Neat web page that lets you compare pictures of various styles of swords, to scale (I’m presuming reproductions).
What AD&D Character Am I?
I Am A: True Neutral Human Wizard (5th Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-12
Constitution-11
Intelligence-17
Wisdom-13
Charisma-14
Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.
Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard’s strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)
I’m pretty puzzled by being True Neutral, actually. I would have expected Lawful Neutral, Neutral Good or even Lawful Good; I suspect the test conflates respect for authority and parents with respect for the law. By the detailed scores, it appears I was pretty close. And I only have one evil bone in my body (I know which question it was, too…. the one about if the elders in your family strongly disapprove of your actions, what do you do. Ignoring them wasn’t an option.)
Labyrinth Lord
Since some of you expressed an interest last week in laying your hands on Basic D&D so you can kick it old skool with your own bad selves, I suggested that you take a look at Labyrinth Lord. While you can get (possibly even legal) PDF scans of Basic D&D from RPGNow, which is where I got what we were using, you’re paying $5 for a not-particularly crisp scan ($10 if you want Expert as well). Labyrinth Lord is essentially Basic & Expert D&D as one book, released under the OGL as a free download. The rules themselves are the same, near as I can tell (with a few fiddly exceptions like rolling 3d8*10 for starting money, and Clerics being able to take spells at Level 1). All the text has been rewritten with an eye towards making it available under the OGL without it being in any way encumbered with any TSR intellectual property that hasn’t been explicitly released by Wizards of the Coast under the OGL. As a practical matter, the rules appear to be interchangeable, with only the organization and some minor terminology changing (e.g. Save vs. Dragon Breath is now Save vs. Breath Attack).
update:By the way, if you do decide you want to buy a pdf from rpgnow, you should probably get the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, which is the same price as either of the other two ($5), but has all the rules that were published for all the boxes: Basic, Expert, Companion, and Masters. What it lacks (the long introductory solo adventure and beginner dungeons), you are unlikely to need.
Scenario Breaker Rolls
Jeff’s Gameblog: a handy tip for CoC keepers, and others Annotated
tags: rpg
More importantly, a fair number of those Spot Hidden rolls were scenario breakers. That is to say, if you didn’t find the door leading to the ghoul catacombs (or whatever) the adventure was effectively over. Here’s how that would work out in actual play, at least when I ran CoC:
Player: My Spot Hidden is 45%, I rolled a 63.
Keeper: Well you find the secret door that leads to the rest of the adventure anyway.
Player: Then why did I roll?
Keeper: Uh…
Then he goes on with a brilliant piece of advice for dealing with these: make the consequence of failing the roll a success, but a success that has a price attached. (Go read the post, it’s short.)
I know, I know, standard advice to GMs making scenarios is not to even bother putting in any rolls where missing the roll causes the scenario to fall apart…but that has perverse consequences. Your players will eventually notice that no matter how low their skill is with any kind of information gathering, they’ll never miss the crucial clues that move the plot along. It takes a particular kind of hard-core GM to trash a night’s entertainment, or kill a party, on the basis of a single botched die-roll or crucial skill that nobody bothered to take. So they’ll either a) stop emphasizing those skills (the munchkin approach), or b) take them anyway, because they’re in character (the role-player approach)…but the skills will still be deadweight, so in effect you’re punishing the role-player for being less of a twink.
If you follow Jeff’s approach, those skills become valuable again–how valuable depends on just how much you’re willing to screw them over on a missed roll, but it’s easily enough to make it so that they want to succeed without your having to hand them everything on a silver platter just to keep them from hitting a dead-end.
If this ever makes it to market, I’m so there…
Browncoat Gamers Rejoice! « The Samurai Gunslinger Annotated
‘Joss Wedon’s “Firefly” series will get its own massively multiplayer online game (MMOG).’
- ‘Shiny!’ – post by jamused
Rambling Bumblers Ramble Again
And I’ve created a thread to discuss it on the Webamused BBS
Fighting with Lightsabers
As you know, I’m not a StarWars fan by any stretch of the imagination (or maybe I’m so much of a fan that I simply can’t accept what’s happened to the franchise), but I thought you might be interested in this. It’s a discussion of what’s wrong with the fight choreography in Lightsaber duels, and what could be done to fix it, from somebody who takes sword-fighting seriously. (His name is John Clements, and he says he’s a professional practicioner and researcher into Renaissance martial arts–which probably means Wendy’s heard of him.)
So this is how GMs do it…
Here’s a pretty funny
RPG Generator.
It lacks a “reload” button, which smacks of poor design, but fortunately all major browsers come equipped with one, so it’s no big deal.
Now that I’ve unleashed this, though, I’m suddenly overcome with a feeling of impending doom.
Cool Keyboard
Optimus keyboard has a little display built into every keyface, so that it can dynamically display what the key is being used for. Although this could conceivably have a practical purpose, in switching a keyboard between alphabets, of course what everybody actually is going to use it for is games (assuming they actually produce it).
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 