Tuesday night we had "D&D smackdown". I had a lot of fun. I don't know how much we learned, but it was fun. :-) Ralph wrote about the session, but I'm going to add some notes of my own.

For the evening we boosted the characters who were close up to the next level, so this could be a predictor of things going forward. We had Larissa (7th-level sorceror), Prolix (7th-level wizard), Liandra (7th-level druid), Turok ("4th-level" half-dragon fighter; functionally 6th, through a mechanism I don't understand), and Kyle (6th-level mostly rogue (1 level of ranger, I think)). Larissa has an owl familiar and Liandra has a wolf animal companion, but neither figured into the fighting much. We ran three fights against this party.

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Tuesday night's D&D game was a lot of fun. The story was exciting, and the player issues that had been problems last time were not present.

Ralph used "dirt cheap dungeons" instead of just drawing a map on paper, and I thought that added a lot. We also got a chance to use some of my painted miniatures, which I won't complain about. :-) (We've been using cardboard miniatures, for the most part -- printed ones, not ones we made. My ambition exceeds my artistic skill, so that's ok, but sometimes having something a little more three-dimensional is nice.)

The role-playing was good, and Ralph was really getting into it too. He did a good job of portraying the major character we interacted with. I wonder what he's got in store for the one we didn't get to.

The final fight of this session (and the end of the game day) was our fourth encounter that day. We were running pretty low on spells; Ralph had apparently intended for us to sleep first. We still did ok, though Ralph was also generous on some things. The undead whatever-it-was (spectre, I think) drained two levels from one of the other characters, though, and that's frustrating. (One was permanent, the other wasn't.) Level drains are different, and better-handled, in 3rd edition, but they're still unpleasant. One thing in particular is that the cost of the drain can vary widely. Consider: Kyle was 6th level, most of the way to 7th, and got bumped back to 5th, mid-way to 6th. Net cost in XP was about 6000. If, on the other hand, he had gotten zapped shortly after making the next level, he would have been bumped back to 6th, mid-way to 7th, for a cost of about 3000. That just seems weird to me somehow.

D&D Tuesday night was exciting. We ended up in a fight where it looked like the big baddie could have easily splattered any one of us in just a couple swings. And he (or rather, his intelligent weapon) had a special grudge against humans. Guess who is now playing the only human in the party? :-) (We also have two half-humans.)

The character who got killed last time ended up reincarnating as what appears to be a humanoid lizard. (The players were told "half-dragon". The other half is human.) This should be entertaining. The character is currently kind of cranky and stand-offish, and more aggressive than he used to be; I hope some of this mellows out over time. It fits with what the character has just been through; I just hope the character can eventually reconcile himself with what happened.

D&D last night was interesting. We learned some things that sound like they're going to be important, accompanied by new questions and mysteries. Ralph described part of it as "a visit from the exposition fairy", but he's too hard on himself. I liked the way this stuff was revealed to us. It's not the first time the DM has used actual props, either, and I think it works well.

Having an encounter in the middle of the night where we had to run somewhere else was interesting. A couple times I found myself thinking "I'll use my... oops, I don't have that here right now". I'm glad that for the most part I've been fairly detailed on my character sheet about what I carry where; it saves having to guess in situations where I would be motivated to be generous. And, in keeping with recent tradition, the fighter had yet another fight with no armor. Maybe he should try to buy some potions of Mage Armor or something.

(This encounter also led to some entertaining role-playing. There were three relevant NPCs at one point, so Ralph distributed a couple parts to players along with general instructions. That worked better than him trying to do conversations.)

I am really behind in my character's journal entries.

Annoyance: the player who chews up significant chunks of time with speculation and argument about how some spells work, when those decisions aren't going to affect what we do, is not in a position to complain about other players spending time with questions that do matter, like whether certain special equipment is available before we leave town. This is not the first time this player had done this sort of thing, and it's rude. (I handle my random spell-philosophy-and-mechanics issues between games, unless they really do matter right then.)

I have a doc deadline today at work (SDK release). Some of my coworkers seem to think I should be frazzled. I've learned over the years how to plan for these things, so I'm right on schedule -- including some planned-in last-minute emergencies. :-) (That is, I allocated time to then-unknown tasks that I suspected someone would come up with.) I'm running what I think will be the final build now.

There are things I want to say about the pledge-of-allegiance thing, but I know I don't have time right now so it'll have to wait.

My new computer arrived last night. Yay! I haven't done much to it yet (took a while to get it to see the network, and that was an important first step), but after Shabbat I'll begin the frenzy of installing software and the like. I also saw my USB external hard drive just zip along, which is pleasant. (The drive is USB 2.0, backward-compatable to 1.0. My old computer was 1.0; this one is 2.0. The difference in data-transfer rate is 40 times. That is not a typo.)

Eventually, I want to partition the drive and put Linux on it (dual-boot). But the 10 minutes I spent last night reading Red Hat documentation were insufficient, so that'll wait. Partitioning the drive from the start would be easier, but it contains dire warnings about interactions with NT and I don't have time to figure them out right now. (The OS is Win2000, which is based on NT.)

I also got a delivery from the beer co-op this week. Looks like an interesting assortment. There are two beers in the mix that I don't personally like, but I have friends who do. (The beer co-op is a method of sampling lesser-known beers in a state that requires that you buy beer by the case.)

Ralph's D&D game was Wednesday night. It was fun as usual. I think we need to come up with a heuristic for communicating what is important and what's not without giving things away, though. We were about to embark on a journey that would take a week and a half to two weeks. We spent a while discussing travel arrangements, how much gear we were carrying, where supply points were along the way, etc. As a player, I expected encounters along the way and possibly even some "weather hazards" (it's getting on toward winter). Ralph had planned to get us to our destination that night, though, without encounters along the way. But he couldn't just say to the players "this doesn't matter", or that would have given this away. On the other hand, we could have saved half an hour of preparations.

Last night before getting the computer I went to services and ended up leading them. (The rest of the people there voted me most likely to succeed, or something.) I really wish the associate rabbi would call or something if he's not going to show up to lead, rather than leaving us to figure this out. This is the second time this has happened recently. (The senior rabbi is out of town; normally he does this one.) I almost didn't show up, but the store was open late enough that I could so I did. (I usually go.)

Speaking of leading services, I'll be doing that again next Friday at Tree of Life.

Sunday afternoon we are going up to Cooper's Lake to paint the Pennsic house, assuming it doesn't rain. We're just doing the exterior, so this shouldn't take that long. I don't have the carved bits for the interior done yet. (Actually, they're not even drawn yet.) I hope to make and apply those in July sometime. (The house is a re-creation of a building in Cordova around the year 950 CE. They did lots of decoratively-carved stucco. I can fake that. :-) )

I think my doc build is done now.

Drivers of school buses should set better examples. A couple days ago I watched a school bus be the third vehicle in a line of traffic that was running a red light. Sheesh. (In case you're wondering, no I was not at the head of that line. I was at the head of the line of traffic that had a green light but couldn't safely move.)

Last night was Temple Sinai's annual meeting. Doing back-to-back meetings for two different congregations led to exercises in comparative anthropology. Tree didn't really give a "state of the congregation" talk; Sinai did but they painted a picture that's a tad more optimistic than the facts really support. (Nothing untoward, mind -- just PR spin.) I wonder which is worse -- no info or sanitized info.

This Shabbat it's my turn to bake for the kiddush. I wimped out; you can get these "instant cookies" that you just break apart and stick on ungreased cookie sheets. I'm not usually that much of a slug.

Much to my annoyance, I learned today that the java compiler isn't as smart as I thought it was. Suppose your class has a method that returns an instance of your class. Suppose you subclass that and want to override this method to return an instance of the subclass. If Base.fn() returns a Base and Derived.fn() returns a Derived, you would think that the compiler would be able to tell, given code such as "Derived d = Derived.fn()", that it should use the overload that returns a Derived and not try to return a Base, right? You'd think so, and I'm told the spec says so (though I haven't checked), but apparently you'd be wrong. Bah.

We watched the season finale for "West Wing" tonight. Some interesting developments, some disappointments. The end of the CJ story was particularly annoying to me. But overall, I'm enjoying this show. We've only been watching it for a couple months. (We encountered it for the first time over Pesach.) I haven't gotten around to the season finale of "Enterprise" yet.

Dani is talking semi-seriously about buying the first season of "West Wing" on DVD. This must mean he's thinknig about getting a DVD player -- which must mean that he's inclined toward that TV upgrade. The (new) TV room is currently under some construction, but that should be done soon. Then we can do furniture.

Our D&D party (in Ralph's game) has some down time between now and the next session. Real Soon Now I need to figure out how my character is spending it. I'm really enjoying being in a D&D campaign again; it had been a long, long time (12 years or so). I like to think that I'm a better player now than I was then, just due to general maturity, though I don't actually know that.

We had an On the Mark practice this afternoon. I think we're in good shape for the con in two weeks. Now as soon as they tell us whether we're doing one long concert or two shorter ones, I can finalize the set list.

Soon we have to actually have a discussion with our prospective new members, and I have to photocopy music and stuff for them.

Dani is a sweetie. He had already agreed (a while back) to pick me up at the airport Sunday afternoon/evening when my plane gets in from the con. Tonight I asked him if he would take me to the airport Friday morning before he goes to work, and he agreed. That saves me either $45 or a lot of time mucking with public transit. (My plane leaves at 10:30, which means I'm supposed to be there at 8:30.)

Passover is in a few weeks, which means we'll be in Toronto for several days. I wonder if Dani's relatives have figured out who's doing the seders yet. I need to remember to contact my cat-sitter.

I really enjoyed Ralph's D&D game on Wednesday. It started off light and kind of silly but ended with Plot Development that involves my character's home town. I've commented on this game in Ralph's journal because he wrote about it, but I hadn't gotten around to mentioning it here yet. I still have to produce the Larissa's-eye view of recent events for the game log.

The observation (from Ralph) that characters can cooperate in creating magic items has opened up all sorts of possibilities. I wasn't going to take item-creation feats; as a sorceress I don't get that many spells, so these feats seem limited. But if someone else can supply the spell... so I took Craft Wondrous Item and am now trying to figure out what things are useful, available, and affordable with my current level and resources. Aside from my familiar's mage-armor gadget, which was my top priority.

Next weekend Seth and Karen come to visit. Yay! I am looking forward to this.

I've been thinking about Larissa's next spell, and it has raised a question that I'd like feedback on. Recall that I haven't really played mages before, excluding those early munchkin days where factors like role-playing and deep ethical musings and stuff were just Not Issues. Maybe there is a well-undertstood answer, or maybe there isn't.

Can a good character use summoning spells?

The answer would seem to depend on how summoning works. Is Summon Monster, as the name implies, really a summoning spell -- plucking a creature out of its natural habitat and teleporting it here to fight for you? Or is it a cojuration, a fabrication that is formed out of the ether and will dissipate a few rounds later when the spell runs out?

If it is a summoning, then does the creature have its normal level of free will that is being surpressed by the spell, or is it a mindless automiton? As the description is written, the creature will fight for you without question -- but if it's a summoned creature, is that achieved through coercion?

Other issues come up if it is a summoning and not a conjuration. Is it right to send a summoned creature into a situation that will very likely be fatal to it? Does one have an obligation to heal one's summoned servants? (I would argue that if the spell is a cojuration and not a summoning, the answers are yes and no, respectively.)

And what is one to make of the fact that the bulk of the creatures that can be summoned, at least at low levels, are of evil alignment?

(For those LJers who are in the game, I also sent this question to the mailing list.)

You can find anything on the web.

I'm in a D&D game that Ralph is running, and my character (a sorceress) just got a familiar, an owl. So Ralph asked me "how big do you want your owl to be?". Um, err, I'm a city kid; I don't actually know much about owls. Not to worry; Ralph found the owl site for me. Check out the species list for more owl types than I thought existed...

This is a pointer to Ralph's D&D journal.

We played our first game last night. I had a lot of fun. I'm playing a sorceress who has a particular interest in, as I'm calling it, "applied physics". She's the sort of person who really did climb up onto the roof with a feather and a rock to see which would hit the ground first -- except that she got inconsistent results because she found herself rooting for the feather and inadvertantly manipulating events. (The spell that looks the most intriguing to me right now -- that I'm elligible for -- is Magic Hand, which is small-scale TK.) Ralph actually let me take a knowledge skill in this area (physics or the like, I mean); we need to refine the definition over time.

I'm playing a high-charisma character. This is so unlike me that I'm finding it a challenge. Does this mean that I should be trying to take on some sort of leadership role? (I don't think so, really.) Does it mean that I should be trying to be (or at least project) "likability" to eeryone around me? The character is a little on the introverted side right now, but that's because I am.

It'll be fun to see what develops.