I definitely recognised the art style in the 4th Edition books when I first picked them up, but it was only recently I figured out where I’d seen it before – the Legend of the Five Rings CCG. I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to realise the common link was William O’Connor.

For comparison, here’s a piece from L5R, and one from 4e. I’ve heard a few people express their dislike of the 4e art, but I believe it suits the new ruleset.

I used to play a lot of L5R until, well, World of Warcraft killed it.

Posted in 4e D&D, Dungeons and Dragons

Tags: art, d&d, l5r

Recently I got back in contact with my old D&D gaming group in Sydney. They’re eager to play 4e, and I have some experience with the system thanks to a good friend of mine whose creativity and DMing skills far exceed my own (probably).

Anyway, seeing as flying up to play on a regular basis would prove expensive and clunky, I’ve been researching ways to play D&D over the ‘net. With the right applications and a bit of know-how, it can be done.

The first task was to select the programs I’d need. For the most part, I had a solid catalogue written in my head. The only part I was stuck on was video chat software, but that looks like it’s been resolved.

Here’s what I’ve settled on.

Continue reading ‘4th Edition D&D over the Internet’

Posted in 4e D&D, Dungeons and Dragons

Tags: d&d

Over the last couple of hours, I’ve been transferring Playwrite from WordPress.com to my server at DreamHost. Everything went pretty smoothly, as you can see!

RIP playwrite.wordpress.com.

Posted in General

Tags: playwrite

See the hand? Yeah, it’s not quite back yet, but it is getting there.

Got fed up with the free hosting I had, but I couldn’t really complain considering, well, I wasn’t paying anything. So, I purchased hosting with DreamHost. MySQL, PHP and unlimited bandwidth and space for life, thanks to the special birthday deal.

Sweet.

I’ll get it up and running in the next week or so, once my damn domain name host allows me to update the name servers. Don’t worry, I made a backup of the Zafehouse score database, so that will return unharmed as well.

And a quick bit on Deadshed: I’m thinking I might release a beta late December to get some feedback on its progress. Not 100% sure yet, but I’m warming to the idea.

Update: It’s alive!

Posted in General

Tags: Zafehouse

Easiest way to explain it. If you don’t get the reference, then Conslide probably isn’t for you.

If you do, well, download the program and give it a try! Pressing Ctrl+~ will cause a Command Prompt window to slide down from the top of the screen. To hide it, just press Ctrl+~ again.

It’s basically a text box that sends commands to a hidden instance of CMD.exe, monitors it for output, and sends anything it spits out back to the text box. The usual DOS commands work – copy, del, mkdir, rmdir and so on – but not everything is supported. It won’t run programs, but it will happily process stuff like ping and netstats.

Definitely needs a lot of work, and is more a proof of concept than anything else. If you’re interested in seeing the source, drop me an email or comment and I’ll fire it your way.

Note that it needs the .NET 2.0 Framework.

Download Conslide

Posted in Tools and utilities

Tags: conslide, quake, vb .net, windows

I’ve been deprived of my PC for over a month now. I didn’t think the lack of a decent machine would affect me much, but it has. My temporary home in Melbourne gave me access to a box with enough grunt to run Fallout 3. I happily clocked about ten hours on the game before I moved to a more permanent location.

Now, all I have is my laptop, a paltry device equipped with a 1.8GHz C2D and X3100 IGP. A beastly piece of hardware it is not.

Despite falling short of the minimum requirements by at least a billion fathoms, I decided to give Fallout 3 a go on my laptop. It refused to get past the intro movie. I wasn’t expecting much, but I would have thought the game proper wasn’t a big ask.

Apparently, it was. And I wasn’t alone. A bit of research uncovered Oldblivion, a hack to get Bethesda’s Oblivion running on older hardware at a decent click. If you weren’t aware, Oblivion and Fallout 3 use Bethesda’s version of the Gamebryo engine. Logic suggested to me that if a solution could be found for Oblivion, then Fallout 3 had an outside chance.

Continue reading ‘Do you have to be smart to be a PC gamer?’

Posted in Opinion

Tags: fallout 3, pc

Argh. Zafehouse has been out of commission for at least two weeks now, so I can’t put it down to a simple outage with my free web host. Looks like I’ll have to cough up some cash for, you know, a decent provider.

Any recommendations for Oz-based services are very welcome – particularly ones with MySQL and PHP support!

Posted in General

Tags: Zafehouse

Having Zafehouse picked up by Rock, Paper, Shotgun was 12 kinds of awesome.

For a while, I thought 12 was the limit. Then, a couple of players smashed this number into oblivion, drowned the dozen of awesome in a torrent of fantastic, and showed me Zafehouse’s true potential.

Over at a forum called Sekrit, user FinalSin not only ran a diary game using Zafehouse, he went to the trouble of inserting the nicks of other forum goers into the random name generator via the source code. I won’t spoil it for you, but sufficed to say it’s an entertaining read.

On a similar plane of radical is the blog Poisoned Sponge, where the author used the events of a Zafehouse game to write a fictional journal. It’s a three-parter and definitely worth your eyeball time.

It’s a fantastic feeling knowing people are doing things with your game you never considered, transforming it from machine code into an experience. The event system in Deadshed was inspired by two things: a conversation with buddy David Kidd, and these guys.

So yes, the sequel is for you.

Posted in Zafehouse

Tags: Deadshed, Zafehouse

This is totally an original idea.

Posted in Zombies

Tags: Zombies

Update: The 4e Power Toolkit is now available! Create custom classes, power cards and powers!

I’ve resigned myself to the fact Wizards of the Coast is far too busy with other projects to worry about those silly online tools it promised to deliver when 4th Ed launched. Still, the outside possibility of an official character creator (or an unofficial one that isn’t Javascript or a spreadsheet) has stopped me from whipping up my own in .NET.

What it hasn’t stopped me doing is coding a power creator for DMs and players with a creative streak. Called the 4th Edition Power Creator (surprise!), the tool lets you customise your own features, utilities, at-wills, dailies, encounters, etc, save them as XML files and output a directory of said files as HTML. It’ll even sort them by level and frequency.

The ZIP below contains the executable and an example of a custom class built with it (or, you can view the program’s output here). This is an older version to the one I’m currently using (I can tell because the example class is utterly busted), and it does have a few quirks you’ll have to work around. But mostly, it does exactly what it was designed to do. I’ll upload an updated version in a day or two, so be sure to check back for it.

The usual “use at your own risk” disclaimer applies, though I’m 96.25% sure it won’t blow your PC up. Requires the .NET 2.0 Framework for XP users, while people with Vista should be right to go.

Download 4th Edition Power Creator
Make suggestions or bug reports at the Power Creator forum.

Posted in Dungeons and Dragons

Tags: d&d, vb .net