The Adventure

My (ir)regular gaming group had a couple of people who couldn’t make it, so we couldn’t really play our regular campaign. I figured this was a great opportunity to create a batch of new 1^st-level characters and take 4E for a spin.

I ran the published introductory adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell. Back when 4E was new, I shelled out 30 bucks for this baby in all its glossy, full-color glory. So I was none too happy when a year or so ago Wizards of the Coast released it as a free PDF download. The lesson here is clear: don’t buy D&D products now. You’ll be able to get them for free later. I’ll say more about that when I write about D&D Insider.

How it Played

Keep on the Shadowfell is actually a pretty well-written adventure. One thing that really encouraged me was there was explicit advice for the DM about how to set the mood and build tension. It is not, in fact, all hack ‘n’ slash. So I was optimistic about how this might play out.

The result can only be described as a disaster. My players were too smart for this adventure. Without giving away any spoilers, they went through the initial encounter on the road, arrived in Winterhaven, had some nice role-playing as they asked all the right questions and found out a lot of information, then left town and walked straight into Encounter A1 just like it says they’re supposed to.

My players made the obvious connection that Encounter A1 indicates the presence of a serious threat to Winterhaven and they decided to set aside their personal agenda and go deal with it. This led them straightforwardly to Encounter A2, and then A3. At the point they reached A3 they were of course still first level (having been through three encounters total since we started playing 4E about three hours earlier). Encounter A3 is a Level 6 encounter. The inevitable result: TPK (Total Party Kill).

So, in my opinion Keep on the Shadowfell has a major design flaw. It seems to me that any group of adventurers with half a brain will follow exactly the same path my group did, with the same result. Who the heck playtested this thing?

More to Come

I have more to say about the actual play experience of the 4E rules, but that will have to wait for another post.

A Boston Globe article from a couple of weeks ago explains this far better than I could.

My new recommendation: don’t use passwords at all. Use pass phrases: entire phrases or sentences all mashed together into one word, or better yet, strung together with unexpected*punctuation^marks. Memorize them to the extent you can, and use a “password vault” program for those you can’t. Don’t change them unless you have to.

This makes me think of science-fiction games, especially cyberpunk games. I kind of like the idea of characters painting their faces with camouflage patterns before they run the shadows. And, it’s based on Real Science! (And on the premise that face recognition software in that ultra-high-tech, futuristic world is not a whole lot better than what we have in the real world today. I think that’s called “dramatic license.”)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that cyber-elf chicks with Mohawks and facepaint are cool. That’s all.

DRM is what used to be called “copy protection:” it’s software that prevents you from making copies of an e-book (or a movie, or a computer program, or an audio recording, or any other digital media). DRM goes beyond just copy protection though. You may have noticed that most programs have a “save” or “save as” function, which could be used to make copies of whatever data is loaded into the program. To prevent you from making copies, then, DRM software must prevent you from loading the data (e-book, video, etc.) into just any old program. It must limit you to loading the data into programs that can’t save it.

DRM means is that when you buy an e-book, you can’t read it on any program or device you want. You have to use programs or devices that are approved by the e-book publisher. This often requires you to jump through a lot of extra hoops.

If all DRM did was prevent you from making copies, then one could argue that it’s really not that bad. DRM is perfect for another (mis)use by publishers, though: to lock readers to using a particular device or program. Since (to prevent copying) an e-book can only be read on an approved device, if you buy an e-book for a Kindle and then later decide you want to read it on an iPad, whether you can do that is not up to you. It’s up to Amazon.

With a paper book, when you buy a copy, you own the copy. This is called the first sale doctrine. You can loan the copy to a friend, or re-sell it, or donate it to a school or library. With an e-book, not so much. The DRM software “manages” your rights, preventing you from doing anything contrary to the publisher’s profit motive.

In fact, unlike a paper book, an e-book can become unreadable if the publisher wants it to. You might be forced to upgrade your software in order to keep using your books. The e-reader you chose might lose in the marketplace and go out of production, leaving you with a collection of books you can only read on one obsolete device — until that device wears out. The publisher might decide to take the book away from you after you’ve paid for it.

DRM gives the publisher complete control over what you can do with an e-book: not only whether you can make copies, but how you read the book, even when you read the book. They can force you to sign in with their Web server in order to read. Charging a fee every time you open the book is well within the realm of technical possibility (though any publisher who tried that today would fail in the marketplace). Forcing readers to look at advertisements in order to read books is already in the works.

Frankly, for a company to have that much control over information is rather scary. When George Orwell wrote his famous novel 1984, he envisioned the Party being able to erase history by destroying documents and records — but he never imagined the ability to un-publish a book, nor the ability to silently rewrite it and replace the copies in all the readers’ libraries.

Back in 1997, Richard Stallman wrote a story called The Right to Read about a dystopian future where students had to pay exorbitant fees to read books. That story is worth a second look today in light of the widespread use of DRM and the rising importance of e-books.

E-Books Without DRM

All is not gloom and doom, though. Music publishers including iTunes have backed away from DRM for downloadable music. As the e-book market grows and matures, there’s a strong possibility that DRM may go the same way.

Although all e-book readers support DRM, not all of them require it. The Barnes & Noble e-reader, the Nook, allows users to lend their books and it can read several DRM-unencumbered formats.

To be fair, the Kindle can read PDFs as well, though not a lot of material is published in that format outside of niche markets.

Before you plunk down $250 for an e-reader (and then, if you’re like me, several hundred dollars more for books), I strongly encourage you to investigate what DRM is attached you that reader and those books. Then you can decide whether you want to gamble on how long the publisher will choose to let you keep reading those books, advertising-free, in the future.

That will take a bit of time, though.

When I left 1&1 (on good terms: their service was really not bad) I downloaded all my files and backed them up and thought I was all set. It turns out I forgot something important. You see, this blog runs on the popular WordPress software, which uses a database (MySQL if you’re interested) as the back-end for storing all the articles and sorting them into categories and so forth. When I downloaded all my files I kind of assumed my database was among them. It’s not. The database is gone. In fact, the databases to my other Web pages are gone as well.

Now I could probably recover that database today by writing a frantic e-mail to 1&1. I would probably have to pay a few bucks to re-open my account. But it would be a big hassle, and it’s quite possible that 1&1 has an automatic script to clean out a customer’s disk space when he leaves.

What I really think is that there was not too much on my old blog that’s important to save. I’ve learned the hard lesson, so next time I’ll have the backups in place. I look at this as an opportunity to set a new tone for my blog. I have a clearer idea of what kinds of things I want to write about than I did when I started blogging. I’m optimistic that I can make this new incarnation of The Runes of Binaria more informative and entertaining.

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek of course, perhaps even a bit unkind, but it raises a serious point. Most people are perfectly capable of learning computer skills — even programming. At any age. Don’t be intimidated. Keep trying. Read the help, even if you don’t fully understand it. You’ll find that you have some small successes, and those lead to small insights, and before you know it, it will start to make sense.

What I Found

I found a great site at www.rpgvirtualtabletop.com that compares several different programs for online gaming. A “Virtual tabletop” is any software that is meant to do the job of a physical gaming table: providing a map display, “miniatures” (little icons you can move around to show where the characters and monsters are), a dice roller, and usually some kind of chat. If you’re interested in playing tabletop RPGs online, that site is a good starting point to see what’s available.

My New Favorite

My new favorite game aid is called InitiatveTool, part of the RPTools suite. My D&D group has a large party (7 player characters plus an animal companion) and they often encounter groups of a dozen or more humanoids. Rolling initiative and sorting all the characters into initiative order can be quite a production. I used to do this by hand.

PCGen has a feature that will do this (on the GMGen tab) but PCGen is a serious memory hog and it gets seriously bogged down after loading that many characters and their opponents.

Enter InitiativeTool. It is much more lightweight than PCGen and does not run out of memory after loading all the combatants in the battle. It does quite a bit more than just keep track of initiative. As you can see from the screenshot, it also displays a character sheet for the character or monster whose turn it is.

InitiativeTool tracks initiative in the left pane and displays a character sheet in the right

InitiativeTool includes handy timers to keep track of events such as when a spell expires. I am quite impressed with it but I do have to mention two drawbacks to the tool. First, the RPTools developers have done their level best to hide any kind of documentation. Supposedly there are forums and a Wiki but I have not been able to find them. Second, data entry into InitiativeTool is a royal pain. The interface is a tree view of the data structure of the character and you have to expand and collapse each node in order to edit it. No fun for typing in 7 PCs and 20 orcs. I’m pleased to say, InitiativeTool ships with pre-loaded statistics for all the monsters in the 3.5 SRD, so you rarely have to type in the monsters; and there is a work-around to avoid typing the PCs as well, but it is not perfect.

If you want to give InitiativeTool a try, I recommend you use the stable version (1.0.b24 at the time of this writing). Anything more recent will probably have spiffy new features, but it’s hit and miss as to which of them will be working. I’ve tried it both ways — the stable version provides a better experience.

InitiativeTool-PCGen Compatibility

The best thing about InitiativeTool is that it can load data created by other tools. That way you do not have to use its tortuous data-entry interface. Recent versions of PCGen (5.14 and later) can export a character sheet to InitiativeTool format. Simply use File -> export -> To Text and choose the cryptically-named csheet_InitTool.rpgrp. This creates an output file that can then be read into InitiativeTool as a “group” of characters.

In a lot of ways, this offers the best of both worlds. PCGen is great for editing a character and checking all the arithmetic, but it can’t really handle more than two or three characters at a time. InitiativeTools is good for displaying many characters at a time but for creating and editing characters, it’s less powerful and a lot less convenient to use than PCGen.

My experience with this is that it works pretty well for the stable version of InitiativeTool. For some characters, there are some slight errors in the output file that cause InitiativeTool to fail to load it. For me, this had mostly to do with the location of the character portraits (stored in the “token” tag of the .rpgrp file). I was able to open the .rpgrp file with a text editor, hand-edit it to delete the offending “token” tags, and then the file loaded fine. So for the stable version of InitiativeTool, the feature has some inconveniences but it works. I tried loading the same (fixed) file into the latest unstable version, and it wouldn’t load at all. This is why I recommend against the unstable version.

It appears the RPTools team is also working on their own character editor called CharTool. I tried it but could not figure out how to make it produce output that can be loaded into InitiativeTool, and as I’ve said the RPTools documentation is missing in action. My guess is that CharTool is in the pretty early stages of development and its integration with InitiativeTool isn’t done yet.

New Page on my Blog

I’ve created a new page on this blog for Electronic Game Aids. I’ll update that from time to time as I discover new software that I find useful.

It’s Slow

Windows 7 is sluggish — at least on my machine (3.00 GHz Pentium with 1 GB RAM). My hardware is a couple of years old, I admit. Mostly I notice the sluggishness when I open a folder or the Control Panel and Windows takes 3-5 seconds to draw in the contents. Launching a program can take a while.

What I think this means is that Microsoft designed Windows 7 for a more powerful computer than I have. Here’s another reason not to upgrade: if you install Windows 7 on an existing computer, you may find that it runs like molasses. Better to wait until you want to buy a new computer anyway, and just get one with Windows 7 pre-installed.

It’s Much Better than Vista

Windows Vista is going to die a quick and well-deserved death. Without going into the details of what made Vista such an epic failure, let me say this: Windows versions are the opposite of Star Trek movies. Only the odd-numbered ones are good.

If you do happen to be in the market for a new PC, don’t buy one now. They’d spoil it by installing Vista. Wait 6 or 8 months and you can get Windows 7 instead.

More to Come

I’ll write more details about what is good and bad with Windows 7 over the next several days/weeks. In a nutshell, it seems pretty good, but needs a powerful, new machine to run well.

Before you run out and install a copy yourself, heed my advice: do not try this at home! Microsoft is not releasing this software so regular users can get a free copy of Windows! They’re doing it so professional and expert users can try out the nearly-finished software and find and report bugs or other problems. In other words, this is a public test, not a sales promotion.

In fact, I would advise most people not to “upgrade” even when Windows 7 becomes available for sale. Installing a new operating system is neither fun nor enlightening, and it is almost certain to cause something about your computer to stop working. For most users, it’s smarter to just wait it’s time to buy a new computer, and then get one with Windows 7 pre-installed.

Windows 7 License Agreement

I should say a few words about the Windows 7 license agreement, because it contains some odious terms that undermine consumer rights. This has become typical of commercial software these days.

The first thing to note is that the evaluation copy of WIndows 7 will stop working after June, 2010. Anyone who has installed it will have to either buy a new copy and re-install it, or go back to their old operating system. This is perfectly fair; it’s an evaluation copy. It’s clearly announced in the license agreement. None the less, a number of people on slashdot seemed shocked and outraged that their “free” copy of Windows won’t last forever.

The expiration date isn’t the problem. The really odious thing in the license agreement is the activation clause. When you first install Windows 7, and at unspecified times after that, Windows 7 contacts Microsoft to make sure, as Microsoft puts it, “your copy of Windows is genuine.” That means they’re looking in a database to see if you’ve paid. If they ever get the impression your copy is not “genuine,” Microsoft has what amounts to a kill switch they can use to shut down your computer. If this is at all a chilling prospect, then don’t buy an iPhone.

Here’s an important point: the need for activation means Windows 7 will only work on one computer. Ever. You can’t install it on one machine and then later move it to another. Microsoft considers that “piracy” — even if you were to uninstall it from the first computer. I’m serious. So don’t pay money for Windows 7 except as part of a brand-new computer.

Installation

Installation of Windows 7 didn’t go smoothly for me. The first problem was that the installer gave me two options, to “upgrade” my current copy of Windows or “clean install” (which is horrible grammar, but it means writing over my current copy of Windows and erasing everything it knows about my computer and all my other software). So I tried “upgrade” to see how it would work. It didn’t.

The problem was that the “upgrade” only works if you are upgrading from Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later. At the time, I had Windows 2000 installed. This is not a big deal, but the installer could easily have determined that and told me the hard truth: the only way I was getting Windows 7 onto my system was a clean installation. Instead it teased me and wasted my time by letting me think the upgrade was worth trying.

The truth is, I was emotionally prepared to blow away my old copy of Windows. What I was not prepared for was for the “clean install” to stop halfway through with a thoroughly unhelpful error message to the effect, “Windows 7 didn’t install properly. Please try again.” No mention of why.

I’ve got a news flash for ya. If a computer tries to do something, and it doesn’t work, and it tries again, there’s a darned good chance it won’t work again. So a better message would be,

Windows 7 didn’t install properly. We’re too lazy to figure out why or even give you a hint. Don’t even bother trying again until you solve this little mystery. Good luck.

It turns out, my hard drive was too full. The installer had helpfully backed up my old copy of Windows 2000 when I tried the upgrade earlier, and now there was not enough space for Windows 7. I figured this out by guessing. Microsoft didn’t put on a Web page information about how much disk space you actually need, as far as I can tell. They just sort of figured everyone has plenty of disk space.

See why I said, “don’t try this at home?”

To be continued…