An Author You Should Read

I just finished reading Michael Van Rooy's two novels, An Ordinary Decent Criminal and Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal. If you like books of the action / crime genre, you owe it to yourself to read these two. I picked up the second book at the library on a whim, started reading, and finished it in a day. Then I went back for the other volume and did the same thing with that. Sadly there aren't any further novels forthcoming, since the author died suddenly in 2011.

Diablo III Beta

I've been playing around in the beta for about a week now. Here are some thoughts in chronological order, oldest first. I culled these reactions from email messages I sent to friends as I was playing. To anyone that's been following other sources, there are probably not many surprises here. Just the viewpoint of a grumpy old video game player.

Split Pea Soup

A quick recipe I threw together this weekend that turned out really well. Split pea soup is usually a love it or hate it kind of thing. I happen to love it. Here you go:
Ingredients

• 4 strips bacon - diced
• 2 andouille sausage links - diced
• 1 medium onion - diced
• 2 large carrots - diced
• 1 sweet pepper - diced
• 2 1/2 - 3 quarts stock
• 1 lb. dried split peas - cleaned according to package instructions
• 2 bay leaves
• Salt and black pepper to taste

Process

1. Cook bacon and andouille sausage in a large stock pot over medium high heat, stirring frequently, for about 6-8 minutes.
2. Add onion and continue cooking and stirring until they become translucent. Bacon should be cooked but not crispy, andouille should be nicely browned.
3. Add carrots and sweet pepper and cook about one minute.
4. Add stock and split peas, bring to a simmer, then reduce heat to maintain.
5. Simmer 30-40 minutes until peas are cooked. That's it!

Notes

• Total time: about 1 hour.
• Tastes great with a good sharp cheese and fresh bread.
• Makes about 8 good-sized servings. 

I used half ham stock and half vegetable stock when I made this. My Mom gave me a couple quarts of ham stock she made using the bone from our traditional Christmas country style ham. This is effectively delicious salty liquid bacon, so I used a quart of it with a quart of vegetable stock. I added no salt, but about 3/4 tsp. black pepper.

Dice Roller Preview

This is just a quick preview of the main screen in the Android dice roller I'm messing about with, showing roll entry and the history of previously processed rolls. This shot was captured from an Android virtual device running on my development PC.

Dice Roller Preview

I still have some work to do, including implementing some additional error checking (allowing d10s to explode on a roll of 3 or higher is bad, m'kay), adding a clear button to reset the entry field, creating a real set of icons, and getting some translations done for the limited number of text messages in the app. Still, not bad for a couple days work in a programming language I don't actually know.

Dice Descriptions

I've been spending some time programming over the last few days, delving into Android development as a way to teach myself Java. As my first project I'm building a dice roller. Originally I was going to use the same text descriptions for rolls that I use on my web based dice roller, but after implementing them I decided I could do better. I'm trying to cover as many rolling mechanics as possible, so I thought I would throw out the roll definitions here and see what other folks thought.

Traditional dice: XdY
Roll X dice with Y sides, sum their values. Y can also be F, indicating Fudge dice, or %, shorthand for d100.

Dice pool: XpY
Roll X dice with Y sides, treating each die as an individual result. As with traditional dice, Y can be F or %.

Modifiers
These can be appended to the base descriptors above. N below is a numeric value.

• +-N - A numeric modifier to the roll. The value is added to or subtracted from the final total for traditional dice, or applied to each die in a dice pool.
• EN - Exploding dice. Any dice roll greater than or equal to N generates another die roll. In traditional rolls the result is added to the total. In a dice pool it is added to the original exploding die's result.
• LN - Drop the lowest N rolls. The classic example is D&D character generation using the roll four six-sided and drop the lowest method, which would be written as: 4d6L1.
• HN - Drop the highest N rolls. Not sure if any game would make use of this. I guess you could make some very lame D&D characters with 4d6H1.
• SN - Count successes. For traditional dice, a total result greater than or equal to N is a success. For a dice pool each die greater than or equal to N is a success.
• FN - Count failures.  For traditional dice, a total result less than or equal to N is a failure. For a dice pool each die less than or equal to N is a failure.

Some things I think I'm missing, but I'm not sure if they're useful.

• Imploding dice - rolls below a certain value generate an additional roll that's subtracted from the first.
• Savage Worlds - Wild Dice. I don't play Savage Worlds, can someone throw me a clue?
• Exploding dice that don't continue to explode.

I'm sure there are a bunch of methods I've forgotten or ignored. Anyone know of a concise list of RPG dice mechanics published anywhere?

Well That Was Unfortunate

The long silence here was not by choice. My main computer imploded shortly before the holidays, so I had the joyful experience of shifting all my stuff from my old sort-of-working-but-only-if-you're-lucky system to a new box. Lessons learned:

• An external hard drive for backups is an excellent investment.
• Five copies of your music library is probably too many.
• Keeping your data organized is a good thing.

I took the move as an opportunity to consolidate a bunch of duplicate data and eliminate a bunch of stuff I really don't need.

Gaming related: I was planning on switching from Firefox to Chrome until I discovered using TiddlyWiki with Chrome requires the TiddlySaver Java module. Not sure if that's going to be a pain or not. We'll see.

Now... back to work!

Daruna - Session Report

A couple of weeks ago I ran the first of hopefully many weekend-long games set in Daruna, my latest campaign world. The session was also the first test run of the Class Free 2.0 system, my home-brew game system loosely based on d20 and 3rd edition D&D, and the first trial of the corrupting magic system I wrote about in a previous post. Aside from the usual goal of seeing my friends and having fun with RPGs, I had three main goals for this session:

• Shake out the bugs in CF2.0. I wasn't terribly concerned with this aspect. Everyone knew it was a new system and that there would likely be changes to the rules.
• Get everyone up to speed with the new system. A bit of work, as the majority of my players were diehard AD&D 1st/2nd edition players. But they're game, I'm game, so... forward.
• See how corrupting magic affected play balance. This was the biggest potential fly in the ointment. I was (and still am to be honest) particularly concerned about healing, since ablative hit points assume a robust healing mechanism.