Nolgroth

Re: Tesunden Isles Write up the sword as a power. That's how many XP. Examples: Variant 1: This version does not have the Real Weapon Limitation applied and therefore the sword requires no maintenance. It is always sharp and ready to go. Variant 2: This version is built with the Real Weapon Limitation and therefore must be maintained (sharpened, oiled, etc) and will suffer the effects of being left in water for long periods, etc. Note that both versions are written up with the 0 END Advantage and Focus, Required Hands, and STR Min Limitations. This is pretty standard fare for building weapons. It is how all of the book weapons are built.

Re: Tesunden Isles Ring of the Ram for the Win.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Dawn of War 2 Official Score - Doyle Donehoo (specifically They Come in Waves and We Push Them Back )

Re: Tesunden Isles Update 9/29/10: Starting to create the Object body table. Noticed that the default HERO values don't make sense. The "Interior Wooden Door" looks like a more modern type prefab door, not some sturdy oak thing. So I have modified the doors a bit. For the most part, I have added additional categories of doors with lightweight doors being equal to the aforementioned Interior Wooden Door. Also added a Heavy Wood Door and a Reinforced Door. I did not get obscene with DEF or anything, but I did improve the Body for those types of doors. It should take a phase or three to chop through them. Aside from that, I am tailoring the list for a more fantasy feel. So far I have added Padlocks and I plan on adding different levels of chests, crates and similar objects. Come to think of it, I should check Fantasy HERO before I get too much further. EDIT: Yup. There is a Fantasy Objects table in Fantasy HERO. Strangely enough, it doesn't have Chests, Coffers, Lockers, etc. yet has Candelabra. I do not necessarily agree with the way the objects are built. So there are some changes to it (increased the Body of thick doors while keeping DEF (PD/ED) roughly the same between thickness/mass of door). The idea that a Joe Average guy with an ax can cut through a wooden door eventually. Enchanted or reinforced doors are a whole other ball of wax.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The constant banging, pounding, scraping and yelling from the roofers above me. The good news is that I get a nice new roof for the winter, compliments of my property manager. Bad news is that I didn't get much sleep today after working a graveyard shift.

Re: Tesunden Isles Update: October 21st I will be going to visit my mother. There will be no scheduled game that day. If you like, I can set up my server so you can log in and have a "pick up" game.

Re: Tesunden Isles Forgot to post here Friday morning, but my blog is updated with a recap of the 9/23/10 session.

Re: Tesunden Isles I'll restart it.

Re: Tesunden Isles Update 09/23/10: Lots of stuff going on today. I reviewed all of the tokens and brought them in line with what I can from the Hero Designer files. Combat Maneuvers are still very experimental so some of those are not fully added in yet. Working on it. Highlights: Fixed Patch's defenses. Added values from Armor. Added Damage Negation. Note that this one is going to be hard to do if she is attacked by ranged attacks. Currently working on a solution. Fixed Haakon's defenses. Added Combat Luck, removed Hardened Resistant Defenses, added values from Armor. Fixed Damon's defenses. Removed Damage Negation (somehow I must have added either Patch's or the Ogre Magus values to Damon). Added values from Armor. Added Combat Luck. Removed Hardened Resistant Defenses. Fixed Celedron's defenses. Added Combat Luck. Added values from Armor. Removed Hardened, Resistant Defenses. I also changed one of the functions that was giving me a headache last week. In the initiative call macro, it was set to "getVisibileTokenNames". Changed that to "getTokenNames". Now I can select any token that is on the map, even if it is not visible on the window. Will save me headaches. Removed all the "dead" tokens. Hope that improves performance. Created and tested the Autofire macro. Basically what it does is add a flag to the selection window for Autofire attacks. If that flag is set (box is checked) it calls a different macro that calculates the DCV for each one of the attacks set in the Multiple Attack box. It then calculates Hit Location and Damage for each individual attack. As before, the macro does not determine "Hit" or "Miss" status, it only displays the maximum DCV hit for each attack. Edited the Quick OCV macro to include Autofire. None of the macros currently allow for the selection of multiple targets. That is something I plan on working on for the next (or possibly the one after) game. Really it is only a matter of copying the code for the selection window and pasting it four more times. Then a little bit of flagging code (a check box) to check whether there is one or more targets for the output. I am limited multiple attacks (autofire, sweep or rapid attack) to a maximum of 5 targets. Anyway, not today. Received Merovign's character. Unfortunately it was in 5th Edition format so I had to do some conversion and tweaking. I think it is done now. Whether the player can join us this session or not is still up in the air but he should be in by next week at the latest. Server is up. See you when you get there.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Been keeping up with Covert Affairs, The Gates, and Haven. I must be easily entertained, as each of these shows has been fun. I imagine that The Gates will be as close to a soap opera as I would ever watch, but it is my least favorite of the three. In fact the only reason I started watching it is because of Claire Radcliff (played by Rhona Mitra). The first few episodes highlighted just how unearthly vampires can be. It is starting to wear down though. Covert Affairs is pretty light fare, but surprisingly engaging. It is the character interaction with this one. If you are looking for anything resembling a real spy thriller, well Burn Notice would be closer but neither really does the genre justice. Doubt that a long term TV show could pull that particular genre off very well. Of the three, I am really liking Haven. It started out slow and awkward, but each new episode adds new layers to the evolving story and disparate elements are starting to get wound together. I think it took me by surprise just how much I really do like how the story is progressing. Looking forward to seeing how this all ties together. I am a little worried that Audrey Parker may get totally Mary Sued, but I'm willing to hold out at least until that time to find out. One of the things that makes the show is how Deputy Wournos (Lucas Bryant) and Duke (Eric Balfour) have this sort of history of conflict and yet they make a pretty decent team when put together. Classic clash of personality coupled with augmented skill sets. Keeps things entertaining when they trade barbs. Saw a preview for No Ordinary Family and that looks like it may be really fun. Love the bit where the Father character is talking to his partner about turning his garage into a "lair." If it goes onto Hulu I will definitely watch a few episodes.

Re: Tesunden Isles All of that can be done with the Quick OCV and Quick Damage macro as well. It would be nice to have an additional macro, but I have not been much for coding lately. I know that will turn around soon and then I can fix it. The weapon builder macro modifies the Weapon1 - Weapon10 (I think there are 10, maybe 15) token properties to list the properties of the weapon (DC, OCV bonus, whether it uses END, etc). This interacts with the Draw Weapon macro, which calls up the list of weapons on your token and places one of them into either the Primary hand or the Off hand. That, in turn, interacts with the Attack macro, which calls up the stats for whichever hand you are using and uses those stats. There is an off-hand penalty figured and an Ambidexterity entry to offset that. All in all, except for the Autofire mechanism (which I did have figured for the Gemini games ironically enough) the attack thing works really well. I'll look for some of my older campaign files to see if I can extract the Gemini code and plug it in to the current build. I hope I still have them.

Re: Tesunden Isles Blog Update: Session overview for 9/16/10.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Suicide Mission - Composer Jack Wall, Mass Effect 2 Score

Re: Tesunden Isles I suppose what I am saying is that I do not have a generic purpose Powers macro yet....and for the time being I am suspending working on that functionality until I get to the point where I am having fun coding again. All Powers (spells, cyberware, etc) will have to be individually coded. What I was thinking as a nice middle ground is to code the individual macros for spells and place them on a token called lib:Grimoire. From there we can create a simple Input window with a list of spells, Switch, and MACRO call for each spell in the list. I am also going to create an Aid and Drain macro (works much like the Healing and Damage macro I already have) to cover that functionality. Most non-attack powers (Invisibility, changing Senses, etc) are just a matter of setting States or Token Properties. Barrier would just create something that we can either draw or, given that I know the size and appropriate Special FX, whip up in GIMP ahead of time. Whenever the barrier is cast, you simply drag the token over and place it. In other words, build a few prototypes and modify those base ones for each individual power. P.S. And you may want to check the Skill Roll name you have rolling. Stygian Bonds seems to be a common thread amongst your macros.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Have not seen Drag Me To Hell. Descent, on the other hand, I did see. Not really knowing your taste in film, it's hard to say. There is some good, creepy stuff before all hell breaks loose. After that, to me anyway, the movie becomes dull and predictable. You get the immediate sense that none of the protagonists are going to make it and the rest of the movie just becomes an exercise in watching the creative ways in which the director visually demonstrates cruel and nasty ways to die. The ending was weird and a little jarring. All in all, "Meh." Watch it if you liked the Hills Have Eyes or some other form of slaughterfest. Even though I am a tough critic when it comes to horror, I can usually find something to like about any particular movie. Not so with Descent. Just mindlessly slaughtering off all the characters in an orgy of death is not much fun for me. I like things to be a little more unpredictable and suspenseful. Hope that helps.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Ninja Assassin I once saw a man on a motorcycle hit by one of those land boat Cadillac sedans, and subsequently pushed through a cinderblock wall. To this day, there are some details that my mind will not recall, even though I know for a fact that I never took my eyes off the incident. Ninja Assassin was nearly as traumatic. So much so that I found myself skipping scenes and creating artificial gaps in the narrative that are very similar to the gaps in my memory of the motorcycle vs sedan accident. Poor acting, crappy special effects, idiotic writing and a lack of knowing what kind of a movie it truly wanted to be make this one bad bad bad. I heartily recommend that anybody who is considering the movie buy a blender and sticking your hand down in it first. That is probably less painful. As always, I try to find good things to go with the bad. In this case, the portrayal of the lead ninja/grandfather of assassins character was the shining highlight of the movie. I could easily see his performance carry over to a much better crafted movie. Dude positively oozed menace as he "raised" all those children to be elite assassins. Though most of the CGI was crap, the chain fighting scenes were interesting. I could see a character with that skill. I think the worst part of this movie is that it could have been good. Not just okay, but good. Instead, the creative direction amped up the cheese factor, the casting department cast people with almost no talent, and the CGI sucked. Curiously, the backstory scenes were pretty engaging. The treatment that these children received was delivered in a very stark, matter of fact manor that clashed terribly with the Wuxia style martial arts that dominate the "Present Day" portions of the movie. If only those present day scenes could have had half the heart of the flashbacks and a third of the acting talent, it might have been one of those fun, action-packed movies. As it was, there were just too many bad elements drowning out the few good elements of the film. This new trend to have CGI blood effects sucks on toast, but the blood effects in Ninja Assassin were so bad that they sucked on toast that had been moldy bread before being dropped between the heating elements. During one of the later fight scenes, the hero lost so much blood that he should have been completely drained of blood about halfway through. And he kept losing blood. Lots of it. If you still insist on seeing it, don't blame me. I warned you not to.

Re: Interactive Map of Middle Earth Or even a more readable "fancy" font like Ringbearer. Still has the Lord of the Rings feel (thanks to the movies) and yet is still very readable to me.

Re: Tesunden Isles Update 9/13/10: Well I have been a busy little bee, working on the mechanical aspects of the game. I finished up the basic macro scripting. I want to build a few of the spell macros, but I am taking that sort of thing easy this week. All of the NPC/monsters are presently written up and macro ready within MapTool so there should not be too many problems with prep work. I modified the map a little bit. Added some furnishings to use as obstacles, weapons or just something to use as a springboard for whatever fancy maneuver you have planned. I also added something else. I learned a little bit about Fog of War by reading the RPTools forums. I think I have a solution that allows me to still use FoW to obscure the unexplored portions of the map and still have it useful. Essentially, instead of using the tokens to reveal portions of the map, I will manually reveal them room by room. With the Vision Blocking Layer in place and this new technique, I think we will have a nice median solution. I also set it up so that Normal vision has a slight radius of darkvision to it so that everybody should be able to see their token in the dark. On a the more story-related elements, I have determined some more of the backstory that led to the dwarf exodus from Tesunde. This led to even further story development to the island itself. Aside from some metastory (perhaps even metaplot) I had several ideas for different adventures. I plan on turning the Tesunden Islands into a very busy place. So far I have ideas for (titles in my head): The Old Holds (part of which is covered in this particular adventure) Sunken Dreams The Alley Wars Nodianne's Wrath (Nodianne is the Goddess of the Sea in this setting) To Break a Deadly Spell And those are just the general titles so far. Each one has sub-parts (as in the Old Holds having at least 4-6 different ruins to explore and the Alley Wars having several permutations). Some of these concepts are very linear in nature (each of the Old Holds is probably a dungeon crawl) and some are more fluid (Nodianne's Wrath and the Alley Wars will probably be ongoing stories that take place in bursts). All in all, I can am excited about running this campaign. Now to just have your characters not become Orc Chow next session. Hmmmm. I have also tentatively invited another player to the game. I am hereby closing the recruitment status as that puts us at six.

Re: Interactive Map of Middle Earth Nice, but there is a point where that labeling font becomes obtrusive.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Wolfman (2010) - Pretty standard fare, which is not surprising considering that it is based on the original 1941 version. I enjoyed watching it, but I was left feeling that it could have been a lot better. Benicio Del Toro was bland. His Hamlet act at the beginning of the movie had far more heart than his portrayal of Lawrence Talbot. With all the advances in werewolf graphics over the years, I would have preferred something that looked a little less like a linebacker in a wolf mask and something more like a, uh I don't know, werewolf maybe. I get homages, but the original Wolfman looked a little silly. Highlights include Emily Blunt, great opening sequence and gorgeous moon graphics. Overall, the movie was a good compromise between the "Saturday Monster Feature" and a modern horror flick. Despite Del Toro's worst efforts at making the film boring, there were better than decent performances by the other cast. Even some of the extras did a better job than the lead. Next time somebody does a remake, at least get an actor that gives a damn. Low point is Del Toro. I know he is supposed to be this great legendary thing, but his performance was wooden and uninspired. By the time we get halfway through the movie, I was really looking forward to the inevitable conclusion. And he did his level best to make the death scene look like a farce. BTW, if nobody has seen the original Wolfman and I spoiled something, sorry. The destination is the same in this movie, but the steps to get there are a little different. Too bad that Universal bombed this project. I would have expected a little more care be given when bringing back a Universal icon like this. Even a modern, Hollywood studio should do better than that. Still, you could worse for a couple hours entertainment.

Re: Tesunden Isles Blog updated with last night's session.

Re: Tesunden Isles @Solron and Starwolf: Sent Starwolf a reply with some character edits. Please read and heed that e-mail. Thanks.

Re: Tesunden Isles I should have listened to myself with the whole "less is more" idea. If I had been "less" concerned with packing as many features into the macros as possible I might have gotten "more" macros done. The good news is that, while tracking END in terms of whether or not you have enough and applying Stun damage is out, I think I might have found an easy way to do martial arts special maneuvers. You see it all started with a spell. This particular spell (of Celedron's) adds damage to an existing bladed weapon attack. The way I have it operate is to call the original attack macro for the blade and then a separate macro to add the extra damage. Taking that concept, I should be able to move the Martial Arts maneuvers from the token properties and into a separate macro or macros. I think it would be feasible and easy to just use an input window to select the maneuver from a list. Then that macro calls a special damage (Disarm, Trip, whatever) macro to implement the actual effect. Don't have time to experiment with that today, but it is the closest I have come to actually having a clue how to implement that. And back to the extra damage macro, it is perfect for adding damage like Poison. Right now it looks for a defense. Should be somewhat easy to add Immunity_Poison as a defense and go from there. I think everybody knows what I think of that method, so we could define a Poison defense as well. In either case, our options are starting to add up. I need to sleep for a while. I might be able to get the basic Warrior Mien spell ready for Celedron. From what I saw earlier, looks like you might have Arial's spells up and running. Stupid week. Looking forward to today's game. Lots of potentially interesting twists and turns. Just got to get some sleep and try to break out of this funk I'm in. I'll chat with you all later.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Pandorum If you ever wanted to see what happened to the crew of the crashed spaceship in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks this your movie. The sets and props are really quite cool. The few beauty shots of the ship make it out to be top notch. The acting is okay. I won't say that anybody was strained to the limits of their acting potential, but I believe each performance was solid. The plot? How many effing times do we have to have a spaceship sent into space only to have just about everything go wrong? Unlike Sunshine though, the ending isn't all bad. The story veers so far off the reality mark that the almost immediate sense of entropic misadventure doesn't put me off. On the other hand, if you've seen the movie Descent (spelunkers meet evil sub-human species and get eaten) then you have basically seen this movie. No real spoiler necessary because it becomes pretty apparent about ten minutes into the movie that things are about to get real bad, real soon. I didn't even have the foggiest notion what it was about before I watched it. A co-worker/buddy of mine shoved in my hand and said watch it. So I did. The riot control weapon is a hoot. I swear it looks a lot like the drawings of the weaponry from EttBP module. Even the mutant horrors look surprisingly like vegepygmies. I would not be in the least bit surprised to find out that somebody in the decision making process was/is a huge gamer and also loves that module. I also like the crank started computer console. In fact a lot the tech seemed to work on cranking up power with a manual crank as a backup power source. Interesting and one of the things that I can take away from an otherwise forgettable movie. I'm not sure how it would work on a real, practical level but it is so going into the next space opera-ish game I run. I also think that this would be a gritty example of Metamorphosis Alpha. Just on a smaller scale.

Re: Equipment I recently started everybody out with 500 Silver Pieces. I found that it tends to outfit the group to what felt right to me. Edit: I noticed that most tended to choose 1 set of armor (shield optional). 1 primary weapon, 1 secondary weapon, 1 utility weapon (knife or dagger usually). Aside from that, ammunition (for those with bows or crossbows), a light source of some kind, and what I call the "Standard Adventurers Pack" which is the typical Backpack, bedroll, rations, etc. No mounts for this setting so nobody purchased horses or whatnot.