I know some will say "it is already there." But looking at the psion and monk previews, it definitely looks like PHB3 is going to introduce a bunch of new wrinkles into 4e.

Monks: Every one of their powers comes with a special "movement" option.

Psions: They get no encounter powers. Instead they get additional at-will powers and psionic power points to augment their at-wills, effectively allowing any at-will to be turned into an encounter level power. The end result is a very flexible character class, since they can repeat encounter-level effects when that is helpful to the party.

I'm pretty happy with the PHB1 and 2 classes, but so far it feels like the PHB3 classes are going to add a lot more complexity. I can see the other side of the problem too -- you don't want all the classes to feel so homogenized that there's little difference between them. I already feel that in a few places -- notably, that there are very little in the way of power source specific counters built into the game. I think the intent there is to avoid cases where someone is demonstrably ineffective (e.g. 3e rogues vs undead).

Nice weekend. I didn't do much for the 4th, but I probably needed it that way.

For the first time in Bruce's D&D game, I feel like I pulled off one of the tricks my character was made to do. Previous attempts have had to deal with the fact that my D20 can't roll higher than a 4. While I also figured out I could have pulled a better trick than what I did, I'm still feeling like the character is starting to gel.

Cleaned up my game room, moved a bunch of house clutter to my office, and generally tried to take a stab at organizing the game room. I still need to take a whack at getting rid of games, books, and junk that I have no use for, but that's a long term and continous problem.

One of the reasons I keep a lot of games around is for the potential for 'research'. I'm not doing any design these days or really any playtesting, but I've always liked that I could pull the right game off the shelve and say "hey, they tried this 10 years ago...."

Anyone have any good ideas for organizing dungeon tiles? I have too many of them now. Ditto for miniatures. I've stopped buying any new items like that.

Work is ramping up again, now that we've had a couple of weeks of post-WWDC quiet. It won't be as crazy as it was right before the conference, but I'm not lacking for work. :)

I'm raiding again in WOW, but to some extent, I'm limiting myself to one night a week. Shooting for two nights, but between my D&D game, work, and other things I need to get done this summer, it feels like trying to raid in Ulduar isn't going to fit for a while.

I need more time to get out and exercise.

There's a computerized version of Blood Bowl! Download only, as far as I can tell, but I bought it and have been putting it through its paces. On the whole, it plays like I remember the boardgame. While you can do one-off fights, it makes running campaigns really easy, and a lot of fun. I've only done single player, but it does have net play.

As far as campaigns go, I've progressed a bit using both a human and an orc team. The orc team is a bit more fun in that I really get to pound my opponents into the dirt. :)

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3/5: Matinee

I liked the story and the acting, even if about half the performances were drowned out by patron noise. (One patron in particular was talking through the whole movie -- when someone went up to talk to them, I *think* I heard one of the other people in that group say she had Altzheimers. If she couldn't remember that her friends had told her to be quiet 10 seconds ago, was she really enjoying the movie? I digress).

Michael Mann has switched to using HD cameras and a more live/organic filming style. Lots of hand camera work, and not lit like or blocked like a traditional movie is. Alas, I really don't like it all that much. While it worked okay in Miami Vice, it didn't work for me here. Shaky cam is a very large part of the complaint, but many scenes just didn't work for me because of the film style.

I haven't made an MMO post in a while -- mostly that's because the MMOs I've tried in the last year or two really haven't done much to keep me playing. In fact, most of them get shelved before the first monthly payment.

In contrast, WOW is still a pretty strong draw on my time, except when I'm in crunch mode. And while I think WOW is pretty fun, I don't think it is the end-all of MMO gaming. In fact, the main draw of WOW these days is, and will continue to be the fact that I have a lot of friends there.

Anyway, I thought I'd brainstorm what I'd want a new MMO to do if it were going to replace WOW as my primary game.

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I still need to figure out what I'll do with the 3G, but I ordered the new iPhone today.

I'm back from my vacation. I still have til monday to rest, recover, and do chores/errands/etc.

The weekend was in Seattle for Chris's semi-surprise 40th birthday party, which was a blast. Was nice to also spend some time in the morning hanging out with Will, Keegan and Dean. Not surprisingly, we geeked out on WOW a bit.

The rest of my trip was in Vegas, which was so-so. When I booked my trip, I didn't realize most shows were dark on Monday, so I really only got to go to Ka. Ka was interesting -- it felt different from some other Cirque de Soliel shows I've seen. More focus on the story, and less on the physical performances. With a couple of exceptions, I didn't feel floored by the performances. On the other hand, the staging was top notch, with extremely good use of hydraulics and special effects to make things work.

One bonus: I didn't know it when I booked it, but last night's show was the 25th anniversary of Cirque de Soliel. Eventually, there will be a photo posted of their special event.

After many years in California or Washington state, hard to remember that some states don't line smokers up against a wall and stone them. Pity....

Anyway, the Seattle leg of the trip was more fun, since it involved hanging out with friends. Solo vacations are less fun for me now. I'm still hoping to do some sort of tropical vacation in the fall, but we'll how that goes.

Okay, the cat is finally out of the bag, since we've announced the new iPhone -- I've had to sit on what I knew for a while now, even if the rumor sites had some of it correct.

Since the keynote glossed over one thing I consider important, here's my 2 cents:

If you play games on the iPhone, you want a 3GS.

There are lots of reason (more storage, faster processors), but he glossed over a critical one. OpenGL ES 2.0.

Basically, 1.1->2.0 is a paradigm shift, albeit one that already took place on desktop hardware.

1.1 is "fixed-function" pipelines. That means there is a hard coded list of functions you can use to process geometry and rasterize it to the screen. You end up building up more complex algorithms by chaining multiple functions together. To put it in perspective, something as simple as a+b+c might need to be decomposed into two different stages of calculation and configured with a bunch of function calls. More importantly, it doesn't take much work before you may have to render the same scene in multiple passes to build up the image you want. It works, but the code is ugly, and eventually it gets really slow.

2.0 is "shaders". Basically, with shaders, you just write a program that gets compiled and uploaded onto the graphics card. So you can just write d=a+b+c. There are still hardware limits on the size of a program that can be run in a single pass, but the limits are much harder to exceed. More importantly, the shading language has some built in functions that go beyond what you could even do in 1.1.

So: better performance for everyone, and a better toolkit for developers. Graphics in desktop games really took off when shaders showed up on the desktop, so having the same capabilities on an iPhone is really huge.

Once I figure out how, I'll be selling my 3G and upgrading to a 3GS.

So, after a year, I finally have a PS3 game (Infamous -- I'll review it in a couple of weeks).

The problem is, the PS3 controller is too small. As our old PS1 jokes went, "I am not a 10 year old Japanese boy."

Anyone know of a decent 3rd party controller for the PS3? Something, you know, around the size, form and function of the XBox 360 controller?

Current Mood: tired

People who've played with me as a gamemaster or a player know that my dice luck tends towards 1s and 20s. Our first session of Bruce's game was a case in point -- in the very first fight of the game, I went almost 4 rounds before I did anything effective....at which point I started getting critical hits.

It very well be that my dice are not particularly well built.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR2fxoNHIuU

Taking a quick look at Microsoft's offerings from their E3 press conference. Some neat stuff there, although I really need to wait and see the video.

Obviously, a halo game this year, and a halo game next year are pretty much automatic purchases.

Silly idea of the moment: The live blogs described two different games. One was a skateboarding game that uses a new motion-sensing skateboard controller. The other is Left4Dead 2. My first thought is "You are a rad skateboarder riding around town when the zombies show up. Now you have to fight them with your awesome skateboarding moves!"


Editing to add Project Natal: Short summary: Voice Recognition + Face Recognition + Body/Gesture Recognition. Pretty neat stuff (in that it seemed like their pre-canned demo worked pretty well). Very Minority Report, to the point where they brought Steven Spielberg out on stage to say a few things.

Of the demos they showed, I suspect I'd hate about 80% of the uses they put it to, but the remaining 20% looks like a gamechanger. The big thing it looks like it needs to support full immersion is a 3D television.

For the most part, Dawn of War II has been gathering dust since I finished the campaign. Because of the annoyance of some of the boss design, I haven't felt the urge to pick it back up.

But...new shiny object in mirror!

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/987/987127p1.html

As I was watching the trailer associated with this, my brain made a connection -- D&D 4e's power structure would work really well for a 40k-style game. In the computer games, you've got powers that knock people back, knock people around, and do lots of damage. The classic maneuver for the Space Marine commander power was the massive orbital strike.

So: simply knockdown powers become encounter powers. The orbital strike becomes the daily.

To a great extent, this goes way back to Final Fantasy VII for me -- the summoning materia in that game were stupidly over the top, and I've wanted to see that in pencil and paper RPG. A lesser example with be Dungeon Siege II, whose equivalent of limit breaks generally let you turn large groups of enemies into a fine pink mist.

The idea of a 4e-style game, with less overall powers but crazy power levels on dailies has a certain appeal, particularly if you can get the players to deliver the proper passionate speeches as the Orks and Eldar are overrunning their position. ;)

16 hour work days kinda blow chunks.

Michael Bay's Winnie the Pooh

"Oh bother" *explosions*

My rating: 2 (Netflix)

Short summary: Too loud, some big gaping logic holes you can fly an H-K through. Some nice visuals round it out though.

( some spoilers )

If Obama says he won't torture, why does he keep talking where Dick Cheney can hear it?

Not much new for me on the political front. I still agree with everything Obama is doing except for the DOJ pieces. My position is still pretty easy: "If they committed illegal acts, and there's evidence, then prosecute."

It isn't about a witch hunt, it isn't about politics, it is about accountability of our elected officials. It is about meeting obligations to our allies and treaty partners.

My hope is that he's really just ducking the issue until the DOJ has enough ducks in a row to do something -- because, more or less, the financial meltdown is still a bigger problem for the nation. On the other hand, I don't see that his being accommodating to his political opponents is actually doing a damn thing to change their spots. At best (and I'm not trying to belittle this), it is just making them appear more and more out of touch, deranged, and dangerous. Given the 2006 and 2008 victories, maybe he's just pushing for bigger gains in 2010.

I'm 100% disappointed in Pelosi and Reid, and I'm concerned that when the backlash comes, that's what will drive it.

Maybe I'll have some time this weekend to write some letters to congress-critters.

I took some time off from work last night to skim the Monster Manual 2.

A very brief and probably not fair takeaway:

1. Lots of monsters trigger things when an ally is reduced to 0 HP.

2. Lots of monsters have stackable ongoing effects. It felt like WOTC decided they wanted ongoing effects to stack, but didn't want to change the rules, so they just special-cased it on a bunch of monsters.

3. Every time I said "woah, that's nifty" it was usually a Paragon level monster, which means I'm still going to feel frustrated with building encounters for my heroic tier party.


More generally, if I could go back in time and change things:
1. Monster Manual 1 should have been VERY focused on heroic tier play and had few epic monsters.
2. Monster Manual 2 should have come out right on the heels of the main books, and focused on paragon play.
3. The whole damn game should have less levels of play. Instead of 30, how about 15?
4. I want a monster design toolkit, not just sample statblocks. Except that as I said to Lee last night, I don't think they start with a toolkit, I think they start with the "monster concept", and just write new rules for every monster. Sometimes, there's a serious downside to having multiple monsters having different versions of the same concept. Does it matter if it is a flock of kenku or a pack of gnolls?

Part of my problem is that I prefer "big plots" and "world-shaking events", but I want to be able to start that even in my heroic tier game, mostly because we're still learning the rules. I'd offered the possibility of starting my game at paragon level of play to begin with, but honestly, with multiple people not having played any 4e, it would have had problems. Heroic tier play still seems to be the realm of goblins, bugs and rats, and that's a shame.

Weird conversations in the house tonight.

Pele (the soccer star) will return in our darkest hour of need to help Brazil win the world cup.

Yes, World Cup = Arthurian Grail Myth.

I've chatted before about puzzles -- in general, I'm more interested in figuring out the strategy and programming a computer to do it than I am in actually solving the puzzle.

Around this time last year, I wrote a quick and dirty iPhone sudoku app. It wasn't that great of an app (since I was mostly using it to learn the iPhone), but it did offer two useful things:

1. the ability to show hints
2. Solving the puzzle.

The latter was fast enough on the puzzles I tested it on, but was somewhat brute force.
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Between network outages and work, I haven't been able to play much WOW or Battleforge lately. But I'm still really enjoying Battleforge, enough that when I have a few minutes to spare, I'll usually try to get a game in.

So here's my quick take, one month later:( Read more... )