High-value Skills

In Dungeons & Dragons, not all skills were created equal. Each is intended to be of moderately-equivalent value to a player character, so that there are no completely-wrong choices to be made at that phase of character creation. Sadly, this isn’t entirely true. Of the skills presented in the Player’s Handbook, some stand out simply by virtue of their availability:

	Cleric	Fighter	Paladin	Ranger	Rogue	Warlock	Warlord	Wizard
Acrobatics	–	–	–	●	●	–	–	–
Arcana	●	–	–	–	–	●	–	●
Athletics	–	●	–	●	●	–	●	–
Bluff	–	–	–	–	●	●	–	–
Diplomacy	●	–	●	–	–	–	●	●
Dungeoneering	–	–	–	●	●	–	–	●
Endurance	–	●	●	●	–	–	●	–
Heal	●	●	●	●	–	–	●	–
History	●	–	●	–	–	●	●	●
Insight	●	–	●	–	●	●	–	●
Intimidate	–	●	●	–	●	●	●	–
Nature	–	–	–	●	–	–	–	●
Perception	–	–	–	●	●	–	–	–
Religion	●	–	●	–	–	●	–	●
Stealth	–	–	–	●	●	–	–	–
Streetwise	–	●	–	–	●	●	–	–
Thievery	–	–	–	–	●	●	–	–

Acrobatics, Bluff, Nature, Perception, Stealth, and Thievery are all only available to two classes. For each of these (aside from Nature), the only classes that have the skill available fill the “striker” role in a party. In a typical four or five-character adventuring party, you probably won’t have more than one or two characters filling the same role, so failing to train one of these skills would leave your party short a potentially-valuable skill.

By contrast, Heal, History, Insight, and Intimidate are available to five classes each. It would be difficult to put together an effective multiple-role party without having every one of these skills available. These, then, would be good skills to just presume a party is going to be reasonably good at. E.g. out of five player characters three or four of them probably have Heal available, and one or two of them probably have it trained. This makes placing a somewhat difficult Heal DC into an adventure a pretty darned reasonable thing for a DM to do.

What should we take away from this? If you’re a player, kindly make sure you’re covering the skills your party needs you to be covering; you cannot expect your Wizard to be intimidating any more than you should expect your Paladin to be sneaky. If you’re a DM concocting a clever skill challenge, try to think of ways that the more commonly-available skills may come in handy, and whether you should set the bar high or low.
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X-Com: UFO Defense

Got myself a new computer at home with a Core i7 CPU under the hood, matched tri-channel RAM, a 64-bit operating system, and what am I doing with it? Playing a game I bought at a yard-sale back when I still lived with my parents. X-Com: UFO Defense is the first and best of a line of tactical games that pit a secretive international conspiracy against brutal alien invaders.

Like many games hailing from the early 1990’s, X-Com is a hodgepodge of minigames. By juggling the pace of your research and manufacturing resources as well as shooting down and investigating alien ships, the game does an excellent job of keeping you on your toes. There’s always something just around the corner for you to take care of, or so it seems. You can dialate or compress time in the main interface, giving you a great deal of control over the passage of dead time.

An important exception to this is when you’ve got your soldiers on the scene repelling an alien terror attack, or checking out a grounded alien ship. This interface is entirely turn-based, and has a strick fog of war. You are presented with a “hidden movement” screen whenever the bad-guys (or unseen civilians) are doing something you can’t see. Noting how long this screen stays up can be a pretty good indicator of how many bad-guys you’re dealing with.

These ground deployments make up a majority of play-time, with each of your soldiers capable of a small set of options that can lead to a rather broad variety of tactics when applied over a strike team of up to 14. I find myself using basically the same setup when I first hit the landing zone:

It all starts by equipping your craft, so I get 10 soldiers and one heavy weapons platform. I keep a captain and a sergeant on each personel carrier, and rotate in rookies to season them up a bit.
I designate one person to carry a heavy cannon with high explosive and incendiary rounds. Once I have them, I equip one person with a small launcher and stun bombs. Everybody else gets a rifle (of whatever flavor I have researched). Two people get high explosives (for clearing out sand mounds that sometimes block a craft’s doors), and everybody else gets a single grenade. Everybody gets an electroflare and a med-kit. This keeps matters very flexible, as everybody can lay down an area-of-effect blast and nearly everyone has a weapon suitable for close combat.
Check the map. Always check the map before moving anything. You’ll often be able to tell right off the bat that you’re at one extreme or another of the play area, which is important; you don’t have to worry about enemy fire coming from off the map.
Once landed, the HWP goes out first. These things are expensive but basically disposable; they don’t benefit from on-the-job experience, and are quite speedy. The HWP flushes out enemy reaction fire, which has saved many a rookie’s life when a barrage of plasma rifle fire greets the first thing out the hatch.
The game plan generally shifts a bit by the time the HWP has finished its turn, but the first two soldiers out the hatch tend to do the same things anyway: one breaks left, one breaks right. This gets a pair of eyeballs looking each of the cardinal directions — somebody’s looking out the windshield when the map loads — so I’ve got a pretty good lay of the land by the time my third trooper activates.
The next four troopers split up to provide back-up to the HWP and the two troopers that went out first, favoring whichever has an enemy in its sites, the direction of a downed UFO that you’ve already spotted, or simply away from a known edge of the map.
The last four troopers generally won’t have enough time units to get out of your transport and squeeze a shot out, so don’t hang them out in the wind. I move them up to the exit but not quite to the ramp. This puts them in a good position to by my second wave.
By the third turn, the fur is probably already flying. I’ll have two or three 3-man fire teams actively shooting up the xenos, attempting flanking maneuvers, and behing useful, with the HWP mostly just running around trying to draw fire and flush out more bad-guys. The remaining two or three soldiers keep their back to the action, looking around for a chance to lay down some reactive fire if anything tries to sneak up.
Once it’s time to actually kick the doors open and raid a grounded UFO, the cannon-toting soldier and the HWP stay outside. I burn a turn or two setting up my entry, lining the boys up outside the door so they don’t have to spend too many time units getting inside. Two preferred tactics:
- Have a rookie prime a grenade on turn a. One turn b, run him in, rifle a’blazing. If he sees a bad-guy, have him take his shot. Worst-case scenario is that the alien counterattacks and you’re short a rookie. When he dies, he lets go of the grenade, and you’re probably short an alien now, too. The downsides outweight the brutal elegance of this method. Obviously there’s the callous expenditure of human life, but this also risks destroying valuable alien artifacts. Waste not, want not.
- Far less grisly is to send your first person in with no intention to actually shoot. You get the door open, see where any aliens are, turn the heck around, and get out of the line of fire. Happily, turning doesn’t seem to provoke reaction shots, though moving sometimes does. With the door open, a barrage of fire from outside can generally take care of business.

TL;DR – If you haven’t playing this before, you are missing out. Don’t let the graphics fool you, X-Com: UFO Defense is one of the best video games available today, a steal at $5.99. That’s not a typo; this is an old game.

Alternative to Bailout

There’s a lot of talk about bailing out homeowners that are under water, upside-down, or otherwise looking at being totally screwed by their adjustable-rate or negative-amortization financial death traps. Some people talk about moral hazard, the risk that such action by the federal government will subsidize and therefore encourage bad behavior. This is on top of the usual arguments about it being a bad way to spend taxpayer money, about it not being the proper role of the government as imagined by the founding fathers, and so forth.

Keeping in mind that you can generally deter a behavior (like smoking) by taxing it, much as you can encourage a behavior by subsidizing it (like growing corn), let’s take a look at this from another angle. I submit to you, gentle reader, a proposed solution to the current explosion of foreclosures that doesn’t encourage bad behavior, and doesn’t cost billions in taxpayer funds.

Reduce the occurence of foreclosures by removing the tax incentive to do so. If you get a mortgage for $200,000 and default on it, the bank auctions it off for almost always less that it was worth when purchased. They write off the difference as a loss and reduce their net profit (and thus their tax burden) to suit. So don’t allow them to write off losses resulting from residential foreclosures.

One change in the tax code and the banks would have to change the formulae by which they decide whether to kick you out of your house or renegotiate your loan or let you slide for a little while longer. If your bank can’t handle the risk, maybe they can sell off your note to a financial institution that can (and write off that loss).

I like the idea of a dog-eat-dog market. The bold and the strong succeed. The foolish and the weak perish. Let the market sort it out, but take the tax-man’s thumb off the scale.

The Umbrella Academy

Roughly thirty years ago, eccentric inventor Sir Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven extraordinary children, secluding them in his private estate, where he trained them, honing their unusual powers for ten years until they were ready to emerge as The Umbrella Academy.

Guided only by their loveless father, the children fought crime and fought with each other. One child went missing, another died, and one failed to display any special abilities beyond a certain proficiency on the violin. Over time the team was fractured by strife, the family driven apart.

Thus begins the second story arc for The Umbrella Academy, a brilliant young title published by Dark Horse Comics. This series merges distinctive visuals with a fertile imagination and gives them room to grow and thrive in a world of mad science, mysticism, and supervillainy unfettered by the long-standing continuity straightjackets of more established masked-vigilante comics.

The six-issue Apocalypse Suite introduces the Academy, making good use of flashbacks and dialog to flesh out the setting and give us the right back-story to make the characters human enough to be compelling while remaining detached enough to remain largely mysterious. The current series, Dallas carries forward from what could have been a perfectly-acceptable one-shot mini series, and is holding up well so far, exploring the disappearance and reappearance of 00.05.

Absolutely worth a read. Pick up the trade paperback. Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba do some outstandin work here.

Warmachine MkII

The game developers over at Privateer Press have been busy. Not busy producing new IKRPG material, but busy juggling what was once a nicely streamlined skirmish game WARMACHINE. Every year since its launch, Privateer Press has released a major expansion to the product, from Prime to Escalation to Apotheosis, then Superiority, and most recently Legends. Each of the four original factions has grown into new niches and fortified early strengths. It’s quite a good game.

But after six rule books and the introduction of the HORDES product line, things have gotten unwieldy. Each of the several-dozen models available has its own special rules, often creating exceptions to a core set of rules that is quite streamlined and almost elegant. The reminds me of a beautiful woman putting on makeup and jewelry. She puts a little something on to draw attention to her eyes, maybe a pair of earings. That’s all nice, but taken a little too far she’ll look like a tramp or a clown. The interactions of special rules had crossed the line at some point. The Privateers had to put an online FAQ up to keep the errata and rules-interaction rulings straight.

So they’re hitting the reset button. In April, we’ll see previews of the rules revisions. Every model’s point cost has been adjusted, unit and warjack rules have been revised, power attacks are being overhauled, and all your stat-cards will be obsolete when the second edition hits the shelves. I eagerly anticipate not the new release (I haven’t played a game of WARMACHINE in over a year), but rather the fanbase reactions. The pro-skub and anti-skub enthusiasts will be pouring out of the woodwork on this subject.

Oh, and here’s to the Juggernaut getting an tune-up.

The Evils of Pork

Sorry, this isn’t about mamma cooking breakfast with no hog (today was a good day). I just didn’t want to completely monopolize kcmeesha’s comment section.

There has been a lot of talk going back and forth about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka “the stimulus bill”). On paper, having a public discussion of a bill before our representatives and senators vote on it is a good thing. A great thing. Precisely what the founding fathers were hoping would happen. Well, most of them (but that would be a subject for another time).

Alas, the quality of the public discussion has been exceedingly poor. Rather than actually hashing out what the mix and nature of tax cuts and government spending will be, we instead hear about honeybee insurance and tennis courts. This serves the double purpose of making the bill look wasteful and corrupt to anybody predisposed to think everything the government does is bad while making fiscal conservatives look small and mean.

So we get references to Chuck Schumer talking about the “chattering class” as though that were somehow incriminating. The “chattering class” would be people who make their living by chattering. The professionally-outraged. Just like the “working class” makes their living by working and the “investing class” make their living through investments. If you were Nancy Grace or Kieth Olbermann, you should be rather insulted by such a statement. He’s insulting you, and you deserve to be insulted.

Rather than speak to the substance of the bill, such professional crisis-identifiers pick out something that sounds silly (like subsidies for bee insurance) and rail against them without ever considering why somebody might have thought bee insurance was a good thing. Or even important. Or even critical to real people out there busting their asses for a living and helping keep our standard of living going. If you don’t rely on bees directly, it sounds stupid. Scientific studies are frequent scapegoats in these soft-shoe routines, dressed up as frivolous expenditure without any examination as to the merits of the programs themselves.

This isn’t to say that every government program is needed. Nor to say that every good government program is free of waste. Or even to say that very important government programs aren’t often bogged down by waste and corruption. I’m not that naive. The solution to government corruption and waste isn’t to cut off the funding, but to ramp up oversight and investigation. Shine a little sunlight on that crap.

CBO Summary since the actual bill is TL;DR

So rather than just bitch about it, let’s take a little peek under the hood:

Not all of the money gets spent immediately. This is a somewhat frequent complaint about the stimulus package: a great deal of it gets spent in 2010 or later, not Next Saturday. The thing is that even “shovel-ready” projects take time. After the engineering and zoning and such is all set and done, the various regulatory agencies have been satisfied that the project should be allowed to proceed, there are steps that take some time. We haven’t nationalized the construction industry, so there’s a bidding process. Somebody has to do the cost analysis and draft up bids. Some period of time must be allowed for this, as we can’t reasonably expect a bidding process to open up until there’s a commitment for funding. Once the bids are in, some jerk is going to demand that they be fairly evaluated, so that takes time. Once somebody’s selected, the work can actually start. Bridges don’t pop up overnight unless you’re talking about those chincy wartime things that the army will straddle a river with temporarily. If it’s going to take two years to finish a construction project, there’s no need to push all the money out up front.
Other items like the supplemental nutrition money get split out over four years, in chunks of $4,859m, $6,056m, $4,317m, $3,115m, and $1,639m from 2009 through 2013. I don’t see anything unreasonable with that. Others include highway construction weighing in at $27.5 billion stretched over seven years. I also don’t think it’s unreasonable for highway projects to take about that long.
Not enough of it is tax cuts. OK. The CBO report linked above indicates that this bill reflects a $211.8 billion dollar reduction in revenue to the federal government. How big of a tax cut were you looking for, specifically? $250 billion? $300 billion? A five-year suspension of all taxes, fees, and tarrifs by the federal government? I really have no counter-argument to this other than a general impression that some people will never be satisfied. They want their big armies and highways and prisons and don’t want to pay for any of it. I understand it in the same way that I understand that children don’t want to eat their vegetables.
Too much pork! In regards to tax cuts, I ask “how much is enough,” so for pork I ask “how much is too much?” Can we get rid of those pork-barrel military bases dotting the midwest and deep south, where we have little to no credible need for military presence (nobody’s invading us through Kansas, so we probably don’t need forts there)? Do we really need separate naval facilities in New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia when we don’t have a single naval station between Monterey and Washington State? Pork is not the villain folks have made it out to be, it’s just easy to make somebody else’s targeted spending look wasteful.

So if you’re on board with the nay-sayers, what should have been removed? What vital clause was left out? Please be specific.

Shark-jumping

A few weeks back, the folks over at the THAC0 Podcast talked a bit about when it’s time to stop following a title. I find that it’s when the series stops being what I liked about it. I’ve commented on this before in regards to anime, but I think I’ve just about gotten to that point for the Order of the Stick.

Rich Burlew started the strip as a way to poke fun at the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, its game culture, its rules, the tropes of the genre. It was funny. It was insightful. It provided a few nice little pauses in my week. For the past several months, this has been more the exception than the rule. The Order of the Stick has drifted away from its comedic roots and has strayed into the realm of dramatic fiction. Wandering off for a couple of strips into serious exposition in order to deliver the main characters to a fresh set of comedic material is certainly fine by me. I can wade through some un-funny text for a while to get back to the good stuff.

The recent reappearance of Belkar the hateful violent little Halfling has served to highlight how far the value of this strip has slipped. We’ve gone from “I think I missed a spot check” to this:

You’re not missing anything subtle. It just isn’t funny. Or heart-wrenching. Or entertaining.

Forest Watch 21

There’s an army platoon assigned to garrison Forest Watch 21, defend adjacent territory, and prepare for recapture of Forest Watch 20. A quick overview:

Lieutenant Of the 1st Order

Pavel Borisenko

Tiefling Warlord

Current commander of FW21, has two subordinate officers, each with his own crack team.

Lieutenant 2nd	Donkey	Dragonborn Paladin
Seargent	Varis	Elf Ranger
Lieutenant	Kasim Whitecloth	Human Fighter
Pvt 1st – kia	Leucis	Tiefling Rogue
Corporal	Katori	Halfling Rogue
Private 2nd	Bailin	Dwarf Fighter
Corporal	Obyn Fudenbeard	Dwarf Ranger

Lieutenant Donkey’s team is specialized in close engagements.

Lieutenant 2nd	Richter	Human
Lieutenant	Orm	Human Warlock
Private 2nd	Tater	Human
Private 1st	NB	Dragonborn
Private 1st	Boont	Human
Private	Zajeck	Tiefling Paladin
Private	Galena	Eladrin Ranger

Lieutenant Richter’s team Includes multiple ranged-attack specialists, allowing them to project force without needing, necessarily, to change positions to engage. As such they will frequently be called upon to hold positions such as the watchpost itself.

Please note that the rank system used only loosely follows those in use by contemporary militaries. That the second team consists entirely of non-player characters is totally coincidental and not a metagame ploy to keep the spotlight on the player characters at all. Really.

Shortly after the death of Pvt. Leucis, 48 reinforcements arrived, consisting of one Lieutenant, six sergeants, and forty-one privates. In total, this brings FW21 to four Lieutenants (including the commander), seven sergeants, and fifty privates.

PPPoE on D-Link DSL-2640B

Since AT&T is distributing the D-Link DSL-2640B modem/router combo in pretty big numbers, it is necessary from time to time to convince one to stop using PPPoE. Configuration changes beyond bypassing PPPoE are beyond the scope of this article.

Connect your computer directly to the D-Link. Use a cable, as Wi-Fi masochism is beyond the scope of this document. Browse to http://192.168.1.1/ in the browser of your choice. If your system has assigned itself a 169.mumble address, you will first need to manually assign your computer an IP address like 192.168.1.5, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and a default gateway of 192.168.1.1 to do so.
You should be challenged for a username and password to proceed. By default these are both set to “admin” and you really ought to change this at some point.
You should be presented with a Home / Wizard screen. Un-check the box labeled “DSL Auto-connect.” This will allow you to specify the VPI and VCI for your connection. For most ISPs in the AT&T ILEC footprint, this will be 0 and 35 respectively. Click Next.
You should be prompted to set the connection type. Select the radio button labeled “Bridging” and the pull-down menu option labeled “LLC/SNAP-BRIDGING.” Click Next.
You will be presented with the Device Setup screen. The default settings will suffice for most home use. Click Next.
You will be presented with the wireless configuration screen. If you wish to disable wireless for some reason (and should have bought at 2320B instead), un-check the box labeled “Enable Wireless.” Click Next.
You will be presented with a summary of your configuration. Read it carefully to ensure that it understood you correctly, then click the button labeled “Save / Reboot.” The DSL-2640B will restart, after which you should have Internet connectivity.

If you don’t know the password for your D-Link, you can perform a hard reset (reverting it to factory settings).

Locate the Reset button on the rear panel.
With the device powered on (but without network cables plugged in), use a paperclip to hold the button down for 10 seconds.
Release the button. The modem should reboot.
Wait about 30 seconds to access the modem as above.

Obamameter

Most reasonable people that I know, including a couple of online acquaintences like Meesha and Prairie Flounder, have a healthy skepticism when it comes to campaign promises. You may have noticed that the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America did not include the return of Jesus Christ, a spontaneous global relapse of all cancer cases, or candy raining from the sky. Of course, these aren’t things that Obama actually promised to deliver.

Politifact’s Obameter has compiled a list of 510 promises that Obama made publicly between announcing his candidacy and his inauguration. So far they have him listed as already having kept six of them, has 18 of them “in the works,” has made serious compromises on one, is stalled-out on another, and have outright broken one promise.

I take some issue with them presenting compromises and stalled attempts as being somehow bad, though. Our governmental system, as I understand it, was intended to bring conflicting interests together to work out compromise solutions that everybody can live with.

Burrowowl

Infrequently-updated geek ramblings