cat /proc/claus

Today I read two pretty amazing articles from ChattyDM, in which he describes how his skills as a RPG DM have helped him in his teaching job (and vice versa). Part1 - Part2 . I think this post really resonated with me, because it made me reflect about what I like in teaching, and what I like in Dungeon Mastering. I think I could extend the ideas presented there by making the connection between something else that I like - organizing events/parties, and preparing adventures/campaigns. I like brainstorming for group activities, and I think I use the same process for these as I do for brainstorming set piece encounters and scenes in my adventures, for example, but before reading those articles, I never really made the connection.

I get a lot of cool things from reading Chatty’s blog. One of those was the “Swords and Sorcery” D&D retroclone, which I had the chance to play with my Brazilian group today. Instead of re-running the great dungeon in the “Quick Start Guide” from scratch, I decided that I would expand the dungeon as it was left by the Daydream group last time I played it with them, in a sort of “consistent world between groups” system that I always wanted to try my hand at. It worked pretty nicely, because the group really got immersed in the changes left in the world by the previous group!

The group was composed of a Fighting Man, a Spell User and a Cleric (I didn’t allow humanoids, because I don’t really like the S&W version, and I want to work on my own house rules for them). The group decided that they were kids from the village near the ruins, and got some money recently from working themselves as hirelings for other groups and wanted to use their earnings to assemble their own expedition. They were heavy on the “character roleplaying”, and insisted with me that they only wanted to hire hirelings which were young kids, because they thought regular mercenaries would not respect them. I rolled a few village bullies and misfits, and the result was a small gang of the worst of the village, that wanted to try and explore the dungeon by themselves after hearing of the riches that the previous group of professional adventurers had gotten from it.

After a little more amusing RPing in the village, which included a visit to the local grumpy witch (who was grumpy because of the forceful haggling of the previous group), they headed down to the dungeon. They turned some undead in the first room, and explored bravely deeper and deeper, door after door. While they were heeding my warnings about the dangers of old school D&D, and had a hireling prodding the floor for pit traps in front of them with a pole weapon (I loved how the player convinced the minion to do that - “You need to poke the ground to see if there is any hidden treasure below the rocks!”), the “4E spoiling” showed up a bit by their bravery :-D. Eventually they got to the “Windy Room”, which I had modified a bit by making the trap cause 1d6 damage to characters who were blown against the walls.

What happened next was deserving of a scene in an Indiana Jones movie - except, without Indy. The entire group sees the room full of “treasure”, and “no danger”, and decides to get in, all at once. When they all enter the room, the windy trap picks up, and throws almost everyone to the walls. The Magic user instantly breaks his neck and dies, along with another hireling, much to the horror of the Fighting man’s player. The surviving members struggled against the wind do get out of the room as fast as they could, then they decided to quickly leave the dungeon with the bodies of their comrades.

The game ended around here. Two of the players were willing to go back in (including the MU player, who had just rolled one of the surviving hirelings into PC-dom), but I could see that the third player wasn’t really that into it, so we did some board gaming next.

The “all groups explore the same dungeon” idea worked really well, but since we won’t get much time to continue playing S&W (since we still have to finish our 4E campaign), I’m not really sure when I’ll be able to pick up on this dungeon again. I could try to start a third group, but with dreaded January closing in fast, that is just not possible.

Also, in spite of the lack of updates, I haven’t completely abandoned the ETD project yet. I had some serious optimization issues earlier this week, when I tried to implement some routines for painting walls. I’ll have to read the python tutorial carefully, because I’m almost sure the function is slow because I’m using some Java-isms or C-isms when I could use some more efficient data structures without much fuss. Expect a more detailed report soonish.

They say that for every problem there is a solution which is simple, elegant, and wrong. I found mine today while working on ETD, and I also find the correct solution (which is also elegant, although a bit less simple).

One of the rules of the “Tower Defense” games is that you cannot completely lock the path that the enemies take from the entrance to the exit of your maze. This path may be as long as it takes, but it must exist. In my implementation, I’m writing in each cell of the path the cost to go to the exit, so that each enemy does not need to calculate their exit paths all the time. Then I have to have a “locking detection” routine that detects if placing an aditional tower in a given location will lock down the maze or not, to prevent that tower from being put.

My first idea was to see what are the distance values of the cells the new tower is going to occupy. If those values were not repeated anywhere else in the maze, that means that that path is a bottleneck, and cannot be blocked. Thinking this solution for a bit while showed that it was wrong (exercise to the reader :-P). The new solution is thus: The entrance and the exit of the maze bissect the surrounding walls into two groups. I give each of this group a flag, and I check each tower when it is put down to see if it connects to one of the groups. If it does, I give it the same flag as the group. If a tower connects BOTH groups, then it means that it blocks the path from the entrance to the exit. I only have to deal with the special case of “island” towers, by giving them a third, “neutral”, group flag, which is painted 1 or 2 when one of the groups reaches the island.

I have not finished implementing the above, but I have implemented most everything else that I needed from the map. I did not have as much time to program today as I had yesterday because I used the bright sunny day to walk around a little bit, clean my home (including washing the dreaded bath), and meeting my friend Dionisio. All in all, I had about 4 hours to hack away at ETD today, and I think I managed quite a bit in this time. Tomorrow I’ll finish implementing the maps, then a bit of tower logic, then link the genome with the tower and the map I hope!