Deck of Many Things

If you were unaware, I am posting weekly over on MMODesigner.com, it’s a more focused blog talking about what I know best, designing MMO’s.

I’ll keep this blog around for non-MMO related blog posts.

Recently the “never stops shutting down” problem came BACK to my tablet whenever I ran iTunes, a problem I never had until I upgraded to Windows 7.

I did some research on the net and ONE thing caught my attention. A user suggested plugging the USB cable into a USB port directly on the motherboard. I was plugging mine into the side port on my Tx2z, so I decided to see if plugging it into the back would fix the problem.

It looks like it did. I was able to sync my iPhone to iTunes with no problem, shut down iTunes and successfully shut down the tablet! So if you are having the same problem I am, try plugging your iPod or iPhone into a USB jack that is directly tied to the motherboard. It worked for me! Good luck.

I am a sucker for new OSes. I bought ME, XP, Vista and now Windows 7 on they day they released. I have -always- done an “upgrade” install, keeping my data and installed programs. I know a lot of people have said you should just do a fresh install, but, seriously, I have never had a problem.

I got Windows 7 for both my home PC and my tablet PC. My home PC is running Vista Ultimate 32 bit and the tablet had Vista Home Premium 64 bit. I installed to my tablet first and had some issues right off the bat of programs running that were causing the install to fail (remember, I am doing an upgrade, not a wipe), eventually I get that remedied and the install to the tablet completes.

I install to my home PC, and I want to upgrade to Ultimate 64 bit at this point, as I want to put more memory in it eventually (have 4GB now). Problem. You can’t use an “upgrade” from Vista Ultimate 32 to Windows 7 Ultimate 64. Grumble. I consign myself to simply sticking to a 32 bit OS for the time being. The first install with that failed at the infamous “62%”, which I read needed a registry edit to get past, but a second try got it installed without crashing, no editing.

Back to the tablet, I immediately have problems with itunes. It just doesn’t seem to want to run, and since this is where I sync my phone to, this is a problem. I can get iTunes to run about 20% of the time. The other 80% it simply refuses to launch, but in the Task Manager you can clearly see it running… and when you “End Task” in the TM, it does nothing. I have never seen a program REFUSE to be forcibly shut down by task manager before. If I go to reboot at this point the tablet will hang on “Shutting down” and never actually shut off.

I did a lot of research on the subject and even asked the twitterverse for advice (advantage to having over 1000 followers!) I tried everything suggested EXCEPT “do a full wipe install”. I simply didn’t want to admit defeat. Finally after a day of trying to get iTunes started so I could sync, I decided that the full install was the last resort. I backed up my data, deauthorized iTunes (once I finally got it running) and did the full install. Everything went smoothly and a reinstall of iTunes messed up some of my settings, but at this point I have not had the problem I did previously. It’s been two days and all signs look good.

On my home PC I have a different problem. Media Player refuses to play MPEG files. It will lock up and sit in Task Manager eating an entire core of my quad-core until I forcibly shut it down (which, thankfully it does). Had this problem for a while now but its pretty minor so it wasn’t until this week I went on the crusade to fix it. In the end there was a corrupted MPEG codec left around from some program that was the issue. Once I deleted the value for it in the registry, Media Player worked fine.

This brings me to my biggest issue I am having with Windows 7. When something doesn’t work, it just doesn’t WORK. It doesn’t error out, it doesn’t crash, it doesn’t hang, it just doesn’t give any feedback at all. On the Media Player problem, if I didn’t know how to end a process in the Task Manager, I’d have no idea how to free up the processing power it was eating up. The iTunes problem was worse as there was NO solution that I could find that fixed the problem without a HD wipe.

For functionality, I must say Windows 7 has some neat bells and whistles, and it definitely feels faster than Vista did on my home PC. For the tablet, I find it hits the HD a LOT and that slows programs load times down to a point that I am looking at a Solid State Drive to improve performance.

Roll a d20
It tumbles on the table
I pray for a crit

I am running a 4th Edition D&D game and one of the suggestions for 4e is that the players write up “loot lists” for magic items that they desire. With the way buying and selling magic items works in 4e (they are only worth 1/5th their value when you sell them), it makes it very hard for a party to “convert” found magic items into the ones they actually want. A loot list is the solution.

Players can write down the magic items they want and then give it to their DM who should seed the adventure with the items from the lists. Of course, the DM can ignore the list and put whatever he wants in the dungeon instead, but that defeats the point.

One of the other concepts of 4e is the “treasure parcel”. These are “all the loot” of an adventure, split up into 10 digestible parts. An encounter can yield one, two, or no parcels, depending on the DM. The only hard and fast rule is that by the time the characters gain a level, they have earned all 10 parcels of treasure.

Now, in the game I run, I tried to run it this way, but I found that I constantly was losing people’s loot lists and asking them to gimme something “real quick” so I could outfit them. This worked amazingly well, so I adapted that into the current iteration of how I am distributing loot.

The current iteration is this:

There is a list of parcels. For the Magic Items, it is just the level of the magic item. For the money, it’s as the DMG suggests. These are numbered 1 thru 10.

There is a list of Player Characters, and their Magic Items. This list is in an order that was established randomly at the beginning of the campaign.

When treasure is found, I roll a d10 and look up what parcel it is. If it is money/potions, I hand that out as normally. If I roll a magic item, I then consult the list of PCs.

I look at the PC who has the least amount of magic items. If there are multiple PC’s with the same, least, amount then I look at who the highest one on the list is. Eventually, everyone on the list will have the same amount of Magic Items, and I can just use the list as an order of distribution for magic.

I then ask that player to come up with at least THREE items of the LEVEL I rolled on the parcels. This way, I don’t need to track someone’s loot list and they get some insight into the items they might get (the level anyway). Once I have the items from the player, I roll a d3 (or higher if they gave me more), and that determines what item is actually found. This way, it might not be the “Best Spec” item on the list, but it will be the same level as the Best Spec, and it will be something that the player wanted.

I usually inform the other players that they find “A magic item for John” or somesuch, and work out with John on the side what that item ends up being.

Once the parcel is distributed, I cross it off the list. Once all parcels are distributed, I generate 10 new parcels and start the process anew.

A while back, I was asked to contribute to the third in a series of books on narratives. This book, Third Person, would contain a chapter by yours truly on how we handled storytelling in City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

Product Description
The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narratives—featuring an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settings—did not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Marvel’s Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds.

Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors—media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others—investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena.

Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in Doctor Who; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the Final Fantasy role-playing games; World of Warcraft adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of The Wire.

Taken together, the multidisciplinary conversations in Third Person, along with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s earlier collections First Person and Second Person, offer essential insights into how fictions are constructed and maintained in very different forms of media at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Rafael Alvarez, Richard A. Bartle, Michael Bonesteel, Stanford Carpenter, Monte Cook, Paul Cornell, Anne Cranny-Francis, Sam Ford, Chaim Gingold, A. Scott Glancy, Richard Grossman, Pat Harrigan, Matt Hills, Kenneth Hite, William H. Huber, Adriene Jenik, Henry Jenkins, David Kalat, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Norman M. Klein, Tanya Krzywinska, David Lavery, Robin D. Laws, Sarah Lewison, Henry Lowood, William E. McDonald, Matthew P. Miller, Jason Mittell, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Orman, Sean O’Sullivan, Lance Parkin, Robert M. Price, Ren Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Ken Rolston, Dave Sim, Greg Stafford, Tamiko Thiel, John Tulloch, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Walter Jon Williams

About the Author
Pat Harrigan is a writer and author of the novel Lost Clusters. He is also the co-editor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, forthcoming from the MIT Press. He is also the co-editor, with Pat Harrigan, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Here is what my life currently consists of:

• Work, including commutes: 630a – 6p Mon-Fri
• Television: (When Andre isn’t playing on the big TV) Monday is the worst at 5.5 hours if nothing I watch is in repeats. Friday and Saturday are empty, which is good because:
• RPGs: DM’ing a 4e D&D game (almost) every Sunday. Playing in four 4e D&D games (John’s, Mark’s, Kyle’s, Bruce’s). John’s almost doesn’t count because certain players don’t want to play anymore, and we ended the last session in mid-combat (and, FWIW, mid-September I think).
• CoH: When I can find a spare hour or so.
• Other computer games: When I can find a spare under-an-hour or so.

Things I should be doing

• Spending time with Andre and Diane: I need to do this more.
• Painting: I have about 60 space marines that need to be painted, but the weather hasn’t been cooperating to prime them. (I primed minis once in cold weather, never again). I have found time to paint some of my PC’s for my various D&D games though.
• Cleaning out the garage: The opener broke, so the door is sealed shut. There is a ton of stuff in there, I don’t know how we are going to get to it to fix it, so I am procrastinating.
• Taxes: Of course, we owe again this year, so I don’t want to deal with this until April 14th.
• Cleaning out the computer room: Too many big boxes from “new stuff” clogging up the room.
• Sleeping: I sometimes wake up too early and can’t fall back asleep. Like today.

• The power went out the first afternoon, when we were in the middle of a game of Battlestar Galactica. Everyone grabbed their iPhones, fired up their Flashlight app, and continued playing like nothing happened. The lights came on over an hour later.
• The first D&D game I played in almost went horribly, horribly wrong when one player “in character” set the entire town against us. Fortunately I negotiated with the NPCs a truce while the player in question was out of the room.
• I got to throw the dagger that killed the Mind Flayer boss in that game literally AS we were being kicked out of the room by the next game.
• The first burger I had from the hotel’s “gamer buffet” was beet red in the middle (as in raw). I avoided the burgers after that.
• I bought dice in the dealer’s room to put into the BSG board game, so there would be plenty of d8’s with it, after realizing I had taken all the dice out of it before Friday’s game.
• I had a great time hanging out at the bar with Randy from Cryptic, catching up on what’s going on at the studio I used to work at.
• I got to play Descent, playing someone else’s character in a Road to Legend campaign.
• I bought a T-Shirt at the gamer geek shirt table in the dealer’s room. I was told I wasn’t going to be yelled at for “messing up the shirt pile” because I was wearing an AC/DC shirt.
• I (hopefully) convinced several people there that getting the .pdf versions of the D&D rulebooks at www.rpgnow.com was a great idea, espiecally when I could search-find rules faster than people who had the physical books.
• I played in a GREAT game of 4e D&D, which was loosely based on the Amber “Throne War” scenario. If anyone ever tells me that 4th edition D&D is just a miniatures game and they took all the role-playing out if it, I now have proof that they are idiots. I didn’t get the throne, but got set up with a very nice duchy by helping the late King’s vizer get who HE wanted onto the throne.
• My wife was AWESOME for letting me go, and I have no idea how to thank her enough for not getting completely pissed at me for coming home super late on Monday.

Ms. Marvel Sketch Cover by =david-nakayama on deviantART

David Nakayama, a concept artist we have working for us at NCNorCal, was kind enough to do my “sketch cover” of Dark Avengers #1. David’s done a ton of comics and covers, including the City of Heroes comics. I can’t get over how awesome this is, or the fact that he did it in just one evening.