Sean Middleditch

I’m a big fan of the Slayers anime, and have been interested in picking up the mangas now that they’re being released in English. I order the first book of each of the three series Slayers Special, Slayers Super Demon Mega-Explosion, and Slayers Medieval Mayhem. I also ordered Van Von Hunter volume 1 while I was at it. I also considered buying the first of the Slayers novels - yes, Slayers was originally a novel series before it became a manga and anime series. Being poor, though, I had to cut something out, and I decided to work on my manga collection a little more before buying yet more books.

I’m also happy to report that I wasn’t the least bit hung over today. Totally wasted last night, no hang over today. That might not mean much though - the first time I drained a whole bottle of rum I didn’t even get a buzz, and last night I was _gone_. So next time I get drunk (sadly, I do believe there will be a next time, because drunkness has its advantages which I need to partake in lately) I could very well end up with a hang-over the next day.

Today, though, just half a bottle of parrot bay. Yum. Need to try to Bacardi (sp?) - say a commercial on TV (eek, advertising *actually works*, despite its irritating evilness!) for their cocanut rum. I think that stuff is a lot more expensive than the Captain, though.

I need to get some of my buddies that drink all over here and try one of the anime drinking games. I found some ideas for doing Slayers as a drinking game (two shots everytime Xellos says, “It’s a secret!”), the Love Hina game was fun, and I’m sure we could turn any other comical anime into an easy drinking game. I also half-concocted D&D drinking rules.

Every player rolls a d8 to see what their condition is. Might be something like “fail a saving throw,” “cause damage,” “take damage,” etc. Only applied to things that happen to their PCs, not any henchmen or summons or anything. When they do their condition, they take a drink, and roll again. The DM uses a different system, since otherwise he’d end up drinking eight times as much as the players. The DM rolls a die to select a player - when that player is takes a drink, the DM also takes a drink. Thus his drinks should average out to about the same as the rest of the players. I’ll have to write these rules down and give them a shot.

We also came up with some half-written field-battle rules for our D&D game since we’re in a war setting right now. I didn’t want to use D&D minis rules because, for one, they are small unit battles and we’re playing large-scale war, and two, I don’t have any of the appropriate minis and the rules are too complex. Instead, I draw out a hex grid on the white board and draw in terrain. The armies then place units; we just write in the units on the white board grid. For example, on hex might have an enemy army with Archers x3 and Cavalry x2. Now each side takes a turn (no initiative except in very small battles). One or more units in each square may either attack or move. Archers can only attack adjacent hex. Infantry can only attack in the current hex. Cavalry can only attack in the current square, but they can also move and attack (and get a combat bonus when doing so). Some units can attack both close-range and attack adjacent hexes, like mages. The attacking side and the defending side each roll a d20 and add their combat modifier. The combat modifier is equal to their number of units plus their terrain advantages plus any special bonuses (like cavalry’s charge bonus, or elves’ bonus when fighting in the woods). If the attacker matches or beats the defenders roll, the defender loses one randomly selected unit. However, if the attacker’s roll is beaten by the defender, the attacker loses a random unit. This only counts if the defender can attack back - archers attacking infrantry don’t have to worry about losing units in return. In some cases, there are two different combat numbers - say you shoot at a group of three archer units and four infrantry units - the defenders get a +7 on their combat roll to see if they are beaten, but only use a +3 to that roll to determine if they caused damage back on their attackers. The terrain has height levels for advantage, and structures grant advantages, and so on. All in all, it’s *very* simple to play by and *very* fun if you like strategy and battles. We also have some simplistic rules for moving the PCs into the battle as units and switching between mass-battle mode and standard D&D melee mode. Pretty cool.

Something I’d like to write would be a web-app for tracking a D&D campaign.

There are four sets of data that are pretty vital for keeping track of: characters, world notes, and GM notes, and session log.

For the middle two, a simple wiki is really all that is needed, with one section being open to all users, and the other only being available for the GM. Pretty simple.

The character tracker is a little more complex, but not by much. I don’t think having a character *builder* is important. Paper, pencils, and dice work just fine for that. It would be nice, however, to be able to enter the base stats of a character, their skills, feats, and - most importantly - equipment. Their would also be wiki entries automatically generated for each character, both public and private.

The equipment manager is important because I often have a lot of private notes on items which the players shouldn’t know, but I tell them right away anyhow to avoid losing track of the information. Essentially, I’d like to be able to put in the item’s description (ie, “mahogany wand”), item’s features (”wand of magic missile, cl7″), price, charges, and so on, and have it be private to the GM unless it has been identified.

The session log would basically be like a mini-blog, something that’s super quick-n-easy to add notes to, and which I could then later summarize and add to the wiki.

One could then add some nice UI to make the web app really quick and easy. AJAX would be important I think to avoid all the page reloading that can often make web apps unbearable to use. I’d like to be able to hit a button, instantly be able to type in a few words for a note, and hit Enter to save it. Adding some things like dice rollers and so on might also be nice.

I actually started to write this last week, but realized I forgot the administrator password on my MySQL database and was too lazy to coerce my way into it. Seriously, what is the purpose of having an admin password for local-administration, anyhow? Wouldn’t limiting it by the user work better? Root can edit the raw DB files, no reason to make him know an additional password (which can then be lost or stolen) to do what he technically already can do. Ah well, maybe this weekend I’ll poke at it some more.

I have most of the details of my table-top game’s spell system figured out; now it’s just writing all the spells. (This also applies to AweMUD, to an extent, although the AweMUD version will be modified to simplify the user experience while retaining variety.)

Basically, spells are composed of a seed and, optionally, modifiers. A spell seed is a base effect with relatively limited applicability. For example, most seeds can only affect other creatures by touch. In order to get any sort of range a spell modifier must be applied. Modifiers increase the power level of a spell and, thus, the difficulty of casting the spell. Additionally, modifiers must be learned just like a spell seed, so a caster is very unlikely to know all available modifiers.

What will make the system interesting is a mix of seeds and creative modifiers. For example, there won’t just be a spell modifier to add range to a spell; there will be a handful of different types of range modifiers, with several levels of each. For example, one modifier will be the Bolt modifier - this causes a bow of pure energy to appear in the caster’s hands and requires a successful archery shot to hit the target. The Improved Bolt modifier would be the same effect, but with a larger range. Another range modifier would be the Ball modifier, which requires a throw check. Other range modifiers would be things like a ray which must be aimed or any creature in sight.

Area modifiers would make the seeds affect more than a single creature. Areas must be simple radiuses, turn rays into cones, sonic range (anything that can clearly hear the point of impact), and so on. Power modifiers would increase damage and such.

Then special modifiers would be added for more interesting scenarios. One example would be the Chain modifier which allows you to link multiple seeds together, letting later seeds take affect only if the prior seed failed. Then would be the Combine modifier, which causes all effects to occur, but allows the target(s) to resist them all on a single roll (and also fail to resist them on a single roll), and the Simultaneous modifier which causes all seeds to go off at once, but requiring the target(s) to resist each individually. Other modifiers might be the Delay modifier, Ignore modifier (making the spell not affect certain creatures/people), and so on.

Casters will have an easier time casting “researched” spells, which are basically prebuilt seed/modifier combinations. The Fireball spell, which would be the Fire seed with the Ball modifier, Lesser Range modifier, and Lesser Power modifier, will be easier to cast than if the caster simply took the seed and modifiers and combined them during casting. This is mainly to give players the incentive to right down spells and refer to them by a consistent name, thus making play more efficient.

For AweMUD, I’m planning on just making pre-scripted spells built using the above system. At some later date I might let players build their own spells as well. Letting players build their own spells shouldn’t be difficult, but I’d much rather encourage the use of pre-built spells for user interface simplification.

Coming along further on the ruleset for the table-top game. (And which I plan on later converting to use as the core AweMUD ruleset.)

Currently, it’s looking similar in many ways to D&D 3rd Edition, but definitely has some distinct differences. The core stats and health system are totally different, the XP system is different, the magic system is wildly different, and we have a few additional sets of rules like Knowledges and our Action Points.

Knowledges are basically Skills (which work pretty much the same in my game as they do in D&D), except that they’re cheaper. I figure that knowledge is something you are told once and retain, while other skills are things you must practice over and over and over to get good at. I also further classified it as a Knowledge being something you know, not something you do, while a Skill is something you physical accomplish. Many Knowledges and Skills overlap. For example, Lock Knowledge and Lock Picking Skill. The former lets you identify the culture and time period a lock was made in, the basic principles of the technology, etc. The later won’t give you too much information about it, but will let you know how to use a set of tools to open the lock.

Action Points are something that I fear may not work too well in table-top, and they’ll be done quite differently in AweMUD. (Although still very similar. For those already familiar with AweMUD, Action Points are basically round time measured in ticks. In the table top game, though, we still have rounds, only because we have to do all the book keeping and the computer can’t do it for us.)

Each character gets a number of Action Points each round. Faster characters get more. Various actions then cost some fixed number of points. A character may spend some or all of their AP each round. Character then also get turns in the round. During their turn, they can perform any number of actions that they want. When it isn’t their turn, they may only perform specific actions; some are things they can do at any time during someone else’s turn, while other actions are reactive (such as defending). So, during a character’s turn, they could potentially do a lot of things, but then they might not have enough AP left over to defend themself during the rest of the round.

It gets a little more complicated with a few actions which cost more AP than a character can possibly have. If the action cost is greater than the character’s max AP, but less than twice their max AP, then the character may perform the action during the round by spending a number of AP equal to their max. (Basically, they can’t perform any other action.) If the cost is twice their max AP or more, it takes two full turns; they may make no actions during the current round, and may only make the one action on their next. (They must declare they are doing this on the first round; they may not skip a turn and then announce that they spent the last preparing to do some multi-round action.) Actions which cost three times the character’s max AP take three round, and so on.

I’ve been working on a custom table-top RPG rule set. Mainly, I’m rather dissatisified with Dungeons and Dragons - the rules just don’t work that well, are still too complex, the power levels are completely unbalanced and unmanageable… it’s just not that much fun to me anymore.

My new system is code named B&L - Basements and Lizards. ;-) One design goal of the new rules is to make them fairly easily adaptable to a computer system, so we’ll have a system finally to use in AweMUD. Which will be most good.

Also been looking over BESM d20 (Anime hack on the D&D rules), which are rather interesting. Still looks like there will be massive power balancing problems, but then, anime tends to be like that. ^_^

Coding

Finally back into the swing of coding, albeit I’m not getting much done. Working on getting player descriptions in AweMUD as dynamic as possible.

I just got done adding hair styles, and am about to start on body frames. (i.e., are you slim, stocky, etc.)

Then I need to work on affects. Really.

Guitar

So one of my Christmas gifts is an ESP F-204 bass guitar. I’ve only just started learning, so I still suck more than a cheerleader on prom night (figuratively, of course), and my fingers are just getting their first blisters. My father (an experienced guitarist of 30+ years) is teaching me, so hopefully I can get to the point where I can actually play something more than three notes without screwing up soonish. ~,^

Bowflex

My second big gift (and so far as size goes, by far the biggest gift) is a Bowflex. It’s a simply great workout machine - you can do just about *any* workout with it (assuming you have the several optional addons) without needing to buy and find space for 10 machines or go to a gym or anything. Absolutely great.

DVDs

My final present(s) were DVD related. A TV with a DVD player built in for my bedroom (I didn’t need a new TV at all up there, but I guess now I have one - someone else in the house is getting a “new” TV tho), and a DVD burner for my computer. So now I can watch Pirates of the Carribean in pretty much every room in the house. ;-)

D&D

My friends are like crack-addicts when it comes to D&D. I wanted to take this weekend off from playing to spend time with a few special women before they left back for school, but no, they won’t let me do that. So I spent Friday and Saturday playing D&D, yet again. (Thankfully this managed to *not* get in the way of time with aforementioned women - yay schedule juggling!)

Still, tho, it’s starting to be a lot of work. I opted to write my own world for this campaign, which means i’ve had to design a patheon, world history, various regional cultures, maps, etc.

I’ve contacted a couple cartographers for getting the world map made (since, again, there is no good software for such under Linux). At the lowest price range, for $35 I can get a rather cheesy-looking map done (the cartographer uses one of the mapping software package for Windows, one with less than superb graphical quality) while the other is going to be $150 or more (for a stunningly beautiful hand-drawn map). Of course, i don’t at the moment have money for either. ~,^