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.

Recently I have read a news article at ACM’s website about the ICPC, which reminded me why I usually hate the media. How facts are casually distorted in order to make the truth “sexier”, sometimes even when it is not needed to.

The ICPC is a programming contest hosted by ACM. In it, students from all over the world get together to try and solve a large number of very hard programming problems in 5 hours. Each team has 3 students and one computer, so the contest involves not just the ability to read a problem, figure out which algorithm will solve it, and implement that algorithm correctly in a short time, but also how to best manage the single computer among the three students (you have to figure out and write down most of your code in paper before sitting down to program to save time). The participants are the best teams of their respective local competitions, young people with a great knack for maths and programming. The contest itself and the associated events were really fun.

However, obviously this was not enough for whoever wrote the article. They had to say things like that “the participants did the work of a traffic controller”, or that “the contest challenges participants to solve real world problems”. Really? Maybe the contest has changed a lot in the last 5 years, but the problems where all mathematical problems (longest path, geometric problems, search, constraint satisfaction, etc) with some “stories” thrown into the mix to test the players reading comprehension. *Sigh*

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On the other news, this week will be dedicated to writing my second journal paper, to complete the publication requirements for my PhD at the university of Tokyo. Allegedly I managed to get enough data for the publication with last week’s experiments, now comes the inglorious tasks of transforming all of that in an interesting and engaging document which won’t be criticized too heavily by the all mighty anonymous reviewers. I only have one week until the deadline of 31st, and I have a lot of other stuff to do in the same period, so I’m getting a bit worried that I won’t be able to make it. But if I don’t make it in time, I can still submit it for another, non-Special Issue Journal, a few weeks later - with the negative side that the lack of a fixed, externally imposed deadline would reduce my motivation.

(why am I posting in my blog instead of working? I’m trying to amp myself into writing mode by sitting down and writing here instead of reading a dozen different news and getting anxious - like the news I just blogged about above :-P).

You may have noticed the new item in the right sidebar in my blog. I have opened up a twitter account.

What is twitter? Twitter is like a mini-blog, where you can post short messages (up to 140 characters), describing what you are doing at the moment. It is supposed to have a simple, clean interface.

Because of the simple interface and the size limit, I’m probably going to try to use it to keep track of my usage of time. Recently, I have noticed that my productivity has fallen by leaps and bounds and I can’t keep track of the time I have been spending in very simple tracks. Maybe by forcing myself to think “what am I doing right now?” every few hours, I can help avoiding losing myself in endless bouts of slashdotting or blogging. I hope.

Also, it should make it easier those interested in my life (hello mom, dad!) to keep track of me - I recognize that I have been doing a terrible job at keeping this blog updated. It is easier to do the trivial posts in my 140 letter twitter update, and leave the blog for when I have some inspired idea.

Follow me!

This weekend, I ran the 12th session of my 4e campaign here in Japan. This campaign is based in my Vlachia world, which is the scenario where I have DM’ed all my D&D campaigns (AD&D, 3.0, 3.5, 4e) since teenagerhood. The 4 players are all Brazilian students in japan like me. We play once or twice every month since august last year, and this has been a great way for me to kill whatever I may have of homesickness.

Anyway, I thought about sharing my views on some resources I have been using in this campain.

Firstly, and specially, I’ll talk about the Obsidian Portal website. They host RPG campaigns, by offering a wiki/blog mix format that works really well to store NPC information/Session information and to make it available for the whole group. I have been slowly transfering the info from my paper notebooks into that site (slower than I wanted). It is cool also to browse other people’s campaigns to hunt for ideas. There are free and paid memberships, but other than the free membership being allowed only one map online, it is completely usable.

Also, I have recently bought the Player’s Handbook 2 for the 4e system. I was really curious about some of its classes, like the bard and the sorcerer, and I wanted to make it available to my players. My opinion of the book is this: the new classes, items and options are a great addition to my game, but the book could be much, much better organized. For instance, something that sorely lacks is a good page where all the classes are described and compared together. Crossreference is also weak - the entire subsection describing the shaman goes by without explaining many details of its spirit companion - the class defining feature. All in all, it is worth to buy the book, but it does feel shoddily made.

Searchs on google for typesetting pseudocode in latex usually refer you to the algorithm/algorithmic package. So it seems that it is the most recent/popular/complete package.

Yet somehow it is not included at all in any package in ubuntu, and it was reasonably difficult (read, it took me 5 or 6 google searches and around 20 minutes) to find the repository for the package online to download it.

So let’s change the meta. Here is the link.

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On other news, I’m looking for people with Mario Kart Wii to exchange friendcodes, to play online and mainly compare scores for their monthly challenges.