How is that different from checking off used spells you'd pre-prepared in 2nd or 3rd Edition?
Personally I find 4th Ed quite smooth to play, having played since the early '80s and lots of other random systems in between.
Combat resolves cleanly without all the arguments we used to have in 2nd Ed about who was standing where and whether you could see/reach your target. We have a couple of tubs of random minis of hero mobs and some jars of coloured glass beeds for packs of lower grade enemies. The battlemat doesn't detract from the storytelling and interesting terrain becomes a much more interactive part of the game. My rogue has developed a tendancy to jump off ledges/bridges/cliffs recently, not sure why, might be something to do with how I keep ending up surrounded by enemies when the rest of the party is still waiting to act.
I've GMd rules heavy and rules light (and rules barely existant) games as both campaigns and tournament modules. There are pros and cons to each side of the coin. Personally I find that in an ongoing campaign, allowing the rules to decide 99+ of cases, with some pre-agreed house rules for the balance tends to result in less friction over time.
Rules light games rely on GM fiat to determine outcomes, despite attempts to be fair, players will eventually build their own perception of whether they think your rulings are 'fair', and given it's human nature to remember when things go wrong more often than when things go right, they will decide that you are against them (usually them personally).
The current campaigns I play, we do all dice rolls in the open, including GM rolls. We have house rules, such as if more than half the party dies in a single encounter it's a wipe and we reset and try it again.
I'm pretty sure most women (when taken over the entire period of history) have been well arware of how harsh life could be, you know being sold as chattels to older men, dying in childbirth, carrying water from wells, watching their children die from disease, infection or starvation, washing clothes with rocks in stream, milling wheat to flour by hand from grain, etc...
Women may not have been sent out to fight in wars as a general rule, but for those living in warzones thay experienced it every bit as much as men did.
Things got cushy for women in the first world about the same time they got cushy for men.
(Free clue: A lot of books on the market today are borderline unreadable even with massive editing and proofreading effort.)
FTFY:)
I'm not a big consumer of text books these days, but some of the random novels I've read recently has me reaching for the classics to get the 'taste' of the poor writing out of my mind's eye. A good test for whether prose is any good is to try and read the first chapter out loud. If it sounds clumsy rather than lyrical, the author may have needed a stronger editor or another couple of drafts.
I have a friend with severe CFS and a few other issues to compound it. She has a motorised wheelchair, but even going to the Drs for an hour or so means days of recovery time.
While she may be at the extreme end of the spectrum (she's currently improving with new treatments, but spent years bed bound), coming back later is not always an option for some people. They may have used an irreplaceable percentage of the energy they had available to them for the day just getting there.
My husband suffers from periodic seizures, they can leave him mildly aphashic or at best stuttering, he gets balance issues which means he can often not walk without support and caan experience memory loss.
He had an experience last year where he was heading home from work and had a seizure in transit. He was catching public transport and there was a problem on the train line causing everyone to be disembarked. He tried to get a taxi home, he asked the driver how much it would cost for him to get to our suburb, the driver told him, he gave the driver the money, and the driver pulled out leaving him on the curb with no cash.
He managed to stumble to a chemist and pass out there, they answered his mobile that I had been frantically calling for 30 minutes and I was able to arrange for someone to pick him up.
Our charitable explanation is the taxi driver thought he was drunk and didn't want to be clearing drunk vomit out of the back of his car. But either way it was despicable behaviour.
My husband suffers from periodic seizures that can leave him unable to walk without support due to balance issues and vision problems post-seizure. These seizures can be triggered aurally by high pitched noises - like the alarms that go off when people take tagged items through the security barriers at the local stores.
We don't have a disabililty tag for our car, and there have been more than a few occasions where I've had to abandon our shopping so I could assist him back to the car. He has a good 30+ kilos on me in weight, so it's a non-trivial exercise to get him across the car park - he's almost a dead weight at the time.
Over the last couple of years the shopping centre has been removing casual seating around the centre to make room for more retail kiosks. It makes it really difficult to find places for him to sit and rest and get himself back under control after a seizure. People can have tranisitory issues which affect their movement capability.
The only time this doesn't work for me is in the pre-christmas shopping periods where even the spots furtherest away from the shops are filled. I try to get all my holiday shopping done early so I can avoid this if at all possible.
I second the nomination for the Feynman books, his biographies are a terrific read and a great insight into scientific endeavours like the Manhattan Project and the paranoia that surrounded them.
I started with Storm Front, and in the first 3 chapters there was a Chicago Gangster, a noir Blonde showing up at a detective agency, a hard bitten detective and vampire hookers. I kinda set the scene for the rest of the series quite effectively.
Hate to break it to you, but not all women read trashy romance novels. Personally I'm a fan of SciFi (lots of PKD, Asimov, Heinlen, KSR, Banks, etc...), Crime & Suspense, AND Fantasy genres. I also read historical fiction ( I have a shelf full of Bernard Cornwall's Sharpe series, and his Arthurian series is awesome), non-fiction (e.g. Freak-o-nomics and a heap of PJ O'Rouke).
I have to clear out a few bookshelves over Christmas to make room for next year's collecting. Currently up to 12 bookcases, I've run out of walls to put them against.
Mr. trouble never hangs around,
when he hears this Mighty sound,
Here I come to save the day!
That means that Mighty Mouse is on the way!
Yes sir, when there is a wrong to right,
Mighty Mouse will join the fight!
On the sea or on the land,
He's got the situation well in hand!
And so they want to make it illegal for everyone. I don't think I like that either. The basic mentality there is "if too many people can'd do xxx safely, we're going to make it illegal for anyone to do xxx". That looks ok until you're one of the (minority/few/whatever) that can (or I suppose, think you can) do it safely, and lose the right. There'll always be the argument that a lot of people think they can handle it but can't.
This is the reason speed limits exsist. Lots of people think thay can drive safely at high speeds, not so many of them can.
Personally I drive a Mazda 323 and would absolutely replace it with the 'current' model equivalent when the time comes. It drives beautifully, is fuel efficient and has been totally reliable.
As a woman who makes a point of wearing comfortable shoes (no, that's not a euphemism), I love my iPad. I use it for hours every day, I have no issues with the weight or form factor - and I say this as someone with small hands. The places I use it the most is on the train commuting, in bed or on the sofa when watching TV.
Killer apps from my point of view are iBooks, the local broadsheet's app, and IMDB. I also read Twitter and G+ from the pad frequently (though wish Google would do an iPad version of the G+ app).
The only problem I have with it is when I'm web browsing for resturant/cafe information when out and about and the site all seem to have flash front pages before you can navigate around to get their contact info or menus. (Yes I'm looking at you KokoBlack)
Kodak actually ventured into digital imaging software, with a couple of cool products including Shoebox which was a digital asset management product and Renaissance which was a DTP product that integrated with Shoebox and handled digital assets as elements that had tranformations applied to them. E.g. if you used the same image multiple times in a document with different cropping, rotation, scaling, etc... the image would be stored once in the document and the tranformations were applied ad hoc depending on each instance the image was used. It made for much smaller files most of the time back when file size was a huge issue.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but Tales of the Floating Vagabond had 'Whips and Chains' as a social skill and 'Target Vomitting' as a weapons skill.
I feel your pain. Back in the '90s my RPGA judge rank was 2 levels higher than my player rank.
How is that different from checking off used spells you'd pre-prepared in 2nd or 3rd Edition?
Personally I find 4th Ed quite smooth to play, having played since the early '80s and lots of other random systems in between.
Combat resolves cleanly without all the arguments we used to have in 2nd Ed about who was standing where and whether you could see/reach your target. We have a couple of tubs of random minis of hero mobs and some jars of coloured glass beeds for packs of lower grade enemies. The battlemat doesn't detract from the storytelling and interesting terrain becomes a much more interactive part of the game. My rogue has developed a tendancy to jump off ledges/bridges/cliffs recently, not sure why, might be something to do with how I keep ending up surrounded by enemies when the rest of the party is still waiting to act.
I've GMd rules heavy and rules light (and rules barely existant) games as both campaigns and tournament modules. There are pros and cons to each side of the coin. Personally I find that in an ongoing campaign, allowing the rules to decide 99+ of cases, with some pre-agreed house rules for the balance tends to result in less friction over time.
Rules light games rely on GM fiat to determine outcomes, despite attempts to be fair, players will eventually build their own perception of whether they think your rulings are 'fair', and given it's human nature to remember when things go wrong more often than when things go right, they will decide that you are against them (usually them personally).
The current campaigns I play, we do all dice rolls in the open, including GM rolls. We have house rules, such as if more than half the party dies in a single encounter it's a wipe and we reset and try it again.
I'm pretty sure most women (when taken over the entire period of history) have been well arware of how harsh life could be, you know being sold as chattels to older men, dying in childbirth, carrying water from wells, watching their children die from disease, infection or starvation, washing clothes with rocks in stream, milling wheat to flour by hand from grain, etc...
Women may not have been sent out to fight in wars as a general rule, but for those living in warzones thay experienced it every bit as much as men did.
Things got cushy for women in the first world about the same time they got cushy for men.
My husband is far more arachnaphobic than I am. I'm usually the one who has to remove spiders from our house.
(Free clue: A lot of books on the market today are borderline unreadable even with massive editing and proofreading effort.)
FTFY :)
I'm not a big consumer of text books these days, but some of the random novels I've read recently has me reaching for the classics to get the 'taste' of the poor writing out of my mind's eye. A good test for whether prose is any good is to try and read the first chapter out loud. If it sounds clumsy rather than lyrical, the author may have needed a stronger editor or another couple of drafts.
That's ok, AOL and MSN will still be up, I"m sure. :)
Apparently you should care less and it would be better for your blood pressure.
For your edification: http://www.dailywritingtips.com/could-care-less-versus-couldnt-care-less/
I preferred dogpile.com
I wonder if it is even still around?
I have a friend with severe CFS and a few other issues to compound it. She has a motorised wheelchair, but even going to the Drs for an hour or so means days of recovery time.
While she may be at the extreme end of the spectrum (she's currently improving with new treatments, but spent years bed bound), coming back later is not always an option for some people. They may have used an irreplaceable percentage of the energy they had available to them for the day just getting there.
My husband suffers from periodic seizures, they can leave him mildly aphashic or at best stuttering, he gets balance issues which means he can often not walk without support and caan experience memory loss.
He had an experience last year where he was heading home from work and had a seizure in transit. He was catching public transport and there was a problem on the train line causing everyone to be disembarked. He tried to get a taxi home, he asked the driver how much it would cost for him to get to our suburb, the driver told him, he gave the driver the money, and the driver pulled out leaving him on the curb with no cash.
He managed to stumble to a chemist and pass out there, they answered his mobile that I had been frantically calling for 30 minutes and I was able to arrange for someone to pick him up.
Our charitable explanation is the taxi driver thought he was drunk and didn't want to be clearing drunk vomit out of the back of his car. But either way it was despicable behaviour.
My husband suffers from periodic seizures that can leave him unable to walk without support due to balance issues and vision problems post-seizure. These seizures can be triggered aurally by high pitched noises - like the alarms that go off when people take tagged items through the security barriers at the local stores.
We don't have a disabililty tag for our car, and there have been more than a few occasions where I've had to abandon our shopping so I could assist him back to the car. He has a good 30+ kilos on me in weight, so it's a non-trivial exercise to get him across the car park - he's almost a dead weight at the time.
Over the last couple of years the shopping centre has been removing casual seating around the centre to make room for more retail kiosks. It makes it really difficult to find places for him to sit and rest and get himself back under control after a seizure. People can have tranisitory issues which affect their movement capability.
This!
The only time this doesn't work for me is in the pre-christmas shopping periods where even the spots furtherest away from the shops are filled. I try to get all my holiday shopping done early so I can avoid this if at all possible.
I second the nomination for the Feynman books, his biographies are a terrific read and a great insight into scientific endeavours like the Manhattan Project and the paranoia that surrounded them.
The one Matthew Reilly I've read so far reminded me of the Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novels with a paranormal twist.
I started with Storm Front, and in the first 3 chapters there was a Chicago Gangster, a noir Blonde showing up at a detective agency, a hard bitten detective and vampire hookers. I kinda set the scene for the rest of the series quite effectively.
Hate to break it to you, but not all women read trashy romance novels. Personally I'm a fan of SciFi (lots of PKD, Asimov, Heinlen, KSR, Banks, etc...), Crime & Suspense, AND Fantasy genres. I also read historical fiction ( I have a shelf full of Bernard Cornwall's Sharpe series, and his Arthurian series is awesome), non-fiction (e.g. Freak-o-nomics and a heap of PJ O'Rouke).
I have to clear out a few bookshelves over Christmas to make room for next year's collecting. Currently up to 12 bookcases, I've run out of walls to put them against.
The borrow from the OWS people, surely 5% is a greater majority than the 1% making our decisions for us?
And so they want to make it illegal for everyone. I don't think I like that either. The basic mentality there is "if too many people can'd do xxx safely, we're going to make it illegal for anyone to do xxx". That looks ok until you're one of the (minority/few/whatever) that can (or I suppose, think you can) do it safely, and lose the right. There'll always be the argument that a lot of people think they can handle it but can't.
This is the reason speed limits exsist. Lots of people think thay can drive safely at high speeds, not so many of them can.
And just in case you wanted to use a real dictionary...
Personally I drive a Mazda 323 and would absolutely replace it with the 'current' model equivalent when the time comes. It drives beautifully, is fuel efficient and has been totally reliable.
As a woman who makes a point of wearing comfortable shoes (no, that's not a euphemism), I love my iPad. I use it for hours every day, I have no issues with the weight or form factor - and I say this as someone with small hands. The places I use it the most is on the train commuting, in bed or on the sofa when watching TV.
Killer apps from my point of view are iBooks, the local broadsheet's app, and IMDB. I also read Twitter and G+ from the pad frequently (though wish Google would do an iPad version of the G+ app).
The only problem I have with it is when I'm web browsing for resturant/cafe information when out and about and the site all seem to have flash front pages before you can navigate around to get their contact info or menus. (Yes I'm looking at you KokoBlack)
Kodak actually ventured into digital imaging software, with a couple of cool products including Shoebox which was a digital asset management product and Renaissance which was a DTP product that integrated with Shoebox and handled digital assets as elements that had tranformations applied to them. E.g. if you used the same image multiple times in a document with different cropping, rotation, scaling, etc... the image would be stored once in the document and the tranformations were applied ad hoc depending on each instance the image was used. It made for much smaller files most of the time back when file size was a huge issue.