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Text of the page (random words):
nil is not null july 2013 nil is not null random osity about computers and games and politics and life and stuff monday july 29 2013 latex pocketmod a few weeks ago i wanted to produce a so called pocketmod in latex the idea is to print 8 small pages of content onto one actual page of paper and then folding it as shown here to get a little booklet i ve since found several different ways of doing it but here s what i came up with as a pure latex solution first put your actual content into a content tex file and use the geometry package to adjust the page size i used this usepackage paperwidth 2 75in paperheight 4 25in margin 0 1in includefoot footskip 0 2in geometry i prefer working at the actual size instead of shrinking larger pages down later only to find that the font is unreadable use pdflatex to generate the pdf for your tiny 8 pages worth of stuff second use pdfpages and the following rotate tex file to adjust the individual pages appropriately some need to be upside down others need to remain unchanged documentclass letterpaper article usepackage final pdfpages begin document includepdf pages 1 fitpaper true content pdf includepdf pages 2 angle 180 fitpaper true content pdf includepdf pages 3 angle 180 fitpaper true content pdf includepdf pages 4 angle 180 fitpaper true content pdf includepdf pages 5 angle 180 fitpaper true content pdf includepdf pages 6 fitpaper true content pdf includepdf pages 7 fitpaper true content pdf includepdf pages 8 fitpaper true content pdf end document of course i should have used a macro to avoid repeating myself 8 times but copy paste won and i never refactored feel free to post a better version third use pdfpages and the following booklet tex file to put everything on a single letter sized page in landscape documentclass letterpaper article usepackage final pdfpages begin document includepdf pages 5 4 3 2 6 7 8 1 frame true nup 2x4 landscape rotate pdf end document i like having the thin frame around all the pages but if you want to get rid of it just remove that option and you re done posted by peter fröhlich at 2 16 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday july 27 2013 thieves and traps in b x d d i noticed two curious things about thieves and traps in b x d d neither of which i had actually fully grok ed before the basic rules list find or remove traps as a double ability but the expert rules only have remove traps in the table the basic rules state thieves are the only characters who can find traps without using magic on page b10 but any character has a 1 in 6 chance of finding a trap when searching for one any dwarf has a 2 in 6 chance this does not apply to magical traps on page b22 regarding the first point note that neither the greyhawk supplement for od d nor the holmes edition have find traps as an option they only list remove traps just like the expert set regarding the second point note that only one rule either b10 or b22 makes sense if we use b10 as the correct rule than b22 must go away completely thieves only have 10 for find traps at first level and it would make thieves worse than everyone else at finding traps if b22 was also in play if we use b22 as the correct rule than b10 must go away completely all characters get a chance to find traps not only thieves i do have a theory about this but that s really all it is a theory the 1981 basic and experts set seem to have been written edited concurrently both list january 1981 for their first printing and i ve never heard that anyone had to wait for the expert set to be released in other words i am pretty sure they went on sale at the same time not one after the other if that s true and if they were primarily put together by the person given credit so tom moldvay for the basic set and david cook for the expert set then it s also quite possible that each started working on their game independently using od d and holmes as their sources for some reason moldvay or johnson or mentzer both of whom moldvay thanks for their dedication in reorganizing and fine tuning this book eventually felt that thieves needed a boost to make them more important and hence we get the rule on page b10 it wouldn t surprise me if that was a last minute decision so neither the rule on page b22 nor the expert set was updated to be consistent with page b10 as i said it s just a theory but it has enough explanatory power for me to house rule that thieves in b x do not in fact get the find traps ability at all they get remove traps but the entire business of finding traps is handled with the everybody has a shot rule from b22 i think b x is on the right track giving every character regardless of class a bunch of basic dungeoneering skills and finding traps should definitely be included in that set which leaves magical traps since they are explicitly ruled out on page b22 personally i never liked the idea that thieves can do something that s clearly more in the domain of clerics or magic users spell casters should be able to figure out magical traps fighters and thieves shouldn t true in a fantasy world where many worthwhile scores are protected by magic one could argue that thieves should develop such powers however it seems much more logical to say that they need to use wands of trap detection to get this done in fact one could even use that to explain that high level thieves get a use magic item ability instead of a cast spells from scrolls ability which again seems to encroach too much on clerics and magic users and at least in my b x game i split up race and class this makes the elusive elven magic user thieves and dwarven cleric thieves that much more interesting posted by peter fröhlich at 1 49 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tuesday july 16 2013 hexographer meets blackmarsh i don t really have anything to say in my defense except maybe that i needed to waste excess brain cycles that i would otherwise have spent on harder exam questions for my students so it s all for their benefit anyways rob conley s blackmarsh is very cool and now i have it in funky hexographer colors of course the conversion to strict hexes made things a little inaccurate but maybe i ll find the time to refine a few sections in the future posted by peter fröhlich at 6 19 am 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest sunday july 14 2013 busy teaching summer session you may have noticed the number of posts dropping off significantly in the last two weeks the reason is that i am teaching a summer session course and that s always a very intense experience for all involved students as well as teachers last year i was even busier because i wrote detailed lecture notes this year i am busy because i am converting the lecture notes into a pdf document that will hopefully turn into something useful eventually i still have a ways to go for example i ll have to replace a lot of ascii graphics with real images sooner or later but it s a surprisingly fun process the manuscript is at about 200 pages right now but that s including a lot of hacking discussions that a stuffy text book would not really talk about of course the notes are also missing a lot that a stuffy text book would have detailed proofs for example it s a trade off i hope that eventually all of this will turn into a fairly concise primer on data structures something a lot shorter than a real text book but approximately just as useful if it is supplemented with decent lectures in any case i have three more weeks of summer session ahead of me and during that time i expect very few blog posts to actually come to fruition after that i ll probably be in germany for a week or two so in the end i ll only have two more productive blogging weeks before the next semester starts oh well posted by peter fröhlich at 8 06 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday july 8 2013 isle of dread better maps i had promised to fix up my rough approximation of a hexographer map for the classic x1 the isle of dread setting so first here s a new image of the slightly improved version and here is the corresponding hexographer file that you re of course free to use for whatever see the license on my blog i used the free version of hexographer to make this map but as far as i know that shouldn t make a difference i mostly decided to work on this because i needed a map i could mess with for my campaign and because i couldn t find one in hexographer format however it turns out that alan g had made a much better version of the map already and he shared it as part of my g thread thank you so much alan personally i am still a bit torn between using mine or alan s but that s mostly a matter of map scale most people are probably better off just ignoring my version and using his instead posted by peter fröhlich at 7 13 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday july 6 2013 isle of dread an approximation i spent a few hours putting together the following approximation of the classic x1 the isle of dread setting in hexographer i wonder if anyone has a better version in hexographer format that is if not i ll try to fix the remaining bugs and i ll post the actual hexographer file sometime tomorrow for others to reuse but it s hard to believe that nobody else has done a version of this classic before posted by peter fröhlich at 1 56 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tuesday july 2 2013 attributes in d d variants almost all d d variants have been surprisingly stable when it comes to the attributes also called ability scores that define a character for about 40 years we have used strength str or s intelligence int or i wisdom wis or w constitution con or c dexterity dex or d charisma cha or x and the only thing that changed from decade to decade was the order in which they were written down the order above is from the 1974 edition aka od d the single letter abbreviations are delta s there is an obvious breakdown into three predominantly physical attributes and three predominantly mental ones strength constitution and dexterity are physical whereas intelligence wisdom and charisma are mental this is presumably the reason why a d d 3e reordered the attributes s d c i w x there is however another breakdown that i have not seen discussed before it may be that i simply read the wrong things online so if you can find an earlier reference for the following please let me know i actually felt incredibly dense when i first realized this about a year ago and i cannot quite believe that nobody else has pointed it out before instead of grouping the attributes s d c physical i w x mental let s group them thusly s x influence d i flexibilty c w stability i know it s horribly obvious in retrospect isn t it both strength and charisma measure the character s influence impact on the external world strength focuses on physical influence break down a door charisma focuses on mental influence acquire and lead retainers both dexterity and intelligence measure the character s flexibility adaptability speed to external forces dexterity focuses on physical flexibility evade attacks and react quickly intelligence focuses on mental flexibility learn a language or spell both constitution and wisdom measure the character s stability resilience to external forces constitution focuses on physical stability resist poison wisdom focuses on mental stability resist charm the only system i can recall that tries to group attributes orthogonal to mental physical is star frontiers it actually even affects advanced character creation there but for what it s worth i think this breakdown of the d d attributes is actually nicer now i have to admit that i cannot think of a good way of using the breakdown for anything in game so as far as i can tell it s just a curiosity does anyone see a way to make it matter posted by peter fröhlich at 9 53 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest newer posts older posts home subscribe to posts atom who blogs here peter fröhlich munich germany i like old games and old computers i dig free software and free culture and i believe that people not organizations have inalienable rights view my complete profile complete works 2021 2 june 2 2020 3 november 1 august 1 july 1 2018 2 may 1 january 1 2017 3 october 2 july 1 2016 10 december 1 october 1 june 1 april 2 march 1 february 2 january 2 2015 22 december 9 november 2 october 3 may 2 april 4 february 2 2014 21 december 6 november 3 may 1 april 4 february 2 january 5 2013 47 december 4 november 2 october 1 september 1 july 7 latex pocketmod thieves and traps in b x d d hexographer meets blackmarsh busy teaching summer session isle of dread better maps isle of dread an approximation attributes in d d variants june 16 may 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