DrOct's blog

I've been thinking a lot about Dungeons and Dragons lately.  My last post which was a general life update I mentioned that I'm still playing fairly regularly in a Dungeons and Dragons game which I've been enjoying a lot.  We're playing 3.5, and it's been a lot of fun for the past several years, even if in the past few months we've slowed a bit due to scheduling problems, still we're playing on Sunday and I'm pretty excited about it.  We stopped the last session mid-battle and we're soon going to begin infiltrating the frozen fortress of an undead evil dragon in order to keep a powerful artifact out of the hands of an evil cult.  What could be more D&D?

But! What's gotten me extra excited about "D's" lately though is the impending release of 4th Edition, which comes out tomorrow.  I was originally planning to pick up the Players Handbook tomorrow night, but now I may wait until Saturday as I'm probably heading over to Falls Church anyway to mow my Mom's lawn while she's out of town, so I figure I'll head

to my old nerd store.  Which I still feel nostalgic about, even if none of the people I used to see regularly still work there (come back Timus!), and others have had some rather negative experiences there lately.  They still have one of the best bookshelves of role playing game books in the area (and they aren't shrink-wrapped for no reason so you can flip through them before you buy 'em).  Hopefully demand won't be so great that they'll be sold out by Saturday.

Some people have been worried about 4th Edition, and there is certainly some worry with any new release like this.  But most of what I've seen so far about the game makes me very hopeful that it'll be even more streamlined and fun than 3/3.5 was.  There are some pretty big changes and I know some of my friends would probably prefer it to be even more simplified and more like True 20, but as even my friend Ben (who really likes the True 20 idea) pointed out, for Dungeons and Dragons you should keep a certain level of defined classes and other iconic elements, otherwise it's just not quite D&D.

Some people are also worried it'll be too much like an MMO, because they seem to have taken a few ideas from things like WoW.  I think that's a pretty silly concern for a couple of reasons.  First of all if an idea is good and it makes things more fun, I don't really care where it comes from, and second, a table top role playing game with good friends and a good game master will never really be much like an MMO, unless that's the way the group wants it.

I have no idea when I'll get to play a bit with 4th Edition, as my current game is 3.5 and I don't see us translating this game into 4th Edition (it'd be a lot of work, and my character would be nearly impossible to translate without some serious house-ruling, since he has two levels of Psion, and Psionics aren't out for 4th edition yet, hopefully it won't be a multi-year wait for that).  Though I'd love to try out a short one or two session adventure with some people, just to see how the game works.

I've also been thinking about what sort of character I want to play next.  I've generally always played rogues, and I still love them as characters (I still don't know how other character classes handle having so few skill points), but I think in my next game I'm ready to try out something different (It's been fun adding a few levels of Psion to my current character, has given me a taste of more spellcasting-type classes).  I'm sort of tempted to play a pure Psion next, and I think that'd be pretty interesting, Sorcerers also seem pretty fun to me.  But I think I'd really like to try out a martial class of some sort.  I've always thought that playing a Monk would be an interesting role-playing opportunity, and I like the simplicity of fighters, and the idea of having lots and lots of feats, I also like psionics a lot so a psychic warrior might be fun too, but I think ultimately I might want to try out a Barbarian or something like it for my next game (but who knows what I'll want to try by the time that happens).  I love the idea of playing a "noble savage" sort of archetype, especially one modeled after some of my favorite parts of Conan.  That is, someone who's main strength is brute-force martial combat, but who isn't afraid to use some sneaking and rogue-like tactics to accomplish his goals when the need arises.

Anyway,  I've got a lot of other thoughts on  D&D and role playing in general but I'll end this now, and end with a few questions for you dear readers.

So are you excited about 4th Edition?  Have you been playing any interesting games lately?  Been looking at anything interesting?  Any other nerd-gaming thoughts?

So now that I have a bit more steady income, I think at some point soon I may go ahead and try to get one of those new-fangled rock-music games.  I won't be getting it in the next week or so, but once I've built up my bank account a bit more again, I'll get getting one of them.
Initially, since I don't know where I'd put the drums and other such things, and don't want to spend 170 on Rock Band, I figured I'd just get Guitar Hero III for the 360, and that'd be it.  But I recently realized it'd probably be cheaper to buy a used guitar hero II (or II for that matter) and a used copy of the game.  This of course made me think a bit more and I realized I could do the same thing but get a copy of Rock Band instead. 

So my question to all of you out there is which should I get? 

Since I probably won't be getting a set of drums anytime soon, and will probably mostly play single player for a while at least, is Rock Band as fun as Guitar Hero with just a guitar? 

Or is Guitar Hero the way to go for a more solitary experience?

Which one has more and better music (I'm counting down-loadable stuff here)?

Does one have more original artist recordings than the other?

Would I be better off getting Rock Band, with the idea that eventually I might get a microphone, and someone might bring over a drum set and or extra guitar (which I might eventually get anyway regardless of which game I get, so I can play with someone else).?

Any thoughts on either game would be much appreciated!

RIP Gary Gygax.

I haven't been a regular blogger for some time now, at least a year or two (I haven't gone back through my archives to see when the last time I was updating with any regularity was but it was certainly a while ago), but I may try to start doing it a bit more again. 
What better place to start than with my thoughts on the products and such announced at this years MacWorld?

On the whole, it seemed like a good steve keynote.  Nothing incredible or too terribly unexpected was announced, but a large number of solid products and services were announced, an some goodies were released within minutes and hours of the keynote.

The most immediately exciting thing for me was the iPhone 1.1.3 update.  The ability to reorganize the icons on my home page, and the ability to add links and such seems nice and will be really important come February when third parties get the ability to make apps for the iPhone (i'm really really excited about this).  Really though the feature that I'm most excited about and impressed with are the new features in Google Maps. 

When the iPhone was first announced and demo'd it was unclear if there was GPS in the thing.  When Steve showed us the ability to find starbucks' around the expo center it appeared that the iPhone already knew where he was. It didn't.  There was no gps in it, and you had to manually enter your starting address to do things like that.  It was mildly disappointing but not a huge surprise and not that big a deal either, as it's not that hard to just enter your current location.  Having google maps on my phone was still useful, especially when Sarah and I went on vacation and could get directions to various places with ease.  But it still seemed like it'd be a lot better with some sort of GPS style function built in.
1.1.3 gives us something approximating that.  By triangulating your position relative to cell phone towers or known Wi-Fi hotpsots the iPhone now gives you a pretty good approximation of where you are, and you can use that as the starting address (or presumably the ending one) for directions.  They also added the ability to move the "pin's" that show up in the map when you put in an address, which is good because sometimes G-Maps gets addresses slightly wrong (for example it's always been convinced that I live on the other end of my street.  Not a huge deal but indicative of potential problems with other addresses and such).  This feature is really quite impressive, and a very smart way to add a feature people want without having to upgrade the hardware.  (As best I know this feature doesn't replace GPS though, it can't follow you as you move around and tell you directions as you're moving, but it's still useful, especially if you're somewhere unfamiliar and want to find a restaurant or something.)

iTunes video rentals seems like a decent idea, most movies you only want to watch once or twice, and the rest you're likely to want to buy, so having a low priced option to rent them seems like a decent idea, but in the era of netflix, $3 seems a bit steep (and $4 for an HD one seems steep too) for something that I have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting (for a good explanation of why that's a problem see this post from Daring Fireball about why that's just too short, and honestly kind of strange.).  It could be good for an impulse buy/rent like "oh I want to see X right now" but for close to the same price I could go to a video store and rent something on DVD, with more features and less restrictions on how I use it.  I could also keep it for several days to a week and watch it at my leisure during that time.
If they lowered the price by about a dollar I might start considering something like this.  Assuming I were to get an Apple TV that is, which brings us to...

...the Apple TV.  Seems like they've finally added a number of features that people have wanted from the begining (like being able to buy/rent movies and music directly from the AppleTV rather than having to get them on your mac and then sync/stream them to the Apple TV.  It's also evidently got an upgraded interface and that's the only place you can rent HD content (probably because the studios are stupid and REALLY worried about piracy).  It's also cheaper than it used to be, and the old ones can be upgraded via a software update.  All in all it makes the AppleTV a bit more compelling but still not something I'm really excited about buying, especially since most of it's features can be duplicated by either my Tivo or my Xbox 360, with a small amount of work on my computer.  I was hoping Apple would introduce their own line of HDTV's with the features of the AppleTV built in.  Thinking about this a while ago I got really excited about the possibilities (I may write about that some later).

There was also the announcmeent of the "Time Capsule" which is an Airport Extreme BaseStation with a hard drive (500gig or 1 terrabyte) built in, for use as a backup volume for Macs on your network using Time Machine.  I believe it can also be used as a general network storage device too. It's cool but it's a feature that the old base station was supposed to have if you attached a USB hard drive to it, but they pulled the feature at the last minute, presumably because they couldn't get it working properly.  From what I understand the feature doesn't work well at all, even outside of using it for Time Machine.  I do hope apple steps up and fixes this problem (it is listed as a bug) soon, or it's going to look like the pulled the feature just to sell another product.  Hopefully that fix'll be coming soon as I can't really see any reason why having the hard drive built in would make it all that much easier for the feature to work than having it attached by USB.  If they fix that problem I might consider buying on of the base stations and hooking up my own hard drive to it.

The "big" news out of this keynote was the MacBook Air.  I'm not personally too excited about it because it's not really targeted at me.  It is pretty cool looking, and is impressively thin, but it's kind of expensive and lacks a lot of features I'd want in any laptop I got.  If I were some sort of road warrior and weight and size were a big issue for me, and things like a decent graphics card, and the ability to run really powerful apps weren't important to me I'd be pretty interested.  But I'm not, so it isn't all that exciting for me besides just looking cool.  I do like the "remote disk" feature is pretty cool and I could actually see it being useful in a lot of situations.  Basically because the Air doesn't have a disk drive of any kind, if you want to install software on it you can "borrow" the disk drive of a mac or PC in the area that has some software installed on it.  It's a pretty slick idea.  I don't know how much of  market there is for this sort of thing, this could be another Cube, ie something really cool that doesn't really have much of a market, or it could be a hit among certain people. Or more likely it'll be somewhere in between.

I'm excited to find out more details on all of these products as reviewers get a chance to use them hands on, and as more info comes out from Apple.  I'm also excited to find out about all the other smaller stuff that gets introduced by other companies at MacWorld.  All in all a solid if slightly less than thrilling Macworld so far.

Sarah and I have realized that New Years Eve is nearly upon us, and we have no plans.  We have also found very few people who seem to have plans.  So our question is, does anyone have any plans?  Can we come?

Anyone have some suspenders I can borrow for Halloween?  Trying to be the "80's guy" from Futurama, and it's the last piece I need for the costume.

I've been working at the Kojo Nnamdi Show off and on for a bit as a freelance producer.  A while back I got to produce a pre-recorded interview with William Gibson, partly about his newest book Spook Country

(which I was lucky enough to get him to sign) but mostly just about his thoughts on technology and society and such.  This was needless to say VERY exciting for a nerd like me.  Anyway, that interview will be airing today on WAMU at 1pm EST.  If you have the chance and are interested please do listen, it's a fun interview, and Gibson is a fun guy to listen to and talk with (he's also very very friendly).

You can listen on the radio if you're in the DC area at 88.5 FM, or you can listen online at wamu.org.  You can even listen later on at the website or through the podcast of the Kojo Show.  Unfortunately because we had to do this interview as a pre-tape, you can't call in.

Also the interview with Paul Haggis beforehand at noon is pretty interesting, and the rebroadcast of the discussion on "Uncontacted Tribes" is pretty interesting as well, and I did most of the editing on it.

PS Spook Country is a lot of fun, and I'd highly recommend it to all of you!

So Sarah got me a Wii for my birthday!!!

That being the case here is my Wii friend code. 

2611 9874 9525 1874

I've added a bunch of you from the post Novak made a long while ago, but I'm sure there are some of you who I don't have.  So what's your Wii friend code?