This won't significantly affect most of you, but we have been working on some meta mod changes. The most user visible change is that the UI we used to use was thrown out, and instead we are using one based on the firehose. Subscribers will see it when they go to the old metamod link although users can see it by going to this version of those hose

The first real change is that we've changed the meanings of the UI around. The old system is 'Fair' and 'Unfair' and the new system is '+' and '-'. The meanings are subtly different. You are no longer rating individual 'Insightful' or 'Troll' or whatever... you are now stating basically "Is this comment good or bad for you". Personally, since I find very few Score:5 funny comments to be actually really funny (and not just cliche memes) I '-' most of them. You are encouraged to be harsh if you don't actually think something is insightful or funny, call it such. The system encourages more of what you + and less of what you -.

You are also welcome now to do more than 10 m2 per day... however we internally have diminishing returns after 10, so you can do more, but they start to matter less and less.

There will undoubtedly be bugs so feel free to email me or vroom at slashdot if you find them. Probably next week or so we'll move this out to everyone, so your assistance is appreciated.

First the madness. We had nine people in my group tonight. And I got an unexpected PK.

I'm not going to try to explain the whole session...It was incredibly chaotic, the party split into four active units, and a town was left in ruins. I'll tell you how that went, though...

The first active unit basically waited outside the town. The characters stayed out of trouble, but it meant the players were pretty much sitting there doing nothing for most of the session.

The second active unit was a ghost PC that decided he was going to haunt the (quite occupied) jail. We use the damage-dealing variant for turn undead. He had 12 hit points. The cleric had extra turning. And he failed his check to regen at his body in 1d4 days...So I got a PK because the player was an idiot. (In his defense, he was a 13-year-old kid who'd only been playing for three weeks. But that doesn't mean he wasn't an idiot as a player.) He later told me that what he'd done was incredibly stupid...

The third active unit is a character played by a guy known around here as Jinto Linn (or kilocmdrlinn). He investigated the cliche mysterious old abandoned mansion and found some key plot/quest items, getting torched by a trapped chest in the process. Then he hung out with the first active unit.

The fourth active unit raided the magic/weapons/armor shop in town. They told one of the characters (who was a bit unstable) to set fire to a couple houses at the outside of town, so the police and the mage who ran the shop would get drawn into efforts to put out the fire. That character (controlled by me, because the player was rolling up a more mellow character) went on an arson spree which included burning down the jail. The rest of the unit broke into the shop, set off a couple traps, and made off with a coffin full of loot. So now I have to figure out how much they got away with. And how much of it is traceable.

Incidentally, the coffin was being carried on the back of the party tank. It held the corpse of the ghost (as a place for the ghost to return to after 1d4 days) until they dumped it out and left it in the shop.

Now the logic. The group is splitting. I'm getting at least five of the players, one of my former players is going to run a Shadowrun campaign with at least two of the players, and another player is on the fence as to which campaign he'll go to.

I've got a dirty secret. I prefer playing as DM than as a player. The reason is simple...I don't like waiting.

When I'm a normal player, I have to wait for my turn. Depending on the number and quality of players (and I've been involved in an excessively large group with a few slowpokes in it.), that can be a lot of down time.

As a DM, every turn is my turn. Sure, it's harder; I've got to keep a bunch of people from getting bored, and I've got to fit a plot into the player chaos. I've got my faults as a DM, but I'm getting better at it. And I'm never bored. Frustrated and angry at times, but never bored. :-)

Fepic Ale was first brewed by a gnomish bard with a penchant for alcohol and pranks. His intent was to brew an unassuming alcohol that would reduce the stoutest of men into gibbering idiots. He used it to great effect in performances, daring anyone in his audience to take a pint and remain standing. If nobody took the dare, he would bring out his lovely assistant, who would offer to spend the evening with anyone who could take the pint and still talk intelligibly.

Some took the dare, but many jumped at the opportunity to prove themselves to the lovely assistant. For many years, nobody beat the drink.

However, one day the bard was introducing his new, beautiful and youthful--but legal--assistant to the crowd. Every man in town wanted to try for the young lady. The bard, making eight silver on every pint--and more than a little greedy--modified the wager. If, after two pints, the man was still standing, he would be allowed to spend the whole night with the assistant.

Well, if you flip a coin enough times, it will eventually stop on its edge.

Out of the hundred men who drank Fepic Ale that night, twelve died, eight-seven passed out--and one bear of a man remained standing. True to his word, the bard left his assistant in the hands of the man, who enjoyed himself to no end that night. Meanwhile, the bard, being responsible for the poisoning death of twelve men, fled town.

The next day, the assistant, sore in many ways, but mostly sore at the bard, was arrested by the town's sherrif. In exchange for her freedom, she offered to lead a group of deputies to the bard who concocted Fepic Ale.

They traveled for several days, and eventually caught up with the bard. The young woman was bound to a tree while the deputies confronted the bard. The bard resisted, and was killed in the struggle. The deputies freed the young woman before returning to their own town, leaving her all of the bard's posessions, sans one piece of parchment that had a recipe for an ale on it, which they had burned on the spot.

While she said nothing at the time, the young woman recognized that what they burned wasn't the recipe for Fepic Ale, but for a milder drink the bard had picked up in another town. After searching her new posessions, she discovered the true recipe, hidden in a pouch in the dead bard's clothing.

While the deputies swear they killed the bard and destroyed the recipe, there are occasional rumors of a performer daring and teasing audiences with Fepic Ale in towns small and large alike.

FEPIC ALE: Alcoholic beverege. Fort save DC 25 or be intoxicated. Fort save DC 16 or take 2d4 INT and 2d4 WIS damage.

Twice tonight, Comcast has blocked *.google.com. "reader.google.com" redirects to an MSN Live Search for "reader google", while "mail.google.com" redirects to an MSN Live Search for "mail google".

I guess it's time to bite the bulllet and reboot my router[1], so I can switch to OpenDNS.

[1] Meaning at least five minutes of No Internet, as a consequence of Comcast's modem sucking so badly.

Well, for subscribers only this week at least. We have a half dozen minor bugs left in the TODO list, but if you are a paying subscriber you can test it out. It works best if you are using the keybindings to navigate. Pressing 'f' takes you to the next unread comment respecting thread order... so you can press that over and over again.

We also added a thing to 'collapse comments after reading' which I think I might turn of as a default setting soon. This is only usable for subscribers atm as well. But basically, as you navigate through a discussion, it collapses the comments you've read after you move on. This makes it really easy to navigate large discussions without having to scroll over 150 comments you've already read.

we're aware of a number of annoying bugs, but hopefully most of them will be squashed by Pudge for this weeks code refresh. If things are stable, we hope to roll this out for everyone rsn.

also my baby cut his first tooth yesterday. My furniture will never be ungnawed upon again.

So one of the PCs has the ability to detect magic at no expense. So
he tells me he's going to be continually casting detect magic.

Well, you know me, I don't plan details of my session far in advance.
So this poses a problem; It makes random generation of spoils after an
encounter impossible. And it raises questions of "well, he was in the
tavern with us, I should have detected it then" and other problems of
spontaneous backstory generation.

If he's going to poll continuously, I'll throw in some spam...

"Do I detect any magic?" "Yes."
"Where is it?" "On the ground below."
"What do I see there?" "A broken sword." (I think, "Hah! A useless
magic item. That's what you get.")
"Well, a sword loses its magic when broken, so it can't be the sword."
(Oh shit. Didn't know that. Ok...)

"I take the sword." "You find an anthill."
"Is the sword magic?" "No."
"Where do I detect magic?" "Where the sword was."
"The ants are magic?" "Yes."
"Cool! I bottle up some of the ants." "Alright..."

(Grr...I've greated something persistent. Maybe I can get him to drop it...)

Rest of the party continues on, starts leaving PC behind. PC leaves
to catch up. They take care of some business, get outside

The rest of the party members go on without them. PC fills his only
flask, and catches up with the other party members. Wizard fills a
flask, continues. Party beds down for the night, then they move on.
After a while, they come across the ant hole again.

PC starts collecting ants again. Wizard comes along, and asks what
he's doing. PC indicates that he found magic ants. Wizard goes,
"Cool!" and starts filling flasks with them.

PC fills his flask, moves on, and the ants start following him and the
wizard. PC catches up with the party, while the wizard obsesses with
filling all nine of his flasks, moving backwards ahead of the ants as
he does so.

Dusk falls, party beds down. Wizard fills all of his flasks, but
notices that the ants are moving toward him quicker, and, now that the
light has dimmed enough to see, are even glowing red. Wizard breaks
into a hustle in the direction the PCs went. PCs, in their last watch
for the night, see the approaching wizard and the red river catching
up to him (at almost ten feet per second...these ants get *fast* at
night.).

When they see the wizard, they bug out and cross a nearby river. The
ants pace them until dawn, when they slow down. Meanwhile, PC did a
couple tests and determined that it was the ant-filled flasks that
attracted the colony, not any of the PCs themselves.

Dawn breaks, the party reaches town, and the PC starts concocting a
plan where the town would become beset by raging magic fire ants that
only he knows how to remove. But first, he's going to check with the only magic user in town to see if he can use the lab to convert the ants into some sort of reagent....

45% off if you order before the June 6th release date. Link.

We've been playing 4e pre-gens on weekends. 4e actually makes combat interesting for spellcasting classes like clerics and wizards. I've even got players pushing me to port my 3.5e campaign to 4e. I probably will, once I port the villains over.

Normally, I would be running my "halfling campaign" at 6PM next Saturday. However, the gaming center I would be running it at is participating in D&D game day, so there was question as to whether there would be enough room for my campaign. When I went to the general manager to find out if there was going to be room for my campaign, they mentioned that they needed a DM one of their two three-hour sessions at 6PM. Oh, and if I would do it, they could hand my a copy of a pre-gen I could study.

So I accepted. I figured, hey...it's three hours, I'll be here anyway, and this way there will be room for my normal campaign at 9PM. (We usually run until midnight.)

Rosetta Code's been moving slowly lately, mainly because the currently-active members have filled out most of the tasks with the languages they're familiar with, and few have an interest in creating new task pages. If you feel like writing some code (or if you just want to see something done in another language), mosey on over and create a task (don't forget to include an example solution in at least one language). Don't worry if those task requirements seem a little heavy...if you don't do it right, chances are someone else will fix it.

I created a task around 3AM this morning, and by the time I woke up it had solutions in ten languages, and all three of my initial examples had been modified or added to. So there are people there, they're just waiting for something to do. :-)

Oh, and RC is on a shared hosting plan again...for the love of God, don't /. me until I get better hosting. :-)

One of the DMs on Saturday has a really cool system. Monsters are often represented by candies. If you kill a monster, you eat the candy.

In short, you eat what you kill.

So as we've been migrating the system from the tired old D1 to the exciting and awesome new D2 a number of complaints have come up. I'm going to talk about a couple of them here because I'm really looking for feedback on THESE issues. Please only talk about these points or I will mod you offtopic or troll or something.

The issue is about the use of Flat/Threaded/Nested modes. D2 cleanly replaces both threaded and nested modes- you effectively get nested mode by bringing the 2 sliders together. And threaded mode is vastly more flexible because you can choose the level at which comments are abbreviated or displayed in full text. So users of those modes should be set (obviously there are other reasons not to use D2, I'm just talking about the layouts here tho)

What's left is flat mode, which has a number of sort options. Now flat mode is used by roughly 4% of our active population. When i think about flat mode, I think about 2 reasons you would have to use it:

1. I hate indenting and whitespace. I want a big vertical column now this isn't my bag, but I can understand it and even consider supporting it in D2. I think you sacrifice legibility, but this is a personal preference. It also would be easy to support in D2. Hell, you could probably do it in a greasemonkey script no problem.
2. It's easier to remember your place in flat mode This to me is the only reason to use flat mode- you can reload your page an hour later, find the last comment you read, and pick up where you left off.

Now I Would think that the only reason to use flat mode is #2... except that only a couple hundred Slashdot readers have the 'ignore threads' sort order enabled. So either they don't understand what they are doing, or #1 above is the real reason that they use flat mode.

So in a nutshell, the question I am asking in this journal is 'Why do you use flatmode?' Is it cosmetic? To more easily keep your place in a discussion? Something I'm just missing? We have plans to implement a read/unread state retention for discussions, so maybe would you migrate to a threaded view if that function exists? Or is it purely aesthetic... an irrational hatred of scrollbars and whitespace? :)

The reason this matters is that simply formatting the page flatly is easy. Probably a simple greasemonkey hack or maybe a few lines of CSS. But re-implementing the alternate sort is gonna take some work. And I'm ok with that... except that the logs say that nobody actually USES that sort... they ONLY are using flat mode for the cosmetic reasons.

Speak out! Stay on-topic or you WILL be moderated down.

So that city campaign I'm running is going to need to drastically change. D&D just wasn't designed for something like that; It's incredibly hard to come up reasonable events and tasks that could challenge a party of even lvl 3 PCs in an environment like that.

When I say "reasonable events", I'm talking about things that wouldn't cause massive damage to the city and lead to major retribution against those involved.

So it's time to start thinking about unreasonable events.

So I'm thinking about a natural disaster.

First, the city sits on a very large island; The city proper takes up a big chunk on the coast, but the rest of the island consists of either mountains or agriculture. The mountains form a large coastal C shape around the farmland; It's not unreasonable that they might be the product of two continental plates colliding. So there might be a massive earthquake. But I like the next approach better.

The mountains form a basis for a kind of continental divide. Since they form most of a ring around the island, virtually all rain that falls on the island flows a massive network of rivers and streams, much of which ultimately flows under the city as its self-flushing sewage system. The farmland itself is largely flat. Sure, they get occasional floods, but the construction out there includes shelter, and minor structures are easily rebuilt. Water that can't fit through the city's sewage tunnel network normally would overflow into a side channel, and out into the ocean. Combine a major hurricane with a little villainy (Such as a wall of force blocking the overflow), and you've washed away 90% of the city, and left much of the rest covered in sewage.

I think I like the hurricane approach better. The event itself will be interesting to play out as the party scrambles to find shelter. (Best bet, I think, would be to get on the city walls.) Following the hurricane itself, the city will be a collection of laes for several days as all of the different districts drain. Central city authority will be devastated, food will be scarce, and most wooden structures will be destroyed or severely damaged.

With food and clean water scarce, those who don't form a massive exodus into the farmlands will fight for what resources remain in the city. New power structures will form and conflict, and power structures the player characters are already familiar with will be caught up in the struggle.

It's going to be interesting. I'm not sure if next session will have the natural disaster take place, or if some foreshadowing is required. (The closest thing I can think of to an early warning system is a bunch of clerics casting Divination, though there may be gnome weatherfolk who watch things like atmospheric pressure.)

I'm thinking of a category 4 hurricane, with a number of tornados thrown in for good measure. Thanks to the beauty of plot devices, the tornados won't hit the PCs, but it's going to be tough.

Hm. Considering the city walls will be used for shelter, let's put some thought into that. Let's say they're stone, hollow, and two levels high on the inside, and a third level on top. Figure they're designed to counter internal conflicts like riots and civil war, not attacks from outside the city. As such, there's likely to be two hollow wall structures for each district border, with a gap in between for buffer and travel.

In peace times, the gap between these two hollow structures is covered and contained, and serves as a sort of thoroughfare and bazaar. Effective shelter from most wind and rain, but not effective against tornados (Rip the roof off...) and flooding. The holow stone structures will be stronger shelter; Their lower level will be immune to wind and tornados, but may have flooding problems. The upper level will be immune to the first stage of flooding, but won't provide from drowning for small creatures. (And the party consists of halflings...).

I think the whole storm is going to last a week..

Day 1: clouds, light rain
Day 2: heavy Rain
Day 3: Heavy rain, thunderstorms, a tornado hits somewhere in the city Winds destroy some wooden structures.
Day 4: Severe thunderstorm, %10 chance of a tornado in their part of town every hour. Eye passes through a different part of town in the night. Winds destroy most wooden structures.
Day 5: Severe thunderstorm, %10 chance of a tornado in their part of town every hour. First level flood. Some wooden structures remain, but are unsound.
Day 6: Heavy rain, thunderstorms, another tornado hits somwhere in the city. (25% chance it's in their area.Second level flood. Stone walls perpendicular to flow of waters at risk. Only wooden structure in calm flood areas remain.
Day 7: light rain, clouds, and, finally, sunlight. Flood level maintained at second level. Gaping holes in stone walls allow quick flow of flood waters through the city.

Flooding will ease to first level on day eight, and will finally seep to below street level (i.e. through the sewers) on day nine.

It's going to be a rough, challenging session. :-)

Yes, yes yes! It has finally happened. According to slashfilm, Uwe Boll has mentioned that if an online petition gets to 1,000,000 votes he'll stop making movies. For all of humanity, please go sign this petition! Last I saw, it was only to 96,543... we need more signatures!

In-Place Posting is now live for all logged in users. Hopefully there are no surprises. We've found a number of very tiny bugs, but nothing show stopping. We'll leave the link up to the 'classic' reply form for a few weeks. Next week anonymous coward will get the new posting form... hopefully there are no surprises with that.

A few new keybindings aren't documented yet... v (end) t (top) [] change upper threshold and ,. change bottom threshold. Also 'r' opens the new reply box, m opens the mod total thingee.

The only major complaint so far is that the design changes consume a lot more whitespace. I have mixed feelings on the subject, but am aiming to strike a balance. We noticed 2 very clear places where the whitespace is excessive and hopefully that will be fixed RSN. But on the other hand, making deep threads visually clear, and drawing some attention to the 'reply' buttons is beneficial to everyone, so bare with us as we work to strike some sort of balance.