Dungeon Master Forum

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee indeeeeeeed! Sadly my old cool graphics card went 'futt' so I switched to a lesser card, and it's fan's being funny. So at some point I might need to go back to a cooler card, and just clean dust out of my computer more regularly,. Which is all the time, cause this place is dusty


*crosses fingers more for the not burning the place down rather than OT and clearance*


Speaking of clearance, time to go to work and hacksaw a side stand for my bathroom. Apparentlly the builders decided to have my sink just <----> much clser to the wall than anyone else usually does Still, beautiful morning, so it's not the biggest hassle to havew an excuse to go outside. Especially when there's an area of old basing I've been meaning to find again in sun for aaages.

OK! - I understood the bit about Radeon but the rest of the stuff I leave to the peeps at the shop

Well. That was annoying. I install new power supply and gfx card. Lo ad behold, everything fits perfectly, decent amount of room (although the stupid power supply has amillion cords I have no use for with these annoying sleeves that make em hard to bend, and I had to zip tie em out of the way to make sure they werent touching a board or covering a fan).

I plug it in and flame-on. I get "no signal" thru my HDMI monitor/TV, although it sounds like it is at least partially booting, the fans go and the HD spins and everything lights up, but theres no signal on the monitor. And after about a min it starts doing a post beep code(Ian- its basically saying *something* is wrong in the bios. KInda like the OBDII codes on a car when your engine light goes on, you plug in a box into the car and it tells you whats wrong.).

So I of course, unplug, check power connections to make sure everything seated and I didnt miss anything and try again. Same thing. So, not knowing exactly what the diff post codes are, I assume its related to the video card, that the bios doesnt like it for some unknown reason, which doesnt seem to make sense but that and power supply are only thing I messed with. So I pull it and reinstall the old one. Same thing. So now Im annoyed. I pull power supply and reinstall old one, thinking maybe its a faulty supply even though I was running it with sidewall off to see what was going on and all the LEDs and fans were lit and spinning. Same thing. No signal and after about a min *beep* *beep* *beep* pause *beep* *beep* *beep*

So then I get on my PS3 and get on the net (thank god even though the browser sucks and using a controller to type sucks even worse it is a godsend in times like this) and look it up. It says its a memory error, reseat memory and if it continues, start pulling the chips till you find which ones causing it. So I poke all my ram cards. They all seem in there but I push on em anyway, hoping to god I didnt just somehow fry my ram (Im pretty neurotic about making sure theres no static and stuff). I turn power on again And lo and behold it boots fine, and here I am.

Of course, the new vid card and power supply are sitting on the damn floor next to me instead of being in my comp, my cat wanted to see what was going on and I woulnt let him, so he got mad and now I'm missing 2 of 5 tower screws cuz he batted them around, my sidewall is just leaning against the tower instead of being attached, and its 3:30 am and I have a splitting headache. Oh, and when snipping the zip tie ends I accidentally cut the shit out of my finger and bled all over(fortunately not inside the tower).

The only thing I think coulda possibly caused that is I must somehow bumped the ram, and it loosened not enough so I noticed when I went to make sure everything was seated properly but enough that it caused a post code beep. I'm gonna try again tomorrow, but that tweaked me out and now Im afraid to do it. Ive built 4 comps from scratch, and installed numerous video cards, ram, hard drives and power supplies and *never* had something like this happen. I kept on thinking "oh no, this *will* not happen again. Especially since I need my comp for my job. ANd entertainment. And basically my life.

In any case I'll be busy tomorrow for most of the day cuz my moms coming into town for mothers day and then I have to go reinstall everything. Hm. Do you think I should uninstall my current video card drivers first, and install the new ones or wait until I get the card installed and booted?

So most likely no updates till mon.

Yeah, computers are evil and have a wonderful habit of having errors never seen before or since. I ended up chasing a fault in drivers for my old reliable wireless network card when I got this new computer, and ended up fighintg for ages and then had to give in and put my new computer right by the router in the living room instead of in my room. Ended up the wireless card decided to fry itself when it was taken out/put it

I would have guessed somehting plugged in or pulled out with the codes, glad it was just the ram getting knocked. Good luck for tomorrow, but it seounds like you've nailed it. Blood sacrifices do work! And cats are the evil servants that demanded extra tower screws.

Hope you feel better by the time you read this!

beowuuf wrote:Blood sacrifices do work!

A genius observation.

Good luck with the hardware upgrade again, then - and try to sacrifice electrons to the silicon gods instead of blood!

WOOOO HOOO! It worked! Of course he annoying thing is I cant get the sidewall back on completely due to al the stupid power cords with their sleeves coming out of the power supply. But nothin a little judicious duct tape wont fix.

Updates tomorrow.

*goes to see if the Witcher 2 will actually run now without bogging down*

Yay! (aside from stupid cables getting in the way)

Well. KInd of ironic, but the worst of the worst happened, windows got corrupted and I had to do a factory image reinstall. The ironic part is that it had absolutely *nothing* to do with my new card. IT had to do with me bumping the surge supressor and shutting it off when windows was booting and corrupting the ever living shit out of it. Hm. Well, at least it was only 2 months of lost data. Not like the last time. Sigh.

Evil computers


And I see OB and Ian get the taste of evil ratties! Though swarms not giant ones this time!

I was wondering if you'd read that....There might be giant ones though...maybe.

Don't give her ideas Beo! Small rats are fine!

Btw I am really enjoying the campaign - I like the unusual surroundings, the characters (even if Artaxes does not!), and the descriptions.

Yeah, Artaxes is the normal one!

Indeed he is, though he still gets to be more ornary than ordinary!

Regarding ACP:Even in 4th edition and 3.5 ACP doens't affect inititive. It only affects like five or seven skills that are directly related to your body movement. Anything that pertains to the speed of your thinking/reactions (like reflexes or initiative) or your manual dexterity (like sleight of hand and ranged attacks) is unaffected. Off the top of my head, the skills are climb, jump, swim, move silently, tumble, balance and...grrrr... ok, looked it up, the last two are escape artist and actually it does affect sleight of hand (I guess sleight of hand does cover using your body and being sneaky, so restrictive/loud armour does affect it)

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/armor.htm

I had to look up the definition of "ornary", but yes that does fit!
So noted about ACP.

Don't you mean "ornery"?

Possibly. But no need to get so ornery about it.

Beo has to put a quarter(or the equivalent monetary unit you guys have) in the "4th Jar" for mentioning 4th! And I'm going OOT (out of town, kinda like out of char but farther away then that!) for the weekend. I'll try and get at least one more update off while I'm gone, but I dont know how likely that is considering my dad mostly uses a mac and I can ever get Safari to display this site correctly.

(Yeah, I know, macs safari...yeeeesh. I don't understand it.)

Even if I do update, unfortunately, the map wont change till I get back, so we're just gonna have to do grid notations where everything is.

:p

Can I mention 5th?

NO! hehe. Ooo! I'm on my dads new comp. Its an Asus AMD 8150 octocore with like 16 gig of ram, and some geforce crazy vid card that can run 5 monitors(dont know enough about nvidia to know what it is, exactly). My brother built it for him. He uses it for *work*. I want to play Skyrim on it! Or pretty much anything! Its name in Windows is "frankenstein".

It makes me jealous!

Is it bolted down to the floor? :p

No, but unfortunately its big enough that I could call it a sibling. Seriously. I'm 5 feet tall and weigh about 90lbs. That tower is about 3 feet tall and weighs about 60 lbs. My quad-core has processor envy. After going back home, I was like "Oooo, its so tiny!"

Nice crit OB! Hope the big eyed creature in the wagon doens't get too mad

Ok, so I never liked the way crits were handled in 3/.5. From the d20 SRD:

"When you make an attack roll and get a natural 20 (the d20 shows 20), you hit regardless of your target’s Armor Class, and you have scored a threat. The hit might be a critical hit (or "crit"). To find out if it’s a critical hit, you immediately make a critical roll—another attack roll with all the same modifiers as the attack roll you just made. If the critical roll also results in a hit against the target’s AC, your original hit is a critical hit. (The critical roll just needs to hit to give you a crit. It doesn’t need to come up 20 again.) If the critical roll is a miss, then your hit is just a regular hit.

A critical hit means that you roll your damage more than once, with all your usual bonuses, and add the rolls together. Unless otherwise specified, the threat range for a critical hit on an attack roll is 20, and the multiplier is ×2. "

I always *hated* that you had to roll twice and if you miss on the second you get nothing beyond a normal hit. Especially since you dont have to double roll a 1 to find out if its a crit miss. 1s and 20s rarely come up (unless youre me and beo in the swamp ) and should always be something special. So beo and I discussed it. This was what we decided:

Basically, a nat 20 always gives you x2(double). And if you roll a confirm, the DM rolls 1d5 (ahh beauty of IC) and specifies whether head, l arm, r arm, l leg, r leg or was hit.And there are penalties for each, taht last d4 rounds. The penalties are head= staggered arm = drop whatever is held and take a -1 hit or -1 ac (if a shield) and leg -10ft move for each. The penalties are not cumulative, so if you hit someone in the arm twice, they dont get a -2 hit penalty.

All this will be done by the DM, so it wont add any extra dice rolling on you guys part, ill be the one doing it. All you'd have to do is note your penalty if you get one, and Id tell you in narration when it ends. I just think it adds more flavor, and it makes how harsh I make nat 1s even out

What do you guys think?

The discussion actually came from thinking about called shots. I perosnally think criticals already covered the idea of your character always attempting to hit the best area they could, and so this idea allowed crits to be cool, and also add the 'called shot' flavour.


The edition that will not be named used maximum damage on the dice, and some special abilities or item abilities also added damage or other triggers on a crit. Just so you know

Right, sounds might fine... Just need to roll a nat 20 now, hmmm?

Well, the crit rules as-written sound rather excessively complicated, so I like that you're changing them . I would also agree with Wuffy that a crit hit is technically an automatic called shot since you're doing the most damage you can and therefore would be hitting the most vulnerable point. DnD doesn't have called shot mechanics so this would probably be more of a narrative thing - in Wuffy's game, I always gave a narrative description of which area of the body Iw as trying ot hit on the fwe occasions I actually tried to hit something - I figure it gives the GM a guide to describing exactly how I hit/miss (depending on what I roll of course). So yeah, I just like the plain old "roll a crit and you do max damage" thing - nice and simple .

Sounds fine with me. I never liked the second attack roll either (I never played a game with it, but it was used behind the scenes in NWN).

I'm an AD&D 2ed player. We set out our own critical hit chart.
A natural 20 was an automatic hit, as it should be. Then we would roll the d20 a second time to determine whether or not it was a critical hit.
1-5 was no extra damage
6-16 was double damage
17-19 was triple damage
20 was instant kill on enemies. A PC that was hit with a double 20 would take 50+5d10 damage. If they survived the 50+5d10 damage, they would have to make a system shock check to see if the shock their system took killed them outright.

Only high level characters would use called shots. Because of the -4 penalty, a low to mid level character had a harder time being successful at calling shots. Called shots pull hit locations into play. This also brings out the percentage modifier.
This is what we used
Torso 50%
L Arm 10%
R Arm 10%
L Leg 10%
R leg 10%
Head 5%
Shield, if applicable, 5%
If no shield, the extremities get 1% added to their total.

What happens if you're fighting a quadruped, or giant spider, or snake, or something with wings, or something that basically isn't a standard humanoid? What if it's a humanoid with a tail (like a lizardman or something)? Hit locations would need some rewording there, I think .