Author Archives: tony

D&D 4e Rules I got Wrong

Posted on by

Probably a recurring theme, but here’s the first 4th edition D&D rule that we’ve been doing wrong

1. You only roll once to attack, even when you’re about to Critical.

It looks like we skimmed the rules around this section, or we read them and then forgot them, or we just plain got them confused.  When you roll to attack, if you roll a 20* then you automatically hit.  You also have the chance to cause a critical hit.  The determination of whether it’s a critical hit is simple.  Does your total attack roll score enough to hit.  If it does, you criticalled, if it doesn’t you still hit, but for regular damage.

So if the enemy AC is 23, and you roll 20, and add 2 for a total of 22, you hit but don’t crit, if your total turned out to be 24, you would have caused a crit instead.  This gives you the chance to hit something 1 in 20 times that you might never otherwise be able to hit, and also gives you an increasing chance to crit against creatures as you increase your attack bonuses off of that automatic hit.

Let me know if I’m still wrong 😉

* A 20 is always an automatic hit, some weapons have an increase critical hit range (19-20), if you roll a 19 and the total is enough to hit, you crit, but if you roll a 19 and the total is not enough to hit, you miss and don’t crit.  Only a natural 20 is enough to automatically hit, no matter what the weapon.

Expenses

Posted on by

So, the British Government are under heavy scrutiny due to apparent abuse of their expenses system.  I don’t want to write loads about it, I just want to say two things.  Firstly, there are always people who take the piss, there are people who make mistakes and there are people who do ‘what everyone else does’ because well, that’s what you do.  So I don’t think all the MP’s were corrupt, or that they were all intentionally defrauding the country using a system with badly defined rules to get away with theft, as some people do.

Clare Short has this to say (here),

She told the BBC she had switched from an interest-only to a repayment mortgage and had continued to send bills to the fees office – but had repaid the money when the error was pointed out in 2006.

I accept that.  I believe she’s being honest.  I work in a large organisation where this kind of thing is probably pretty common.  Confusing rules, mistakes, people paying things back.  But here’s the kicker, and the second thing I want to say.

Clare Short may not have been abusing the system, Clare Short may have made a real mistake, and may have rectified it.  Many MP’s probably did.  But those same MP’s knew their colleagues were fleecing the system.  They knew their colleagues were claiming stuff that didn’t add up.  They knew the system was too easy to abuse.  They may not have personally abused the system – but they didn’t make any obvious, real attempt to stop others doing so.

As a result, the entire establishment is at fault.  It should shut up, stop whinging and deal with the issue at the root.

HeroQuest (again)

Posted on by

I’m quite excited by the prospect of using the mini’s from the HeroQuest boardgame for use during D&D sessions.  They’re plastic, robust and ideal.  However, they don’t cover all the monster options you need.  Despite that, I’ve been painting them, as you know, and there’s a huge pile of them to do.  In the last couple of days I’ve been checking ebay to see what else there might be, and I was reminded of Advanced HeroQuest (which is not the same as HeroQuest Advanced edition).  Then I remembered I had an edition of Advanced HeroQuest, and then I remembered I had three editions of HeroQuest (one of which is HeroQuest advanced).  Thinking about it, I realised I only had two sets of hero miniatures.  Which meant it was likely I was missing two sets.

Today I opened the boxes, and the net result is another pile of miniatures to paint.  Basically, I now have (including HeroQuest x 2, HeroQuest Advanced Edition x 1, Advanced HeroQuest x 1, 2 x HeroQuest expansions)

  • Skaven – 20 – unpainted
  • Heroes – 16 – 5 painted
  • Chaos Warriors – 12 – 8 painted
  • Chaos Priests – 3 – 2 painted
  • Gargoyles – 3 – 1 painted
  • Ogres – 7 – unpainted
  • Zombies – 10 – 8 painted
  • Skeletons – 20 – 4 painted
  • Mummies – 10 – 2 painted
  • Fimir – 12 – 2 painted
  • Pikemen – 12 – unpainted
  • Men at Arms – 10 – 1 painted
  • Orcs – 31 – 3 painted
  • Goblins – 24 – 18 painted

So we’ve got our work cut out.  The Advanced HeroQuest figures and the Ogres are more traditional miniature resin than the plastic of the old HeroQuest figures, so they’re not quite so robust but they’ll still do the job.  And I needed a lot of skaven, as it happens.

Fringe Benefits

Posted on by

So I’ve seen 18 episodes of Fringe now, and a comment from Mark prompted me to blog about how it’s going.  I’m still compelled to watch each week (which is good), and while there are dips of ‘odd thing which Walter solves’ there are also highs of ‘really odd thing which explains some stuff and asks more questions’.

It’s worth saying again, this is not a programme which intends to depict fringe science as anything but totally made up.  The writers take a thread of what might be a possible thought about the existence of some concept in fringe science and then turn it into something totally outlandish.  Don’t watch it for the science.  It’s an FBI / Weird-Shit-Goes-On investigation programme.

So are we any nearer to knowing things?  Yes and no, during the season we’ve learned something things about Olivia, we’ve had some hints about Peter, both his past as a child and maybe his past as a young man.  We’ve learned a little about Walter, but mostly there are still many questions.  In the last few episodes it feels like we’ve had some deeper revelations but JJ could just be toying with us.  I’m pleased at how the relationship between Olivia and her boss (Phillip Broyles) has improved.  It grated on me that they didn’t trust each other at the outset.  I’m pleased as well that we’re seeing Olivia unravel to some extent, she’s seeing a lot of weird shit and it needs to have some impact if we’re to give it any kind of credibility.

If you like detail – then you’ll like the series.  Most of this goes over my head, I’m just in it for the story and the characters, but JJ makes sure there’s a lot of detail.  For example, the colour motif (red, yellow, blue) shows up for several episodes, several times an episode.  A line of M&M’s, a poster in a nightclub, lights in a room, even the gore on a body.  The fan forums are full of people discussing the deeper meaning of the tiniest things like that, I scan them every now and then but I don’t need them to enjoy the shows.

Threads sometimes get dropped and never resurface (we’ve not heard anything about the odd egg-shaped things travelling through the earth from an early episode), and sometimes they do come back (the glass discs).  Links are starting to appear, but as I said, JJ is likely to be messing with us on some level.

In general, I feel that it’s been worth watching, I’ve enjoyed most of the individual episodes for what they are, I’m starting to enjoy the arc that is forming and I’m interested in knowing where it goes.  I’m hoping that JJ won’t annoy the shit out of me with a huge cliffhanger ending to series 1, but somehow I think I’m going to be upset.

Star Trek

Posted on by

I’ve never been a ‘fan’ of Star Trek.  I’m certainly not a hater, and I’ve probably seen more than 60% of the episodes in any of the different settings other than the Enterprise final one.  It was sci-fi, and so kinda of my thing, and so I watched.  I cringed a lot because to me it always felt twee.  The movies were something I sort of watched if they were on, other than the first couple when I was young and really interested.  Some of the ones in the middle I’ve never seen end-to-end, only cringeworthy scenes of twee-thigh-slapping moral-delivering tweeness.

Hmm, maybe I am a hater.

Anyway, suffice to say, Star Trek was okay, I know the stuff at a superficial level and TNG is the one I’ve seen most of.  So I was kind of curious about what JJ Abrams would deliver with his reboot.  I thought Cloverfield was an excellent movie which I didn’t enjoy because of the camera work, but the direction and production were excellent.  After watching Fringe and hearing about Lost I know that JJ’s attention to detail is beyond incredible, and knowing he was a Star Trek fan, I was curious to see how much he kept and how much he ditched.

I was very surprised at the small size of the release in the UK, and I read it was the same in the US.  Over here, Wolverine and State of Play are the films in the Premier seating screens and Director’s Lounge, not Star Trek.  Only on two screens at a time in the Showcase.  I was a little nervous.  Anyway, we grabbed our tickets and sat with the unwashed masses (normally, we hide in the premier seats), ready for our two hour Trek experience.

And wow.  What an experience.  Spoilers follow, probably.

Continue reading →

The Garden Update

Posted on by

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted about the garden, but we’ve certainly not been slacking.  Neither of us can quite believe we’re enjoying doing the gardening so much.  Despite the fact that I have a suspected hernia, I’ve been trying to help Grete as much as I can but she’s having to do most of the heavy lifting now.  In fact, the pain really flared up a couple of days after I carried the top soil around from the car to the back garden last week.  Anyway.

Grete’s done an amazing job sorting out the left side border, we both put in a lot of effort getting the soil under where the deck had been turned over, cleaned out of bricks and rubble to some extent and mixed in a bunch of new top soil.  We’ve seeded that with grass, hopefully to get it looking like the other side and stop the soil washing away in the first heavy rain we get this year.  We’re still not sure what to do with the exposed brickwork and fence panels, but we’ve got some wooden edging we hope to use to hide some of it when I get the chance, and as for the rotten wood holding up the fence panel, that will have to wait until we’re both a bit more confident.

We stopped in B&Q today and picked up 6 shrubs for the right side, and a Japanese Acer for the area we’re grassing to replace the honeysuckle, so hopefully they’ll all put down some roots and do well.  The weather is certainly on our side.

Updated some photo’s at the picasa page (here if you’re really keen), and here’s a couple of my favourites of the cats from the last couple of weeks.

Not a cat! A plant!Bubbles enjoying sun and shade at the same timeShe'd been rolling in the dirt and needed a cleanThe great black hunterShe loves the stick

New restaurant

Posted on by

There’s a new restaurant / takeaway place opened up in town, Indian and Nepalese cuisine.  We saw it a couple of days ago and a menu was popped through the door today.  Quoting verbatim, you may enjoy the following dishes (I checked my spelling four times, anything I write below is verbatim),

  • Tender of baby lamb traditional bring spiced from Nepal add fresh garlic & highly flavour coriander.
  • Tender of lamb cubs slow heating cooked with fresh herb and spiced.
  • Cooked with chef secret spices creating exotic taste on the top boiled eggs.
  • Assorted fresh vegetable light spiced herb freshness cooked.
  • Charcoal grill salmon tikka tandoori king prawn, prawn cherry tomatoes fresh fenugreek leafs, home made spices, smooth sauce.
  • Cooked creamy coconuts nuts very mild dishes
  • Plain think curry cooked with fresh green chilli and spices.

I kinda feel sorry for them, I think they rushed the menu out and opened in a hurry but if I was printing their menu, I would have called them up and maybe offered some advice.

More encounters

Posted on by

Wrote a couple more 4th edition D&D encounters last night, again won’t really know how well they play out until the characters get to them (maybe this week, maybe not, depends how quick we get through the remaining encounters in the ‘intro’ adventure).

I knocked up a quick spreadsheet (yes Grete), which does the work of adding up the numbers so you can play with how many of each creature type you want included.  That makes it easy to move between a load of minions and a few tough mobs, to more tough mobs and fewer minions while staying within your XP budget.

I did flirt briefly with the idea of signing up to WoTC’s D&D Insider thing which gives you access to some online tools, but decided not to in the end, we’re on a budget this month for one, and secondly I think I can probably hack together anything I really need.  We used to do all this by hand you know 🙂  I’ve enjoyed working out the maps for the encounters as well, trying to take into consideration the different kinds of terrain and situations that affect abilities, to spice things up.

The three encounters are sort of bridging encounters between the starter adventure and the published module I want to run.  I’ve added some treasure although it’s a bit of guesswork as to how much I should be giving out.  All-in-all it should be enough to get the PC’s to 2nd level and give them some excitement.  We’ll see if they turn into pushovers or are so deadly the PC’s die three times over.