Living on the edge of a canyon is interesting. Get all kinds of wildlife coming up to the back fence. And every year we have to relocate a rattlesnake back into the wild. Yesterday I saw my first one of the year. Sucker must have been 3 feet long. I’m not scared of snakes, but I do have a healthy respect for them, so I decided that I didn’t want to try to wrangle this one into a trashcan and move it. My father however did relocate on while I was in LA over the weekend.
On the unwanted visitors note, some pest control guy just stopped by going house to house looking for customers. I swear the guy must have planted it, because he asks me to open my screen and look over the door at this huge Black Widow just chilling out. If he didn’t plant it he just has the best timing ever.
Onto lootable creature things. Last night we had our D&D game. As I mentioned we’ve moved to 4E, which I’m really digging so far. The name of the game now seems to be Options Based Tactical Combat (OBTC). OBTC works by giving everyone a ton of options, it’s rare to see anyone just swing their weapon. I think this really works well for everyone, it sucks being a first level Wizard and having nothing to do because you only have 4 or 5 spells. Magic Missile is a regular attack for them now, and it does sort of scale with level. My fighter has a wide array attacks, I can go for an attack that gives me a bonus to hit that forgoes my strength damage, I can hit an enemy and shift him to a square adjacent to me and hopefully set him up for a flank, or if he has a friend next to him I can hit him and deal my strength damage to the ally. And those are just my base powers, once per fight I can hit a guy and let an ally who is also adjacent to the enemy shift twice and hopefully take up a flanking position. My daily attack also lets me heal myself and my new daily utility power (we leveled up last night, hell yeah) lets me gain a bunch of temporary hit points.
I know I talk a lot about the combat, but that’s because it’s such a huge deal. The game has become very tactical, you have to pay attention to how to use your options so that you can hopefully open up your allies options as well. This creates a well-oiled machine of monster killing. We haven’t gotten much into using skills in social situations, but I think that really has more to do with our DM’s. Usually if you want to try to talk someone into doing something you role play it, so we don’t make that many rolls outside of combat. And I think that’s more of something that happens on a group by group basis.
So yeah, highly enjoying 4E. And I think that if you like D&D you should check it out, and not listen to the haters on the internet. Most of them haven’t even played the game and don’t really know what they are talking about (people not knowing what they are talking about on the internet? that’s a surprise). I know when I first heard about the new edition and even up until we started playing with it I was worried that it was just going to be another 3.5 money grab. I definitely don’t think it is now, a lot of care went into this to try to make sure that no one is sitting around waiting for the fighter to get through his 11 attacks so they can throw a meteor swarm.
Peeling myself away from gaming: I found my photoshop! Site will hopefully be completed in the next few days! Woo, no more curiously hanging text in the other pages. Images of stuff I’ve done! Uh, another contact form! Some other stuff! I also fixed the database issue I was having with the ethics gradient forum. I think they’re kind of pissed at me at the moment. I didn’t know it was down until after I came back from my trip, okay! You’d think they’d be happy that I was changing passwords and trying to make things more secure.
And on to music now. I’ve mentioned before that I listen to some weird, experimental, extreme music. Some of that you can see in my last.fm widget on the right. Well a friend of mine who is obsessed with Japan keeps trying to get me to listen to Japanese rock and video game sound tracks. Most of the time, I just don’t care. There’s some bands that I like from Japan like Sigh, Boris, Gallhammer, and Acid Mothers Temple, but this is just way outside of what he’s trying to give me. So I’ve started fucking with him. First I gave him the last Boris album to listen to, my hope was that he would stop trying to give me music. That failed because when he returned the album he then asked if I wanted the sound track for Guilty Gear X or something. Denied. So what I’ve started to do is just give him more of my music. Usually just cd’s I have at hand. Stuff like SUNN 0))) and Lugubrum and Wolves in the Throne Room. I’m not sure if he likes the music all that much but it gives me someone else to talk about music with.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a scholar of Heavy Metal, it’s one of those things that I just love and try to learn everything I can about. It used to be a pretty narrow field I was interested in, mainly Black Metal, but it recently branched out into Doom, Stoner and Sludge metal. Maybe branched out isn’t a good term, I can’t think of a good term offhand. Anyways, I’m not sure where I was going with that. Probably just giving myself a pat on the back. But it’s really nice having someone who will listen to something I give them then want to talk about it and ask questions about the sound, and why a band did a particular thing. Most of my other friends that have similar tastes will listen to my lectures but don’t ask questions and such. I guess I should try returning the favor sometime. Oops, rambling.
I think on that note I’m going to sign off. Don’t really have anything else to talk about fro now.