Planet Elite: United states of Superior Americans

USA: The S stands for superior!

Loduwijk

Guild

[Forum]

Danial.Beta

Elation

Kunark

SpikeNeedle

Ter13

Tetsuya

Uchiha Kai Itachi

YMIHere

Afghanimal519

Android Data

…

View all 12 members

[Become a BYOND Member to join this site]

My libraries

KeyState

Blog Comments

[Add] [Subscribe]

Newer Posts »

New Blog Theme: Science

In light of the fact that I like science more than fantasy, and that I didn't have many posts about my previous theme of D&D anyway, I decided I will change my theme to science and technology. Mostly math, astronomy, chemistry and physics based probably. What got me thinking that I should do this was my post about star evolution which, oddly, was in my thread about Iraqi WMDs (hefty off-topic sub-thread). The off-topic subthread was detached from the main and is now here: ID:466849

I've deleted some of the posts I already had, but I left two of them about D&D because of the resources they contained in case anyone cared to access them.

I might as well say something about the sciences while I'm at it here.

I just bought a book today called The Essential Dictionary of Science. This thing is great and I highly recommend it. It is very insightful, and I've already learned several things since it explains topics in a way that is not purposefully confounded. I previously had to dig for things mostly on the internet which means mostly looking stuff up on Wikipedia since it is the easiest way to find relevant information, but that is not always accurate, and even when it is the people who make articles often try to make science topics sound overcomplicated, much more so than the topic really is.

For an example, I looked up pions and it described them in the easiest, most straightforward way: a pion is a hadron consisting of a quark and an antiquark. As many of you may recall, I did a research paper on antimatter a while back, and I mentioned pions enough in that; but I did not actually know exactly what one was, so although I had a general idea of what was involved, the pion part seemed like an odd magical aspect of the formula. Now it makes much more sense.

And if anyone cares to discuss the aforementioned topic from the forum any further, that would be a nice way to kick off the theme.

Oh, and if anyone ever gets downwind of any interesting science/technology news that I haven't posted about, please give me the heads up as I like to keep informed and help others to do the same. You can either comment to this post or email me or whatever works.

Posted by Loduwijk on Sunday, June 25, 2006 08:17PM - 0 comments (link) / Members say: yea +0, nay -0
(Edited on Monday, June 26, 2006 07:29AM)

Special classes: they're generic, yet they're closer to what you want.

Thanks to RagnarofBurland for showing this to me. I was talking to him the other day about my vision for the future of P&P RPing, and I tried to explain my idea for an RPG rules set where you don't have any classes, but rather you have "modules" to mix and match to create a completely customised character. Well, it appears D&D already has something close, which should keep me appeased for the moment.

Hypertext d20 SRD has an interesting article here that I read through about a concept known as generic classes. I had not heard of it before.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/genericClasses.htm

Basically, with this rules variable you limit your game to only 3 classes, and those classes are very generic. However, they aren't predetermined like your normal classes. Basically, you set up the class as you see fit, and thus your character is highly customised to be how you want. It's a great concept; check it out.

Since your spells are more open-ended, imagine getting a spellcaster and mixing and matching some potent combinations. Go grab Heroe's Feast so you never have to resupply, Major Creation and Greater Magic Weapon so you can always have a +5 weapon at hand, and whatever one you want at that, and Transformation so you can be a fighter whenever you want, and a good one at that. Then grab some healing spells and some other offense/defense spells and whatever you like for utility ones... alright, this is getting out of hand. What would you do with some of this freedom?

Another article there that RagnarorBurland linked me to which is quite an interesting idea is about gestalt characters. http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/ gestaltCharacters.htm

That gestalt character thing is good for groups that can't muster up enough people for a well rounded party.

Does anyone know whether that website created these ideas or not? I had seen people use gestalt characters on the WotC board, so I thought either it's an official rules variant or they got it from that site.

Also, does anyone know of any other interesting rules variants that enhance the gaming?

Posted by Loduwijk on Saturday, April 08, 2006 05:53PM - 6 comments (link) / Members say: yea +0, nay -0

Miscellaneous D&D Stuff

I was wondering how to kick off the theme, and I thought a good way would be to share D&D resources. If you know of any good D&D stuff that I don't, I'd like to hear about it. Drop me a link in a comment.

First on the list has to be the webcomic "The Order of the Stick". This is a great work of satire on D&D.
Order of the Stick
Rich Burlew, the guy that owns that site, also has some other great things on there if you want to browse around. I like his articles on game world development.

For core rulebook related information, if you don't have them, then these are a couple good places to go. And yes, they are legal suppliers of D&D information from the core rulebooks.
System Reference Document v3.5
Hypertext d20 SRD
The first one of those two also has a very nice spell-search tool that helps you quickly and easily look up spells by name, type, class, level, school and so on.

This site has pretty much every official feat ever made and has them in a well organised layout that makes it easy to find feats of a specific type you're after. It saves me a lot of time when trying to find suitable feats, and it gives me plenty of interesting options.
Feats
That site also has other stuff on it, but I haven't bothered looking into its other resources yet.
I have found several other huge feat databases, but I think this is one of the best.

And there is a Dungeon Master utility I have here that some of you might find useful. I'll see if I can dig up the address to the site where I got that. (edit: RagnorofBurland has kindly given the link for me. See his comment for it. Thanks)

Obviously, the WotC site itself also has lots of D&D related stuff since, y'know, they now own the D&D name.

And again, share what you have too. It's always good to find new resources that help out with the gaming.

Posted by Loduwijk on Wednesday, April 05, 2006 11:03AM - 8 comments (link) / Members say: yea +0, nay -0
(Edited on Wednesday, April 05, 2006 05:02PM)

Newer Posts »