Colors

Many of my adventures are more exploratory and political rather than problem solving and stabbing, I've gotten a lot more interested in the details and nuances of things. Descriptions, colors, tastes, and so forth.

As such, lame as it may be, I sort of enjoyed this: tavern chatter.

Update: Another post on reading in-game text.

Digital books are your friends

I posted a defense on Stupid Ranger for using digital documents versus their paper counterparts:

A book is nice but its also nice to:

1. Have a search function.  Try finding a random spell or odd phrase in 10 seconds or less with the paper version.  It can't be done.
2. Save a tree.  In 3rd edition, about 1 in 10 of the monsters in the monster manual are meaningful to me.  Why do I have to carry around the other 9/10ths?  Instead, just print out what I need.
3. Keep it forever.  Digital books don't get stolen, lost or damaged.  You make a backup and save it on to a key drive the size of your fingernail.
4. Modify it digitally.  Skim (Mac) and PDF XChange (PC) both edit a book without actually damaging or modifying it.
5. Digital readers.  Book reading tools (like the Kindle and others) are gradually getting better and better.  They will eventually get down in price enough to be comfortable to read, last weeks on one charge, and hold millions of books.

Keeping track of the rules

I'm posting my rules Cheat Sheet, which helps me keep track of how things work. Will hopefully add to it as time goes by with my own custom stuff.

Campaign Setting

Time for some details about the Wasteland scenario I've spent months on. These are still very unfinished and are constantly being updated.

If you don't wish to spoil the surprise if you might ever play, please do not read them. This info is only stuff a DM would care about.

• The Wasteland Campaign Setting - very rough draft -- spoiler warning!
• Map of the Wastelands - currently an ultra-basic map.

They are released under a "BY-SA-NC" Creative Commons license, which means you are free to use and modify the material for your own purposes so long as you use a similar license. I reserve some rights for commercial use. Read more about this here.

Bulldozer

My characters were walking around a town that I hadn't planned out well enough. I tried to keep the action moving but I was basically pulling things out of nowhere as the action progressed. The characters felt directionless and vague and because I didn't expect any of this, neither did I.

So I came up with the bulldozer.

He is slow moving, destructive, and scary. He looms in the background when the characters dally too much and helps keep things going. He's been in quite a few shows but the best example I can remember is the sexy evil girl Andrea Parker from The Pretender who was always chasing the hero, but always just missed him. Her job wasn't to catch or hurt the hero, it was merely to push the story forward: she's a bulldozer.

I'm not sure what the bulldozer will actually be in my game but a few ideas came up:

• In the town everyone's visiting, a scary group of Dwarves who are guarding a caravan might do the trick. The dwarves are growing in power in the north west so their newfound power is turning into a gruff adversarial nature.
• I'm also considering a magic user who is pursuing them either because they have something he wants or he thinks they have something he wants.
• Maybe the characters worked for someone in Quartz who had a lot more ties than anyone thought. Those ties make even former employees dangerous.
  

Attributes

One of my players suggested that attributes didn't make any sense. I remembered one of the tricks for using 3 six-sided die to determine stuff like strength, dexterity, intelligence ...

The idea is to answer the question: could an average human do ___ action? All they have to do is roll their attribute or below. Someone with score 10 (an average person) has a 50/50 chance while a person with a score 20 has a 100% chance. As much sense as that makes, that doesn't come up in D&D.

So I guess I'm not really sure why that system is still used.

PCGen frustrations

Really annoyed with PCGen software, even though it should be everything I like. A big open source software and Java fan so it was almost required that I try to make this go. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to buy items and the manual that comes with it is useless. Its as if someone created the most amazing, complete, detailed software and forgot to make it anything but a confusing mess.

• The support doesn't exist (sign up for an e-mail list -- and you can't read the archives)
  
• The online manual doesn't correspond to the latest version so you know they haven't been updating it.
• One reference to changing buying tools in the option menu doesn't exist.
  

Its free so I suppose I'm not supposed to complain but got am I annoyed. I'm going to look into the non-free rpgxplorer.com.

Update: this post from 2005 makes some good points that an open system is still necessary. Ugh -- so once more into the breech of PCGen dear friends.