I played Dungeons and Dragons from 1980 to 1986. I started with the basic rules and moved to the 1st edition (1E) rule set early. I was a player with a group of people older than me, and I was dungeon master for friends my age. We played Grayhawk and a couple of custom campaigns I invented. I stopped when I went to college and didn't pay much attention to D&D between then and now.
The 4th edition (4E) news online got me interested in the game again. How do other people play D&D? What's changed between 1st edition and 4th edition? Would my kids (girls, 9 and 12) be interested in playing? Suprisingly, it was hard to get good information on the Internet. Most information related 4th edition to 3rd edition, and playstyle articles were scattered and disconnected. There was also almost no information about how accessible 4th edition would be to casual players or young players new to the game. It was pretty frustrating.
I had this week off from work, so I decided to answer these questions for myself. I borrowed a copy of the rulebooks from a friend, bought a copy of Keep on the Shadowfell, and found some dice. I talked about the game with the kids, they seemed interested, and we decided to play. The rest of this post is a few notes from our experience.
The Encounter System
The encounter system in 4E is great. There is a very deliberate separation between noninteractive storyline elements in the adventure and the encounters where the players get to take action. The encounters can be combat or noncombat oriented. Keep on the Shadowfell illustrates how encounters are set up and also gives story elements to transition players from encounter to encounter. Story elements include NPCs and information they might give to players in response to questions as the players accumulate clues as to what's happening at the Keep. It's a lot of detail, but the module is illustrating how to lay out a story and keep it moving.
I found myself wanting to use graphviz to make another kind of map: an encounter map. If I had it, I could see a high-level structure to the story arc, and I could see at a glance what critical encounters were important to play before others. In Keep on the Shadowfell, the early encounters are important to gather clues as to what's going on in the Keep. If I were designing an adventure from scratch, I'd start with the encounter map to back the story and only then work the details of each encounter. Sounds like a plot outline? It is!
Combat
The combat mechanics make 4E almost a new game for me. The mechanics are advertised as simple: you roll a 20-sided die and compare to a number. The catch is the modifiers to the roll, and those modifiers can change from round to round and even turn to turn. 4E is also designed to be played on a grid with miniatures or tokens, i.e., space, location, and movement are important. It makes the game far more tactical than 1E ever could be. I like it.
The system doesn't have to be complex. You can drop some rules, and all it affects are modifications to that d20 roll. As an example, the kids and I ignored terrain and cover modifiers. If you had line of sight, you were good. The problem I had was knowing what rules I should drop being new to the game.
This is an important point. I was overwhelmed when I first read the combat mechanics in the Players Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide. They've developed a deep, tactical combat system that can be a lot of fun to play, but it's not an approachable system. As it stands, I don't see how an unmentored 12-year-old could pick it up without tons of errors and an incredible will to wade through the rule books. This is a see-one, do-one, teach-one game.
As a suggestion, it would have been nice to have a template worksheet for managing the bookkeeping. There seems to be a list of stuff that can change dynamically: condition, combat advantage, continuing effects, etc. A good worksheet for tracking this would have helped with the numbers and also served as a cue for what to track.
As for our personal experience, the kids and I made steady progress learning the combat mecahnics through the first three encounters. In the first encounter I made us stick to basic melee and ranged attacks. We didn't appeal to anything but at-will powers. By the end of the third encounter, we were getting more teamwork, more variety in powers, and more interesting tactics. The kids put themselves in a bad tactical position, and the party's paladin got knocked unconcious before the end of combat. This made things exciting enough that they high-fived when the last enemy turned and fled. Meanwhile, I was wondering how many mistakes I made with modifiers but kept that to myself. If you can't bluff, you don't DM.
Roleplaying
The rule books and the Keep on the Shadowfell module make the roleplaying and storytelling explicit in their advice to players and especially the DM. The first 30 pages of the DM guide is all about how to run a game. Keep on the Shadowfell is almost a tutorial on how to run an adventure. They are very well-written, which means they got a lot of attention in development. WotC is taking this part of the game seriously, far more than TSR did with 1E.
I've got a theory about why this is so: Dungeons and Dragons has to differentiate itself from computer-based games. The combat mechanics are interesting, but in the last twenty years, computer-based games have developed enough where these systems can be automated and made more fun on the computer. The comparisons to World of Warcraft are apt: if you just care about stats and want a faster pace, then World of Warcraft is probably a more fun game.
Where World of Warcraft can't compete is in the social and story aspects of the game. Online chat doesn't replace getting together with people in real life. Telling your own stories and making your own adventures is a different reward from static, computer-based game content. Dungeons and Dragons provides this.
Only because of the storytelling is there an opportunity for roleplaying. How players want to express this is up to them. It's important to have a your character's personality, because the DM can start to incorporate personalities into how adventures unfold. There's a small taste of this in Keep on the Shadowfell when you encounter the undead remains of the Keep's last defender.
Here lies the rub. Roleplaying and incorporating characters into storylines is work for the players and work for the DM. Is there enough fun over computer-based games for people to pick up Dungeons and Dragons and stick with it? Good question, it's for the player to decide, and I'm happy WotC is being clear in the rulebooks and this first adventure module about where they add value.
Coming back to our experience, the kids hadn't played a tabletop roleplaying game before, so they didn't understand the concept. I had to prompt them to think in-character and in-story, but I could do this mostly in the way I asked questions and did setup. They started to get the hang of it, but it's harder to learn than the mechanics. Kids play tabletop games, they engage in pretend games, but they rarely do both together.
My Takeaways
I enjoyed playing 4E with my kids. I've learned they can pick up complex game mechanics when they are interested, and cooperative games fit their style a lot better that competitive games. Siblings have enough rivalries, after all...there's no need to add to it with a game. We had lots of laughs and a great time.
Will we keep playing 4E? Good question. The girls pinned me down for one last session before they went to see their grandpa, and they'll want to keep playing when they get back. They're enthusiastic. If we keep playing, we'll have to make a regular family game night, and we'll want to mix in some other games, e.g., Settlers of Catan. The prep time for 4E is scary, but using published adventures might make it manageable. It still looks daunting.
Twitter is what I hoped it would be: a way to stay in touch with friends. The way I use it has continued to evolve. Here are some notes.
I made my timeline public. It means I've moved away from the idea of Twitter as a backchannel for activities like work, but I was never able to get traction with that idea. In truth, I consider everything on the Internet public anyway, so simply marking a timeline private wasn't sufficient for me to tweet freely.
My public timeline complements my personal blog. If people want to know who I am, they can follow me or read my timeline to get a better picture. Maybe I'm setting the example: I wish I could learn more about the job candidates I'm phone screening and interviewing. I assume they want to know about me, too.
I'm using text messaging to receive tweets when I am out of the office in the evening and on weekends. I can't overstate how this changes the Twitter experience. With a 140-character tweet you get to know how that person's weekend is going, and you learn about it when you're out doing stuff too. It's a great way to stay connected to people when you're not camped in front of the computer. You should at least experiement with it and see what you think. It's also convinced me there is at least one more major breakthrough in social network applications coming once the right mobile platform arrives to enable it.
My brother the doctor insisted I read this book. It's out of print, but I found a copy at the Indianapolis Public Library.
Let's get the negatives out of the way. The book is poorly written and poorly organized. Most of the prose borders on ranting, and many of his assertions are unsupported. It's ironic that a doctor wrote it; the attitude of the writing oozes the know-it-all-doctor stereotype. To top it off, the included menus and recipes don't measure up to what you would find in any reputable cookbook. It's obvious why this book is out of print. I'm glad I didn't buy it.
Nonetheless, it was well worth spending an hour thumbing through it. He drives for a vegan diet that minimizes cholesterol and sodium, radically opposess processed food, and strongly discourages dairy. I agree with his targets, and it inspired me to think about what I can do to get there.
I have to be practical. The unspoken challenge in these diets is how to prepare food that is low-fat and low-sodium but still tastes good. My brother's wife is a professional cook and is willing to devote a lot of time to food preparation. For the rest of us, we have to find a compromise that works.
I feel like I have the family in a pretty good spot already. I prepare the meals, I push veggies, I don't fry, I avoid salt when I can, etc. I'm still going after some easy kills to do better.
- Stop buying potato chips and cereal
- Make more bread myself
- Switch to unhomegenized peanut butter
- Introduce nuts
- Increase the fruit and veggies ratio at meals
- Cut back on meat and cheese in routine dishes, e.g., the sausage in my red beans and rice or the cheese in my lentil cassserole
The timing is good. I've been in a cooking rut for the last year and have needed something to shake me out of it. I pulled my Moosewood cookbook off the shelf with new eyes yesterday and spent an hour menu planning. Grocery shopping today should be fun; I'm sure I'll end up at Trader Joe's for some of this stuff.
I had my weekly guitar lesson today, and for the first time my teacher and I sat down and figured out how to play a song I brought on CD. I chose Johnny 99 by Bruce Springsteen to keep it simple.
Ryan figured it out in about eight minutes. I checked the clock. It included the following.
- Figuring out that Springsteen's guitar is sharp on the recording. Speculation is that the original 4-track was sped up when mastered.
- Determining it was a straightforward 24-bar blues with a basic rhythm.
- Deciding it sounded better with a capo on the first fret after trying it both with and without capo.
- Throwing in some embellishments for the solo where Springsteen is blowing his harp.
After that it was just another five minutes to write out the basic chord structure and talk a little about the embellishments. We still have some followup on that next week.
He mentioned, by the way, that 24-bar blues shows up in the craziest places. Remember Prince's song, Kiss? Yep, 24-bar blues.
I got the tow kit installed this weekend. The car doesn't need to be towed right now. Why the kit?
In 2006 I broke down on I-465 during rush hour. You don't ever want to do that and have to think. The traffic is heavy and fast. It's extremely loud. It's hard to think straight, and you mostly just want to get the heck out of there.
I want to be prepared for the next time I break down. I want to be able to walk into my garage, grab the tow bar, drive the new Beetle back, and rescue my old Beetle. I want to know exactly what needs to happen and how to get by '73 Bug back to my garage in peace.
Related to that, I don't like having to bum rides out to Greenfield to drop off the Bug with Dick or pick it back up when he's done. If the car's not running, then I have to find somebody with a truck and hitch.
So that's all fair, but there's a third reason too: I wanted to see my New Beetle tow my Beetle. It's a statement. I tooled around the neighborhood to see how the New Beetle would handle with the load. I got a look from every single person I passed, because face it, when have you ever seen such a sight?
I got my 1973 Beetle out of storage. It feels a little late to be pulling it out, but it's been a cold and wet Spring in Indiana.
All I had to do was change the oil. The oil in the lawn mower needed changed too, so I did both at the same time. The car's oil was pretty sludgy, but that's probably a consequence of sitting for the winter. A little gasoline and air is all the filter needed to get clean.
As usual, it was a messy job. My car doesn't have the separate drain plug you can remove before removing the filter. I have to loosen the six nuts holding the bottom plate enough to let the oil drain, and there's no way to do it without getting oil all over your hand. Chloe thought it was pretty cool to see the oil running out when I let it go, though. Me, I was tickled I got her interested enough to get under and look.
The car started on the fourth round of cranking, which is exactly how it's been every year I've had the car in Indiana. That's its personality. Once warm I cut the choke and drove around the neighborhood for a while. She ran a little bit rough the first half a mile, and I had to ride the brakes half a block to clear a little rust out of the drums. After that she was smooth as butter. No flat spots when accelerating, and the idle speed is fine. I checked the valves last fall, so I don't think I need to do any more work on the car.
Now I feel like Spring is here.
I finally watched the C4[1] talk Exploring Erlang (video, slides) by Bob Ippolito. It's a basic introduction to Erlang and worth watching if you've never seen the language and have only heard a little about it. He goes through several examples. Alex Payne wrote a nice summary of the talk.
He did a performance comparison of an Erlang web server to Apache. I believe the performance claims, but his comparison unfortunately is apples to oranges and isn't fair. Come to think of it, few benchmark comparisons are.
The questions following the talk were a little bit interesting. Someone asked if Erlang was suitable for desktop applications, e.g., using it to back a Cocoa application. The answer, predictably, was no. Alex Payne asked about the adoption rate at Ippolito's company, Mochi Media, since he had trouble getting people to consider Erlang at Twitter. If I recall correctly, Ippolito said there are eight engineers at his company, four are using it currently, and all new projects are using Erlang (as opposed to Python).
Bob spent some time talking about process trees and structuring collections of processes to be fault tolerant, but he didn't get to specific patterns. What's the right way to break down problems? Nobody pushed him on that in the questions.
I don't know what to say about the performance. Folks say Erlang is fast. These are the same folks using Python, Ruby, and Perl. Coming from Chez Scheme, I suspect the performance is nothing special, because I know that Chris and Bob's Erlang embedding in Chez is blistering fast.
I've been experimenting with Pownce for the last few months and have decided it's not going to work for me. I've got a blog, and I've got Twitter. I thought there was a gap between the two that Pownce could fill nicely, but I was wrong. I think most of what I have to say is either concise enough to fit in 140 characters or has enough meat to justify a real blog post. So I've stopped using Pownce.
Nate challenged me and suggested that the problem could be that the Pownce client is lame or that Pownce doesn't have the hip community that Twitter has. He's right on both points. Twitter is dirt-simple, and desktop clients take advantage of that. The desktop client for Pownce by comparison is cumbersome and not fun. As for community, just look at my favorites to see I get a lot of laughs from the crowd I follow.
That said, I'm still following friends who have Pownce accounts. None of them have full-blown blogs, and Pownce seems pretty useful for those who don't want to deal with a blog. Microblogging has more potential and is more intimate.
After months and months I still find it hard to explain why Twitter is cool. This video does a pretty good job, though.
I rediscovered a lost, favorite musician this weekend: Pat MacDonald.
I didn't listen to a lot of music in High School. It cost money, I didn't have any, and I spent a lot of time programming anyway. During my last semester in the Spring of 1986, though, a cassette tape started circulating, and I got my hands on it for a couple of days. It was Timbuk 3's Greetings from Timbuk 3. I had no interest in punk, so in 1986 that was as close to alternative as I got. It opened up a whole new genera of music with funky beats and charged lyrics. I was hooked on'em.
During college and graduate school I collected every album Timbuk 3 recorded. The band broke up 1995, coincidentally the same time I left school and started being a grown-up. I assumed their music was gone and regularly played their recordings for years and years up to this day.
Several years ago I tried to see what happened to Pat MacDonald and Barbara K, but I could find nothing about MacDonald and just a few bits about Barbara K still active in the Austin music scene.
Now just the other day I tried again and discovered Pat MacDonald has a solo career going. After some more digging I grabbed all the recordings I could find. I found Sleeps with His Guitar and in the Red Room at Amazon, got a copy of Troubadour of Stomp from a comic store in Massachusetts, and have both Begging Her Graces and Strange Love: PM does DM coming from ulfTone Music out of Germany. The only thing I can't find is a copy of Degrees of Gone.
Here are some videos I found on YouTube. The first is a performance, and the second is an interview. Check'em out!
I started my taxes this weekend and got far enough to see that my mortgage interest deduction has fallen to where I need to stick more money in retirement savings. No big expensive house means no big investment.
Or was it ever an investment? What kind of return am I getting on my house? My mortgage is about 6%. I calculated appreciation at that rate and then looked at house listings in my area. Guess what? House appreciation is running close to 4-5% in my neighborhood based on recent sale prices, and that does not account for maintenance.
I've been saying for years that a mortgage is a lousy way to save money. It's convenient, but not only is the rate of return pretty poor, the bank is extracting appreciated value in the form of interest! This data also matches my intuition about new construction. My house was built in 1996. It's built using modern materials, there is nothing unique about the craftsmanship, and it's on the north side of Indianapolis where land is not scarce. It's nonsense to expect appreciation much above inflation.
All of this just confirms how I've approached my house and mortgage. You don't get something for nothing, and home value is no exception. Personally, I'm happy we chose not to upgrade two years ago, stayed put, and spent some money improving the house we have. I think the memories I'm building with my family in this one house are a lot more important than searching for a house that's a "better investment."
