The Diary of A Simple Man

If I ever play a bard, I will name him "Bop Dylan" and he'll hit people on the head with his guitar.

Can anyone recommend a good D&D 3.5 character sheet that can be filled out electronically?

Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died on Tuesday.

No saving throw jokes, please.

I forgot a few points in the TMNT post I did recently. Since this won't make any sense unless you've read that post first, here's a link.

Anyway, when we escaped from the experimental lab, we got a chance to grab some pieces of clothing. One of the things we grabbed was an Oakland Raiders cap. I spotted it as we were sorting through the clothes, grabbed it and said "Mine! Or I will help you not!". I wore it continually after that.

And later, when we were looting the 7/11, right after I said "Surprise!" and tusked the store clerk, I added "I'm a Tusking Raider."

I wonder how many of you will get that? I'll admit that I wouldn't have, if I hadn't read all three of the original Star Wars novels recently. Teri found an omnibus edition in a dump somewhere (and I'm not exaggerating, it really was a dump). Speaking of which, I have to say: George Lucas is a sucky writer. He got lucky with Star Wars, as Jar Jar Binks proved all too clearly.

I've been watching some of the later movies on cable at night lately, and I have to say: I could have scripted it better. The lines for Obi-Wan are a joke. I can only imagine that Alec Guiness improved his dialog during the first three movies. If the original novel (which is by Lucas) is taken from the pre-filming script, as I suspect, that's proof that I'm right.

Okay, enough geekiness.

I'm playing catch-up again. I was going to do a smörgåsbord post, but instead I'll break it up by topic.

My Tuesday D&D game has lost half its players. One of them moved away to live with his girlfriend; once he's settled in he may be able to come for an occasional game, but it will be a three or four hour drive. Unfortunately he was also the alternate DM, running the game with my angry chain-wielding dwarf.

His younger brother seems to have dropped out as well, as has another player who may return later. But that leaves us with just four people. We'll see about getting more. As it stands, it doesn't seem likely that I'll be able to run a RQ/BRP game any time soon.

In the meantime, we're playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - but it's not what you might expect. This wasn't the plan, but the three PCs seem to have rabies (not literally, of course). In our first session last week we escaped from a corporate building where we were being experimented on quite viciously. In the process, we killed a number of people.

Last night saw us on the run in a stolen van. We needed food and money, so we backed the van through the front doors of a quiet 7-11 late at night, jumped out, and went on a spree.

I should explain that the other PCs are a psionic killer poodle named Poochie, and an escaped Army-experimental wolverine with guns named Mordecai. I'm a mutant elephant with tusks that are very effective in combat. I've been playing dumb, for laughs.

The wolverine tried to shoot out the store camera and failed, so he went into the back room and stole the VCR with the tape. The poodle tried to kill and eat the store clerk. I was busy grabbing all the peanuts in the store and tossing them in the van. Once all the peanuts were gone, I grabbed all the circus peanuts (the giant orange marshmallow kind), and after that, I grabbed some food that I thought my companions might like: cans with pictures of dogs on them. This amused me because in the TMNT world the mutant animals eat human food, not dog food.

Like I said, I'm playing it stupid for laughs.

The poodle does relatively low damage, so he was chasing the clerk around for quite a while and taking bites out of him. Finally the clerk made a break for the front door. As he passed me (still busily looting), I said "Surprise!" in my stupid elephant voice and tusked him quite savagely in the hip. After that, he was dog-meat - literally.

I'm less vicious than the other two, but I'm uneducated and my few experiences with humans have been pretty negative. :D

As we drove north to the wolverine's lair, I sang "Mahna Mahna" 23,822 times.

Watch on YouTube

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While I'm at it, it's worth noting that Chaosium has sold the rights to make RPGs based on the Michael Moorcock books to Mongoose. I can't say I'm happy about that, because as far as I'm concerned Mongoose and their "RuneQuest" are shit. But I hope Chaosium got enough money from the sale to make a success out of d100/BRP.

Just did an Irony Games email die roll for my dwarf:

notreal@gmail.com requested that 20 rolls of 4 6-sided dice be rolled.
The lowest die for each roll won't be counted.
Roll them bones ... your dice are
Roll 1: 6, [4], 6, 6 = 18.
Roll 2: 4, [1], 3, 1 = 8.
Roll 3: 3, [1], 4, 4 = 11.
Roll 4: 6, 6, 6, [4] = 18.
Roll 5: 6, 5, [3], 4 = 15.
Roll 6: [2], 2, 5, 2 = 9.

Where would YOU put those rolls?

Addition: I posted this just before running for the train, so I didn't get a chance to add something rather amusing. My game group has their own way of rolling up characters, as just about every group does. In their case, they roll 4d6 and take the best three - but you ignore all rolls below 16, and keep rolling until you DO get a 16 or better. And after you've made that 16+, the next five rolls, however good or bad, must be taken. Of course you can assign the six rolls to your characteristics as you wish.

I used the Irony Games dice server to generate a set of 20 rolls of 4d6-take-the-best-three. I figured that the odds were excellent that I'd get a 16 or better in the first 14 rolls. Incidentally, 20 rolls are the most you can make at one time. And the rolls are numbered sequentially - it's a really useful tool.

So I made the rolls, and not only did I not get better than a 15 in the first 14 rolls - I didn't get anything higher than a 15 at all. I shot off an email to a couple of guys from the game, telling them about that rather remarkable result, and then tried for a re-roll.

The results, in order, were what you see above. I deleted the remaining 14 rolls, of course, but there were no other 18s among them.

I think I'm going to play a vile-tempered, vicious chaotic neutral dwarf fighter - possibly with a spiked chain. That's how I feel today.

I'm talking about the game where my paladin died, of course.

Tonight Sebastian was in bed with Teri, watching The Jetsons. I never much cared for the Jetsons, but I watched a bit of it with them. It was a really freaky episode, so strange that I wondered if it was a real episode or some sort of wierd parody which had been made recently. Boomerang has some of those, sometimes, and they can be pretty damned strange.

When I came in, George had just had his teeth replaced with "techno-teeth". But right after he left the dentist's office, it was discovered that they were the wrong teeth - they were dog teeth. The dentist left on vacation without correcting the problem, though.

The whole teeth thing was really, really strange, and I commented on that several times to Teri. But otherwise it was typical Jetsons, so I got bored and went over to the den to update my character sheet.

After a little while I heard screams of terror from Sebastian. "Turn it off! Change the channel!" he screamed, sobbing hysterically. Teri was just changing the channel as I came in.

Apparently George Jetson had suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a vampire, scaring the living daylights out of Sebastian. He was SO upset, in fact, that after a few more moments he puked, violently, everywhere. On my comforter, on Teri's quilt, on the cover sheet and the matress cover, and on himself.

We showered him off, and he begged to sleep with us tonight so he could hold me all night long ("Why doesn't he want to hold me?", Teri wondered). Now he's asleep in our bed.

Looks like I'll be up late, washing and washing our bedding. This hasn't happened in quite a while.

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I forgot to say, on Saturday the guys came over to play D&D. The last time they'd come Sebastian had been super-shy, and spent the whole time hiding from them; they never actually got to see him. This time, he started out by peeking out from his hiding space between the two couches. But before long his curiosity overcame him.

At first, he just peeked into the dining room from the front hallway. But before long he was being far more open about it. He put two new Christmas stockings that Teri had bought on his feet; they looked astonishingly like elf boots, apart from the tendency to sag down and fall off. Waving his little plastic sword and shield, he kept coming part-way into the room and making funny faces at everyone. They're all relatively young, and mostly ignored him, but I was hard put not to crack up.

He was clearly fascinated. Even when he wasn't in the dining room, or walking through it (over and over), he was making very loud noises of excitement from the living room. It was really quite funny.

I'll make him a roleplayer yet!

Oh, by the way: I'm going to do my very best to get him to dress up in his Link costume, with those stockings on his feet, and take some pictures of him with his sword and shield. They'll be absolutely hysterical. And of course I'll post them here.

The session on Tuesday was a good one.

The drive itself was better than I expected. There wasn't much traffic; I did get stuck behind a couple of slow drivers, but that's pretty much inevitable. For the first time, I made the drive without referring to the directions at all. So now I know that the route is definitely well ensconced in my brain, which is reassuring.

I'd expected to play in Matt's game (the one where I play a paladin), but when I got there, it turned out that we were playing in Steve's game instead. Which meant that all the pondering I'd done on how to react to simultaneously losing an eye, 20 years, lots of characteristic points, my world, and my god, was...not wasted, but it could have waited.

So it goes.

Anyway, I was looking forward to the game. I'd just leveled - as had most of the other characters - and had gained a Fly spell.

I should explain that my cleric chose the Luck and Travel domains, and as a result gets Fly as a third-level spell choice. Unfortunately I can only take it once (until I get a fourth-level domain slot, anyway), but it lasts for fifty minutes. I figured it would change things quite a lot.

Incidentally, everything else about the level was surprisingly lame. No increase in saving throws, attack bonuses, or any other spell slots (i.e., I didn't get any more 1st or 2nd level spells). For hit points in this group you roll a regular die for your character type, and simultaneously roll a die of the next lower range, taking whichever result is higher. Clerics use a d8 for hit points, so I rolled a d8 and a d6...getting a 1 and a 2. So I gained two hit points.

Actually, I did the hit point roll the last time we played.

The session opened with the party on a mission: we had to clean out a bunch of bandits or face prosecution for adventuring without a charter. So we started out in a horse-drawn covered wagon towards the area where the bandits were operating.

Soon we ran across a group of about fourteen bodies. It didn't take a genius to figure out that they'd encountered the bandits. I checked around, and found one that was still alive - barely. Some quick healing, and we had a new member of the party (a new player named Gene). He was a monk, and wasn't able to give us much information. But the tracks of the bandits were fresh, less than an hour old. So we followed them.

Before long we spotted the bandits, five of them, under some trees. They didn't seem to have spotted us yet, so the party immediately got into a lengthy discussion about what to do. It seemed to me that the conversation was going on way too long, so I told the DM that I was casting Fly on myself; it seemed like a good time to try it. Unfortunately the sound of my voice casting the spell alerted one of the group's leaders.

Several people also pointed out that it was probably not a good idea to cast the Fly spell for that encounter. At the time I thought that they were probably right. But as it turned out, the spell was extremely useful - more useful than I'd expected.

The ranger had just gained spellcasting ability, and cast an Entangle spell on the bandits. It had a huge area of effect, getting all five of the bandits that we'd originally seen. The leader was able to make a save and resist the effect, but the four others - generic bandits with bows - weren't so lucky.

The ranger charged into battle. So did the monk. The conjurer summoned a lemure (a smallish devil resembling an evil lump of flesh) and sent it in to fight the enemy leader. The archer cast a Shield spell and started shooting at the entangled enemy archers. I flew 30 feet straight up and started shooting at them as well.

Before long the monk was badly injured, so I flew down and cast a Cure Moderate Wounds on him. It was a lot easier to get to him quickly while flying. After that there was more combat, during which the archers and leader were taken out. An enemy wizard in the distance summoned his own lemure and set it on us, after which we lost track of him (the wizard, not the lemure). And an enemy monk, and a number of other bandits came up from further away to attack us.

The enemy monk was beaten down pretty quickly. But we noticed her opening her mouth and apparently swallowing something. When she healed up it didn't take much intelligence to realize that someone invisible had poured a healing potion in her mouth.

I was 30 feet up in the air, so I did something that I'm rather proud of: I targeted an area-effect Dispel Magic burst (with a 30-foot radius) twenty feet back from the enemy monk, towards the enemy camp. And dispelled the invisibility of a rather terrified wizard, who immediately started running like hell.

I flew after him, shooting, but a shield spell protected him. Fortunately the conjurer (I think) took a shot at his back and knocked him down. I flew down and pummelled the wizard into extra-unconsciousness, then picked him up and flew back with him. We'd gotten the whole group of bandits, I think.

The next step was to interrogate them to find the location of their main base, and the boat they'd used to get to and from there. The party started arguing about what to do, so I flew up and started looking around; making a lucky roll on a Spot, I saw a boat just offshore in the distance. At around that time I was called back down, and returned to the party.

The conjurer was suggesting torture on the captives, although I'm pretty sure that he was joking. The bard was about to cast Read Surface Thoughts, which would have allowed him to get the truth from their minds - if they didn't resist, i.e. make their Will saves. It seemed to me that since we had them totally helpless, it shouldn't be too hard to reduce their chance to save; for example, we could tickle them, which would almost certainly make it harder for them to resist.

I suggested tickling, but the bard misheard me and thought that I too was suggesting torture. My response:

"I said tickle, not torture. And you've got a big hat with a feather in it!"

I should explain that the bard has a second persona that he uses for various amusing purposes, a bit of a fop; his hat is a particularly prominent part of his disguise. So that was the quote of the session, earning me 100 additional experience points.

(The DM instituted a policy of rewarding a quote of the session last week.)

It later occurred to me that it would have been even easier to hold a knife to the captives' throats and say "If you resist, you die".

We got the information we needed, got one of the captives to agree to take us to the boat (he'd taken an arrow to the groin on a called shot), and I suggested stripping the cloaks off of the dead and disguising ourselves as bandits - it would make the approach to the boat easier. And that's where we broke for the day.

Incidentally, I've been thinking about the possibilities of the Fly spell, and did a post about it over on rec.games.frp.dnd. I've actually gotten a lot of interesting responses to my posts over there recently, so I'm looking forward to see what people have to say.

Oh,by the way: I seem to have caught something. My sinuses are swollen and bleeding, all the skin on my head feels hot, and everything hurts. So I didn't remember the details of the session as well as I normally might, and I'm not writing as well as I usually would. I'm just not functioning well at all right now.

I've been here before.

Two years ago today I voted, and then drove to my D&D game while listening to NPR on the radio; the news sounded good. When the game was over and I started driving home, everything had changed, and my hopes had gone down in flames.

I don't think it will work out that way; from what I've heard up to this point, there's no way that the Republicans (I will never call them the "GOP" again, because there's nothing grand about them) can steal the House back. I still suspect that they'll keep the Senate (barely), but as of right now, we don't know.

Still, I'm not going to stay up too much later.

I do suspect that Bush & Co. will ignore the House, stonewalling any attempts at checks or balances, incidentally. I only hope that the Democrats don't give in. I'm very much afraid that they will, though.

I was home from work today, incidentally. Sebastian woke up screaming in pain; his hip hurt terribly. He couldn't get out of bed. We considered taking him to the hospital, but since he didn't seem to be suffering unless he tried to move, we decided to call his doctor when the office opened instead.

We got an early appointment and took him in. I had to carry him to and from the car, which became pretty painful for me; he's no lightweight! There was a possibility of a break high up on his femur, but the doctor suspected that it was just some soft tissue damage, some pulled muscles perhaps. I'd thrown him onto the bed (it's a game he likes to play) about a week ago, and he'd landed wrong; he started complaining of hip pain then, and the complaints got worse and worse as time went on. But this morning the pain apparently got much worse.

Anyway, we took him for x-rays and there's no break. The doctor gave him a high dose of ibuprofen, and that helped a great deal. With any luck he'll be well enough to go to school tomorrow.

Okay, time for me to sleep. Here's hoping when I wake up tomorrow that the Democrats still have a comfortable majority in the House. The Senate is still too much to hope for.