Virtual TTRPG Maps

So our TTRPG group has been playing online for several years now.  We started during the pandemic, but having group members kind of spread out and most of us having jobs that require getting up kind of early means that not having to drive 45+ minutes home at the end of the night is enough of a bonus.

I like the map options.

Pathfinder offers a lot of options for tactical combat, but virtual maps also mean that I can more easily plant clues or potential rabbit holes on maps than I could when I was just using theater of the mind or dry-erase combat maps.  Chekhov's gun is too obviously Chekhov's gun sometimes when you're describing the space (or you have party members who ignore potential plot hooks completely).  But when I put something weird on a map, I'm doing it for a reason (which may be because I found a neat graphic in the asset set, but I will improv plot around them if someone takes an interest).

I have been using Dungeondraft to make maps for a couple years now.  The ability to load additional assets (I've gotten some modern ones, some Cthulhu-esque ones, and high-level city grids) gives it flexibility beyond the basic fantasy RPG set that comes with it.  It lets you export both with and without the grid, and with or without lightning, so if you want to import it into a virtual table top that lets you set those up, you can just do an image, or if you're going to print for actual table-top use, you could print it with the additional features.

Now that I've been using it for a while, once I know what map I want to make (say, a forested encounter map), I can set it up in about twenty minutes.  More complicated maps (like the Clue house) take longer since I have to place a lot more assets, but I don't usually need a lot of those.  It does mean that, if I need to, I can probably slap together a battle-map while the PCs are talking themselves into a fight.

I'm putting together a setting for a 1930s game, and for that I'm looking at using public domain images of locations from that era for non-combat maps - lobbies, offices, restaurants, theaters, etc.  I don't know how well that will work yet, but for combat I'll still be putting together standard top-down maps; I've read some things about using isometric maps, but I haven't worked out the technical aspect of it yet.  I'll also need to put together some Empire State Building floor plans - which should be easy, since they're available online - especially since I learned that only one or two of the floors was actually occupied in the time-frame I'm looking at.

There are a variety of places to get asset packs; here are some I've used:

• Cartography Assets
• 2-Minute Tabletop
• Patreon (Dice Grimorium, BluBerrey, Tyger_purr, Cthulhu Architect, Brian Patterson - those are the ones I follow, but there are tons more)

I have not yet found great options for Art Deco assets, but hopefully by the time I run that game, I can at least approximate it.

One of the other nice things about these maps is that I'm now playing with two groups, and some of them can be repurposed for the other.  I haven't needed to do this yet, but I have them in the same overall campaign setting at the moment, so should they wander into areas the other has already been, I could reuse some of the maps for my own personal continuity's sake.

Putting points in Linguistics

Okay, right, so I'm the kind of nerd that wonders things like, if I were a character in a role-playing game, what kind of statistics would I have?  Just how many points is that history master's worth?

I've spent way more time thinking about this than I probably should.  Pathfinder uses the d20 OGL system for the most part, with some tweaks, and has around thirty skills that players can put points in for their characters.  So I've been looking at that list and debating where I likely have points.

• Acrobatics:  Probably 0
• Appraise:  Definitely 0 - I'm pretty bad at knowing or guessing how much something is worth
• Artistry:  For the Literature subskill, maybe 1 or 2 points
• Bluff:  0 - I'm not good at bluffing at all
• Climb:  Probably 1 or 2 points; I spent a lot of time up trees as a kid
• Craft:  This has multiple subskills, and is basically skills that make something; Cooking probably 3 points; Clothing 1 or 2 points; Alchemy (substituting for chemistry) maybe 1 point
• Diplomacy:  Given my years working at a customer service point, I'm estimating about 3 points
• Disable Device:  In game terms this is about traps and locks, so 0
• Disguise: 0 - I can't even really put on normal makeup
• Escape Artist:  Probably 1 point
• Fly:  Uh, we'll go with 0
• Handle Animal:  Probably 1 point
• Heal:  I don't really remember enough first aid or CPR to have points in this, so probably 0 (really, no one should be looking to me for help if they injure themselves)
• Intimidate:  Probably 0
• Knowledge:  This is a multi-part skill in game terms; Arcana - 0 (unless you apply it to tech instead of magic, then maybe 1); Dungeoneering (this is caves and such) - maybe 1; Engineering - maybe 1; Geography - probably 2; History - 6; Local - maybe 1; Nature (this includes life and earth science type stuff) - 2; Nobility (this includes legal and political stuff) - 1; Planes - 0; Religion: 2
• Linguistics:  You get a language for every point you invest, but you also get bonus languages for your intelligence score, so this is either 1-2 or 3-4 points, based on the number of languages beyond English I've studied (German, Russian, French, and Spanish)
• Lore: this is a specialized knowledge area skill; I figure I've probably got 1 point in this for copyright issues
• Perception:  I don't think my Wisdom score (the affiliated skill) is that great, so I probably have about 5 points in this, based on what I notice while driving at night versus what my husband notices
• Perform:  This is another multi-part skill; I'm basing the points on years of lessons divided by two: Keyboards - 5, Trombone - 2, Singing - 3, Oratory - 1
• Profession: Another multi-part skill, similar to Craft but which doesn't produce physical goods; Librarian - about 7 points; Gardener - maybe 1 point; Scribe - maybe 1 point
• Ride: 0
• Sense Motive: probably 0
• Slight of Hand: probably 0
• Spellcraft: probably 0; if applied to tech rather than magic, maybe 1
• Stealth: maybe 1
• Survival: maybe 1
• Swim: maybe 1
• Use Magic Device: probably 0;  if applied to tech rather than magic, maybe 1

So there was a point to this, right?  The language app I've been using (Duolingo) recently added Russian to its offerings.  I took four years of German in high school, then a semester at Purdue, then transferred to a college with no German language offerings.  So I started taking Russian and did three semesters there.  I took two semesters of French condensed into twelve weeks over one summer, and French is the one I remember the least of.  When I first got the Duolingo app on my phone, I started off with Spanish, since it was something I hadn't studied at all.

Anyway, adding Russian to the app means I can now practice four other languages every day!  I really want to pick up Mandarin and Latin (and Hebrew and Arabic and Swahili), as well, but they're not in the app yet, so it would be more work to add them into the mix.

Based on my skill points and spread, I'm probably either an Expert (an NPC class) or a Bard of some sort.

Saving Throws

I've written before about what happens when I fail Reflex saving throws.  Yeah, this time it was a Fortitude save:

I didn't see what bit me, since it's in the middle of my back, but the doctor said it was probably a spider.  (Just in case, I'm supposed to get a Lyme test in a couple weeks.)  The fortitude save wasn't for the actual bite; no, the fortitude would have been save vs. disease, because it's infected (skin antibiotics now), and it itches.

Oh, how it itches.

I don't know if it itches because of the spider part of it, or the infection part of it, but I'm trying really hard not to scratch it, since it's irritated enough as it is.

Anywho, I got to do a ton of laundry this weekend (she recommended washing the sheets in case it was lurking in the bed), and I'm supposed to let it air out when possible.

Did I mention that it itches?

This is what happens when I get sick

So while I sit here and wait to see if the antibiotics make me sick again today, I figure I'll write about this:

This is what happens when you lose a fight with a toilet.  Ahem.

This cold started last Tuesday, and Monday night I was up all night coughing, so I figured I'd go to the doctor yesterday and see if there was anything they could do about it.  I got the general "bronchitis" diagnosis and a script for azithromycin and figured I'd go into work for the afternoon.

Except I apparently failed some kind of fortitude save and/or a constitution check, because when I got to work, I lasted about a half hour before I was in the bathroom throwing up.  I hit my glasses with the toilet seat, and I was expecting the bruise, but on the inside of the eye where the nose pad of the glasses hit, not where it actually bruised.  (Taking the antibiotics at the same time as the Dayquil may have been a bad idea.)

You remember my post about jargon?  Yeah, I spent the whole drive home from my meeting this morning debating just which gaming scenario most accurately represents the event.  I mean, the failed fortitude save or constitution check is kind of obvious, since I got sick, and I managed to throw up in the toilet, and not on myself, so I must have made some kind of secondary constitution and/or dexterity check.  But I do have an Amy-Winehouse-eye-makeup shaped bruise going, so the toilet came out ahead on some roll.

Possible scenarios:

• The toilet got (and succeeded on) an attack of opportunity when I initiated the grapple.
• The toilet was trapped, and I either failed the reflex save for the trap, or there was no save, and the trap beat my armor class.  (Given the nauseated state, my armor class probably had a -2 penalty already due to loss of dexterity bonus.)
• I failed a general dexterity check to operate the toilet seat.
• The toilet won the initiative roll and got to attack first.  (I did, after all, manage to throw up in it still.)
• Edited to add -  While making an unarmed melee attack, fumbling dealt me nonlethal damage.

Really, though, I'm just glad I didn't break my glasses or, worse, knock the lens out and into the toilet.  So apparently I didn't entirely fumble the rolls, or I'd have had to pick my glasses out of the vomit or something.

Jargon Creep

I'm both a librarian and a gamer.  I suppose I was technically a gamer first, but given my slightly compulsive organizational habits and, well, compulsive helpfulness (ask a question and see if I can try not to find you an answer), librarian may have been inevitable once I had the requisite schooling.

Both areas are fairly steeped in jargon.  Raid, weed, stack: all common words that have enough of a jargony twist that when you're talking about the gaming or library usage, they cause confusion if thrown into general conversation.  Some samples I find creeping into my general vocabulary:

• Weeding.  If I mention to someone outside the profession that we're weeding at the library, it almost inevitably causes confusion.  It's really pretty straightforward - just instead of removing undesirable plants, we're removing books that, for some reason, no longer fit in our collection.  The material could be outdated, the book could be in poor physical shape, or the library's purpose may have evolved such that it's no longer relevant to the patrons.  For example, if our college drops a major, we'll probably have items in the collection that are no longer going to get used.
• Raiding.  People unfamiliar with MMO (massively-multiplayer online) games can have a hard time grasping the idea of raiding.  The general concept is the same as what peoples have done for centuries - grouped up to go attack something.  But in a gaming context, if the person's point of reference is, say, Pong, it may be hard to understand.  Raiding is a group of people in a game getting together to go assault an enemy stronghold.  In World of Warcraft, that generally means monsters controlled by the game, but there's also player-versus-player scenarios that use the same kind of group.
• WTB/WTS.  These tend to drift into my social networking posts (Twitter, Facebook, G+); they're shorthand for "want to buy" and "want to sell".  "WTS cold, PST" is shorthand for "Want to sell cold, please send tell."  ("Tell" is the inline command for a private message in many games.)  Translation: "Anyone want my cold?"  "WTB A/C" may have crept into my updates sometime this summer (I don't remember), but "Want to buy air conditioning" did apply to most of the summer here at the library.
• Everything related to maintaining order in a book collection: stacks, shelf-reading, shifting, and so forth.  Stacks are the collection of shelves; shelf-reading is making sure the books are in order; shifting means moving a section of books, generally to better distribute them on the available shelving.
• Library of Congress call numbers.  So many people only know the Dewey Decimal System (if they understand classification at all) that mentioning book subjects by their LC number doesn't really get me anywhere.  The P's, the S's, the T's - literature, agriculture, technology.  The only reason my home collection is in Dewey and not LC is because my collection isn't big enough to need LC's granularity.
• Fumble.  Fumble probably came into gaming from football (dropped the ball), but in Dungeons & Dragons, if you roll a 1 on a 20-sided die in a situation where a 1 is the worst possible roll, that's a fumble.  It means you not only failed in what you were trying to do, but you also botched the job so badly you probably hurt yourself in the process.  Normally this only applies to attack rolls and saving throws.  If you tried to play darts and the dart somehow ended up in your leg instead of the dart board, you fumbled.  If the situation in which the failure occurred wasn't a saving throw/attack roll kind of situation, however, you're more likely to have...
• Failed a spot check.  That pen you're looking for that you can't find that's sitting on the desk in front of you?  Yeah, you failed a spot check.  Fell off your deck?  Failed a balance check.  (If you hurt yourself when you fell off the deck, you possibly fumbled your reflex save.)  Skill checks can't be fumbled (you can actually succeed on a 1 if you have enough skill points invested in the one you're trying to use), but failing them can have disastrous results (especially if climbing or swimming are involved).  I generally notice deer along the side of the road at night; my husband doesn't.  Guess who has a higher spot check?
• /commands.  World of Warcraft's in-game command-line input is preceded by a / - so /dance makes your character dance; /hug will display the hug echo (generally "X needs a hug!" or "X hugs Y." depending on whether you have someone targeted).  You can actually do combat via the command line if you can type fast and know the commands.  (Occasional interface bugs have led me to chain-typing /cast Steady Shot for my hunter.)  But while most people #hashtag on Twitter, I compulsively /command - so instead of #hungry it's /hungry.  I really need to get out of the habit if I want to jump on the hashtag bandwagon.  (When people post bad days on Facebook or whatnot, I'm more likely to /hug than *hugs* - especially on G+ where the asterisks make the word bold.)  If you don't play WoW, though, the / may be unfamiliar.  In a way, this is similar to when I was still playing on the MUD regularly, and I would compulsively type in my gossip macro de jour (gg or gos usually) when replying to people in AIM.  I still occasionally "fbs" if I'm sitting at the keyboard thinking; that was the macro I made for "fill bottle spring" on the MUD, where you had to actively make your character eat and drink, or you'd starve/die of thirst.  If you ran out of water while you were out in the world, you'd have to go find some, so I got into the habit of filling my bottle every time I returned to the town square (also known as Recall...).

There are others, of course, but these are ones I've noticed slipping into everyday usage.  A lot of the library jargon I try to catch myself and talk around as I'm talking to someone, because things like OCLC, consortial borrowing, LVIS, and whatnot are sometimes easier to just use other words to start instead of trying to explain them in full.  (LVIS is said like Elvis, but is not Elvis, for example.)

Unfortunately I sometimes forget just which words are library jargon, and which are the ones the patrons use to describe something.  OPAC?  Catalog?  At least with a lot of gaming jargon, the origin is more obvious to me.  It's more concerning when words that shouldn't be jargon confuse our students: journal, article, volume, and issue should not be foreign words to them (or at least not to the native speakers of English), but unfortunately sometimes seem to be.  That's where the compulsion to help people learn comes into play.

Gaming

I'm a gamer.  This has been true, I think, for most of my life; we started on board games and cards early, and we effectively LARPed most of the summers once we were old enough to figure out how to fashion bows and arrows and swords out of random tree parts.  We got a computer when I was in about 7th grade, and I became something of a Minesweeper addict for a while.  My cousins got us into pencil and paper role-playing games (RPGs) a couple years later.  I started playing on a MUD my senior year of high school (where I met my husband).  I'm now the leader of a World of Warcraft guild of about 120 members.

I think this shakes out to about 25 years of gaming, and I play three main kinds on a regular basis: computer-based RPGs, pencil and paper RPGs, and board games.

Computer-Based RPGs

World of Warcraft: this is the only computer game I'm playing regularly right now; I've played two of the three main facets of the game (player-versus-player and raiding) at various points; the only thing I haven't dipped into is dedicated role-playing, wherein you build histories and stories and adventures for your character with other players that aren't pre-scripted into the game.

Right now I'm mostly raiding and getting my secondary characters (the ones I play less often) better equipment.  I play a hunter, which is a character class that uses a ranged weapon (guns, bows, crossbows) and has a companion animal to assist in combat.  I've been playing hunters in WoW for a long time... say, over 8,000 hours of playtime in the past six years.  (I used to work only part-time.  Ahem.)

Raiding is cooperative game play where a group of players goes into an area to defeat the area's inhabitants, be it undead, dragons, some other dangerous creatures.  The setting can be anything from an actual dungeon to a fortress, cave, floating castle, or underground city - there are many variations, but the key is that the area is instanced - each group sees a unique identical copy of the area.  Raiding has gotten more complex as WoW has evolved; players are more sophisticated with regards to the game's mechanics, and this has allowed game play to mature.  Fights used to be:

• Character A (the tank) attacks the monster first to get its attention, and his job will be to keep its attention;
• Character B (the off-tank) will get the attention of any additional monsters that show up;
• Characters C, D, and E will cast healing spells to keep everyone alive, but especially A and B; and 
• Characters F, G, H, I, and J will deal damage to the monster in various ways without drawing its focused attention, until it dies.

Fights are now variations on:

• Characters A and B may have to trade the monster's attention back and forth to give debilitating effects a chance to wear off, or one may need to swap off to get the attention of monsters that join the fight; 
• Characters C, D, and E's jobs haven't changed as much (still casting healing spells), but removing debilitating effects, interrupting enemies' spell-casting, or casting controlling spells may be required more often now, and the playstyle of healing in general has changed;
• Characters F, G, H, I, and J are still mostly dealing damage, but they have more damaging effects to move out of, additional monsters that come in during a fight to control or kill, or some other special mechanic for a fight to learn and execute.

For the original version of WoW, multiply B by two to four, C-E by two and a half, and F-J by five: the original raids were for forty people.  Nowadays we have enough trouble scheduling raids for ten people; I'm not sure how we ever managed forty.

So, yeah, that's the raiding side of WoW.  I'm kind of looking forward to Diablo 3 coming out if it still has a single-player option just for the break in the complexity of social computer gaming.  Not that I'll stop playing WoW: I've been a guild leader for two years, which is basically managing a club.  I have absolutely fantastic officers who keep the raiding side of the ship going, and I do most of the administrative nitty-gritty stuff.

Pencil & Paper RPGs

My husband and I have been playing with the same gaming group since the day I interviewed at the library where I currently work, for the part-time position I started in here.  We actually met through MeetUp.com, but when they went to a pay system, we just started using e-mail to coordinate.  We play a handful of RPGs:

• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd edition
• Dungeons & Dragons, 3.5 edition, both in homemade settings and in the Forgotten Realms
• Serenity, which uses the Cortex system
• D20 Modern, although I set it in 1903, using the Sidewinder book for some game data
• Pathfinder, set in the Forgotten Realms

Five of us trade around who's running the game.  We're currently playing in the Serenity setting, with a captain, a doctor, a crazy hacker, a pilot (me), an engineer, and an investigator.  One of the things I like about the Cortex system as a system is that when you're really good at something, you get to roll a lot of dice; in a Firefly type ship, my pilot rolls d12+d4 for agility plus d12+d4 for piloting skill checks.  Rolling both ability score and skill score for skills you have is kind of neat.

We briefly tried out 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, but it got dropped like a hot potato.  It's just not us.  Right now I'm really liking Pathfinder's updates to 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons.  I played a half-orc wizard for it, which was something of a change for me, because I don't usually play spell-casters.

Board Games

I got Settlers of Catan for my birthday; I've been playing it online until we get a chance to play it with people offline.  I'm bringing it in for National Gaming Day, along with Scrabble, Bananagrams, and Munchkin.  We've got several other games for that, but Settlers is one of my (albeit recent) favorites.

We've played Munchkin with our gaming group several times; it's kind of like D&D, except someone actually wins - you're playing to 10 points (levels), and whoever gets there first wins.  So while there is some cooperative play, eventually you're out to get each other.


I joined the Games and Gaming Round Table today.  I figure it's a good fit.

1903

So I want to run a d20 "modern" game in 1903.

I'm not sure why 1903 - maybe because the Harry Nilsson song about Dayton, OH, is 1903. Maybe because, subconsciously, I know it's when my great-grandmother was born. (The one I knew, anyway, of the four.)

Anyway, 1903 is fascinating - the first World Series, Ford's Model A came out, the Wizard of Oz was on Broadway, the Wright Brothers' first flight.

Hopefully the gaming group will go for it.

Random gaming stuff

I pre-ordered Wrath of the Lich King yesterday. I didn't do it so much because I wanted to pre-order, but because Amazon briefly had the Collecter's Edition available again, and the soundtrack is included, and is supposed to be awesome. (Thanks, WoW Insider, for the heads-up on the CE!)

And a little time-sink: This Is Sand.

Kobolds!

We're playing kobolds right now in my D&D group.  Teehee.

WoW and the Resume

I've been an officer in a World of Warcraft guild since May or June of 2006.  The position is basically administrative and personnel related - helping maintain the guild roster, booting inactive people, and inviting new ones and alternate characters of existing members; mediating conflicts between members (although, one finds, people don't always want to work out their differences); enforcing our few policies; organizing events.  Sometimes, especially when a lot of our younger members are on at the same times, it can feel like babysitting - they can get rowdy, and we try to maintain a PG or PG-13 guild chat channel.  I'm not usually a raid leader - partly because my work schedule has always overlapped with the guild's raiding schedule - but I occasionally fill in when the organizational necessities to make the raid happen put in that position.  I got promoted again a few weeks ago; it's not really a big change - a bit more forums administration, a bit more responsibility, running officer meetings (still getting used to that), and so forth.  There are roughly 100-120 active people in the guild.

So, yeah.  A large chunk of my hands-on supervisory experience is drawn from a virtual organization.  Real people, virtual world.  One of the terms I recall from my management course (getting on 4 years ago now) was "stakeholders."  It sort of bothers me that the best way I understand this right now is in terms of raiding.  Sure, I can plug it into a library setting, but for the past few months, our guild has gone through a serious hashing out of how we look at our raiding.  The long-term raiders, the short-term raiders, the frequent, the more casual, the non-raider - each has a somewhat different perspective and interest in our guild's raiding, and in terms of the rewards (loot), we've tried to find a balance that rewards, somewhat equitably (however that can be defined), people with different levels of attendance.

Anyway, I've got about a year and a half of part-time supervisory experience in a relatively large and diverse social organization, but it's not based in the real world.  At what point does that become viably mentionable in the working world?

Oh, and by the way...

The Random Inn Names table:

Step 1:  Roll two d6; one determines the tables for the first part of the name; the other determines the tables for the second part.

1 Color
2 Number
3 Miscellaneous

1 Animal
2 Person
3 Object

The first part of the name can be color, number, or miscellaneous (all a d8).

1 Green/Gren/Gruen/Verd
2 Red/Rot
3 Blue/Blau
4 White/Weiss
5 Black/Schwarz
6 Gold/Gelb/Geld
7 Brown/Bruen
8 Silver

1 Lone
2 Three
3 Seven
4 Dozen
5 Fifty
6 Score
7 Hundred
8 Thousand

1 Happy
2 Sad
3 Dancing
4 Laughing
5 Oaken
6 Shady/Quiet
7 Gilded
8 Lazy/Sleeping

The second part is either animal (d10), person (d8), or object (d8).

1 Stag
2 Ox
3 Bear
4 Boar
5 Hart
6 Dragon
7 Griffin
8 Lion
9 Eagle
10 Wolf

1 Maiden/Maedchen/Maedel
2 Wright/Smith
3 Elf
4 Dwarf
5 King
6 Knight/Knecht/Ritter/Chevalier
7 Bard
8 Monk/Muench

1 Grapes/Apples/Pears
2 Rest
3 Bucket
4 Oak/Pine/Elm/Tree
5 Rose/Lily/Iris
6 Loaves/Pies/Buns
7 Quills
8 Bottle

And that's pretty much it.  In the first test, my d6's seem to favor numbers and people.  Hm...

Blizzcon Contests

I didn't go, but someone who did took video of the dance and sound alike contests.  There are other clips out there on YouTube, but these seem to be the most comprehensive.  Some of the people are quite good, and if you're a WoW player, some of the references are quite funny.

Random Towns

Last night I was working on the new region that the D&D group will run into the next time I pick up DMing, and in the middle of coming up with names for the various principalities and city states, I made a random town name table for randomly encountered villages and such.

It is a multi-step process. The first table, determining which table is used for the first part of the town name, is thus:

1 Color
2 Animal
3 Person

After rolling on this table (generally a d6 is used, so 1-2 is 1, etc.), one goes to the appropriate table to determine the first part of the town name; color and person are a d8, and animal is a d10:

1 Green/Gren/Gruen/Verd
2 Red/Rot
3 Blue/Blau
4 White/Weiss
5 Black/Schwarz
6 Gold/Gelb/Geld
7 Brown/Bruen
8 Silver

1 Stag
2 Ox
3 Bear
4 Boar
5 Hart
6 Dragon
7 Griffin
8 Lion
9 Eagle
10 Wolf

1 Maiden/Maedchen/Maedel
2 Wright/Smith
3 Elf
4 Dwarf
5 King
6 Knight/Knecht/Ritter/Chevalier
7 Bard
8 Monk/Muench

After the first part of the name is determined, one rolls on the suffix table, which is another d8:

1 Ford
2 Bridge
3 Brook
4 Bach
5 Stream
6 Crossing
7 Burg
8 Bridge

Most of the combinations work out all right; some of them may need minor grammatical adjustment (to things like, say, the classic Rothenburg, or Bard's Crossing).

Next project: random inn names.

Hunter Pet Peeves

So, my main (character that I play) is a hunter. Hunters, for the uninitiated, use ranged weapons and have pets that help them fight. I've been playing hunters since Easter 2005; at this point in time I've developed some pet peeves from incidents that occur while playing in groups.

1. People who break my freezing traps. I can only use them every 30 seconds, and they only last 20 seconds. (Sometimes it's surreal if you start to think about the pace of combat - you actually realize you're reacting in fractions of seconds. And in combat, 30 seconds is a long time.) If you break my traps, you don't get a new one for quite some time, and if I have to kite it, you're getting a lot less DPS out of me. Oh, and I can chain trap... if I'm told to trap something, I expect to keep it trapped until just before any caster crowd-controlled mobs are dealt with, and most certainly after any saps, since those can't be redone.

2. Warriors who get pissy about my pet having growl on. I turn it on and off as needed (because my pet pulling aggro off the tank and dying gets expensive in terms of food, if nothing else), but yelling at me about it does not do much to endear you to me, and it just highlights that you have trouble holding aggro on a mob. If my pet can pull it off you, I probably can, too.

3. Having my pet offtank without any healing support. The biggest problem with pet tanks is their lack of bonus defense skill. They squish fairly easily even if, like my wolf, they have an armor rating around ten thousand. If they have to tank a mob long enough, the hunter's little heal-over-time spell just isn't going to keep them alive, especially through crits. So if you really want my pet offtanking, it needs healing. Oh, and if my pet is going to be offtanking at all, #2 is especially applicable.

4. Party members pulling mobs within 8 yards of me. This is one of the biggest issues I have... I don't generally get angry about it, but if it happens enough in a group I make sure to stop standing by people. Hunters can't use their ranged abilities on things closer than 8 yards (game yards, since melee range starts at 5 yards). Between 5 and 8 yards, a hunter can't hit anything, and if the mob is in melee range, we're doing a lot less damage. If you draw aggro off the tank, don't pull the mob towards the hunter.

5. Really, really stupid hunters.  Not having ammo, losing their pet in the middle of the instance for lack of pet food, running in to melee, rolling need on stuff with strength or leather armor in the 50s, thinking they should be pulling mobs in instances while the rest of the party is still replenishing mana, letting their pet run amok and pull extra mobs...  I'm not a great hunter, but I run into some occasionally that just make me want to cry.  The class is called easy-mode for a reason. >.<

I'm sure there are others not occurring to me because I haven't grouped on my hunter today... so possibly more later...

Proof of nerdiness, part 2

I just calculated the weight and cost of a mithril 2"x4".  I am such a dork. >.<

(If you must know:  A 2"x4" (they're usually ~8 ft long) made of iron would weigh about 218 lbs (iron is 7.86 g/cm^3), so a mithril one would weigh half that, about 109 lbs, and given that mithril is listed at 500 gold per pound...  it costs about 54.5k gold for a mithril 2"x4".)

There's still hope!

The Remote Mail Terminal is still in the Armory! There's still hope for Engineers to be useful!

Yep, I'm a dork

I threw a steam tonk war/party for the guild on Sunday. About 10 people showed up, which wasn't too bad - it was over half the people that had signed up. I do feel kind of silly for forgetting to take screen shots, but I was busy handing out and launching fireworks (the kind you learn from the Lunar Festival) - I made somewhere between two and three hundred, which was a bit much, since the husband and I had to sit for five minutes to burn off the last of them before the launchers disappeared. There were prizes for those who attended, as well - Ornate Spyglasses, Mechanical Squirrels, Mechanical Yetis, and a Lifelike Mechanical Toad. I had also bought 120 Darkmoon Special Reserve at the Faire I got the steam tonk schematic from - it is, I think, the most potent alcohol in the game.

WoW Pics!

I made an index page for my WoW screen shots finally. (Well, a small portion of them - I have over 2000.) Unfortunately most of the humor in them is probably lost on people who aren't familiar with the game (or, in some cases, the guild).

They're at http://www.kebrent.com/wowpics/.

WoW, part 2...

This will hopefully be shorter than my last WoW post...  I suppose I tend to ramble.

 So I'm in a guild, a fairly big guild.  We're a casual guild that does some raiding.  A guild is a group of people with similar goals.  Some guilds are "hardcore" and focused on getting to new content and gearing out as fast as possible; some guilds are built around PVPing as as team (player versus player combat); some are just a bunch of friends, online or off.  Our guild falls into that third category.

Since we're a big guild, with a lot of good players, we've been able to get into some of the "end game" content - the stuff you can only do at the highest level, usually with a group of 20-40 people.  End game content, of course, has the best in-game rewards; since we're not hardcore raiders, though, we haven't gotten to the highest levels of content.  We have a lot of parents, students (college and high school), people with full-time jobs, and so forth - most of our people can't dedicate 4-8 hours a day of intense raiding.

I'm also an officer in the guild - basically an administrative position.  Officers set policy, though we try to keep our concrete, written policies to a minimum - we aim for flexibility.  We have meetings, generally weekly, to deal with issues that come up.  We consult on whether to accept a new member, enroll alts (people's secondary characters), set official raid times, and set up special events (such as raids on the opposing faction's cities).  Sometimes we have to set policies about who we'll accept into the guild, or the procedures for applying, or how we're going to decide who gets to go on raids, or how to fairly distribute loot in big raid dungeons.  We spend about 65% of the time just talking, though.

WoW! Part 1...

I say part 1 because I don't know how often or how much I'm going to ramble on this.  The gist of it, though, is that I find explaining World of Warcraft to people who are not gamers to be... difficult.  The social side of the game is fascinating, but explaining why when people don't have a concept of what the game doesn't really get anywhere.

So what is WoW?  The organizational breakdown of a game with 6 or 8 million players may make things easier to understand.  Yes, there are millions of people, but there are also over 200 servers.  You can make characters on more than one server, but most people I know mostly focus on the characters they have on one server at a time.  (That gives you 30-40,000 people on each server, on average, but they're generally not all playing at the same time.)

The game population itself is broken into two factions, the Alliance (blue) and the Horde (red).  You get to choose which faction you play.  Each faction has varoius fantasy races (human, elf, orc, troll, among others) for you to choose from; each race can play certain classes (there are 9).  The factions are in conflict with each other.  The Alliance is said to have "prettier" races than the Horde, though with the expansion, the Horde picked up an Elf option.  This has led, to some extent, some servers having a larger Alliance population.  I've played both factions; currently I play mostly Horde.

Solo play in the game is similar to some other fantasy games; to some extent it's an improvement or evolution of the Diablo game play.  (I can make a pretty good argument for WoW being Diablo III.)  Since WoW is inherently multi-player, though (you can't play offline), group play is integral to the experience.  For the most part, you spend your time running around the virtual world (another concept which is sometimes difficult to explain), doing quests for the computer-controlled population (NPCs) of the world.  Some of them want you to kill certain mobs, to bring them certain items, or to take something to another NPC.  For quests, and for killing challenging mobs, players get experience points (XP).  This lets them gain power, represented by levels (1-70).

Although you can group for almost any quest in the game, most of the quests can be done solo.  Some require you to kill harder than average (elite) mobs; these are group quests.  Other quests will send you into dungeons where all the mobs are harder than average; these also require groups.  Anything that can be completed with 2-5 people falls into the "group" concept.  Anything more than 5 people is a "raid."  Raids are generally for quests or encounters involving bosses or mini-bosses, which are especially tough mobs.

The dungeon structure of WoW helps regulate how many people you can take to complete quests in certain areas.  A dungeon is like a mini-map within the game, entered through an "instance" portal - each group that goes in gets their own copy of the dungeon to play in, allowing multiple groups to run through them in parallel.  Some instances only allow 5 people in at a time; some 10, 20, 25, or 40.

Group play highlights each class's abilities; you want someone with heavy armor and a lot of hit points to hold a monster's attention while the other characters hit it; this is called "tanking."  (This is also what a hunter's pet is useful for in solo play.)  The classic tank is a warrior, though the hybrid classes (druids, paladins, shaman) can also pull it off depending how they've trained.  You also want someone who can cast healing magics along to keep everyone alive so that the run through the dungeon goes faster (priests, druids, paladins, and shamans are all healers).  And then you want some players along who can dish out damage to help kill the mobs faster; these are called "DPS" classes (hunters, rogues, mages, and warlocks are all classic DPS, but any of the other classes can do respectable damage, depending on their training).

Besides these roles, there are utility roles; crowd-control refers to abilities that can somehow remove a monster from combat temporarily; the particular dungeon may require different types of crowd-control (for example, mages can turn some types of monsters into sheep temporarily, and priests can immobilize undead).  It never hurts to have someone along who can open locked treasure chests (or sometimes doors) - that would be a rogue, for the most part.  Another useful ability is "wipe recovery" - some classes have abilities to allow themselves or others resurrect on the spot after dying; normally one has to run back from a graveyard to the instance portal.  This type of ability (shamans, paladins, and warlocks all have some form) lets a healing class raise the other party members from the dead; it's a big time saver.

Okay, that's enough for now... I think I'll go into guilds next time.