing side seems to have been gutted both by a lack of non-combat rules and by character and monster abilities that make no sense at all except for the metagame reason of interesting combat tactics. The latter problem undermines immersion in the setting more than the designers realised, imo. But I wont say more here as I've already posted more detailed thoughts below.
Okay - funny joke, but it's not accurate. Have you checked the price of the new books? I don't know if it's just the US$ to UK£ exchange rate at the moment, but the new books bought together are actually cheaper than I paid for the same three core books years ago when 3.5 came out. WotC (Wizards of the Coast) are hoping to keep on selling further books each year, but right now, the cost to get into the game is really low.
The online tools are $15 a month which may or may not seem a lot depending on how much use they see, but they're Windows only so I wont be using them anyway. Shame, there. I'd have probably given it a try.
The new rules are very much more elegant. They play quickly in all sorts of areas, from actual combat to monster customization and NPC creation. Character classes are very well balanced with each other and the "sweet spot" that you got in the mid-levels where you were tough enough to survive with good tactics but not so powerful the game became broken... well the game plays well at all levels now. Production values are also very high and I don't think when you read the books and grok the rules, you can really disagree with any of this. There are many well-thought out refinements to the system.
However, the game, imo, seriously suffers on the role-playing side. Non-combat skills are all but gone, character abilities are designed solely for their tactical interest in combat with little thought to justifying them in the game or whether they make the remotest sense and playing with table-top miniatures is all but compulsory now. There are also serious concerns being voiced about whether the classes are now too balanced for their own good. If you can be a wizard firing off endless Magic Missiles (they're at will now), or a ranger firing off endless arrows and both have similar range and damage, you ask yourself whether everything has become a little meaningless through nothing being better than anything else.
It's a difficult one that will only be resolved through trying it out. There's much good stuff in the new game, but there's a serious worry that it's lost it's sole as an actual role-playing game. We'll have to see.
Selling like Charm Person scrolls on a Saturday night, though.
How do I go about getting this information out of the councils to find out if they've been spying on me and if so what information they have gathered? Can I apply for this under Freedom of Information? And can anyone else?
Not UK slang. We might say over here that someone is a bit of a skiver; skiving being skipping school or work (but usually school), probably with a lame excuse such as pretending to be ill.
That would be wonderful. And I, as a skilled professional, would love the opportunity to take a short teaching sabbatical.
That's got to be one of the most obscure jokes I've ever seen on Slashdot. Nice!
"Git" is UK slang for someone who's a bit of a bastard (not in the literal sense).
And similarly I'm not forgetting what Microsoft have done, I'm just condemning the summary.
I think GITS would be more appropriate.
So basically, Microsoft, listened to their customers, went with the better default mode (and it is better that they do this), and the Slashdot article ends with "But it makes more work for administrators - boo!"
*sigh
Missing Option: Active, Representing Your Needs.
Of course the notion that Republicans would want to help Hilary helps Obama. So where did that notion come from?
Honestly, a partisan open source project? The Punch and Judy show that is Republicans vs. Democrats has done more damage to the people's ability to guard against government excess than almost anything else. Their campaigns are both financed by the same people and the flak target just gets swapped around every few years when it's getting unusable through taking the blame for too much scandal and the opposition come in to take over. Yet people fall out over who their allegiance and no-body works together to actually deal with government problems, instead just blaming each other. Don't let it start infecting the open source movement, please.
No, the original analogy was as if reproducing the car was free. The initial one still took a large amount of resource to produce. This is an important distinction from what you surmised.
There are numerous problems with that model, not the least of which is your innappropriate use of the word "simply". Off the top of my head, I see the following problems:
I, as a customer who purchases a fair amount of music and DVD's, don't want to have to use your model where I have to commit money in advance to a product I haven't seen, am pushed away from those projects that public perception thinks will fail and so doesn't commit money to and must operate through a central, overly-powerful distribution company. I want to be able to listen to a song on the radio or in a club, go out and buy that song. Which is what I have now.
No, I'm saying (quite clearly, I thought), that there is no longer a motivation for someone to invest a lot of time and money into making a car in the first place.
I'll certainly still be interested. And it's a good thing when I'm forced to justify my statements in depth. Anyway, I hope, disagreement not withstanding, that you at least no longer consider me to be talking from some particular political bias. Whether we end up disagreeing is not a big issue. I just like to have reasonable debate. I'll consider your comments about military spending more carefully.
Regards (and there are better things to spend five bucks on than Slashdot debates
H.
And if you spend years making a car on the promise that you'll sell a hundred of them. And then sell one to a person who makes exact copies of it... well you probably wont make any more cars, will you?
So they have basically concluded that it is legal to do something, but to help someone else do this legal thing, is illegal.
Well I seemed to have picked up an Offtopic moderation for my question, but I consider it worthwhile to have asked. It's an interesting answer and we only have to look at the Megabyes / Mebibytes fiasco to see the damage that can be done by people re-inventing the language because it gives them a chance to correct other people. (Note - not the hard drive marketers but the Well, Actualy's that cling to it).
Cheers,
H.