In the past couple of years I have not only been playing a lot of board games, but I have been working on rebuilding my collection of board games after the minimalism purge of the noughties. Being a somewhat obsessive statistician, I had a spreadsheet where I was keeping track of all of these games. But I had some problems with the spreadsheet, and so I wanted to redo it, but that was going to be a lot of work.
I really enjoy computer programming. It’s what I started doing when I first retired, and what I still do because it brings me joy. Over the years I have collected a file of programming project ideas. One of them is based on a quote that I can’t remember the source of. It was something like “to learn how to program games, take six simple, classic games and program them.” I was originally going to do this is Pygame, since I’m mainly a Python programmer, but then I learned about Unity. I decided to do the six games thing in Unity, but Unity doesn’t support Python, so I decided to learn C# (pronounced “cee-sharp”), which it does support.
Back in March I finished a two month project to clean out the excess stuff from my condo. This is the latest episode in a long see saw of my life. I’m hoping it’s the final episode of the see saw, but I doubt it.
Last week I finished the Nand to Tetris online course taught by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken, after seven months of working on it (part time). This is a course where you design and computer from the ground up, starting with the smallest of logic gates. Then you program the computer, creating a simplified version of the Java programming language and writing an entire operating system in that language. I’ve been programming for decades, and still found it to be a fascinating exploration of what is going on behind the scenes.
I recently completed the Science of Well Being course on Coursera, taught by Professor Laurie Santos. This is sometimes called the Yale Happiness course. I did think there were many useful things in the course, but there was also some poor reasoning and misunderstanding of statistics. I think it is a decent course to take, but you should take the claims of the course with a grain of salt.
If you are standing in the Dome of Heaven, you appear to be on a large landscape, with a tall dome arching overhead. On the interior surface of the Dome, there appears to be more land (and more oceans, and more clouds). The sages teach that the Dome is actually a sphere, and the dome-like appearance is a natural illusion.
Continue reading “A Short Introduction to the Dome of Heaven”
So I’m working on the Gygax 75 challenge by Ray Otis. In part 2, the surrounding area, you make an encounter table for the area. The table uses a 2d6 roll, and he advises putting the weaker encounters in the middle of the range, so they are more common.
That’s all well and good, but I have a trade road moving through my area. I was thinking I should have one table for the road and one table for off the road. But there would be some overlap between the two tables, and I was trying to think of a way to make one table. Then I remembered the dice mechanics of Silent Death (an old spaceship combat game), and came up with 3M tables. Although I would not be at all surprised if someone else came up with this idea previously and called it something else.
My goal with these house rules is to make a more clear and balanced D&D that is still playable in Roll20. They are not set in stone, and may change at any time. However, I will do my best not to change them in a way that screws over players.
There was a post on reddit about moderating the player vs. player randomness when rolling ability scores. There was some sentiment that if you want players to be evenly matched, don’t roll; only roll if you’re okay with some players having better abilities.
I initially agreed with that assessment, and posted some stats about the expected variability. But then I realized that it is valid to want different levels of variability, so I went through my list of ways to roll abilities, and did some simulations to try and find a range of possibilities with different variability between players. Continue reading “Player vs. Player Variability When Rolling Abilities”
So I’ve always wanted to make a 20 level random dungeon, ever since I was in middle school with the random dungeon tables in the AD&D DMG. Well, now that I’m retired I have some time on my hands, so I did just that. This is exactly the sort of silly, stupid shit I intended to do in my retirement. However, I used the tables in the 5E DMG. Continue reading “Random Dungeon”