Diablo III Redux

Those of you who read my blog may remember my post on Diablo III in June . I am afraid my judgement may have been a little harsh based on the game continuously crashing my computer. However, when uninstalling stuff to make room for the 17 GB of Assasains Creed 3, I decided to give it another shot. Apparently in the intervening nine months Blizzard figured out how to make the game run (WOW a patch that actually fixed things!!!). I switched from playing a barbarian to a demon hunter, and although not as good as in melee as my beloved amazon from Diablo II the demon hunters rapid shot makes makes a nice machine gun for ensuring thing never get into melee. Laying the caltrops and backfliping away also works well, So Assasains Creed has returned to the install sometime pile, and I happily machine gunning my way through Diablo III. Pluses beautiful artwork, fascinating story Minuses liner as heck, limited character customization. The magic items flow like water, so much so that I have stopped picking up stuff that is not magic. I like the new auction house for dumping those rare items you just can't throw away, but can't actually use. However I still for the life of me can't figure out why a randomly generated procedural needs to be linear rather than a sand box. lack of imagination I think, I'll play it one through and then put it away like the other Diablos. Apparently no D&D supplement for this one, the D&D 3e Diablo random magic item chart is still one of my favorite. I am working on a 4e version of the magic item chart, but since I am DMing mostly Living Forgotten Realms I don't have much use for non-standard magic items. Perhaps when we go off the reservation to keep 4e alive after D&D next.

Am I an Artisit?

O.K. I have been hanging out at deviantart, having discovered both the magic and tedium of groups back in early December. devianart is home to many awesomely talented inviduals, who my humble technical skills to shame. However, I find trying to keep with the firehose of 1000+ new Fantasy NPC portraits a week, even worse than tracking my the 200+ blogs on my blog roll. I also found that looking at a 1000+ portraits in thumbnail dims my interest in them. I was wowed by the artistry of many of the maps and battle mats. However, I discovered on closer examination that some of them are pieced together from other peoples clip art. The maps seem to issue at the much more reasonable pace of 10-30 new ones a week. If I did that I could have cool maps too! Unfortunately the gaming rhythm I have fallen into involves drawing the battlemat for Sunday's game on Sunday afternoon, lends itself to drawing with colored wet erase markers on my vinyl battle mat. I have been taking photographs of the battle mats before erasing them off for next's week game, so I can deviantart them up sometime in the future. I have also posted some of the raw photos to my deviantart site directly, but since I feel humbled by the things on other sites I have been doing this sparingly. Devianart seems to make a bright line distinction between ametuer and proffesional artists. Am I a proffesional artist? My art has graced the cover of things sold for cash, but I didn't get any money for it. The item "Myroun Island" was a tournment prepared for the MINI-CON 1980 at Seatle University. It exists in less a hundred copies. I know because I took the master to the Kwik copy myself Saturday, and ordered as many a would make the best price break, cost was under $2.00 each. Because we were on deadline and desperate we took the map I had prepared for the tournment DMs and pasted it on the cover. Although the copyright status of "Myroun Island" is in limbo, belonging to a orginization which no longer exists, I feel comfortable publishing my own artwork. Behold "Myroun Island"

Copies of "Myroun Island" sold less than six. She-who-must-be-obeyed is still sore because we buried the cost of publication in her publications committee budget instead of the MINI-CON budget. However, by doing so we were able to show a slight profit for the MINI-CON and convince the club to go on to orginize the much bigger Dragon Flight, so I deem it a nessesary evil. So that leaves my career as a "professional" artist rapidly approaching the sales and earnings of Vincent Van Gogh (total one painting sold during his lifetime for 400 francs).

The pipes of doom waaaaaiiiiiiil

Just for the fun of it

Old School Computer DnD Pedit 5

Just finished reading Playing at the World by Was a little miffed that he missed crediting the pedit5 PLATO program which my buddy Rusty Rutheford at University of Illinois wrote, and only mentions the PLATO DnD program (which sounds very much like pedit5) being observed by an anonymous source at Cornell instead. However that is price one pays for not writing stuff down. When I voiced my complaint on the blog of holding, I was surprised when the author of the book responded in person. He suggested an alternate book "Dungeons and Desktops" which might have more details, unfortunately in it pedit5 is dismissed as ephemeral and not well documented. However, after the publication of that book "Rusty" sent an email to author which is reproduced here

I actually played pedit5 a lot in fall of 1975 before being subverted to the face to face version of DnD. It played a lot like the much more modern Dungeon Hack with a single player wandering the dungeon facing a series of random monsters with random treasures.  PLATO has has a long  but ambiguous history with gaming. Being one of the first interactive terminal computers and having networking capability across the many University campuses, it foreshadowed many multiplayer online games we are familiar with today. It also had the  ability to allow one to generate ones own fonts, which Rusty used in pedit5 by creating line art enclosing parts of a square to generate a top down view, as well as the sprites for the monsters. Those who are looking for more graphical representation have only to look at the thin wall 20x20, 30x30, and 20x20 with a 10x10' extension rooms in my old school dungeon which was influenced by the style of pedit5. However, the academics at the University who had created PLATO as an Educational tool highly frowned on its use for games (I had to use it for freshman physics homework, dull as dishwater).   Being 17 and on PLATO at the time I am well aware of the furtive nature of playing games on “Play-Toy”. About the time they gave me the boot for hijacking my fathers account I decided to quit wasting time on computer games and become an engineer instead.

Was in the same Boy Scout troop with Rusty’s sons and played DnD, Runequest, and Empire of the petal throne with him many times. Unfortunately the University of Illinois Conflict Simulation Society was not big on writing news letters (Some of members are still running Winter War an annual convention dating back from that time, although the club has been disbanded, most likely due the lack of a student to act as president, a role I fulfilled while attending graduate school at the University of Illinois in the mid 1980's), so the only documents I have from those times are a few issues of the Wurm Walder, the news letter of the local SCA chapter. I do remember playing many interesting variants of DnD (It seemed every DM I played with had his own rules). I suspect most of those are lost in the depths of time. And no I don't know "Rusty" actual first name, everyone just called him "Rusty" or in my case dependant on the situation Mr. Rutheford.

P.S. Here a link showing actual game play of pedit5 which is still playable on the cyber1 PLATO emulator here Someone with access could try cryo2 and see if my buddies magic fountain game (I loaned him the file space) is still there too!

Selandia, it's back!

Loyal readers will remember a post a year or so back about a french website which I had to take the link down because the spyware checker listed it as a "know bad website". Well the french have rebuild their website and this time it checks out clean. Here's a couple samples.

Although the bulk of the site seems to be by Partrick Janniaud (iparcoss) thre are some leads for work from the missing Pascal Furland (Faeriss). A few adventures with his name in the credits, although the Simlaracco overblog link remains as dead as a doornail.

Summer of Kickstarters update

O.K. so its November, so I thought I'd post a little update on the kickstarters I signed up for this Summer.
I signed up for three: Dungeon-a-Day, Rappan Attuk, and Midgard Besitiary 4e. I am mostly complete on the first two. For Midgard I am still waiting for the print edition (Although Wolfgang has upgraded it to color and promises it will be worth the wait), I have the .pdf so I am happy.

Dungeon-a-Day took from August until October to get me a password for a a web site that already exists (not exactly stellar performance), but the site has over four complete dungeons as well as all the Super Genius stuff Hyram is selling on drivethruRPG (including one on my wishlist) so I won't complain too loud.

Rappan Attuk after a bumpy start (needed to fill out two survey forms, I was worried I missed the deadline for the credits but I am in there) went relatively smoothly. Giving out .pdfs in advance of the print helps to keep my waiting anxiety under control. I have everything,  but the subscription levels, and am pleased with most of it (although now that I am used to color battle maps,the black and white ones seem a bit flat). The secret level was cooler in concept than execution, I like the idea of a level the party can't talk about because every evil cultist in the world will try to torture the information out of them, but the level itself is kind of small and the monsters didn't catch my fancy. I do have to find a hole in my bookcases large enough to stuff the massive tome that is the main dungeon into, so maybe I'd have been better off with the print edition. There are certainly enough extra levels to warrant having purchased Rappan Attuk for the third time, and all the extra levels and sub-levels definitely push it up from the lightweight megadugeon to one of the all time heavy weights. The Cyclopedean depths holds its own with the other published underdarks of the world (although the Greyhawk fan mash-up from TSR modules is still the all-time champion[see also Dragonsfoot forum on the mash-up]). Not so fond of the plain brown wrapper covers for either module though.

Old School Dungeon Crawling is like Baseball *rant*

OK given the current controversy about why a certain semi-famous internet blogger's dungeon is suck, I figured I would not be a blogger worth my salt if I did not climb up on my almighty soapbox and throw my hat into the ring. I will not name names or provide links as I think innuendo and indirection are more appropriate to the rant format. The first comment is to note the disclaimer firmly placed on the blog that lit the fuse ""[name omitted] is a known shit-stirrer. He stirred the shit. He got banned. Asking what he did to stir the shit introduces unnecessary complication to the scenario, therefore he was banned for stirring the shit." The second comment which the basis of this rants title, is as I read the review and listened to what they complained about, it brought found memories of the way game of DnD was played back in my college days. Much like baseballs duel between the pitcher and batter, DnD was a duel between the DM and caller, with the other players waiting to spring into action once the magic words "Roll for Surprise (note: not initiative, that came later)" were uttered. Much like baseball players don't have much do until the ball is hit and have to amuse themselves in other ways, DnD players did much the same engaging in idle gossip and conversation. The empty rooms in the early editions heighten the tension, much like baseball's waiting for the ball to be hit, by introducing a random factor into when springing into action will be required. One factor I though might have contributed to the bad time had by all are that rather than sticking with the old, old, school approach of saying "its an empty room" and moving on, the author in his new improved version felt the urge to provide detailed descriptions for all rooms, thus slowing the pace of play down. Another factor I thought was the DM decision to run the dungeon "as written". To successfully DM one must draw upon the players at the tables motivations and desires to lure them into the shared fantasy, this requires adaptation of whatever you are running to the players at the table. Having been around long enough to run the same adventure for many different players, I know that different groups experience the same adventure differently. I am both bemused and dismayed, by the large quantity of Monday morning coaching going on on the internet (even as I contribute to it now).  If the reviewer was bored by playing the adventure, he was bored, no amount of commentary will change that. As my father was fond of saying "there is no accounting for taste". The current flame war reminds me of a certain other flame war of a year or two passed, when a certain Finnish bloggers abrasive clockwork dungeon was labeled as suck, because the players turned left when they should have turned right. Its not the first flame war in the OSR and it won't be the last. Don't take any one's word for what's good or bad, make up you own mind. And remember "if your not having fun, your doing it wrong".