D20 initiative cards

A lot of folks track combat order in D&D with index cards. I don’t know who the first person was to think of making custom index cards with a pre-printed form on them, but I first saw it at The Game Mechanics web site (great people, unfortunate choice of names).

I had just gotten back from a con where we’d run a four-party adventure with a total of five DMs, 24 players, and umpteen monsters, and the freeform index cards we used just weren’t good enough. I didn’t like the actual layout of the TGM cards, but the concept is great, and the rotate-for-character-status mechanic really improves the flow of a large combat.

My response was, of course, to come up with my own layout, adding fields and spot color to make them more useful. Along the way, I decided to increase the size from 3×5 to 4×6, greatly increasing the available space. TGM’s original cards, along with instructions on how to use them, can be found here; their forums also have several lengthy discussions on the subject.

My latest version is here. Several people have argued for a double-sided 3×5 version, and I’ve prototyped one here.

Printing Note: Acrobat has two settings that can make it annoying to print odd-sized documents: “shrink oversized pages” and “enlarge small pages.” Turn them both off if you want the cards to come out the right size.

Custom RoboRally boards

I think everyone who ever played RoboRally has toyed with the idea of making their own boards. Indeed, a quick Google will turn up dozens of sites devoted to fan-made boards and editing tools. I tried using a few of them, but the tools were clumsy and the results uninspiring.

So I did it in Adobe Illustrator, and my first original board looks like this.

Arcana Unreadable

Picked up a copy of Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed over the weekend, in case our group wanted to try it out sometime (D&D 3.5 went over like a lead balloon), and discovered that, while Monte may have learned a great deal from the rules mistakes in 3rd edition D&D, he has definitely not learned from the layout mistakes.

1. the font is smaller, with a small x-height.
2. the headers stand out less from the body text.
3. the body font uses lower-case numbers (similar to web font Georgia, for those who aren’t up on type jargon) so they blend in with the surrounding words.
4. new sections still start in the middle of a column, so you have to hunt for things like character types.
5. the index, while comprehensive, is set in italic sans-serif, so it’s extremely hard to read.
6. the index is also set with negative leading, so the page numbers in multi-line entries overlap slightly.

The only nice thing I can say compared to the WotC D&D books is that the page backgrounds aren’t crufted up with “spiffy” graphics, so you have black text on a white page. That high contrast, along with the generous leading, are all that saves it from complete unreadability. 3M Post-It Flags are all that can save it as a reference manual; you’ll never find anything quickly without them.

He does offer it as a PDF, which would be great if it weren’t for the tinyfonts. I suspect it would be quite readable blown up to fill a 20” widescreen display, but not on anything smaller. Blech.

Updates: I’ve found some more layout errors to be annoyed by.

Big food

A relatively constant factor in my life is the weekend gaming/cooking session with friends. We have a large stable of entertaining games from companies like Cheapass, Steve Jackson, and (pre-Hasbro) Wizards of the Coast, and an Xbox or two. The recipes come from a variety of sources, including my still-under-construction online cookbook, built from assorted MasterCook-format archives.

This weekend was at my place, which gave me an excuse to do some massive house-cleaning and show off my newly-completed landscaping. Since I had so much cleaning work to do, I insisted that the meal should be relatively simple, which meant steaks.

A glowing victory

Things not to do in Civilization III: detonate 270 ICBMs in one turn, blasting every other civilization back into the stone age (or at least to cities of size 3 or below).

Why shouldn’t you do this? Because the resulting global warming took fifteen minutes to resolve. That’s fifteen minutes each turn, for the rest of the game. Fortunately, there were only a few turns left, as my Modern Armor rolled across the countryside razing cities. Then I signed peace treaties with the survivors.

Belatedly, it occurred to me that this is the sort of behavior that the folks in Berkeley and Hollywood are expecting from the current administration.

Casino poker lessons

How to annoy the guy who’s slowplaying pocket aces: flop a full house with 43 unsuited.

What a difference a few years makes…

This from the people who basically invented the concept of the Asshole Player-Killer:

“EA owns your gold, your swords, your characters — they are all just digital bits. If your entertainment is to destroy other peoples’ entertainment, you’re going to be tossed.”

(in fairness, I should note that they pretty much dumped the entire UO team sometime after all of my friends gave up in disgust)

LucasArts buries Sam & Max again

For the first time in quite a few years, I was looking forward to a LucasArts game release. Naturally, they just cancelled it. No doubt they’re focusing their efforts on tie-in games for the next crappy Star Wars flick.

Oh, well; they didn’t need my money anyway, right?

Poker women

Darn it, kids today just have it too easy. Do you know how hard we had to work in college to get women to play poker? Okay, we were actually trying to get them to play strip poker, but still.

Some of the reactions suggest that it may be a short-lived fad, but judging from the spring-break crowds in Vegas this year, it’s a big one.

“It is crazy on campus,” said Rachel Dorfman, a University of Georgia sophomore who often plays poker for hours with her Sigma Delta Tau sisters. “It is absolutely the thing to do right now.”

I can’t complain, though. I feel sorry for the Vegas old-timers who had to suffer through the days when there might be only one woman in the entire room. The only downside to this trend is that women tend to be very good at reading men, giving them a distinct advantage at the table. I don’t even like to think about the advantage that pretty women have…

Of course, no story that mixed college and gambling would be complete without the twin specters of targeting students and addiction. I love this quote:

The 18- to 24-year-old age group has some of the highest rates of gambling addictions, said Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.

Good luck finding actual statistics on the NCPG web site, though, and you’ll find even less about the differences (both psychological and financial) between different types of gambling. Not surprising, since they’re hardly the bias-free concerned-citizen watchdog group that the story presents them as. A quick Google reveals that NCPG recently got nailed for antitrust violations for trying to monopolize the lucrative problem-gambling treatment market.

ConQuest note

A quick pointer for the people attending ConQuest who asked about our initiative cards. The PDF file is here. Be sure to shut off the page-resizing options (called shrink oversized pages and enlarge small pages, last time I checked) before printing.

Traveller PDF mapping

Sunday was a pretty slow day, so I wrote a Perl script that generated PDF hex-maps for use in the Traveller RPG (we’re starting a D20 Traveller campaign soon). I also integrated star-system data from the standard SEC format that’s been passed around on the Internet for many years, and I’m adding an assortment of features as I find time.

Currently it prints at the sector, quadrant, and subsector level, in color and b&w, on paper sizes ranging from 4x6 to 11x17. All the heavy lifting is done with the PDF::API2::Lite module from CPAN, which has a straightforward interface.

Update: I seem to have pretty good page-rank with Google, so just in case there’s anyone else out there who’s trying to set a clipping region with PDF::API2::Lite, the magic words are:

#create some kind of path, like so
$pdf->rectxy($x1,$y1,$x2,$y2);
#clip to it
$pdf->{hybrid}->clip;
#start a new path
$pdf->{hybrid}->endpath;

Note that this doesn’t seem to work with the alpha 0.40 versions of the PDF::API2 distribution. I’m using 0.3r77.

Still waiting for Java

Gamer friend Scott just discovered that the reason he was having so much trouble with PCGen under Linux was that the JVM was defaulting to a rather small heap size, effectively thrashing the app into oblivion when he tried to print.

Now, while it’s true that PCGen is as piggy as a perl script when it comes to building complex data structures in memory, it’s still fundamentally a straightforward application, and yet it exceeds the default maximum heap settings. He had plenty of free RAM, gigs of free VM, and here was Sun’s Java, refusing to use any of it unless he relaunched the application with a command-line override. Doing so not only fixed printing, it made the entire application run substantially faster. Feh.

I’d noticed a slowdown with recent versions of PCGen on my Mac as well, but Apple was good enough to compile their JVM with defaults sufficient to at least make it run completely. Sure enough, though, increasing the default heap settings makes it run faster, by eliminating a whole bunch of garbage collection.

In other words, with Java, Sun has managed to replicate the Classic MacOS annoyance of adjusting memory allocation on a per-application basis, and made it cross-platform!

PCGen is still the only major Java app I have any use for on a regular basis, although there’s another one that has recently entered my arsenal of special-purpose tools, Multivalent. I have no use for 99% of its functionality, but it includes robust tools for splitting, merging, imposing, validating, compressing, and uncompressing PDF files, as well as stripping the copy/print/etc limitations from any PDF you can open and read.

There’s another Java application out there that might join the list sometime soon, Dundjinni, but first the manufacturers have to finish porting it from Windows to the Mac…

They had me at ‘Ohayou’

Okay, the gameplay looks pretty standard. The graphics are colorful and well-rendered, though, and one of the screenshots suggests that you’re not limited to (literally) pedestrian locations, but that’s not what won me over about this video game based on the R.O.D The TV anime series.

It was the title, ElePaperAction.

Morons of Azeroth, number 37

“Hey, I’m a shadow priest! I don’t want to get stuck healing all the time.”

“Dude, you’re the only healer in the group, and we’ve already died three times.”

Photoshop tips

Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d mention that the two most recently posted pictures here were resized in Photoshop CS, using the new(-ish) Bicubic Sharper resampling method, available in the Image Size dialogue box. I hadn’t seen any mention of it until about two weeks ago, and had been using Mac OS X’s command-line tool sips for quick resizing.

Bicubic Sharper is much better than the standard Photoshop resizing, sips, or iPhoto. It’s particularly good for rendered images with fine detail. I’ve been working on a Roborally tile set for Dundjinni, creating my basic floor texture with Alien Skin Eye Candy 5: Textures. Dundjinni expects 200x200 tiles, but Eye Candy renders best at larger sizes. Resizing down from 800x800 using the straight Bicubic method produced an unusable image. Bicubic Sharper? Dramatically better.

I found the tip in a discussion of photo-processing workflow, which makes sense. For a long time, photographers have been making Unsharp Mask the final step in their workflows, because if they sharpened at full size, the slight softness introduced by resizing for print or web use would force them to use Unsharp Mask again, which tends to look pretty nasty. Integrating it into the resizing algorithm takes advantage of the data you’re discarding, reducing the chance of introducing distracting artifacts.

A new low in gaming lawsuits

I’m sorry, but this is bullshit so raw that even a Democratic presidential hopeful wouldn’t touch it:

The parents filed a suit against Blizzard Entertainment on Wednesday, saying their son jumped to his death while reenacting a scene from the game, the report said.

What scene would that be? The one where you deliberately send your character off the edge of a cliff, knowing that he’ll die when he hits the ground? Or did he leave a note saying that he was going to teleport to the top of the Twin Colossals and try out that cool new Parachute Cloak he picked up at the Auction House in Gadgetzan? Or did these loving parents just not pay enough attention to their kid to notice that he was suicidally depressed?

If this cash-grab fails, no doubt they’ll turn up a witness who claims that the kid was shouting “Accio Firebolt!” on the way down, and sue J.K. Rowling next.

The wrong spam to send to a D&D player…

Subject line:

First-level designers available for you

Personally, I want designers with more hit points.

And here’s the pitch, straight from “Doug” (Joerg Wempe of Bad Hersfeld)

Corporate image can say a lot of things about your company. Contemporary rhythm of life is too dynamic. Sometimes it takes only several seconds for your company to be remembered or to be Iost among competitors. Get your loqo, business stationery or website done right now!

I think anyone who buys a loqo from this man is crazy…

How to make anime dubs sound better

Force your audience to listen to these video game dubs first…

Remembering Zork, Haiku Edition

the quiet forest
a white house stands before you
you see a mailbox.

climbing the dark stairs
you were eaten by a grue
GET THE LAMP next time.

(maybe more later…)

Con report

I had an epiphany this weekend at KublaCon, sometime before we ran Rory’s usual monstrous Dwarven Forge MasterMaze D&D adventure (this time with added “live” roleplaying).

I do not like cons.

I do not like gamers.

I particularly do not like loud, clueless, obnoxious, asocial, grotesquely obese, unbathed gamers whose greatest ambition in life seems to be saving money on a hotel room by sleeping on a chair in the hallway. Cons are full of people combining at least two of the above characteristics, frequently more.

In truth, I don’t much like people in general. I’d like to use the term “energy vampires”, but it looks like the woo-woo pop psychology cranks have already sucked it dry of meaning. Besides, they seem to think that only some small minority of the population consists of soul-draining monsters, whereas for me, there are very few people who do not eventually wear down my thin veneer of sociability to reveal the cranky bastard within. And I can only recharge when I’m alone.

[our event went surprisingly well, by the way]

[and a lot of cute JAL stewardesses stay in that hotel…]

World of Warcraft ganks my DSL modem

[update 8/9: The ActionTec GT704 that I replaced my SpeedStream with has been rock-solid with WoW; I haven’t had a single disconnect since I started using it]

[update 6/21: I scrounged up a different brand of DSL modem, and preliminary testing suggests that this one doesn’t have the same problem. Current working theory is that excessive packet fragmentation is causing the ethernet port on the Speedstream to choke.]

I recently started playing WoW again, after a lapse of several months. I like the game, but I really hate the way it crashes my DSL modem when I turn in quests.

This is not my imagination. Frequently, the act of turning in a quest disconnects me from the Internet, forcing me to power-cycle the modem. It happened five times this morning, as I was running my Orc Warlock through some low-level Crossroads quests. Turn in quest, lose connection, power-cycle modem, log back in, repeat. It’s not the volume of data; I can flood the line with BitTorrent traffic for days, upstream and downstream, without the line going down. I think that since I got the current modem, it’s lost connection maybe once every six weeks.

Except when I play WoW. I’m stumped. And despite the fact that I know I’m not crazy, I can’t think of a way to explain this to SBC tech support that would result in useful support.

[update: more details. I’ve now repeated the crash using the PC version of WoW, and it’s 100% consistent. Turn in a quest, power-cycle the Siemens Speedstream 4100 (running in bridge mode with firmware 1.0.0.53, upgraded from 1.0.0.48 today without fixing the problem). Even the direct web-admin connection goes down.

To my astonishment, SBC tech support believes me. It took a bit of doing, but I managed to get to a second-tier support guy who spoke sysadmin, and we spent half an hour on the phone diagnosing the problem. There is no evidence on his side of the modem crashing and failing to resync, or of other problems on my line. What may in fact be happening is that the uplink port on my switch is crashing, not the DSL modem at all. Connecting directly to the modem and turning in a quest worked once, but I didn’t have any other quests to test further with.]

[update: I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a gigabit switch for a while now, so I did that today, replacing the 10/100 that was connected to the DSL modem. I was able to turn in three quests without a problem, and just as my confidence started rising, the fourth quest crashed the modem. To do more serious testing tomorrow, I’ll have to move the G5 into the same room as the modem, so I can easily try with and without the switch in the loop. I’m coming to believe that it’s simply the LAN port on the modem that’s flaking out, not the software actually crashing. Supporting evidence is the fact that it’s still up enough to detect the disconnection of the phone line and reconnect when I plug it back in.]

Sad, really

A 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook plays World of Warcraft far better than a 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo Macbook, even with 2GB of RAM, even with the video settings set lower on the MacBook. Civ IV, on the other hand, runs fine, something that’s not true on the G4. There’s got to be a bug in the video drivers, because that just doesn’t make sense, even with shared video memory.

[and why did I buy a MacBook instead of a MacBook Pro? Partially because I already have gaming hardware at home (and, at least for now, a work-owned MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM), partially because I wanted the slightly smaller form factor and increased battery life, partially because Sony launched the α100 with a 135mm f/1.8 Zeiss lens…]

[by the way, I replaced the stock drive with a 160GB Seagate from OWC. I never even booted off of the supplied 60GB drive; I just moved it into an external enclosure and copied everything over with SuperDuper!]

[Update: I expected the problem to be related to the variety of shapes and textures used for player-character armor and weapons, so that having more people around made the performance worse. Nope, it’s geometry. I can run through a crowd in Undercity at 15 f/s, but I can’t stare at a single complex building (such as Light’s Hope Chapel, with no players in sight) without the frame rate dropping to 4-5 f/s. The crowds of people around the bridge in Ironforge aren’t what slows the MacBook down to 2 f/s; it’s the buildings themselves. The game is perfectly playable away from architecture.]

[Update: Damn. I mean, damn. I just finished putting the latest Boot Camp beta on the MacBook, and tested WoW under Windows. The frame rate was 3-5 times higher, across the board. Exact same hardware, exact same game settings, ridiculously fast. So I turned the settings up, restarting every time to see when it would choke, and found myself riding past the bank in Ironforge at 10 f/s with every setting at maximum, on Saturday night at 9pm. I realize that a reliable OS can’t let random drivers get as chummy with the hardware as Windows does, but damn. “Dear Apple. Fix this. Love, J”.]

Dear Microsoft,

Please make the Xbox 360 Music Player more modal, with deeper menu trees and more confusing navigation. I understand that this may be difficult, but after using your current release, I’m sure you can manage it. Your goals should be to use as little of the screen as possible to display information about my music, and to double the number of keystrokes and screen transitions required to construct a playlist.

[Update: please also make it even easier to accidentally wipe out a new playlist while editing it.]

The Idolm@ster

Just search for it on Google and Youtube. It’s terrifying, in a “do I really need a Japanese Xbox 360 right now” kind of way. If you find yourself downloading the 720p version of the trailer from that German torrent site, all hope is lost.

[Update: this site seems to have the best set of screenshots showing the gameplay. I like the dialogue in this one:

]

[Update: holy crap, that qj.net page is a giant cesspit of Javascript, weighing in at nearly 240K of code, and maybe 2K of actual HTML content. I was initially curious how much overhead the trendy-annoying JS image display code was adding (72K if it’s the only thing prototype.js is used for, 21K otherwise, plus the overhead of actually calling it, which makes the HTML basically unreadable), but now I’m wondering just how painful this site is for anyone with low bandwidth and an older browser.]

WoW, look at all the time I’ve wasted…

So, the new World of Warcraft Armory is up….

• Nishtir
• Zenra
• Nyarne
• Komusume
• Harlaath
• Krina
• Ikariya

Detailed data seems to come and go, even if all of the characters have logged in today, but that’s why they call it “beta”.

It’s interesting that someone, somewhere, has copied our Alliance guild name on another server. “Defias Rod and Gun Club” is pretty distinctive, and all we can think is that some of our friends have made alts there.

Most of my character names are unique on all the worlds. A bunch of other people have used Krina and Zenra, but of the ten who’ve used Ikariya, I’m the only one playing a Draenei. Since the only reason I picked the name was its association with tentacles, it’s surprising that someone would use it with another race.

I’m actively playing Zenra and Nishtir right now, and I’d be playing Komusume more if they hadn’t cut off the free server transfers to Arathor right before most of our Horde guild made it over. I’ll probably have to do a paid transfer back to Bronzebeard, because our petition to move the rest has been ignored.

Nyarne is mothballed due to the regular game of “nerf paladins” that the developers love to play; apparently the kids who enjoy ganking other players are annoyed that it’s hard to kill a paladin, so they whine until the devs respond with the nerf bat. Feh.

Harlaath is mothballed because I enjoy being arcane-specced, and they’ve found a new way to screw up Arcane Missiles while leaving the old misfire bug intact. Double feh.

Krina is viable, but if I’m going to play a pet class, I like warlocks more. Hunters occasionally have to stop and drink, while a good warlock never runs out of health or mana.

As for Ikariya, I enjoy the new Draenei quests, and killing Hogger and VC never gets old, but I’ve done the low-level quests so many times that I burn out easily. I can rip through Elwynn, Westfall, Redridge, etc at ridiculous speed, but it’s not as much fun as doing something new.

Expose breasts before entering

A Chinese online game is enforcing gender in character creation. Want your online avatar to be a girl? Prove you’re a girl. Using a webcam.

In their next release, players will be required to provide proof that they’re elves, dwarves, trolls, warriors, wizards, thieves, heroes, assassins, or demigods before they’re allowed to select anything but the “geek living in mom’s basement” character class.

By the end of the year, they plan to require all characters to be exact replicas of their players, leading to 1000-man raids on the Lord of Cheetos and endless camping of the Valley of Free Porn.

Hey, wait, I can play this!

I knew I’d find a use for my Xbox 360 sometime: Portal. I’m trying very hard to hold off until after we finish the building move and I get back from Japan, but I doubt I’ll be able to resist, between the trailer, the 2-D Flash version, some of the many gameplay videos, and this:

Black boxes blech!

Who came up with the idea of using black boxes full of white text as the universal character-sheet format? I just took a look at the new 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons character sheet, and there they are again! It’s like these people have never heard of chartjunk, or, more significantly, inkjet printers that bleed.

The designer at least had the good sense to use nice thick fonts in the reversed-out sections, but its still a huge inkblot, and the layout of the key data is an assault on the senses. I’m also surprised that someone would go to the trouble of using Adobe InDesign to lay this out, and then not bother keeping the text grid consistent between columns.

There are sure to be third-party character sheets, some better, most worse, but if Wizards actually delivers their promised official online tools, and they don’t completely suck, almost everyone will use them, which means their official character sheet will dominate. Pity.

On Piracy

Back in March, Shamus Young suggested practical ways software vendors can deal with piracy. Step number 5 was “clean house”: as with movies, most of the widely-traded pirated copies of games come from insiders, not retail customers who’ve disabled DRM on their copy and uploaded it.

Supporting evidence for this claim? I just saw the official honest-to-prepress PDF file for the just-released 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook. I’m sure WotC will sell plenty of copies of the book, but I’m also sure a lot of people will be downloading this PDF version for free.

[Update: heh; some downloaders have outed themselves by posting rules complaints and questions based on the PDFs, which apparently are not identical to the printed books. The files that leaked out were not the “gold masters”, as it were.]

Expect to see a lot of these…

Today was the public pre-release of the Spore Creature Creator. Lots of people are going to be making critters and posting pictures and videos of them.

Here’s my only contribution for the foreseeable future:

And here’s the video, which works in some video players, but not others. (Quicktime with assorted plugins, but not Quicktime as a browser plugin, for some reason; also, no VLC)

I like the way that the children are chibified.

[Update: the web site claims 71,860 creatures uploaded in the last 24 hours. Oh, yeah, you’ll be seeing a lot of these.]

One in every crowd…

A short visit to Sporepedia.

The creator:

The artist:

The specialist:

One in every crowd:

More Spore

I couldn’t resist linking to this one. Eeeeeevil.

4th edition Dungeons & Dragons

Braving the heat on Saturday, we gathered at Scott’s to try out the new D&D rules, using the commercial 1st-level module that’s available. We had fun, we felt vaguely heroic, and we narrowly avoided a TPK, so I’d call it a success. The occasionally-subtle, usually significant rule changes didn’t interfere too much, and many of them contributed to making for more dynamic, exciting encounters. We’ll play again. With a cleric.

Character creation was annoying. As usual, the rules are scattered across dozens of pages, and with so much that’s new, you really need to read up on how things work to understand the decisions you’re making. Due to the poor layout of the rules and the character sheet, it would have gone very slowly if I hadn’t already run through the process several times and taken notes, including page numbers.

The game can run very smoothly if the DM has a summary sheet of the characters’ defenses and passive skills, but the supplied “combat cards” are just a cargo-cult imitation of the init cards I and others designed for 3rd edition. They’re slightly more useful than tracking combat on a sheet of scratch paper, but have no value for handling situations like “everyone make a spot check” or “make a saving throw… okay, nothing happened”.

The character sheet wastes a great deal of space on trivia, while leaving you little room to record information that’s needed in combat. For instance, there’s no place to record the range of a ranged weapon or the area of effect of a power. A few fan-made sheets have turned up, but I’m not impressed. We’ll have to make our own, and we’ll definitely have to design a useful combat card before the next huge event at Kublacon.

Here’s my character-generation cheat-sheet (pdf). Hopefully it will clarify the process a bit for others.

One more note on character creation: we decided to try the new point-buy system for stats. It was fairly easy to use, but there’s just something un-DnD-ish about min-maxing your stats, so I decided to knock together a random generator that produced N-point characters. Unfortunately, doing that well is more work than simply generating all possible N-point characters, dumping them to a file, and selecting one at random, so I did that instead. It turns out that there are exactly 118 22-point stat arrays.

4th Edition D&D: character sheet and combat card

[Update: character sheet updated after playtesting; also added extended powers page for wizards and high-level characters]

I’m still tinkering with these, and I haven’t even started on the creation/leveling worksheet, but I think they’re a solid version 1.

The official character sheet has a lot of problems: first, it’s cluttered with ugly header boxes; second, a lot of the space is devoted to calculating values; third, a lot of information that you need during play is either on page 2 or just plain missing.

My goal was simple: put everything you need during combat on the top half of the first page. That leaves half a page for recording all other useful information, and frees up the second page to be a coherent worksheet for character creation and leveling.

The half-page rule also gives you a clean design for a combat-tracking card that can be used for monsters as well as players. This is always useful, and critical for large con events (we run 20-30 players, and the finale is always a massive player-versus-player battle). I actually started with the 4x6 combat card, and then expanded the design into an 7.5x10 layout that can be printed on both US Letter and A4 paper.

Here are the PDFs: character sheet, combat card.

Sometime this weekend, I’ll adapt my character-creation document into a proper worksheet that can be used to maintain the other two.

[side note: I’m working in Adobe Illustrator CS2, and the best way to get a small PDF file is to “save a copy” as EPS, then open it in Mac OS X’s Preview app and save. The only semi-downside is that it clips the bounding box to the objects rather than generating a full-sized page.]

Okay, this would be annoying

In the Yumeria anime, Mone, the #1 Strange Cute Girl, has a very expressive one-word vocabulary. It never occurred to me, however, what a pain in the ass that would be in the associated adventure game.