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A HISTORY OR A STORY… Chapter One

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Categories: Books

"Get outside!" I hardly ever heard that as a kid growing up.  It was more like, "Get in here! It's dark"  (raining, lightning, snowing) just fill in the blank. If we were awake and our stomachs were full we were 'outside'.  I guess that word meant something totally different back then than it does now.  As small children, big enough to let go of mama's skirt tail, but not big enough to leave her side, Terry and I discovered a gillion things to entertain us. Bugs under rocks, butterflies dive bombing mama as she washed our clothes on a washboard in a great big tub in the front yard.  It was big to us anyway, since Terry and I could both fit in it with room to spare. We'd pet the dogs or try to depending on their mood and our behavior. Mostly we chased them.  Kittens? We loved kittens!  It seemed like Mama cat had a litter of kittens every three or four months .  Once we were petting the kittens that daddy brought in from the cold. There were four or five of them I think but I couldn't Read more [...]

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5 Minute Work Day – November 6, 2012

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Categories: Aetherianica, Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Games, Tags: , , , , , , , ,

  *** I like that giants in D&D Next have a more restrained strength compared to 3rd Edition, where their numbers went up and up. But 5th Edition are getting a little close to a problem we ran into in 4th Edition. Because stats were based on level, giants often didn't have that much more strength than their medium-sized opponents. A frost giant was rocking an impressive 23 strength, but a human fighter three levels lower would be giving him a pinkbelly with his 24 strength. A hill giant (level 13) had a pathetic 21 strength, likely matched by the 4th level human fighter. In both 4th Edition and Next, carrying capacity is simplified for easy math, it's your Strength x10. However because of the difference in scaling,  a large-sized creature weighs 2x2x2 times a medium-sized one while a huge-sized creature is 3x3x3 times heavier. According to the 3.5e SRD a storm giant weighs 12,000 pounds while the cloud giant weighs 5,000. They'll be struggling to life their own body weight. 5 Read more [...]

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The 5E Rogue we should have gotten in the 3rd play test packet

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Categories: Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Games, Tags: , , , , , ,

This is my opinion of what the Rogue should have been. Open up the play test classes packet and skim down to the Rogue class. Replace the advancement chart with this one: The Rogue Weapon  Expertise Level      Attack      Dice       Class Features 1            +2          1d4         Expertise, Rogue Scheme, Combat Maneuver 2            +2          1d4         Exploration Maneuver 3            +2          1d4         Social Maneuver 4            +2          1d6 5            +3          1d6         Combat Maneuver 6            +3          1d6         Exploration Maneuver 7            +3          1d6         Social Maneuver 8            +3          1d8 9            +3          1d8         Combat Maneuver 10          Read more [...]

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The 5 Minute Workday and why its such a huge issue

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Categories: Aetherianica, Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Games

Disclaimer, I'm one guy.  I'm not the elected speaker for my side or anything fancy like that, and I'll probably miss something.  Anyone else who hates the 5MWD, feel free to chime in. First, we need to look at what the 5MWD is.  This would seem straightforward, and no one really stops to explain it anymore, not beyond a sentence or two.  They probably should, though, because there are two distinct problems that are both referred to as the 5MWD.  They're not dissimilar, and they tend to both occur during a good example of the 5MWD, but they are distinct. The first problem is when the party is pressured to stop and rest before the dungeon is complete, often resulting in running back to town or making a camp in a defensible position.  This is an issue because it's just so narratively jarring.  Camping in a dungeon isn't really a part of the thematic sort of stories that D&D is built from.  The only story I can really think of where this happens at all is LotR, when they Read more [...]

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5 Minute Workday – November 1, 2012

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Categories: Aetherianica, Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Games

*** In preparation for NaNoWriMo I've been reading a lot of fairy tales. The original Grimm ones from a book gifted to me when I was one year old. I couldn't help but wonder how many D&D players would solve similar problems faced by those in a fairy tale:Evil queen wants you to take a princess out to the woods and kill her? I know one queen who's going through the looking glass, if you know what I mean. An entire kingdom fast asleep due to a magic spell? Time for some looting. No door into the tower save some long flowing hair? That's why there's stoneshape or rope and pitons. The example of cracking a fae over the head with a spinning wheel to hunt for his ID and learn his hidden true name is one option, but it might come after cold iron related torture. Or divination spells. But those might be a back-up because you don't want to burn a valuable fireball just so you can scry. We're an odd, misanthropic bunch.   ©2012 by "Jester" David Gibson Read more [...]

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5 Minute Workday – October 30, 2012

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Categories: Aetherianica, Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Games, Tags: , , , ,

*** Magic Missile always hits its target. That's what makes it magic missile opposed to the lesser known variants mundane missile and pretty good missile. When I played a wizard, I always liked to imagine my missile would take the most round about route to the target. It'd whip between legs, dodge through a brawl, and home in on the bad guy like the arrow in Gamers. The show presented above might be a little boring. You know it's never going to miss. When you watch a knife thrower you're also pretty sure they're not going to miss but there's always that secret dark hope that this time, this once, there might be an accident. That's where the thrill comes from. Of course... that presumes the wizard isn't aiming for the assistant. ©2012 by "Jester" David Gibson Read more [...]

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US war law explained: Arrest US War Criminals before they do Iran

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Categories: Politics

An examination of the legality of the U.S. wars: "Letter of the UN Charter: The UN Charter is a Treaty in Force; an active US treaty. Article VI of the US Constitution declares treaties as having equal power with Constitutional law and laws from Congress. This is also known as the Supremacy Clause: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Therefore what the US president and 2/3 of the Senate have agreed to in a treaty is the law of the US until such time as the US rescinds that treaty obligation. The UN Charter is therefore the law of the US with its clear restrictions of using war as a foreign policy option. It's also helpful to understand what the UN is Read more [...]

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5 Minute Workday – October 26, 2012

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Categories: Aetherianica, Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Games

***An understated part of levelling-up in most editions of D&D is training. There have been a few optional rules that suggest a character needs to practice their skills and be taught new tricks from a master or trainer. But, for the most part, those rules are unused. Instead, the Player Characters just venture into a dank and foreboding dungeon for a few weeks and emerge with five times the talent, gaining mastery of new abilities from the aether. Even if the optional training rules are used, what kind of training would there be? What would a master barbarian teach his angry pupils? What lessons would there be at Berserker Academy? "Class, today we're learning how to roar. NO TALKING! I WILL SMASH! To begin, everyone needs to take a deep breath." ©2012 by "Jester" David Gibson Read more [...]

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5 Minute Workday – October 23, 2012

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Categories: Aetherianica, Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Games

***A symptom of the influence anime games and cartoons has had on D&D can really be seen in the art of the game, specifically weapons and armour. Stylistic weaponry and armour have become much more common and realistic medieval gear has become dismissed or downplayed. Some of this is to better enable each of the races to have a distinct visual style, but other times it's just seen as "cool". All I can ever think of is "man, that sword would be heavy to lift and impossible to wield" or "that armour would just direct blows to vital spots on the torso." It's one thing to depict fantastic weapons and armour that would be slightly impractical, it's another to present armour and weapons that are detrimental to the wielder. 5 - Minute Workday - © 2012 by "Jester" David Gibson Read more [...]

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Twinned Fractal – Chapter 3 – What Sins Will You Commit?

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Categories: Books, Tags: , , , ,

This is chapter 3 of the online book Twinned Fractal you can find chapter 2 here. The first thing they did when they took him out of the cell was to strap him into a large medical chair. Once they had him firmly trapped and unable to move the machines went to work. They scanned his entire body with some kind of light. He hoped it wasn't anything like the back scatter radiation machines that TASA had placed at strategic locations such as airports, subways, coffee shops, bus stations, and shopping malls. It seemed to him that to go anywhere he had to get 'scanned'. He had heard from his underground sources that these machines had deadly amounts of radiation and that the tests they used to label them as safe were done by the very company that was in a position to make the most money from them being deployed. When the scanning was done a large cold and clinical metal arm with wires hanging off of it in various places jabbed him with its attached needle in the arm. he felt his blood Read more [...]
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