Awesome Tactics, Bro

Kick reason to the curb!

  1. Think before negotiating: If you fire at them with everything you have, could you remove the need to negotiate?
  2. If negotiation is a necessity, think while doing so: what is the best way to cleave the enemy ambassadors in twain?
  3. If all else fails, fighting is always the answer.
  4. If fighting fails, you are not fighting hard enough.
  5. If you are not fighting hard enough, fight louder.
  6. The best approach is always from the front.
  7. If the enemy has left their flanks open, feint and then attack from the front.
  8. If the front is heavily defended, they are expecting a flank attack. Attack from the front.
  9. If their flanks and front is both heavily defended but they are vulnerable to an aerial strike, distract them with aerial bombardment and then attack from the front.
  10. If attacking from the front does not work, you are not fighting hard enough. See point 5.
  11. If attacking from the front is still not working, you’re obviously not attacking their front! See point 6.
  12. If there is no possibility for victory, attack from the front as furiously and loudly as possible. Remember: the greater the defeat, the greater the moral victory.

Diplomacy is over-rated.

Back in 1989

Tianenmen Square, June 4 1989

In late 1989, democracy and market capitalism were finally winning the cold war. Solidarity was heading towards political victory against the incumbent Communist party in Poland. Germany was on the road to reunification. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution was brewing. Hungary was adopting a multi-party electoral system. Bulgaria would follow soon after. The people of Eastern Europe were pulling the plug on International Communism’s life support.

But on June 3rd, twenty years ago today, the government of the People’s Republic of China wasn’t having any of that. Thousands of students and intellectuals seeking political and economic reforms had gathered in Tiananmen Square in April to honor the death of Hu Yaobang, a political reformer. After two weeks of martial law, and protesters blocking soldiers from entering the square, the army got serious and things went south in a hurry. Armored personnel carriers and troopers with fixed bayonets closed in. Shots were fired by the soldiers, firebombs thrown by protesters, and over the next two days an unknown number of people would die.

China’s still a communist dictatorship. Political freedom remains next-to-nonexistant. A great many economic reforms have come through, allowing many to benefit and suffer from the freedom and predations of a limited market economy. A search of images.google.cn for “tiananmen square massacre” still looks just like a search for “tiananmen square,” but at least they’ll bow to explicit searches for “tiananmen square tank.” Maybe there’s some political progress after all.

Item Distribution

Typical Adventurer

So I was knocking around some of the suggestions from the 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide regarding the distribution of treasure. When following the advice of the DMG, a DM basically ends up distributing one less magic item than there are player characters every level, each of increasing level-value (level +1 … L+4). For four characters, the book recommends dropping the level+2 item, yielding an item output of L+1, L+3, and L+4 by the time the party advances.

As an issue of basic fairness, you wouldn’t want the person who got the level +4 item (ostensibly the coolest material reward that level) to also get the most super-neato-von-awesome stuff during the following level. It seems to me that a round-robin approach makes a lot of sense. But which direction to spin the wheel? Does the character that got the L+4 item this time get the L+3 item next time? Then the L+1? This would allow whoever missed out to get the L+4 next time. It also means that starting at 1st level, some guy is going to end up with multiple same-level items repeatedly during his career. Odd.

Here’s how the downward-stepping round-robin breaks down:

Level Player A Player B Player C Player D
1st – 2 4 5
2nd 6 – 3 5
3rd 6 7 – 4
4th 5 7 8 –
5th – 6 8 9
6th 10 – 7 9

And so forth. An upward-stepping round-robin goes like this:

Level Player A Player B Player C Player D
1st – 2 4 5
2nd 3 5 6 –
3rd 6 7 – 4
4th 8 – 5 7
5th – 6 8 9
6th 7 9 10 –

In both cases, naturally, the same number of items show up, of the same power levels, at the same rate. When descending, an individual’s gear clusters up into tight little clusters of general potency. When ascending there’s a lot more scatter.

Descending, I observe that if you look at each character’s best gear (at the tail end of level 6), Player A gets at 10th and 6th level item, Player B gets two 7th level items, Player C gets two 8th level items, and player D gets two 9th level items. All else being equal, I’d expect Player B to feel a little put-out at that point.

Ascended, Player A gets and 8th and a 7th level item, Player B gets a 9th and a 7th level item, Player C gets a 10th and 8th level item, and Player D gets a 9th and a 7th. Player A is right behind the pack and player C is a little ahead. I suspect this is the approach that would be most likely to yield a defensible appearance of fairness at the game table.

SRWare Iron

About Iron

There was a time when I used to post about Firefox in a kind, generous fashion. Then we had a falling out, but the alternatives just weren’t cutting it for me. I’d keep straying off to another browser for a while, lose interest, and end up back with the the most popular Google-funded communist web browser on the market. Google released Chrome. I’m not a big fan of Google as a company, but I gave it a spin. It was nice, but I don’t like the creepy multiple-year-duration cookies they dish out normally: I sure as heck wasn’t going to do my daily web browsing on something coded by those guys.

But it was pretty neato, so back in September when I found out about SRWare’s Iron browser, a stripped-down version of Chrome that doesn’t phone home, I went out and got it. Hadn’t written anything about it because I was waiting for that new-browser shine to wear off. It’s been a few months and a couple of updates, and I’m ready to render a verdict:

  • Iron has Chrome’s tab behavior, which is excellent. You can tear a tab off to form a separate window, consolidate disparate windows into one unit, switch between tabs far more smoothly than in Firefox, Opera, or IE.
  • Iron has Chrome’s light and responsive feel. By default it ties up a lot less screen real estate with control mechanisms.
  • Iron has Chrome’s nice ctrl+f search function that actually highlights where on the scrollbar you’ll find additional instances of the phrase you’re looking for.
  • Iron doesn’t rat you out to Mountain View every time you follow a link.

I recommend at least giving it a test drive. There is some IE-centric content on the ‘net that won’t render right, but that’s a problem I don’t find compelling enough to use IE as my go-to browser of choice. My only real complaint is that Iron doesn’t seem to be able to actually assert itself as the default browser in Windows Vista. This can be a little annoying when following links from other programs.

Polite DMCA Complaints

Piracy is very serious

I never thought I’d see this, but as part of my job I field DMCA take-down requests. My employer is an Internet Service Provider, and from time to time our end-users may take it upon themselves to skirt around the release schedules and pricing schemes of various intellectual property industries. Traditionally the owners of those properties have been quite strident in their tone towards alleged pirates. This morning I noticed that J.K. Rowling’s folks have taken a more fan-friendly approach for an audio-book version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:

Unauthorized file sharing is illegal.  However, we truly appreciate your
interest in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Audio).  We are making
every attempt to provide this wonderful content to you in a host of
legitimate ways, one of which is through the following
website:

http://www.apple.com/itunes

That’s a big change from the “You’re a criminal and we’ll see your ass in court” approach I’ve been seeing for years. A welcome change that I hope some of the other IP-enforcement types pick up on. Try to win back your customers. Barring that, stop twirling your mustaches and cackling evilly.

Full text of complaint follows
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Accidentally Telling the Truth

A gaffe is roughly defined as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” This is the kind of misstatement that results in press offices racing to rephrase things into a carefully-crafted slate of B.S. that fits better with the message of the day. Earlier today Joe Biden, vice president of the United States, was asked what he would tell his own family in regards to the possibility of a pandemic influenza. Don’t go on airplanes, subways, or other confined places where the air recirculates and the flu can easily spread. That was, unfortunately, a pretty good piece of advice, and politically unspeakable at the moment.

Don’t go on public transit if you have symptoms. That’s the official advice. If you have to cough or sneeze, cover your face. Again, the official advice. Wash your hands frequently. Finally some good advice for avoiding a flu. The other advice has to do specifically with not communicating a flu to other people. If you’ve got the dreaded swine flu, staying off the subway isn’t going to help you. If you have reason to think you have it, get your ass to a doctor.

Nobody wants a public panic or anything, but Joe was just telling it like it is. He doesn’t want his family to get sick in the first place. Oh no.

Pirate Bay Verdict

Pirates on the Internet

File under O for “obvious.”

Today the Swedish justice system has found four muckey-mucks from The Pirate Bay guilty and subject to a year each in the klink, along with just under $1,000,000 in penalties each. The charge? “Assisting in making copyright content available.” Huh. The Pirate Bay’s administrators and financial backers were assisting in copyright infringement. Who’da thunk it?

One thing I’m quite unclear on about this matter is why they’ve bothered to fight this (including continuing the operation of the torrent tracker) when apparently they’re going the martyr route. They have been able to offer no defense that their site wasn’t intended to assist in infringing copyrights. This was clearly their intention. The Pirate Bay isn’t a massive clearinghouse for open-source freeware and public domain art. If this is an exercise in civil disobedience, they should be pleading guilty and getting to work on the Swedish nerd version of Letters from a Birmingham Prison.

TorrentFreak link

Disney Learning Kindergarten

If you ever find yourself trying to run Disney’s Mickey Mouse Kindergarten or Winnie the Pooh Kindergarten on a Windows Vista Home Premium x64 system, you may find yourself running into the following gem of an error:

Script runtime error
VERIFY: [3s.dcr] OpenForWriting Error:
I/O Error

It then refuses to continue, dumping you back to your desktop. Now, this is a pretty self-explanatory error message, but I fired off a web search anyway. The only page I saw that looks reasonably-likely to provide a solution to this problem wanted me to sign up for an account and provide credit card information. Oh hell no.

As a public service:

Mickey Mouse Kindergarten Preferences

After you install, find your shortcut to the launcher and right-click on it. This will give you a pull-down context menu. Select “Preferences” and click on the “Compatibility” tab. Mark the checkbox labeled “Run this program as an Administrator.” Click the button labeled “OK.” Done.

Now every time you use that shortcut you will be prompted to allow it to run as administrator, but it will work and your little kid can stop bugging you about his Mickey game. You’re welcome, Internet.

Hey Look, Pork!

Pork, it brings us together

Earlier this evening, the local paper reported that local congressman Mike Thompson’s office has released a list of all the earmarks he requested for the 2010 federal budget. The total dollar amount is just shy of $395,000,000.00. This was even more than what they reported in this morning’s paper about my representative, Lynn Woolsey; she only asked for $285,000,000.00. Most folks these days seem to like to complain about earmarks, so I’m going to air my complaint too.

Why so little, Mrs. Woolsey? What the heck about district 1 merits $110,000,000.00 more in earmarks than district 6? You see, I’m rather a fan of having my representatives bring home the bacon. I pay my taxes and want my area to get its fair share. I didn’t hire my US Rep to go let some pencilneck in a Virginia office building decide where all the money should go. That guy doesn’t know where Occidental is and whether it really needs wastewater treatment plant improvements. He doesn’t see what happens to south-bound traffic on 101 North of Steele Lane at 4pm on a weekday.

Earmarks are more often good than bad. Some congressmen do a better job of separating the wheat from the chaff than others (Thomspon apparently got $1.2 billion in requests and pared it down to under $400 million, much of which will overlap requests from the White House), but the practice itself is fine. If we don’t like the earmarks we’re benefiting from, we can kick the bums out.

TL;DR – “all politics are local” == “fuck you, John McCain.”

Thompson’s list (PDF)
Woolsey’s list (PDF)

Themed Parties and Skill Spread

Harnessing all them magics and stuff

Previously I whipped up a demonstration that the “classic D&D party” (Cleric-Fighter-Rogue-Wizard) can cover the skill spread quite easily. With the Player’s Handbook 2 out today, it is now possible to make a couple of power-source-themed adventuring parties, with all four party roles covered but without having to mix your peanut butter and your chocolate. There’s no reason to avoid such delicious flavor combinations, but sometimes you just want chocolate, right?

What we find, pretty quickly, is that there is a lot of overlap in each power-source group. The Arcanists all have Arcana, History, and Insight. The Divine classes all have Religion. The Primal classes all have Athletics, Heal, Nature, and Perception. Some of this overlap is reinforced by requiring characters to train spefici skills as part of character creation (Arcana, Religion, and Nature being the big culprits for obvious reasons).

With the exception of the Bard (which has every skill available save Endurance, Stealth, and Thievery), each of these groupings have big gaping holes in skill availability. If you want to have a broadly-skilled Divine adventuring party, you will probably have to sink a fair number of feats into skill training, or resort to creating a gang of Eladrin.

Moral of the story: mix up your power sources. Most DMs and players have been stitching together traveling-circus hodgepodges of adventuring parties for years, of course.

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