Quick Update

Well I managed to sell my extra copy of Keep on the Shadowfell to one of my co-workers. So I didn't have to go through the machinations of returning a different copy to Barnes and Noble. So there is no longer a "rumbly in my tumbly" (I took a fair amount of ripping for using Winnie the Pooh as my go-to when I was feeling guilty...) I ended up selling it to him for the discounted price, so I paid 20% (the pre-order) discount for my ethics, but I guess that's as it should be.

Last night I had heard it was the finale of American Idol. So I thought I'd see who won, since one of the finalist is from Salt Lake City (Actually Murray, but it's all one big metropolis). Well it was one of those things where I didn't really care that much, but where I thought the information should be easy to obtain, once the show was over. I mean the news of who won American Idol is big. Well what I didn't realize is that it's a two night finale and I guess they figured if they announced the winner on the first night that no one would tune in for the second night... ;) So I was googling and using wikipedia, and for some reason I couldn't figure out who won. The point was because of my weirdly OCD curiosity I spent way longer on a piece of information I only dimly cared about...

David Archuleta WILL win

Keep on the Shadowfell

***WARNING MORE TALK ABOUT D&D***

So today was the street date for Keep on the Shadowfell, the first full 4E product. So as you can imagine I got it. I had to do something that made me really uncomfortable, and still feels me with a certain level of guilt. I'll use you, my readers, as my confessor and you can tell me what my penance should be...

So I pre-ordered the adventure (as I believe I mentioned) from the FLGS, but when I went to pick it up, they didn't have it yet. This was very annoying... This is just one more reason why it's hard to support the local guy, because I knew the minute he said that, that I could drive to the local Barnes and Noble and it would be on the shelf. So that's when I did something bad... I decided to go buy it from Barnes & Noble, open it up, and then when my pre-ordered copy arrives at the FLGS return it unopened to B&N, and get my money back... Okay it's not pre-meditated murder, but it's one of those things that are just unethical enough to give me a rumbly in my tumbly.

As far as the product itself, I've only spent about 30 minutes with it, which was enough to read the entirety of the Quick Start Guide, and get mad that the pencil-draw character portraits they have for the pre-gens don't match the actual description (for example the dwarven fighter is supposedly wielding a two-handed hammer, but the picture is of a fighter with a shield and a sword.) On the other hand as I read about all the different ways people have to force movement, led me to believe that finally D&D could do justice to a true Force Mage (or Telekineticist). That would be the most awesome class ever, and overcome everything else bad about 4E (including the character portraits).

The really nice thing about the adventure is that they include six poster maps for the major encounters. Which should be really handy when it comes time to actually run those combats.

It bothered me and I did it anyway... Such was my BB Gun mania...

Chess Club

You remember that story I told awhile back about the guy who was involved in cryonics? Well I have a similar story. Not anything on the same scale, but the mechanism was similar. So three years ago my daughter transfered to a new elementary to be in the gifted magnet program. When it came time for "Back to School Night" or whatever it was they had a whole list of programs that you could volunteer to help with. One of them was the Chess Club, I thought that sounded okay so I put my name down. I didn't really have any idea what it entailed, but I thought that just volunteering to help couldn't be that involved. I'm sure countless tales of misery start out just this way.

Anyway the first two years were pretty low-key. Someone else was actually in charge, we met every other week we'd get around a dozen kids if we were lucky. During those two years we were aware that there was another elementary chess club going on at the next elementary over, and that they were quite a bit more serious. But it seemed a good match, people who just wanted to have fun came to our club and people who were out for blood went to the other one. Well at the end of last year the other chess club ended, and so all the ultra-competitive kids and their parents joined us, and where there had been two clubs now there was only one.

They (the parents mostly) ended up making lots of changes instead of meeting every other week they wanted us to meet every week; we instituted a ladder; and where before things had been fairly easy going now the we did "touch-move" rules. I'm not complaining about the changes per se I think of lot of the additions were good, but it ended up translating into a lot of additional work and responsibility, not for the people pushing the changes, for me. For one thing the guy who was basically in charge of the chess club worked every other week, which meant I went from being a volunteer to being co-dictator (or something like that). This wasn't too bad during the year, but I found out on Thursday (or maybe it was Wednesday) that there was $300 in the chess club budget and it needed to be spent and we needed trophies and a party, etc.

Well it turns out that the other guy couldn't make it any of the last three times, so in affect that transition was finally complete. Without direct requests, using the time-honored death of a thousand cuts method, I went from being a volunteer to being completely in charge. Which means that I had to figure out and buy all the trophies. My overarching goal was that no children should cry. I don't think I can meet even this modest goal, but I can hope. In any case I had to spend a couple of hours today getting the trophies ordered, and I'll have to spend more at the end of the week getting everything else arranged, but that's how it goes. As they say, and truer words were never spoken, "No good deed goes unpunished".

Some day I'll learn to listen to Nancy Reagen and, "Just, say no!"

D&D on the brain

As the release date gets closer, I'm having a hard time keeping my excitement in check, so I'm going to subject you to another post on the subject. This is your warning, if you don't want to read a post delving into the arcana of the difference between the current transition and past edition transitions. You have been warned. So here we go.

There's a small but very vocal group of current D&D players who are very much opposed to a new edition. They have many complaints, but one of the biggest is that the current designers, started bad mouthing 3rd edition the minute 4th was announced in order make it look better by contrast. This upsets them because they feel like 3rd Edition was really good, and they are annoyed to be told that the game they've been playing for the last 9 years is a sucky inferior imitation.

Now of course that's not quite how I see it. The thing is that anytime you're coming out with a new edition, people are going to want to know "Why? Why was a new edition necessary?" So there's a fine line between extolling the improvements of the new version and pointing out the failings of the previous version. I'm inclined to believe that they intended to do the former, but people took it as the latter. And so I'm a little curious as to why. More particularly I'm wondering what happened with previous versions.

The transition I'm most familiar with is the transition from 2nd Edition to 3rd. And I think that's the transition that most people are familiar with, most people in the D&D community that is. It's somewhat instructive to consider that transition. TSR the original company which published D&D had gone out of business and been acquired, there was a big chunk of time when nothing new was being produced. On top of this 2nd edition just wasn't built to be smoothly expanded on, instead there was a menagerie of busted kits, and classes and powers and options, it was a mess. So when people talked about how much better 3E would be there were no die-hard 2nd edition fans that got offended, people were honestly just glad that D&D was still going to be around.

Just about everything I mentioned about the transition from 2E to 3E is the opposite now. D&D has been going strong, it's a system that expands well. There has been some power creep, but not a ridiculous amount. It's still pretty tight, and on top of all that, since 3E was opened up, you have a huge number of third party publishers who have stepped into fill the gap.

I think a closer analog would be the transition from 1E to 2E. I didn't follow things as closely back then, and of course there was no internet (well there was, but it was exclusively the domain of a few hundred people at a few universities and in the military). So I can't speak to all of the details, but my impression is that the attitude was much closer to the current attitude then the attitude that existed between 2E and 3E. And I think that's part of the problem. People are comparing apples and oranges. They're using the last transition as their reference point when there's almost nothing in common between the two.

Is it possible that 4E came too soon? Sure. I'm pretty excited now, but there was a time when I would have strongly argued that point.

Did designers come down a little hard on the perceived flaws of 3E? Sure I could see that, but they've been working in secret on 4E for a couple of years. I think they can be forgiven for being overly exuberant.

Is 3E a great game? Yeah. I would in fact argue that it's the best role-playing game for the kind of game I want to run, up to this point. Of course it's my hope that 4E will be even better.

Anyway I've droned on long enough, and since no one is actually reading this I'd better wrap it up.

I was hot and I was hungry...

D&D 4E

From the very beginning it wasn't a question of if I would buy the 4th Edition D&D books, but of where I would buy them. The best price is basically Amazon, but as anyone in the gaming community knows there is a large amount of pressure to support the FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store), I may have already blogged about being torn between buying them off Amazon or buying them from an FLGS. Well I have 4 FLGSs within about about a 10 minute drive of my house, (which is probably more than the area can support). So if I was going to support an FLGS which one would it be?

Well one of the four is on the west side, so it's right out. That's kind of an inside joke. In reality it's just one of those situations where my mental geography of what's close doesn't match the actual geography, so that store has always felt farther away then the other two. Plus it's kind of a chain and one of the outlets is in Provo, so there's one more reason not to frequent it.

The second one is the biggest and most successful, Hastur Hobbies. I like the store, and I considered doing all of my 4E shopping with them, but despite liking the owner Cthulhu Bob, the rest of the staff always seems vaguely annoyed every time I'm there. And after having spent over $1000 there in the last few years that's really off putting.

The third one is where I bought all my Dreamblade minis from. And they're pretty cool, and they always greeted me by name. But for some reason, and I have no idea why, since Dreamblade went away I feel guilty every time I think about going into the store. I'm sure it's some twisted artifact of my puritanical upbringing, but it exists despite it's irrationality.

The fourth one just barely opened. They've got maybe 300 square feet of retail space that they carved out of a haunted house. What's great about that is that as long as it's not October they can use the entire haunted house as their gaming area, so they have a huge open gaming area, and a very tiny retail area. I went in on Monday mostly just to check them out and see what was up, since I'd never been in. But when I mentioned 4E they said they'd give me 20% off if I pre-ordered (if you're curious Amazon was offering 40% off). Well that was what I wanted to hear so I went ahead and put in my order.

One big advantage of going locally is that they're doing a midnight release party, so I can get my books well in advance of even the most optimistic estimate for them shipping from Amazon. The first product, an introductory adventure, comes out on the 20th, so I'll let you know how that is. When I get it next week.

I wonder if they'll do a midnight release for the adventure as well...

Blood Pressure

My blood pressure is always a little bit on the high side. I think it's a combination of genes and stress. Well we decided to look into getting some "Key Man" Life Insurance on the three founders. So of course when you're looking to get life insurance they want to do a whole bunch of medical tests, I guess the first time the Med Tech came by my blood pressure was a little bit on the high side. Presumably it was high enough to raise some eyebrows but not high enough for them to automatically say okay you're higher risk. So I guess I was in kind of a gray area so they decided to recheck it. We scheduled the check for this morning at 8:00 am.

Mornings are obviously the best time to get your blood pressure checked, but this morning was unusual. I have two sick kids. The youngest has been sick on and off for about a month. Most recently she had an ear infection, so they put her on some antibiotics and she seemed to improve, but a couple of days after the last dose suddenly she's got a fever again and is complaining about a headache. And then the next youngest is sick as well. I guess we're taking both of them into the doctor today, so we'll see what they say.

Also while I was checking my e-mail first thing this morning I found out about a big competitor of ours who had just launched. A little competition is good because it shows that there's actually a market, but at a certain point it you'd rather people just stopped coming up with the same idea you did.

The Dude abides...

No Country for Old Men

I donated platelets this morning. I watched "No Country for Old Men" I really liked it though I'm hesitant to recommend it, because it's basically about as depressing as movies come. Personally I like depressing movies, and many if not most of the movies in my "Top Ten" are depressing. I should pause here for a moment to talk about my top ten list. I'm sure if I ever sat down and made the list that there would be more like 30 movies on the list. When I say something is in my "Top Ten" it basically means that it would be on the short list to make the top ten list if I ever did make one, and that it's something that if I was making up a core collection of movies to own it would be one I would not hesitate to buy.

Anyway back to the movie. I really like the Coen Brothers, and I'm amazed by how deft they are. I mean they can make a movie like "O Brother Where Art Thou" a comedy with an amazing soundtrack and then a few years later make "No Country" a tragedy that's barely even scored. Now of course in both cases they did borrow from a book, but when you look at all the horrible book adaptations it's still impressive what they've done. At this point I would say, trying to compare apples to apples, that I liked "No Country" better than "Fargo", but it could be just because it's fresher, though I did see Fargo not that long ago.

People talk a lot about "Chick Flicks". This is the opposite, this is a "Man Flick". And by that I don't mean that it's an action movie, like "Die Hard". It's a "Man Flick" in the way that "Fried Green Tomatoes" or "Steel Magnolias" are "Chick Flicks" (If I don't want to get in trouble with my wife I should really use a less pejorative term than "Chicks" or a more pejorative term than "Man" but "Dude Flick" makes it sound like I'm talking about "Dodgeball"). For Tommy Lee Jones' character at least it's all about living up to the standards of his father, and in that sense it actually reminded me of "Quiz Show". I'm sure that something of living up to parental expectations is present in both genders, but there's something unique for men about the quest to make your father proud of you.

Every generation loses a little bit...