Old Guy Gaming

I was wandering around the WotC forums yesterday and ran across a thread discussing whether or not NPCs in a party were a detriment to the players’ enjoyment of the game.

NPCs as Party Members

Often a group doesn’t have enough players to put together a balanced group. Other times, the numbers are there but the character mix is lopsided. When this happens, many DMs allow an NPC to join the group to fill a needed role. As long as the NPC is no more powerful than the other characters in the group, this usually works just fine.

When I quit playing D&D, v3.5 had just been released. When I returned, 4e was in full swing. I bought the core books to see what they were about.

For the most part, I was pretty impressed with much of what they had done. But there was a subtle paradigm shift that I find unsettling.

Or… How Do You Stop a Bad Bot?

The internet is crawling with spiders! These spiders, or bots, are automated agents each on a mission to scour the internet for data. Some of these are quite useful. Google would be a boring place if googlebot wasn’t out there gathering information about all the sites for us. But there are many other spiders out there that do nothing but cause trouble. They mine email addresses, steal content, post spam messages and comments, and even look for security vulnerabilities that their masters can later come take advantage of.

Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons implemented a more substantial change than any previous edition. Virtually everything was changed. It also sparked the greatest player split the game has ever seen. Everyone seems to either love it or hate it.

When I started playing D&D, the rules were a bit different than they are now.

It occurred to me that a great many people playing today probably started with one of the more recent incarnations of the game. They may never have had the chance to find out anything about how the game used to be played or what changes it has gone through.

Some of what was lost was wonderful. Not everything that was added was for the best. I think every DM should know a little bit about where the game came from so here is a brief overview of the various versions since I started playing.

The 4th edition Monster Manual, written by Mike Mearls, Stephen Schubert, and James Wyatt is 287 pages of character-crunching goodness. It contains 489 monsters, many of which are brand new and first introduced here in the 4th edition book.

This book is by far the best, and at the same time the worst, of the three core books.

I don’t claim to be a wiz at WordPress. If I was, I would have already known that v2.9 introduced thumbnail image support. If I had bothered to stop by the WP plugin site, I would have discovered that a search for “thumbnail” brings up 31 pages of plugins.

But I’m not a WP wiz and I didn’t know those things, so I wrote my own. :)

Digging Into WordPress by Chris Coyier & Jeff Star was an instant sensation and sold out practically overnight. Their second edition just became available today.

The book itself is 400 pages of full color, well designed, insightful wordpress goodness. It is spiral-bound so it actually lays flat and you don’t have to fight to make it stay open to the page you want. It is full of step-by-step tutorials and loads of amazing tips and tricks about everything wordpress.

The 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) was written by James Wyatt and is a high quality book with a sturdy binding and 221 pages of not-for-DM-eyes-only content.

The 4th edition Player’s Handbook (Arcane, Divine and Martial Heroes) was written by Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, and James Wyatt. It is a high quality book with a good binding, glossy pages and over 300 pages of new content.