Wasteland Wiki online

Got tired of working with Google Docs so here's all the info gradually being added: http://wasteland.dreamhosters.com

Quite possibly the nerdiest things ever

A discussion about vampire anuses and a rap about kill-9.  One is D&D nerdy -- the other UNIX nerdy.

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.

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.

Maybe one of them is an Elf

Surprisingly, as much as I thought D&D was to some extent looney toons, I've been surprised that quite a few people are interested in playing.  Rapidly approaching critical mass.

(Obviously, the Penny Arcade series of recent D&D games have been both good and very welcome.)

No dice

I realize this is silly but over a long period of time I managed to pick up quite a lot of dice.

The smallest one: