Gwardinen

It's actually surprisingly difficult to run Minecraft on non-gaming laptops, in my experience. I've used a laptop that will run Torchlight on more or less full settings at a solid 50+ FPS, but stutters and shakes on Minecraft on low.

Check out the "Summary" tab in the character builder. It only summarises the system stuff, though, so if you wrote any cool shit in the information section about what a drunken lech he is, that won't come through.

I think right now we're mostly throwing character ideas around while DanJW figures out exactly how the campaign's going to work. Since Snooglebum has now volunteered to assistant DM, I've actually come up with a character concept (or a second one, I had a warforged idea but I'll leave that to Hermie if he's into it). Since we have no controller ideas yet, I thought it would be appropriate to be a motherfuckin' wizaaaaaaaaaaaard: Quelan Laerco, level 1 Eladrin, Wizard Build: Illusionist Wizard Arcane Implement Mastery: Orb of Deception FINAL ABILITY SCORES Str 10, Con 10, Dex 10, Int 20, Wis 9, Cha 16. STARTING ABILITY SCORES Str 10, Con 10, Dex 10, Int 18, Wis 9, Cha 14. AC: 15 Fort: 10 Reflex: 15 Will: 16 HP: 20 Surges: 6 Surge Value: 5 TRAINED SKILLS Perception +4, Arcana +12, Nature +4, Diplomacy +8, Insight +4 UNTRAINED SKILLS Acrobatics, Bluff +3, Dungeoneering -1, Endurance, Heal -1, History +7, Intimidate +3, Religion +5, Stealth, Streetwise +3, Thievery, Athletics FEATS Wizard: Ritual Caster Level 1: Phantom Echoes POWERS Wizard at-will 1: Illusory Ambush Wizard at-will 1: Nightmare Eruption Wizard encounter 1: Grasping Shadows Wizard daily 1: Phantom Chasm Wizard daily 1 Spellbook: Horrid Whispers ITEMS Spellbook, Cloth Armor (Basic Clothing), Adventurer's Kit, Orb Implement, Dagger RITUALS Comprehend Language, Dowsing Rod, Tenser's Floating Disk The concept would be that Quelan was born and grew up in the feywaters, and during his occasional trips to the mortal realms he became obsessed with the idea that any reality containing both and other planes of existence (such as elemental realms) must be much more complex than most people accept. He began to experiment with stretching his consciousness far past the traditional understandings of reality using arcane magic. He also began to sail as far and wide as he possibly could, seeking to always experience new perspectives on existence. As a result, he is slightly unhinged but incredibly gifted at "enlightening" people using his magic. Usually this enlightenment results in extreme confusion, fear, often psychic damage, sometimes insanity and occasionally death.

I was intending to vote Yes, but as it turns out, as a foreign national I not only can't take part in general elections, I also can't take part in referendums. So, sorry, if I was able to give it you would have had my support!

Well it's not a mod but you should definitely download the Enhanced Edition patch from the developers if you have a retail copy. If you have a Steam copy or something along those lines it should theoretically already be Enhanced Edition, but I'd check anyway. It makes a big difference. There are also two content packs that put in quest lines that were intended to be in the main game but had to be cut. They're called the Price of Neutrality and Side Effects. Again, I don't know whether they'll already be in a digital edition, but for retail they're in the updates for the Enhanced Edition, along with the update itself and the language pack for whichever language you wish to play in.

While I agree that we haven't reached the limitations of any of the art forms we've discussed, so their theoretical maximums aren't an issue yet, I don't think that means that we shouldn't consider their actual physical limitations in variety. Just because there are still an almost infinite number of unique paintings that can be made, doesn't mean that the fact that there are more "moving parts" in a game isn't relevant, simply because of the scale at work. When there are so many variables, as there are in the development of a film or game, one only has to change a relatively small subsection in order to make something radically different. By contrast, a "radically different" painting is often genuinely pretty different in terms of its physical composition.

That's a good point. It would be difficult to claim films are more varied than paintings at this point in time, but I also wonder how much of that is to do with how much longer paintings have existed and that they are generally a non-collaborative art form. By which I mean, it is clear that the potential variety of films greatly exceeds that of paintings due to them being, as you said, thousands of images and sound, but the nature of creating films as a group at this time has constrained their actual variety. Changing technology may well broaden the variety of films as time passes.

Oh don't take what I said as discouragement. Wild magic seems like it could be hilarious and interesting.

Oh god wild magic. I haven't seen it used in 4E yet but it never used to end well for anyone in the vicinity.

Yeah, that gets even weirder when you consider the expansion to the first game is called Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening. I don't know if it was just a marketing push on the origin stories, which were a decent selling point for the game, or if they originally intended to name things differently in the series.

I agree with the fact that "ownership doesn't translate into yielding all rights to the customer" but your analogy is flawed as you can actually do all those things, provided you don't distribute them. Additionally, what you're talking about would be more akin to copying the PS3 and distributing knockoffs, rather than just using the product differently. The analogy here would be that you are absolutely allowed to turn a book that you buy into a pop-up book, or tear the pages out and glue them to your walls, or use it in any other way that doesn't violate copyright.

Everything worth saying has been said, but I would like to point out how fucking creepy this is:

I'm actually not giving out books, just an out of date character builder program which is no longer supported by Wizards of the Coast. That said, I don't really judge people who want to at least get a game of D&D under their belts before dropping the (significant amount of) money on the books, since it's a niche hobby and most people will end up not really getting into it. As I said in an earlier post, in a perfect world one goes to a local gaming store and gets involved with a campaign there that allows a newbie to experience the game and learn what it's all about without making an immediate investment. When that isn't an option and one wants to play over distance as we would be, the only other "trial" option would be to find scans of the books. It's not a great solution but I certainly wouldn't condemn anyone for using it if they would only otherwise never try the game. If they get into it they'll end up buying the books almost for sure, and many also buy miniatures, terrain, additional adventures, D&D Insider subscriptions and a whole host of other things.

I have sent Hermie a PM regarding the older character builder, please let me know if you need this information as well.

I watched some of that but I honestly couldn't bring myself to actually try the game. It is oddly tempting though, I agree.

I wouldn't mind doing something that's difficult to do in a video game. The trade empire thing you mentioned is a good example of something that has been attempted in RPGs (such as Fable) but not done well. What I'd actually love to do is some kind of political struggle, because my fantasy political juices have been set flowing by Dragon Age 2 and the Game of Thrones mini-series. Then we could be trying to further the aims of various factions via diplomacy and violence and commerce and so forth. I like fairly regular combat in D&D4 for some of the reasons you mentioned, but plenty of other strange situations and set pieces are cool since they're often things one can only do with tabletop roleplaying. I won't submit any character ideas yet in case I'm assistant DMing, but I have enough experience with the system now that I can make something in whichever role the party needs.

Actually that's something I didn't really consider. The concept of comic book Thor is almost appallingly bad, but the film didn't make me want to beat my own head in, and actually the lore they put behind it wasn't even particularly terrible. So maybe that's a triumph all its own. Above said, I do have to agree with this. Iron Man is just much more charming and slick. The characters are all there for a purpose and are all played well, plus Robert Downey Jr. is just so believable and charismatic in the role. By contrast the Thor character as defined by Marvel is boring to start with and the actor didn't really make it any more interesting (not placing blame, I don't know how he COULD have).

Well, actually, the character creator is pretty self-explanatory and has excerpts from the Player Handbooks to explain all the bits when you're building the character. So theoretically you don't really need the PHs to make a character. The first Player Handbook also contains all the rules for actually playing the game, but since you're part of a group we should be able to bring you up to speed on the basics fairly quickly, and if the compendium works like I think it does you'd be able to look up any specific rules you wondered about. So... actually the subscription might well give you everything you need to start.

The D&D Compendium is basically a big database of every rule in the game - technically you could probably use this to make a character, simply because it will have all the character rules in, but practically I don't know how easy it would be. Chances are it would make more sense to still use the Player's Handbooks, either via finding PDFs or a shop that sells them. I'm always loath to ask people to go out and buy these things (or subscribe to D&D Insider) because D&D is an expensive up front investment because of them, and it really isn't for everyone. For that reason, if you don't have a hobby shop near you that will let you sit in on games or whatever else to allow you to find out if the game is really for you, I tend to think it's justifiable to download the books and things like the character creator tool, at least on a trial basis.

I just got home from watching Thor and I'm trying to figure out whether I agree or disagree with you and I'm encountering some difficulty. Maybe I'm just in a "whatever" mood, but I can't seem to summon any real feelings in either direction about Thor. If it's not just me, it's probably that the film is incredibly middle of the road at this point. Had it not been for the fact that there have been so many comic book films recently, it might have been considered a good, high budget comic film. But we're sort of used to that now. It didn't really have the charm of Iron Man for me, so it was more along the lines of the Hulk films. Good action scenes and it's nice to see a property one knows brought to the big stage, but that's about it. Thor also had the advantage of, as you said, good design. It both profited and suffered from my love of Norse mythology, as it made me more willing to invest in their concepts but also made some of the interpretations a bit grating for me. Maybe I'll think more of it later, or maybe it really is just too generic at this point to elicit strong opinions. Edit: Remembered one thing I did love, the wide-angle shots. The way the sky in Asgard blends into space, and the actual shots of space, nebulae and the like were amazing. I adore that kind of stuff, so that was neat.

No, there is obviously a Player's Handbook (several, actually) that allows you to make your character by hand, it's just that the character creator is a useful tool. I have an old version of it you guys can use if you wish to, updated as of Player's Handbook 3. If we don't use Orokos, however, it is not necessary to build your character with it.

As it turns out we can choose to join an existing empire as soon as we start the game, so do you want to give us your details so we can all work for the glorious betterment of Orvidosia? Alternatively if there is enough interest we can begin a civilisation of Intergalactic Thumbs.

That actually sounds incredibly cool. I may get bored with it within three days, but I'm definitely going to give it a go. I'm downloading the installer now but I intend to make my screen name Gwardinen.

I've played some 3.5 and Pathfinder, though not much. I found it more or less as you described it, overly complex and exploitable. What was weird about it was that while it was overly complex, it was also incredibly generic for anyone that wasn't a spellcaster. Obviously as characters go on they always accrue more options, but certainly at lower levels it felt like if you were a physical class your "option" was basically to run at people and perform "melee attack". One of the reasons I prefer D&D4 is that everyone has powers, everyone gets to do cool shit, like in video games. OD&D Advanced sounds like it's the ultimate ideal, but it also sounds like it takes a good (and probably experienced) group and DM to actually get the system to do what you want it to. All of this said, ultimately the great thing about tabletop RPGs is you only allow the ruleset to control you as much as you want it to. We can probably make it work whichever we go for.

It definitely helps to know them well, I think. People who are deep into a subject are always going to have a different perspective on it than those who aren't. I think those who have a broad (knowing a little about many things) perspective and those who have a deep (knowing a lot about few things) perspective are often the interesting ones to compare and contrast. Perhaps it's difficult for you to compare games and films because you have a deep perspective on games and a broad perspective on films? I do sometimes get the same feeling you have described, though, and can only reason that it is due to that extra dimension of interactivity. Ultimately, however nuanced and complex a film is, it can always be reproduced entirely in a game because a game contains all the same physical characteristics that a film does. By which I mean it is essentially a moving picture attached to an audio track. Except that games have that extra dimension, the fact that the player engages with the game as well as the game engaging with the player. It is in this way that two films can be as different as it is possible for them to be to each other - different acting styles and qualities, different writing styles and qualities, different methods of directing, different tones, different genres, different lengths and budgets and so on - and you can assign them in some sort of X-dimensional space based on all those concepts. You get a whole continuum of potential films through the combination of these possibilities, but games will always exist in an X+1-dimensional space by comparison, simply because they have that extra possibility of interaction. Truth be told even that is a simplification because it's not as if interactivity is even one dimension itself - games have both a genre of story and a genre of gameplay, for example. We even tend to describe them by the latter; if I asked you what StarCraft was you'd probably tell me it was an RTS. A StarCraft film, on the other hand, would undoubtedly be called sci-fi action. StarCraft the game contains both those attributes, and it contains the attributes of acting and writing and directing that a film has while also containing attributes no film can have, such as interface and dominant strategies and balance. It is also dynamically expressed though not only the interplay between itself and its player but also the interplay between different players and each other. It's not impossible for that to happen in the minds of a film's audience but it's not the norm either. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit about things we all mostly already know, so I think now is a good time to stop. Also, don't misunderstand me and think that I mean games are inherently better than films - I am actually in a phase of my life (and so are games) in which I often enjoy films and TV more than games, but that doesn't change the fact that as time goes on the matrix of possibilities for games is only going to grow.