Realism in D&D – Skills, NPC Class Levels & Encumbrance

My DM at one of the current campaigns I am in posted the following links to his yahoo group:

D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations

Encumbrance

Don’t know if I agree with everything presented, but a very thought provoking post, a least for D&D players.

As a DM, one of the things I found the most difficult was making time and consumables meaningful. Earlier editions, with their 10 minute turns, made time pass much more quickly. This would cause torches to burn out, supplies to be eaten, etc.

3rd edition uses 6 second turns – characters can explore in a couple of hours what would have taken a day or two in previous editions. While more realistic, I just found it harder to track time. Lots of guestimating on if a spell had ended, etc. and supplies never seemed to run out in a dungeon.

Virus 2

Via Chizumatic comes Virus 2, a very enjoyable Flash-based game which has already eaten up a large chunk of my spare time.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Time Travel

Came across this interesting page by science writer John Gribbin concerning the possibility of time travel.

The Wit & Wisdom of Robert Heinlein

I found this via Daily Pundit: a Wikiquote’s listing of some of Robert Heinlein’s greatest quotes.

Considering the fact that I consider Robert Heinlein the greatest Science Fiction author of all time and certainly the number one formative element of my political philosophy, I recommend it is highly.

What A $6,000 Dental Bill Looks Like

I was laid off from my job after 9/11 and lost my dental insurance. After several temp jobs, I finally got hired to a permanent position in April. My new job provides dental insurance, so yesterday I made my first visit to a dentist in about five years.

The net result is that I need about $6,000 in dental work done. My insurance maxes out at a $1,000 per year and my dentist cut another $1,500 or so off of the price, so I get to shell out $3,500. Fortunately I can pay it off over 18 months, so it shouldn’t be too bad. Still, ouch!

I am fortunate, though. After the diagnosis and the administering of smelling salts, the dentist was able to get right to work. My guess is that if we had a single-payer health system, there would be a long waiting list for all of the work I am getting done.

Anyway, here is a “nice” photo of what all the fuss is about: (more…)

Campaign Log Updated

I have updated the Cormarian Campaign Log to include the results of the Saturday, June 4, 2005 game session.

Campaign Log

The Cormarian campaign is up and running again. I have updated the Campaign Log.

Tonight’s Succubus Club IRC Chat Transcipt Up

I have posted the transcript to tonight’s Succubus Club IRC Chat…the first in 2005.

Mirroring Launchpad Zero At Home

I do all of the development work on this site at my home computer. The home system is where I test whether posts will look right, etc. When it is sufficiently formatted to my liking, I’ll copy the post to my production website (this one). Occasionally, though, I will post from work or elsewhere to the production site, causing my home database to be out of sync with the production one. It can be a pain to have to cut and paste each post into the local version whenever I got home.

Fortunately the One-Click Backup plugin creates an easily downloadable SQL file that I can run on my home machine and update my local database. It does have a downside, though – it causes the Siteurl for the local database to point to the production website, and all of the WordPress scripts reroute everything there. This makes it impossible for me to edit or post to the local version of my site.

I did some snooping around in the WordPress tables today and found where the site URL is stored. It is stored in a table called “lz_options” (“wp_options” for default installations) as the option “siteurl”. This option is conveniently located as the first entry in the table. The following SQL updates it so that the local version of WordPress admin scripts point to my local version of the website:

UPDATE `lz_options`
SET `option_value`='http://lz/Weblog'
WHERE `option_id`=1 AND `blog_id`=0 AND `option_name`='siteurl'

If I just run the above SQL each time after restoring from the production site, everything works wonderfully.

Three Web Comic Recommendations

I have been poking around the web and came across a couple of webcomics I’d like to recommend:

Alpha Shade is an alternate universe war comic. The drawings are just gorgeous and the plot so far is very interesting.

Casey and Andy is a hilarious comic about two D&D-playing, mad scientist geeks who are best friends/mortal enemies.

Technically, I didn’t just discover Nodwick – I have been following it for several years. I just figured I’d just toss it in here… Nodwick is probably the best RPG/D&D based comic I have ever seen. Very, very funny, especially for anyone who has been into roleplaying games a while.