Throw Up The Horns

Every now and then, I find out something that just transcends the boundaries of awesome.

I grew up in a time where the best musicians had big guitars and bigger hair. They saw a million faces, and they rocked them all. I love rock. I have been known to throw up the horns during meetings at work.

I never really gave much thought to the gesture's origins. I'd heard it was "devil horns" once or twice, but I never really worried about it (any more than I worried about, say, Black Sabbath's music corrupting me). Admittedly, when I was a teenager, I was accidentally throwing up American Sign Language for "I love you", which is about as metal as oatmeal. I have since rectified this.

And now, I come to find out that the Rock Horns are actually a Protection Against Evil spell.

Frankly, the part of the article that suggests that a rock concert is "forming an enormous shield against the evil eye" is the coolest thing I have ever heard. Although I must question why some more powerful demons would fear a minotaur. Perhaps shadow-puppetry is their secret weakness?

Regardless, I seriously think if I go outside there is going to be a motorcycle equipped with bat wings waiting for me right now.


---

Speaking of rocking out, we here at SR have become hopelessly addicted to the Guitar Hero series (and Rock Band) as of late. Me, I'm stuck on (ironically, The Metal on Expert).

If you'd like to compare scores or test your *ahem* mettle against the might of Bat Loaf, go ahead and shoot me a message or a friend request. BUT BE WARNED!!!! I choke in multiplayer!!!!!!!

Vanir's Xbox 360 Gamertag:


Vanir's guitarhero.com profile:
batloaf

Dante and Stupid Ranger's guitarhero.com profile (the family that rocks together, stays together):
Dante8

If there's enough interest, maybe we could even start up a tour group?

Either way, rock on, and keep on casting Protection From Evil!

<Vanir has left the building>

More Random Thoughts

I read an article on The DM's Blog earlier this week that talked about how one of his friend won't play 4E until they get rid of hitpoints. And since I was writing about random number generation about the same time, that got me thinking about why on Earth hitpoints should be random. I always hate rolling for them because I'm always scared I'm going to roll a 1 or a 2 every level for the life of the character and end up with this anemic dude who is afraid to walk in tall grass for fear it will whip him unconscious if the wind blows.

That got me wondering why we roll for stat points when we create our characters. And that got me thinking about how it'd be super keen if we could just have a pool of stat points to distribute however we wanted. Then I remembered that there were already point buy systems in D&D and I hated them.

Well THAT got me thinking why I hated them. Sure, it's fair and you can construct your character however you choose. But I don't like to point buy because it encourages a lot of seriously bland, mediocre characters maximized for a purpose. If you roll your stats at random, you might wind up with some uberstats and some horrible ones, all uber, all crap, all mediocre -- you don't know what you're gonna get. You can base a character around their strong points and their flaws, and you could do that with the point buy too. But a lot of times, that's how an idea for a character pops into my head -- Lumbar came about when I had high STR and high WIS and a low CON. So I decided he was a powerful warrior who drank heavily but couldn't hold his liquor (or stay conscious in battle) due to inheriting his father's "delicate constitution". You can draw inspiration from LOTS of places -- this happens to be one of my favorites.

Life might not be random, per se, but it's certainly not constant and invariable -- sometimes you're never quite sure what you're going to get hit with next. Randomness gives us a little taste of that. I'm very very curious to see how 4E is going to handle such things, as they seem to be taking a much more hands-on approach to character development this time around, what with the new skill and ability trees.

Personally, I'm a little worried that they're going to blandify things. Dante is currently alternating between trying to ease my mind with reassuring words and silencing my nervous bleating with the Official DM Half-Nelson. Stupid carotid artery. Either way, one of these months I will awaken from being rendered unconscious and we will see how this "fourth edition" plays out.

Behind the Screen: Vacation Day! Well...not really...

I'm writing to you on the eve of my first vacation day of this calendar year, and my musings about enjoying some free time to get some household projects caught up led to musing about character downtime and how often it is glossed over.

In fact, the only characters that I know of who actively sought out roleplaying their off time all exist within our current campaign, and they run the gamut from scoring with local barmaids to providing extra prayers and service to their chosen deity.

Tomfoolery For Dummies

Unfortunately, too many DMs hand wave downtime or worse yet handle it like a cutscene from a film or a training montage from a Rocky movie. It doesn't have to be this way! I can remember many satisfying days spent in campaigns just doing something in character to pass the time, usually while the DM was looking up a rule or arbitrating something with another few characters.

In one of our college campaigns, several of us took to inventing a dice game (complete with bets) while the DM was busy doing something one-on-one with another character. After he was done, he asked what we were doing as we had attracted most of the other five players into our game at that point, and he had an NPC gambler show up to play the game with us for awhile. This didn't lead to any specific plot point, but we ended up making some platnium pieces off of the gambler before the night was over. We also got a chunk of roleplaying experience for doing something interesting with our downtime. It was fun for all involved.

In my own campaigns, I have taken to letting characters run with their downtime pursuits. Sometimes these activities, if given some time to grow, can be used as plot points or opportunities for impromptu fun. Other times, its simply a means for character development.

Everybody can get in on the fun!

Players can capitalize on this by really thinking out what their character does to unwind. Don't take it as assumed that your character does this certain routine each night, especially if you are one of those players that claim to be bored for much of the night. Wander around town, find someplace interesting to go. You might even be able to ask your DM something like: "I'm looking for some adventure tonight! I wander around town to see if anything looks interesting."

If you've got a good DM, they'll bite every once in awhile and give you that something interesting. Who knows, it might even lead to places you didn't expect!

Random Thoughts

Every now and then I hear an argument that has been around as long as there have been laptops and PDA's to bring to the D&D table: "You're not using REAL DICE!"

Some say it takes away from the spirit of the game or sucks the magic out. I've seen go so far as to accuse the guy running a dieroller program of cheating. I have to say, I don't really get either of those.

In Which Vanir Divulges The OTHER Reason He Is Surprised He Successfully Wed

I'm a computer programmer by trade, and I've been coding since I was literally about 5. Granted, the programs back then were about the Dukes of Hazzard and didn't really do much aside from:

10 PRINT "BOSS HOGG IS MEAN"

20 GOTO 10

Regardless, once I got a little older and learned about generating random numbers, it wasn't really a giant mental leap when I realized rolling dice was just random number generation for luddites. And while I can say there is a definite thrill in rolling a d20 during a critical moment and having everyone watch the die roll from your hand, hearts leaping in anticipation with every bounce to see if they all live or die -- well, that anticipation is still there if the player clicks "ROLL" in his die roller. It does suck a little that everyone can't see what you rolled, but then again I know lots of people who use DM screens or simply just have too much junk on the table for people to see what got rolled. And I can't honestly say I haven't still cheered when one of our laptop-die-rollers saves the day.

"But", you say, "dierollers aren't TRULY RANDOM!" Well, no. But it's close enough. Computers usually use what's called pseudorandom numbers, which in a nutshell means the computer takes some number it has access to that is going to change rapidly and often (like the computer's internal clock) and does some math on it that produces a number that is, for most intents and purposes, random. If you're going to run quantum physics experiments, or you're a hardcore computer scientist, or you're just THAT ANAL, then yeah, pseudorandom numbers might not work for you. Rolling d20 to hit a goblin? Not really an issue so much!



Dirty Rotten Cheaters

As far as cheating, anybody who thinks dice are 100% fair is kidding themselves. Loaded dice have been around ever since it became profitable to cheat, and they even sell loaded polyhedrals at Gen Con. And I can remember attempting to come up with harebrained schemes at a teenager with a friend of mine on how to influence our die rolls by spinning the dice or palming a certain number up. It didn't always work, but it did sometimes. I'd be willing to bet holding the dice funny would get you really closely watched at a casino at the very least!

Sure, writing a computer program that cooked the results wouldn't be very hard. And I suppose it might be a little harder to detect if cheating had occurred. But if you're rolling 19 or 20 every other roll, people are going to look at you funny no matter what you're using.

Besides, people who cheat at D&D need to die from blunt force cranial trauma from a PHB regardless of method.


Die Roller Resources

For those of you who want to use a die roller on your PC or Mac, here's a good one that probably does WAAAAAY more than you need it to.

http://www.aroooo.com/rpg_stuff/dice_roller/

Linux guys, sorry -- they don't have a version of that out for you. But if you install Ruby, you can use this instead! (Or write your own, I know how you guys are.)

http://www.rubyquiz.com/quiz61.html

There's a swell web-based die roller at Pen, Paper, Pixel:

http://www.penpaperpixel.org/tools/d20dicebag.htm

If you have an iPhone, you could always try out this web-based iPhone dice roller (but don't tell Yax -- he didn't much care for it!)

http://yoav.org/dice/index.html

Me, I stick to real dice most of the time but if I'm playing somewhere without a real table to roll on I'm using a homebrew application on my Nintendo DS (you'll need a cartridge that lets you run homebrew).

http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=14642664&postcount=2



No matter what you use, it's always a good idea to check in with your DM to make sure using your shiny new die roller is kosher. PHB's don't do subdual!

Behind the Screen: Drop-Ins - A Cautionary Tale...

In our campaign, our storylines tend to shape up by crafting a few major story elements and the rest gets filled in by our absurd crew of player characters. Occasionally, my co-DM and I will come up with some really great idea that we feel like dropping in at the last minute, just for fun.

Sometimes that goes well, and sometimes it doesn't.

The Situation Gone Wrong

In our campaign, the drop-in gone wrong was the mysterious appearance of a dead gold dragon, a portent of Bad Things Happening in our world. It was iconic, neat, and generally a fun idea that we had late in our planning session and we decided to go with it.

We didn't factor in that at Epic Levels, our characters might have the paltry ability to restore life to the fallen creature, forcing us into interactions we weren't planned for. When someone mentioned Resurrection, both my co-DM and I threw up the "oh no" signal and quickly went to work via chat to spackle up the holes we had left.

Let's look at how we can prevent this from happening to you!

Best Practices for Drop-Ins

1. Know Your Limits - If an idea is too complicated or too large, consider putting it off until you have the ability to flesh out the idea a bit further. If you practice writing episodic content, you can use the great idea that you had as an episode and drop it in later after you've thought it over. Discretion is a powerful ally!
   
   
2. Know Your Players - If you can come up with more than a half-dozen ways that your campaign group can derail a given idea, consider plugging some of those holes before you use the idea.
   
   
3. Keep Player Character Abilities in Mind - In my example above, if we would've kept the abilities of our party in mind we would've remembered that they had the ability to restore life. Important details like that can make or break your drop-in, so run a quick sanity check against major known abilities to prevent the "oh crap" moments.
   
   
4. Let Your Players Succeed - If you do miss something and your players capitalize on something that you didn't consider, make every effort to let them succeed. Nothing sucks worse than railroading, so learn to think on your feet and let them have their victories.

There's my road map to a successful drop-in! Go forth and run with all those fun ideas that you've always dreamt about!*

* Caution - Actually running campaign ideas that spring forth from your dreams may result in physical, mental, or social damage. Please consult a psychiatrist if you experience blurry vision, loss of appetite, or night sweats. StupidRanger.com is not liable for any damage caused from using dreams in your game.