Every now and again there’s nothing on television and I get a weird idea in my head.  I was rolling up a new character for a new campaign that a friend of mine is running and I thought about it:  what do some of the common rolling systems get you as far as stats go?

So, I broke out my copy of Python and decided to investigate with the power of statistics.

A Brief Introduction

I went ahead and generated the easier systems (all dice roll combinations) with a few for loops.  Out of this, I grabbed the mean (the sum of all the roll combinations divided by the total number of combinations a.k.a. the average), the mode (the most frequent roll combination), the standard deviation (a measure of how varied the data is), and the range of values that are within one standard deviation of the mean.

For standard deviation a good rule to remember is that the higher it is, the more varied the rolls are.  Approximately 68% of all the rolls fall within one standard deviation of the mean.

Straight 3d6

The old faithful of dice rolling.  I’ve rolled more than my fair share of characters using this tried and true system.

• Mean: 10.5
• Mode: 10/11 (both are equally as likely)
• Standard Deviation: 2.96
• Range: 7.54 to 13.46

Not-so-straight 3d6 (Reroll 1′s)

Basically, take your 3d6 and pretend that the 1′s don’t exist.  Not commonly seen, but a quick way of separating your characters from the common folk.

• Mean: 12
• Mode: 12
• Standard Deviation: 2.46
• Range: 9.54 to 14.46

The average goes up 1.5 points but the average set of stats falls within a smaller range.  And you’re very likely to roll a 12.

4d6, Best 3 of 4, No Rerolls

Take straight 3d6 and add an extra die.  Take the best three of the four and add them together.  I’ve used this a few times (including the current character) and the rolls were interesting.  My average stat was around 13.33 which I thought was a bit suspect (yes, I’m looking at you dice) which is what started this process.

• Mean: 12.24
• Mode: 13
• Standard Deviation: 2.85
• Range: 9.39 – 15.09

My character falls within one standard deviation.  I’m not sure how that explanation will win over my GM, but we’ll see.

4d6, Best 3 of 4, Reroll all 1′s

Take the previous system and reroll all ones.  This should elevate the average while reducing the standard deviation.

• Mean: 13.43
• Mode: 14
• Standard Deviation: 2.37
• Range: 11.06 to 15.8

I like those stats however my foes may take some offense to that.

Straight 5d6, Best 3 of 5

I have never seen this used.  Ever.  But I was curious on what would change when you added another die to the system.

• Mean: 13.43
• Mode: 14
• Standard Deviation: 2.60
• Range: 10.83 to 16.03

Conclusion

Each system has its own merits and flaws, but sometimes it’s a good idea to know what each system will give you as far as values/rolls are concerned.

I’ve had a file server for quite a while.  The original incarnation had six 160GB hard drives and was as reliable as my first vehicle.  Basically, it had attitude problems and nothing short of an exorcism would have fixed its problems.

The next iteration was this.  Not a bad setup, held 1.5TiB of data (1.6TB for you base-10 folks) and had six hard drive caddies.  Each drive was hooked up to a Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 which could hold up to 8 SATA hard drives.  It ran like a champ (last iteration was Linux) with a Pentium D 805 and 512MiB of RAM.  It was simple and never had any issues with it (other than my general dislike for raidadm).

The New Server

I jokingly called the prior computer a server.  It served files over the home network and did it well.  It’s lack of RAM and processing power didn’t aid in its ability to do anything else.  Basically, it meant that you couldn’t do anything fun with it.

The new server, however, was spec’d out a bit better with respect to everything.

Comparison between the old server and the new one.

Piecing it Together

This will be one of the shortest installation sections I’ve ever written.

The case was simple to work with once you understand how everything fits together.  Installed the motherboard, then the OS drive and power supply.

The OS hard drive was installed under the power supply (room for a 3.5″ hard drive), and the four 1.5TB hard drives into the front.  A standard ATX power supply fits in the back of the case.  Next goes the LSI MegaRAID controller card into the motherboard.  From there, hook up the power supply’s Molex connectors to the backplanes (only need one per plane, not two: the second one is for redundant power supplies) and the SAS connectors.

Ensure the OS hard drive is attached to the motherboard via SATA connector and has power.

Next was a USB Optical Drive to install the OS and voila!  You now have a functional computer.

Operating System

OpenSolaris + Ubuntu: A good mix.

From Nexenta.org’s wiki:

As we already learned, Nexenta is based on Ubuntu, with an OpenSolaris kernel (not unlike Debian GNU/kFreeBSD or Debian GNU/Hurd). So why should I use Nexenta, as Ubuntu is probably supported/used by more people, as is maybe more hardware?

You should because it got outstanding, mainline, features. You won’t have to patch your kernel or otherwise use unsupported features to get instant access to ZFS, DTrace, Containers, Fault Management, 32/64-bits multiarch, …

Plus, Solaris is known to be one of the best OS out there when it comes to multi-threading, which is great with today’s CPUs with multiple cores and hardware threading (such as Intel HyperThreading or Sparc CMT).

Basically, it’s the goodness of OpenSolaris without the added headaches of OpenSolaris.  Or, in more basic terms, ZFS plus Ubuntu/Debian goodness.  It’s an ideal operating system for a file server.

Hard Drive Configuration

I like graphs.

The old file server was a 6 drive software RAID-5 setup.  It worked, but the system itself was slightly underpowered and you always worried about the very slight chance of UPS failure combined with a power outage.  It was slow, the best transfer speeds seemed to float around 40MB/second on a gigabit network setup.

The new file server hits transfer speeds of up to 90MB (sustained).  Evidently the onboard NICs on the old server were pretty much crap.  Four 1.5TB hard drives in a RAIDZ configuration have expanded the amount of useless stuff I can store on the computer dramatically.  With an increase to 4GB of RAM, ZFS seems to purr.

Also, I have room to expand.  The graph are somewhat scientific in nature.  Basically, it shows how much storage I could easily add to the system with the purchase of some SATA/SAS cables and some hard drives.  The drives added were 1.5TB each with RAID-5/RAIDZ configuration.

Hard Drive Controller

It's fun and it's fast! (LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i)

The High Point RocketRAID 2320 controller card was decent when I first looked at it.  Had Linux support, seemed to be easy enough to install, and supported a metric crap ton of hard drives.  When you’re previous setup involves a mixture of controllers and hard drive types, it was a breath of fresh air.

However, as time went on (also known as the first month of ownership), I realized something: it was slower than slow.

The LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i was everything I was looking at in a card.  It runs very, very fast on the Nexenta box and even in its current configuration (allowing ZFS to do the RAID stuff), it still has room to run my various side projects (which I often grow bored of and remove from the computer).

It is a marked improvement.

Conclusion

It’s been a pretty good adventure and a pretty simple build.  I’ll post later on how it fares later on in its life.

One of the first members of Elendor, a Tolkien-based MUSH.

I remember back in 1995 playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends.  The internet was a touch on the young side, and I was still using a somewhat slow dialup to connect with all of my friends on various MUSHes and MUDs such as Elendor.  If you missed that experience (along with LoRD and BBSes), well you missed out on some fun.

However, as time has progressed and my friends have dispersed to the far corners of the globe we have found that we still enjoy roleplay.  The problem is that we don’t have the luxury of all getting together around the kitchen table with our dice and maps and such.  Of course, this major inconvenience is pretty much a showstopper: for a table-top RPG, you kinda need the table or, at the very least, have a means of communication that will accommodate more than two people and allow for the free exchange between the players and the GM so that he may smite them at his/her leisure.

What to Do?

An artist's conceptualization of the Internet (courtesy Ted Stevens)

Well, the internet (being full of tubes and all) is no longer young.  Hell, she’s getting a bit old.  There are so many ways of keeping track of friends that you can follow every bowel movement and mundane detail with a simple Twitter subscription.  You can talk to family anywhere in the globe for free with programs like Skype.  You can see all the pictures of people you really don’t care that much about over Facebook.

It’s an interesting time for everyone.

But what do you need for a modern-day tabletop RPG that is run over the internet?  Read on to find out the pitfalls and some of the surprising successes.

How It Didn’t Work

After running a couple of campaigns recently, it became increasing clear that there were going to be difficulties no matter what methods you imployed (fudging dice rolls not included).  Combat was confusing since it was almost impossible to keep initiative and dice rolls straight.  Also, you only had a vague idea of where your character was at with respect to the battlefield.

Exploration also suffered.  A GM/DM can describe what the scene looks like, impart the proper amount of doom and gloom.  What cannot be imparted effectively is where in the name of Paladine the characters are in a deep and dark dungeon.

Modern technology and clever programmers have most of these solutions.

How It Will Work

What we’ve discovered that works:

Skype

Skype

Skype is the backbone of this entire thing.  You can use Ventrillo or something related to it, but they’re more for people playing World of Warcraft or FPS shooters where teamwork is a must.  Skype will let everyone talk at the same time with extreme prejudice which is why it works so well.

Skype may be free, but it has a major shortcoming: if you are only talking to one person you can share your screen as well as chat with ‘video’ between the two of you.  Once you get past the someone else and yourself (also known as the average party size), it becomes voice only.

A benefit, however, is that if you have a decent internet connection you will not be hampered at all.  Skype tends to be bandwidth polite and work with the other applications that also need the internet.

Skype also has a built in text messenger which will help in coordinating attacks, dice rolls, and the first PC you want to get rid of due to him playing a 5th level Druid/8th level Game Breaker.

Webcamera

A Random Webcamera

This is more of an afterthought to be honest, but the more I thought about it–well, the more important it seemed.

Most people have a set of gaming headphones with a microphone attached.  It works, and seems pretty simple to set up.  Most require no special drivers to get working and are relatively inexpensive to purchase at Best Buy/Target/[insert brick-and-mortar store here].

The real issue is when you’re playing.  Even the best headphones can get uncomfortable over time and no matter how clean you try to keep them clean, they will end up with a certain unpleasant smell.

Modern day webcameras are great.  Mount it on top of a monitor, plug in the USB cable and you’re ready to go.  They’re very good at removing feedback and allow you to focus more on participating and less on being physically connected to the computer via cables.

A Good Digital Character Sheet

JamesTheBard in his younger years.

This is pretty simple.  As a DM you are going to need a simple way of getting your player’s character information.  The internet acts as one of the best DM screens in the history of mankind but it also acts as a great player screen.

I’m not saying not to trust your players, but they are the enemy…

Also, having it digitally makes it easier to send back and forth.  It seems like a small thing, but for rolling behind characters backs and creating a sense of doom, there is no substitute.

Now, there is one other reason why you need to do this: the next item on the list requires it.  There is no way for players to put their own character sheets into the d20Pro program other than through the ‘Judge.’

d20Pro

You Need To Check This Out

I haven’t had a chance to use this program as much as I would have liked.  We found it after realizing that hold battles via Skype and a map that my players couldn’t see wasn’t going to work anymore.

After downloading this program and playing around with it for a bit, I realized that it kicks ass.

First, it has an integrated IRC-esque chat client.  All of the dice rolls get put there along with general conversation, game information and the like.  It reminds me heavily of some of the MUSHes I’ve played on over the years.

Second, it simplifies the entire battle system.  Initiative is handled automagically as well as attacks/damage, effects, spells and conditions.  It is, however, flexible enough to allow the players to adjust for conditions that may be aiding them in the fight as well.  There is room for abuse in the system, but every attack and action that is made has to be approved by the DM or it’s rolled back.

The map builder (as is the entire interface) works very, very well.  It does take a bit of learning to get started, but once you’re in the application and get some experience under your belt it becomes a necessity.

The main drawback: players cannot import their character sheets.  Some would argue that isn’t correct, but without a 3rd party program in the mix (which also costs money), you are left with only one real option: have your players generate their characters and send them to you.  After you get them, open up the appropriate options and start inputting what they want into the “Library.”

The folks at d20Pro know about it, and I’m sure they’ll think of something.  It’s a pain in the ass, but relatively minor in the entire scheme of things.

What Else?

Other than your source books, this will get you 90% of the way there.  Once you have clear and concise channels of communication, there isn’t much else that you need other than some imagination and a terrasque or two.  If you rock the RPG over the ‘net and have some recommendations on what you use, let me know in the forums!

However, for something a bit more recent and somewhat more exciting.

Why Do We Even Need Another Sheet?

It’s pretty simple on this front.  There were a few typos and artifacts that were in the character sheet from the Pathfinder Beta Test (most of it involving equipment slots).  I thought that the skills section was a bit more important than the feats section (I would move both of them around on the character sheet.

But more importantly:  I don’t think there’s going to be much more work on the original character sheet’s base.  Many of the problems on the character sheet were things I had no control over which left me with either laying Adobe Acrobat “patches” on it, or redesigning the character sheet from scratch.

I’ve opted for the latter which should work out well, but the goal is to create a good character sheet for everyone playing no matter if they’re the old-school pencil and paper variety or the newer type-it-out-on-the-character-sheet.  Neceros had a great character sheet and I think most of the layout is definitely still something that should be in the new character sheet (such as the class recorder).

So, The Plan Is…

I’ve attached a scan of the first page layout.  If anyone has ideas on what should be in the layout, drop by the forums and give me a yell.  I won’t promise I’ll include it, but if it’s a good idea I’ll see what I can do.  If anyone has an criticisms of my artistic abilities with respect to the scan, well…I failed 7th grade art so I blame the schools.

Presented by the People-Who-Can't-Draw Association

I hesitate to change the title of one of these entries, but a few people pointed out that the Flat-Footed AC value wasn’t being calculated correctly which means that I had to release another version of the Pathfinder Character Sheet (version 1.0.8). It’s available for download, and the full change log is now located in the forums.

This is just a quick note that a new version of the Pathfinder Character Sheet has been released addressing more than a few issues so grab yours today under the Downloads section. If you have any comments, just join the discussion in the forums.

After a bit of poking and prodding, some friends and I are partaking in a bit of us versus them style campaigning. Us being ‘those who are still alive’ and them being ‘those who are about to become goo.’

We’ve decided to take a run at All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

It looks to be a well thought out system that is sleek and allows for quite a bit of flexibility. The stats are simple enough to grasp and should be pretty fast as far as gameplay goes.

Now, there are no campaign plans as of yet but after a night of insomnia and too many cups of coffee and too many hours in front of Adobe InDesign, I can give you a new character sheet.

As always, feedback is welcome with this. If there’s anything that could make this character sheet better, please let me know in the forums.

Download here: AFMBE Character Sheet, version 1.0.0

Before we begin, many would ask: Why in the Hell would you roll your own eBooks? An honest response to this statement would be because I can. There have been more than a few incidents where I don’t like the layout of a book I’ve purchased and thought I could do better if I had a text editor and access to the source HTML.

Well, enter in the ePub format: XHTML 1.0 goodness wrapped in a convenient ZIP file. It’s a good format. Simple to wrap one’s head around and easy to craft, especially with a program such as Calibre to do the heavy lifting.

The First Step

My first step was Python and a module called lxml. The HTML was formatted decently well, but I had grandiose ideas. I wanted to scrape all 57 chapters (including Prologue and Epilogue) into one massive HTML file. The script started off very simple, but grew due to the fact that I wanted to make the script do exactly what I wanted it to do, and do it exactly the way I thought it should be done.

So after thirty or so versions of this Python script, I finally had this large yet fully compliant XHTML 1.0 web page with proper attributes for the images, proper CSS for centering images and text, good layout for the quotation located at the beginning of the book. I was happy and even proud of this proto-eBook.

However, there were foul things lurking in the margins. I had decided that each chapter needed a container around it. This would make navigating the tree much easier if I needed to layout the book again. Also, I had purchased a decorative horizontal rule from iStockPhoto to replace the <br /> with something a bit more presentable and easier to see. I even stripped the ALIGN="CENTER" from the original img tags and used the margin-left and margin-right attributes to center the image across the page.

All of these would bite me in the tail by the end of the day.

Chapters Contained in a DIV

The first issue I had was this great idea of containing the chapters in their own div element. Looking back on it, I was an idiot, but that didn’t stop this great idea from coming into fruition. I have no real proof that this can’t be done, but after looking at the output from Calibre and the generated ePub file, they were stripped away in the final product. For some odd reason, even with Calibre’s changes my layout looked poor at best. There were other reasons for that, but allow me to explain exactly why this was a bad idea: it was unneccessarily complex and didn’t do anything but make troubleshooting more difficult. So, with this in mind, I removed them and pressed onward.

PNGs, the Sony PRS-505, and You: Know Your Limitations

So, after taking this decorative horizontal rule and pushing it through Adobe Illustrator into Adobe Photoshop and then saving it as a 800×12 pixel, 64 bit, transparency-enabled PNG file, I placed it in the proper directory and added it to the html where the br tags used to be. This was fairly simple and I thought nothing of it. Using CSS to resize the image to a svelte 400 pixels wide would make the image fit right in with everything else.

Then, after I was done adjusting the other images in the XHTML page I centered them and waited for Calibre to create the ePub file (yet again) and give me exactly what I had seen on my screen.

It simply was not to be.

After much screwing around with the CSS, I looked at some of the other ePub files I have and figured out something: You must wrap the img tags in a div element.

The div must then be set to text-align: center so that the image will, after all of this hard work, be centered across the page.

The good news was that every image now was centered—except for the horizontal rules which wouldn’t even render. They might have been centered, but their only presence was a large blank space in the resulting ebook.

So, another trip to Adobe Photoshop was required. After reducing it to 32 bits and downsizing it to 400 pixels across, I re-introduced it to the book and voilà, everything layed out perfectly.

Summary

These issues aren’t Calibre’s fault: after the first main issue, every one of them looked correct on the program’s display program. I don’t know if it’s an ADE issue, or if it’s an issue with the PRS-505. I have a feeling it’s an issue with the version of ADE that comes with the firmware. With that in mind, a quick list of what not to do:

1. Keep it simple. It’s hard to troubleshoot things that are needlessly complex. I will, at a later time, verify that this will not work. But first, I need to finish reading the book I made…
2. Don’t assume good CSS will work for centering images. Use div elements as containers for your images (span might work as well). In this case, text-align: center is always a good choice.
3. Keep your images small and ‘standard’. No need to be fancy, it’s a friggin’ eInk screen. Also, people have reported that anything above ~400 pixels won’t center correctly no matter how hard you try.
4. And one other thing: Just as an FYI, the edition of ADE on the Sony PRS-505 does not support text-align: justify. Your text will have to settle for the standard alignments of left, right, and center.

I have finally conquered the beast known as Adobe Acrobat.  This is good news, for this means that the first official-not-in-beta release of the Pathfinder Character Sheet (not to be confused with the official one released by Paizo).

I want to thank everyone who has helped out with this from Neceros to the people who tested out the previous versions and let me know what was wrong and gave me ideas to make it better.  Without you, this project wouldn’t exist.

Now, for a few fun-filled facts:

• This character sheet contains approximately 1,500 fields.
• It’s now approximately 1.9MB in size.
• It took what seemed like an eternity to complete (two full weeks of work).
• Adobe Acrobat Professional is not an actual application, it’s a lesson in sadomasochism.
• There is quite a bit of JavaScript that comes free with this character sheet.
• I hate JavaScript.
• This character sheet will attract beautiful women to you (if you’re a guy) and attractive men (if you’re a woman).  Also note that it can read your mind in the event that these two conditions aren’t applicable.
• I hope you enjoy the character sheet.
• The icon on the front page was created by John Ammon who is a-heluva-lot better with graphics than I am.

Here it is for your perusal.

Changelog

• [09/13/09] 0.9c: Original version.
• [09/15/09] 0.9.1: Fixed the Willpower save being linked to Dexterity. [thanks to T Gross]
• [09/16/09] 0.9.2: Corrected the AC value formulas so they get calculated after the total amount of AC bonus from equipped shield and armor. Also fixed the issue with the CMD being off by 10. [again, thanks to T Gross]
• [09/21/09] 0.9.3: Quite a few changes and additions.
  • Updated the base sheet to Neceros’ 1.1.1 Pathfinder Character Sheet.
  • Added forms for the second page of the character sheet. The Equipment, Magic Item, Special Abilities, Loads & Lift, Worn Equipment, Wealth, Bags & Containers, and Notes sections are now good to go (not including bugs).
  • Changed skills to automatically factor in Armor Check Penalty along with adding a box near the top of the skills reiterating what the AC Penalty currently is.
• [09/25/09] 1.0.0: Even more changes.
  • Updated the base sheet to Neceros’ 1.1.2 Pathfinder Character Sheet.
  • Added forms for the entire third page of the character sheet.
  • Corrected every “Clear” button so that they clear only what they are supposed to.
  • Corrected the Appraise bug that didn’t add in the Appraise “Trained” checkbox but the one above it [thanks to Ullapool].
• [09/27/09] 1.0.1: Corrected the Perception skill so that it adds the “Class Skill Bonus” to the total. [thanks Zo for pointing that out.]
• [10/24/09] 1.0.2: Corrected the Max Dexterity Bonus problem on the character sheet along with a typo for the forms version number. [thanks to everyone who pointed that out]
• [12/01/09] 1.0.3: Multiple corrections and a revelation:
  • Corrected the Size Modifier for the CMB and CMD calculations [thanks to Marshall]
  • Fixed an issue with the second section (right-hand side) “Clear Group” button under Spells and Powers showing up when you printed the character sheet. [thanks to Benn]
  • For now, I recommend using Acrobat Reader for the character sheet.  FoxIt isn’t playing nicely with others on Page 3 and I hope to figure out why.
• [12/2/09] 1.0.4: Multiple fixes:
  • Fixed a typo on the version number under the Pathfinder logo.
  • Enabled User Rights in the character sheet to allow users to save their characters in Acrobat Reader.
  • Until I get the problems with FoxIt fixed, Acrobat Reader is required to use the sheet to its full potential.
• [12/3/09] 1.0.5: Multiple corrections:
  • Fixed the concatenation issue with the Equipment section.
  • Corrected the formula problem with CMB/CMD and Size Modifier.
  • Changed the default font width on page 3 for spells so that page numbers with more than two digits displayed correctly. [thanks again Marshall]

Update: Due to popular demand, I’m moving the commenting from here to the forums. If there are any feature requests or Pathfinder character sheet requests, please ask for them in the forums.


]]> http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?feed=rss2&p=278 43 http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?p=257 http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?p=257#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:33:48 +0000 jamesthebard http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?p=257 I’ve been working to modify WordPress to make things easier when creating things like the modified version of the Pathfinder Character Sheet that Neceros has produced.

Looking back, I’ve made two public prestige classes and having a forum set up is good when you’ve got a dedicated group of people to game with.  This tends to break down when you have a main site dedicated to your ramblings and rants that you want to share with the outside world.

As with the Pathfinder Character Sheet, I’m going to attempt to keep everything up-to-date in the downloads section at the top of the webpage.  This includes any character classes that I come up with and changes to the Pathfinder Character Sheet as I come up with them.

If there’s anything that you would want posted, please let me know.  Also, if you have some feedback for the things you see posted there, definitely let me know.  I can’t make them better without feedback.

]]> http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?feed=rss2&p=257 0 http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?p=226 http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?p=226#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:06:34 +0000 jamesthebard http://www.jamesthebard.net/blog/?p=226 Over the last few days, my efforts have pushed me to the brink of insanity, one crumbling step from plumetting into an abyss of darkness that no being can return from without being changed for eternity.

That abyss is known as Adobe Acrobat.

The war was hard-fought, and the victor was—well, the character sheet?  I’m exhausted and really don’t have that much literary muscle left to truly write with.

The sheet is based directly on the good work that Neceros put into the latest version of his character sheet (at this time of writing: 1.1.0).  Using it as a base, I added forms across the entire first page that worked out the tedious bits so that you can spend a bit more time working on your background than on figuring out the overall totals for your skills and such.

The resulting PDF is pretty small, about 670KB 905KB.  I hope you enjoy it, and please let me know if you find any demons lurking inside of it. Remember, though, the forms are still in beta and will be until I finish fleshing out the second and third pages.

Click here for the new version.


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