I’m definitely in the middle of a slow period in WoW right now. I’m not interested in raiding. Running instances again doesn’t appeal – there are very few instances that I haven’t run at least once in each of the four roles. I keep meaning to try the PvP battlegrounds, but I can’t stir up any enthusiasm for it. Arenas are right out as my reflexes stink and I’d feel bad about dragging partner(s) down with me – besides the charm of WoW for me is being able to play when I have chance rather than according to someone else’s schedule.
Normally I’d be off somewhere leveling an alt or three, but there are a few things keeping me from doing that. With the revamp of 1-60 in Cataclysm, I want to see it all when it’s new. It feels like a waste to redo the old zones yet again. I’ve leveled all the classes, so I don’t think I’d be seeing anything new playstyle-wise either. I want my heirlooms on any new alts, but I’m reluctant to pay for a server transfer just to shift them over.
I’m not really worried about this. Chances are when Cataclysm comes out I’ll play a bunch then wind up getting bored again before the next expansion comes out. At this point, I don’t know if I’ll be subscribing all the way through to the next expansion though. There are only so many alts I can play.
This looks like a great way of learning math: Khan Academy.
I did calculus via a correspondence course and I found the most difficult part was actually doing it. There’s no lack of things to learn out there but taking the time to actually learn them is a lot more difficult.
One of the things that makes classroom learning most useful for me is the strict deadline. You have to finish the assignment by a certain date and to a certain standard or you don’t get any credit for it, which gets rid of the problem of indefinite procrastination.
I’m probably being too conventional, but a way of certifying that you have completed online courses would probably help a lot.
We found a few extra people wandering around Icecrown and finished off the last few group quests Jaimie needed for Loremaster. Now she has a Loremaster for each faction. I think she’s nuts, but it is quite the achievement! Congratulations hon!
Tonight’s game featured bullywugs, kobolds and dragons.
First the party followed a new spring up a hill and ran into some bullywugs. The fight was tough but they didn’t find anything exciting.
They crossed to the other side and found a kobold mining operation. There was much discussion of candle taking. TheBeast took down one of the kobold guards in no time and jd4 the minotaur was skillfully tanking the other when a young dragon, Kethendtir, burst out of the sandy mine floor to accost the home invaders. The dragon’s sandstorm and breath hit them fairly hard but once the party got their tactics together the fight was pretty one-sided.
The cave goes a little deeper, but we had to leave our heroes taking a brief rest. Dang real life interference.
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Gauging combat difficulty and dropping clues were the areas where I had problems. I bounce between being way too vague and leading the players by the nose. With these initial forays into 4th edition D&D it’s tricky to decide what makes an appropriate level of challenge. The bullywugs were supposed to be easy and the dragon was supposed to be hard, but it turned out somewhat the other way around. Part of the problem was that we don’t have much in the was of AOE so minions were around longer than they should have been. The other part is simply bad tactics on my part. Hopefully my tactics and my force estimation will improve with practice.
I like the idea of this: The Two Story, Climb Inside Bookshelf Tower | Apartment Therapy Chicago. Sadly, I don’t know if I’d be up to maintaining that many books. If I were to get something like this due to winning the lottery, I think I’d go for something more along the lines of Professor Higgins’ library in “My Fair Lady.” Still there’s something appealing about a tower of books to climb among.
DnD4e Combat Manager is a really useful tool for tracking D&D 4e combat. I used it in our game on Saturday and it worked really well. Being able to set up encounters ahead of time and paste in monsters directly from the Adventure Tools really helped keep things moving along. Keeping track of hit points was a lot easier than jotting them down on bits of paper and trying to read my writing.
Callie the halfling Cleric, Lia the elven Ranger, TheBeast the dwarven Barbarian and Unnamed the Minotaur Fighter had hardly left Renth when they encountered a white mare with an arrow in her leg. Backtracking the horse’s trail brought them to the scene of a recent encounter where a group of goblins was still dividing up the possessions of a pair of recently deceased travelers.
Eager for battle, the group moved in to attack. Callie blasted a number of goblins with silver arrows, The Beast gave vent to his barbarian rage with a cleave , Lia carefully targeted her quarry, and Unnamed mocked the goblins as their attacks bounced off his armor.
After the battle, TheBeast realized that he had forgotten to equip his armor, which might explain his near-death experience. Since the goblins had recently looted Awakening Hide armor, he didn’t even need to take off his old armor to use his new one.
We bought a new couch and loveseat last week. Jaimie pointed out that we spent a long time debating about spending money on furniture. Our last expense of similar scope was replacing Jaimie’s computer after a lightning strike and there was no debate or discussion there. We have our priorities straight!
I ran our first encounter in DnD 4e tonight. It was a lot of fun.
I used the Eyes in the Forest encounter from Dungeon 177. It’s a battle against 8 goblins who have killed a couple of unfortunate travelers. The party was a halfling cleric, a half-elven ranger, a dwarf barbarian, and a minotaur fighter. The barbarian went down to unconscious at one point, due in part to forgetting to put on the leather armor he’d bought. Oops. Also it turned out that the barbarian had the highest intelligence score in the party.
It was a fun night of figuring out the new rules. I’m not sure if we’ll do a couple more skirmish type encounters to get used to the rules or just start in on the exploration of the world.
I was reading one of Tobold’s posts where he talks about MMORPG business models and fundamental player decisions. Since I’ve been looking at playing pen and paper D&D again, I was struck by the similarities between the Free to Play model and the D&D business model.
Unlike most free to play games, D&D costs money up front to play. Usually a friend has the books so you don’t need to buy them right away. If you’re cash-strapped or willing to make do, you can pass game books and dice from person to person and a whole group can start today and play for years for less than $100 total. (There are still people playing the original edition of D&D and 35 years of play for $10 is pretty close to free.) At no time are you forced to buy anything beyond the core books.
So where does the money come from? There are new editions of the core books, pre-written adventures, books with additional creatures, books describing whole new worlds to play in, miniatures representing the heroes and monsters, variant rules, shiny new treasure descriptions and on and on. You don’t have to buy a single one of these to play, but they can enhance the game. It’s the free to play model with 35 years of history behind it!
It’s interesting to note that TSR was draconian in enforcing “official” content at the expense of third party content, while Wizards of the Coast has been much more open to third party developers. I don’t know the details, but so far it appears that a more open approach has been more successful.
If we’re lucky we will see an MMO that has a core and official content, but which will also be open to user and third-party developer content. D&D shows that it can be done – now for all those devilish details!
I spent yesterday out in a field, so I loaded up on podcasts to listen to. The podcast of the Penny Arcade/PvP Dark Sun game is a magnificent example of what a fun roleplaying game session looks like. Some of the character comments and situations made me double over with laughter.
If you’re curious to see what a well-run, well-played game of Dungones and Dragons looks like, this is a great set of podcast episodes to listen to.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has an article on ebook publishing Grantville Gazette » Universe Annex » Changing Times (ironically locked behind a paywall). The key quote is
Suddenly, a reader can find the story they’ve been hearing about for years with only the click of a button. This is great, not just for writers, but for readers. As someone said on my Facebook page a while back, readers don’t care who publishes their favorite author, just as long as they can get the book.
I would love to see this come true.
photo credit: osde8infoI watched Mamma Mia yesterday. What a fun movie!
Somehow this movie felt like a really well done amateur production. The actors were in character the whole time, but it felt as though they were just having a blast. The story is one of those implausible sitcomish ones, but somehow it just works. The songs felt shoehorned in in places, but again they were fun.
Simply put, this is a somewhat silly but very enthusiastic and enjoyable movie.
EDIT: The key trope is Luke I Might Be Your Father. Oh and the chorus for every song adds a ton of humor too!
This looks like the direction I want to try taking my next RPG campaign: LotFP: RPG: Guide to Adventure Writing. I particularly need to keep this quote in mind:
The most important thing to remember when
constructing an adventure is to not assume that the
PCs will succeed at any point during the adventure.
(Found via Open Game Table)
As someone who loves games, I found this interview on Spark 108 really interesting. What I liked was Jesse’s comment at roughly 25 minutes in where he describes a key component of games is the challenge. Humans love to solve problems and games give us challenges at an appropriate level. The bonus in games is that the problems are solvable! Life may throw problems at us that cannot be surmounted, but ideally game problems are just challenging enough to be interesting but not so difficult that they’re insurmountable.
I ran across this quote from Buddha in a podcast
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
The Buddha, The Kalama Sutta
Most people have an innate sense of morality. Paul said much the same thing in Romans 2:14 and Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene made a similar argument on evolutionary grounds. The Wikipedia article on Natural Law discusses the analysis of human nature to come up with laws.
What I liked about the Buddha quote is that it encourages us to judge things by their effects. Too often morality is something that’s legislated from above. “I was just following orders” is not an acceptable excuse for moral failings, even when the orders come from Almighty God. God cannot declare good evil and evil good by fiat. At then end, distinguishing between good and evil comes down to: “By their fruit you will recognize them. Matthew 7:16″.
Well, Flint and Tinder made it up to 80! These toons have now made it to level cap every time. I don’t think we’ll be raiding on them at all this time around. If Cataclysm takes a long time to come out, it’s possible I’ll get geared up enough to try a pug raid, but I’m not betting on it.
The Noob’s take on the effects of removing anonymity made me laugh.
The Noob chronicles “Adventures and misadventures of Ohforfsake, a n00b in the online game Clichequest. Now with 33% more generic evil creatures!” It pokes fun at all the people involved in MMOs – PVPers, roleplayers, GMs, raiders, and of course the titular noob.
One thing I appreciate about this comic is that Ohforfsake is not stupid. At worst he’s somewhat clueless, but his actions all make sense based on what he knows. If it wasn’t for sites outside the game teaching me how to play, I’m not sure that I’d be any more clueful. Hopefully future MMOs will be better at teaching players just what it is that they’re supposed to do.
This is fun: Inside Google Books: Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you.
What I found interesting was the effort they’ve put into defining a book. You wouldn’t think that the question “Is this a book?” would be quite so tricky to answer. Then there’s the question “Is this book distinct or another copy of an already counted book?” Beware of bookish relativists – they’re trying to destroy good old fashioned books with their wishy-washy ways! 
photo credit: Let Ideas Compete
