kent_allard_jr | Recent Entries

Now that Minecraft has KITTENZ Kimberly says she'd like to try the game. (Recent exchange: "Damn, I just got killed by a creeper!" "Any kittens killed?" "No." "Oh, it's OK then.") She only wants to play multiplayer, though, which is tempting me to set up my own server. Questions:

Is this a good idea, for a non-tech head like myself?
If (A), then would anyone like to join it?

If it were just Kim and I then we'd build a compound, breed animals (Kim wants me to bring her "lots of pink sheep") and do other couple shit. If more folks joined I'd build dungeons and so forth.

I returned to Minecraft after getting stuck in Arkham Asylum: My reflexes are just too damn slow and I couldn't get through a fight with Bane AND a room full of thugs. (I'm sure most of you breezed through this part, but please keep that to yourself, OK? It's embarrassing.) It's too bad because I was really enjoying the game. I love stealthing around, carefully planning each takedown, but the quick-time events are hard for a lousy typist who was diagnosed with bad reflexes as an infant and who hasn't gotten better with age.

A comparison with DC Universe Online is instructive. I created a maskless Batwoman type, and got all of Batman's fragility without the stealth. None of the money, either, and you have to return to vendors to repair your equipment all the time. You also have to buy soda, the main source of healing in the game. (Funny, I don't remember Bats quaffing Mountain Dew very often...) I got to 10th level and called it quits.

I wasn't a big TV viewer in the old days. Even as a little kid, I'd watch Sesame Street or something and shut the thing off (much to the annoyance of my mother, who wanted more time to herself). When I married Kim my evenings changed: Kim works in TV and loves the medium, so now we sit in front of the Boob Tube every night. Luckily we have Netflix Streaming and there's a lot of good stuff to watch. I've already talked about Mad Men; here are my thoughts on some other shows we've watched:

Mythbusters. I always liked the "Worst Case Scenario Handbooks" that were popular a decade ago, and I enjoy Mythbusters the most when it's like those books, and tells you how to be Batman one way or another. Their love of explosions is endearing, but I don't get the same thrill from the big blasts as I do from, say, watching them break out of prison with watches and paper clips.
Justified. Based on an Elmore Leonard short story, it's excellent overall but makes me uneasy. It's filled with Leonard's cutesy machismo, and as I noted to Ta Neishi Coates today, I'm uncomfortable with it when it's coming from a guy with a badge. I highly recommend Justified, but with that reservation.
Breaking Bad. Extremely well done but I find it hard to watch. It's not that he's dying of cancer while being threatened by psychotic drug lords; I can accept that. Weirdly enough it's his family: I find his prissy, humorless wife revolting, for some reason, and the main character's cavalcade of dreary misery, from all sides of his life, more depressing than entertaining. Kim and I watch it occasionally but there's only so much we can stand.
Archer. Very Adult Swim-esque in that every character is a mild sociopath, but we laugh anyway so who cares?
The X-Files. It's amazing how well this show has aged over the last two decades, at least when you rewatch the comedy episodes (I don't remember the "mythos" ones being that great). That's until the 8th and 9th seasons, anyway, when I had stopped watching. I tried some ninth season eps for the first time, but even when the concepts were great (Burt Reynolds as God! The Brady Bunch as serial killers!) the execution was dull as dishwater. So sad.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Kim likes this a lot better than I do, since I find the mysteries/"thrillers" to be simple-minded and crude (not surprising with only 30 minutes to cover them). Nevertheless the intros and closers with Hitchcock himself are delightful, funny and charming, and the show can be worth watching for those alone.

Kim's mother got me Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Christmas, and I enjoyed it immensely (well... as much as I can with any videogame, since I always have the sense I'm letting my life dribble away while playing). The graphics were stunning, as you can see from the left-hand screenshot, and the world wonderfully immersive. After I finished the main story, became leader of the Companions and Grand Wizard of the magic academy I gradually lost interest; there were a few more quests left, but it didn't seem fulfilling, extorting protection money from shopkeepers after saving the world three or four times. Ultimately I bought the largest house in the game, got married, and happily retired, which wasn't a terrible way to wrap things up.

Before Skyrim I had briefly returned to City of Heroes. Now free to play, they had introduced a few new features that I wanted to try out. One was the "morality mission," which let you turn your villains into "rogues" (mercenary, Catwoman types), your heroes into "vigilantes," and then from rogues to heroes and vigilantes to villains. I took Fantomah on the full path to redemption, and enjoyed the ride, getting a strange sense of accomplishment I never got from the leveling grind. I also tried some of the "user-generated content," and while I still believe amateur dungeons are the future of MMOs, they weren't good enough to make City of Heroes worth playing for long.

I put a lot of faith in amateur-designed dungeons because I'm a non-programmer who's written paper&pencil RPGs, loves to design worlds and loves to be a game-master. I have to acknowledge, though, that something like Skyrim is better than a D&D campaign in just about every way. There's no math to juggle or rules to memorize; you can play it any time you like (no tedious scheduling emails); and the sights and sounds are more vivid and intense than the descriptive text of even the best game master. Players are almost always better off with a computer for a GM.

It's the GM who loses out. I want to create and show off what I make, and for some reason RPGs have been the best medium for my diverse if underdeveloped talents. I don't think I'm alone in that regard, and would like to see more tools for budding Dungeon Masters who would like to continue creating content for a 21st century medium, hopefully without requiring the vast resources that computer games seem to need these days.

That's part of why Minecraft appealed to me so much. I stopped playing after its official release in November -- I just ran out of new stuff to do -- but with a few new features I think a Minecraft server could serve as a custom designed online RPG. I don't think I have the computer chops to run one, but it's a possibility.

Wizards of the Coast will soon release a 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. (They're refusing to call it "fifth edition," saying it's the "next iteration" or some other nonsense like that, but we all know what it is.)

From what I've heard, their main goal is to avoid the fracturing of the market that occurred when 4th edition came out. Right now Pathfinder, essentially a 3e variant, has roughly the same sales as 4e D&D, and Wizards would like to bring its committed players back into the fold.

Right now they're talking about a "modular" rule set. It's hard to know its exact meaning in practice, but I think it's an excellent approach. To me, the ideal game system should have something like the Hero System for infrastructure, and Tunnels & Trolls as a superstructure: Super-simple to the casual player, but with with enormous range for customization for those who want it.

My main suggestion would be two-fold:

Every class trait or feature should be purchasable with one or more feats. In fact, the number of feats should be about equal for each class, so DMs could create new ones by taking, say, 20 feats and matching them with sets of powers.
As players advance, however, their feats will be chosen for them based on their class or sub-class, much as powers were pre-selected under D&D Essentials. They'll have the option of replacing the packaged feat with one of their choice, but they won't have to do so.

In essence, this would be using a point-build system for classes, where 1 feat = 1 character point. From the standpoint of the player, though, it would be like 1st edition D&D, where every "thief" has the same abilities. If he wasn't happy with that straitjacket, though, he could customize his character as he wished.

I woke up to hear (from peacewood) that Christopher Hitchens had passed away, and I'm sadder about it than most.

Most folks know Hitchens as an aggressive atheist and supporter of the Iraq war, but I knew him first as a columnist for the Nation, a position he shared with the wacky Leninist Alexander Cockburn back in the 80s. Even by the Nation's standards Cockburn was extreme, and when he fought with Hitchens (such as over the 1991 anti-Gorbachev coup, which Cockburn supported) the latter was a welcome voice of reason. They say he turned from the Left after the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, but I don't remember anyone taking an anti-Rushdie position. Sometimes he picked fights with the Left when there was no one to fight with, as if he was too eager to join Orwell in the pantheon of anti-leftist leftists. It wasn't until he testified for Kenneth Starr, in the Whitewater investigation, that I finally lost patience with him.

Nevertheless I could forgive his support of the Iraq war, because unlike the neoconservatives, I think he genuinely believed it was in the best interests of the Iraqi people. He never wavered in his support for the Palestinians -- his second book was co-edited with Edward Said -- and he urged his temporary allies to be more sympathetic to their plight, a lost cause if there ever was one. His opinions of the scoundrels and fools of the Reagan years remained the same, but in the 1990s and after, he became awfully naive about the competence and benevolence of Reagan's successors.

In his last years he was best known as an anti-theist. His anti-religious diatribes probably burned any good will he earned with the conservative movement, which for all I know may have been intentional: He was always happiest fighting somebody, and most of the time, your ostensible allies are the only folks in the ring. Nevertheless, I have many of his books on shelf, and wrong as he could be, I always enjoying his writing. So rest in peace, Hitch.

Fights take too long in 4th edition D&D, and while a number of fixes have been suggested over the years, I think the best would be to reduce the number of hit points everyone has, especially if it would make HP calculations simpler. Based on my calculations, the following formulas would reduce HP, for all classes, by approximately 25%:

Class	Hit Points
Wizards, Invokers, Psions*	Constitution + [level x 3]
Clerics, Rangers, Rogues, Warlocks, Warlords, Bards, Druids, Shamans, Sorcerers, Ardents, Monks, Runepriests, Seekers	Constitution + [level x 4]
Fighters, Paladins, Avengers**, Barbarians, Battleminds	Constitution + [level x 5]
Wardens	Constitution + [level x 6]

* You can give Psions 2 additional HP at 1st level, if you like, to be compatible with current rules
** You can give Avengers 1 less HP at 1st level, if you like, to be compatible with current rules

For NPCs, give one additional HP per level. For monsters, use the following table:

Role	Hit Points
Artillery, Lurker	Constitution + [level x 5]
Controller, Skirmisher, Soldier, Solos	Constitution + [level x 6]
Brutes	Constitution + [level x 8]

There you go.

Before y'all leave for Thanksgiving, and celebrate the illegal immigration of my paternal ancestors to this country... I wanted to remark on the latest headline: Newt Gingrich, that great humanitarian, is "on the defensive" for taking a halfway reasonable position on illegal immigration. Recall that Rick Perry got in hot water, too, for a momentary flash of sanity on the issue. Considering our border is better patrolled than ever, and immigration has been down during the recession, these rabid reactions are way out of proportion to the problem.

I've never been afraid of insulting Republicans, but I never bought the idea that racism is behind "Obama-derangement syndrome." Sure, some of it is, especially out in Appalachia (where Obama significantly under-polled John Kerry), but I suspect they'd be equally nasty towards a President Clinton (or Kerry, for that matter). The obsession with immigration, though, is hard to justify any other way.

As Yglesias points out, as long as OWS lacked specific demands there were only two ways the protest could end: Fizzling out, or with an eviction. (We can argue, until the end of days, whether Occupy Wall Street should have made specific demands, but I don't think anyone can dispute this specific point.) Bloomberg chose option #2.

I'm glad to see the guy lose street cred among liberals, at least. Bloomberg supported gay rights and abortion, and since those issues are important to middle-class liberals we thought he was a mensch. But ultimately he's a billionaire businessman who sees the world through billionaire businessman eyes. We know that Bloomberg subscribed to the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News line on the financial crisis, that it was all caused by Barney Frank, Fanny Mae and the Community Reinvestment Act, and I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, because I'm sure many of his rich Wall Street buddies think the same thing.

There was an election last night, and things apparently went well, in referenda at least. (Referenda? Referendums? You decide!) I wouldn't read too much into it for 2012, but best to appreciate good fortune when it happens.
Meanwhile, Herman Cain looks worse with every passing day. I wouldn't jump to conclusions -- Lord knows, he may be innocent for all we know -- but the idea that it's a big Democratic smear-job is preposterous. (Believe me, conservative readers, we'd love to run against this clown.) I must admit I LOL'd at Ta-Nehisi Coates's take on the whole thing.
It's a bad hair day for conservatives, so what do they do? Change the subject! Their new issue is a 15¢ tax on Christmas trees. Just to be clear, the tax is bad policy, supported by the Xmas-tree industry to finance one of their PR campaigns. Nevertheless, even if the tax is passed to consumers, this is chicken-shit, with everything else going on in the world today.
Probably the biggest story of all is outside the USA: The threat of default in Italy, and from it, the very possible collapse of the Euro. I agree with the great Krugman that the ECB's interest-rate hike, earlier this year, many go down as one of the dumbest economic policy moves in history. And while I'm happy to see Bunga-Bunga go down, it all has me even more afraid for the future.