Usage: $ average.sh filename.* > filename.avg

sum=`ls -l $1 | wc -l`
tf=`ls $1 | tail -n 1`
fld=`tail -n 1 $tf | wc -w`

count=1
while [ $count -lt $(($fld + 1)) ]; do
paste -d” ” $1 | nawk -v s=”$sum” -v f=”$count” ‘{
for(i=0;i< =s-1;i++)
{
ta=f
tta=tta+$ta
}
print tta/s
tta=0
}' >> tmp$count
count=$(($count + 1))
done
paste -d” ” tmp*
rm tmp*

Bonus points for anyone who can make the above code simpler.

One of the research topics addressed in my laboratory is the use of Evolutionary Computation to assist in music composition. Basically, a EC algorithm generates multiple small pieces of music, which are evaluated by the human composer, and those evaluation scores are sent back to the computer, which try to generate a new generation of pieces similar to those which received a high score. This particular framework of evolutionary computation is called “Interactive Evolutionary Computation” (IEC) [1], because the fitness function is a human operator, and not a algorithmic function.

A big issue IEC is “user burden”. Evolutionary computation is based on scoring multiple candidate solutions, many times - when this evaluation is done by a human, instead of a computer program, the user may get tired after scoring too many individuals. To avoid that, it is important to either use the least amount of evaluations as possible, or make the evaluation as quick and painless to the user as possible - a lot of research has been done in both areas.

Now, the idea - how about using the concept of crowd sourcing to IEC? Instead of having one user evaluating the songs, we would have multiple users evaluating them in a asynchronous manner. The example we thought up would be a website where, say, mobile ring tones are generated by EC, with downloads and user evaluation being used as scores. Every few days(?), these values would be used to generate new tones, which would replace the old ones. This could not only generate more interesting tones, but also be able to “track” or “follow” fashions or memes of users.

A quick google search on the above keywords seemed to reveal that this is still a new idea (nothing relevant shows up on the first page for “crowd-sourcing IEC” and “crowd-sourcing composition” only show non-EC approaches [2]). Try it while it is fresh. Brainstorming in the comments is welcome

Links
[1] IEC on Wikipedia
[2] Crowdsourcing Composition

I must say that it is a fine idea that has helped me a lot in my recent games. The players want to disrobe the evil priestess, tie her to the end of a 10 foot pole and use her as a trap detector? Yes! They want to honestly join the creepy cult of strange gods being built by the shady NPC? Yes! They want to completely ignore two tribes fighting for “destiny” in a forgotten temple and head first to another ruin they had heard about hoping things will be easier there? Yes! They want to try and placate the raging alligator with a whip and a chair, circus style, instead of fighting to the death? Yes! They want to charge and attack into that NPC-GHOST? Yes! Yes! Yes! In my experience, all these “yes” brought their reward to the game.

But saying yes is not only good for the DMs. I believe that players, too, should take “Say Yes” into their minds when sitting at a table to play an RPG.

One recent example happened recently. Two friends of mine were visiting town, and I got together part of my regular group to play a one shot S&W dungeon to them. I have this one particular dungeon that I like to run every time I need a quick one-shot, adding a few new rooms/changing some rooms. One of the players, realizing it was the same dungeon I always run for one-shots, asked if he could use the same character he used “the last time” - that character was one of the few surviving members of a previous expedition. I thought that would be a great idea: The surviving character, after years dealing with the deaths of his friends, eventually decides to face his fears and finish his business with the dungeon, mounting a proper hired expedition this time. It tied beautifully all the other members of the group into the game.

Then, just as the game began, before anything happened, that player who was supposed to have called/hired everyone else, and to lead them to the dungeon decides that after all he is just too afraid of dying and don’t want to go into the dungeon any more. Cue meta-roleplaying of everyone trying to encourage him to change his mind. Ooops…

A few other similar cases. In a recent investigation game I was playing, one of the players was paralysed with fear that the group we were investigating already knew about our presence. The player would shot down every lead by other players and the GM with “they already know we’re here, they would be prepared for that”, effectively stalemating the game. In an old 3e game I ran, the group was a bunch of kids lost in a forest. One of the kids was a bookworm who had dropped her favorite book in the woods when the group had to run from a bunch of monsters, and the player decided that the girl would sit down and waste away because “that book was her life”.

That is the thing that gets me. A Role Playing game is a story about someone who enters in an adventure. But not only interesting things (the adventure) has to happen to the character, but the character must be also active in regards to the adventure itself. Of course, this does not mean that the players are supposed to follow every hint and lead that the DM throws before them just as they stand, but this does mean that refusing to act at all should not be an option. After all, we don’t have a movie about the teenager who thought the old geezer in the white lab coat was too geeky and refused his plea to help testing a time machine.

Of course a GM can try to adapt the story around players that insist in saying no. But just as in the case of saying yes or no as a GM, a gaming table moves much smoothier when both sides are saying yes and improvising around each other. The RPG is much more fun as a group dance than as a one man’s tap-dance performance in front of an audience.

Actually, the campaign was not supposed to end so soon, even though it did have a definite, planned end, but since two key players were leaving in 2 months, and myself am leaving Japan by October, I decided to pull the plug and wrap things up. It is something new to me, to actually bring an RPG campaign to a grand finalle! (both as a DM and as a player!)

As I have written last time, the group was exploring and abandoned island, in search for the riches left by a forgotten civilization, promised by a crazed NPC. They had managed to climb the highest mountain in the island and get a general view of their surroundings, which revealed to them the location of the old capital of the lost civilization (think Mayan Pyramids). They decided that whatever treasure this island might have, it would certainly be hidden in that island.

As they followed the river north towards the location of the old capital, the woods around they started to get creepier and creepier. Every so often, they had the impression of being observed. The weather was becoming darker. The group stopped as they heard voices coming from the woods - ghosts where about them!

This is where it gets interesting - one by one, the adventurers were taken by illusions. Each of them saw themselves as “king”, facing some sort of catastrophe. Some of the group members dove deep into the illusions, trying to solve the problems posed before them. Others tried to fight what they saw as “not truth”. Those that fought the illusion eventually became freed, and found themselves on a misty cemetery, with their companions heading slowly but surely towards a large stone structure, while shouting whatever they were saying in their dreams.

Afraid of the stone structure, the waking members of the group managed to stop and free the sleeping ones before they entered there. They decided then to investigate the stone structure, which seemed to be the centre of the strange powers which were about them. Inside, they found a large and very pompous tomb, surrounded by statues and minor tombs. On top of the big tomb was a ghost in the trappings of a king, tied by some sort of ethereal ropes.

The group promptly charged to attack that ghost! (Shoot first! Ask questions later!)

A big battle followed, in which ghostly defenders of the king attacked the party, as they tried to destroy the big ghost in the center of the cemetery. As they hacked into the king’s hitpoints, more and more ghosts assistants would appear, and the king would scream both for help and for freedom. Finally, the group managed to destroy the King’s material form, which sent its servants into sturpor.

At that moment, the ropes that tied the ghost king started forming his body again, and even more ghosts started to appear. While the group decided to stay and fight, Sincearu, the bard, chose to perform a ritual to sanctify the king to the Elder Gods. This ritual made the king stronger, and he started to fight against the magical ropes that bound him. The rest of the group helped Sincearu with his ritual, and soon the ghost King was freed from the magical bounds that kept him controlled.

He revealed to the group that he was the last kind of the ludians, the lost civilization of the island. That he was controlled by some sort of creature from the “World of Nothingness” that they had summoned accidentaly while trying to find a escape route from a catastrophe that was hitting the island. He pleaded with the heroes to help him defeat the creature that held sway over him and the remaining souls from Ludus, and in exchange he would reveal to them the secrets of the island.

==

The game itself worked pretty flawlessly. In the last session, one of the players complained about “senseless fights” where the group was basically walking around the island killing whatever moved in front of them, so I decided I would give them some “good guys” and “bad guys” to ponder about. I did not count, however, with them attacking the King’s ghost so viciously even though I dropped a bunch of hints that he was supposed to be talked to, not fought with.

In the “illusion” encounter, I wanted to try a way to resolve conflicts in the game that did not involve fighting or dice rolls. In the encounter, each player was faced with a facet of the last moments of the life of the king - yeah, they were being “possessed” by ghosts at the time. Each “round” in the illusion was defined by a scene playing out, and the player’s reaction to that scene. For each round, the character would sleepwalk closer to the tomb, and after 6 rounds it would be laying prone at the feet of the ghost king, ready to be sacrificed.

The solution for the illusion scene was to act twice in a row in a way that disbelieved the illusion (the first time would show some cracks in the illusion), although I accepted some alternative solutions, such the bard which decided to invoke his god during the illusion. The one thing that I (unwittingly) did right in this scene was to have the players describe his action, before describing the results of that action moving to the next player’s scene first - two of the players said that this resulted in a nice “suspense” effect. This was probably the highlight of the game.

In the ghost encounter, I wanted to go for a battle encounter where the goal was not to “kill all enemies”, but rather to finish a ritual which would free the king ghost. Ideally one or two characters could concentrate on the ritual near the ghost while the rest had to protect them from the hordes of guardians. However, I did not counted on my players being so bloodthirsty - I guess I did not train them that well. What actually happened is that they managed to beat the ghost king to a pulp WHILE kicking the guardians at the same time. I then decided that i would have hundreds of the ghosts show up at the same time to force the party to flee, but just at that time one of the players figured the solution to the puzzle So I guess no big loss.

Now to prep for part two of the game - infiltrating the Capital!

Unlike many of the “rituals” of Japanese academia, this is one that I don’t find to be completely useless. The professors don’t read your thesis anyway, but at least they have the chance to make some serious questions to your work, and you have the chance to address those questions, which makes a kind of “building together” feeling which pleases me.

So most of my late December and all of January was spent preparing for it, a time where almost all of my other activities where stopped or cancelled. But it was actually worth it. I managed to get rid of 90% of the “drudge” of my thesis, and stablish all that had already been done. The presentation itself was much lighter than I expected, the professors liked my thesis and my results, which gave me a boost in confidence. Instead of making any big criticisms of my thesis, they all just suggested extensions to lines of research that I had already drawn out in the first place.

Now, after a month and a half in this backbreaking pace, I go back to “almost” my normal routine. I got two papers I have to finish by the end of march, so the idea is to do experiments now in Feb, and writing the results next month. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I’m now on “job hunting” season, which means getting my shit together to find out and apply to a few nice places to a post-doc/professor/researcher position. Of course, I also have to finish the changes to my thesis, but I got at least 4 months after these papers, so that is on hold. On the personal side, I want to return to regular geocaching, reading books, bi-weekly RPG games, and python programming. And writing a dozen of late blog articles I wanted to write about.

Heh, maybe I don’t have so much free time as I thought I would, but this is looking like a very interesting last year in Japan, if I can keep myself from procastinating too heavily

The report is broken in two posts - this first one will focus on the fun stuff I did in Okinawa, the second one will focus on “school stuff”.

Okinawa is an island far to the south of the Japanese archipelago. It is considered to be a beach resort by many people. I have actually been here for tourism only in 2006, when I came with the rest of my lab. This time, I decided to try and do some exploring by myself - I downloaded about 20 different geocaching locations around Naha (the main city) to find while I was there.

In the first night, I went out around 22:30, after having dinner with a Sempai (see the other post), with the goal to find about 7 caches within 1km of my hotel. Unfortunately, the force was not with me that night. I could not find the first two caches, and when I went to search for the third one, I somehow managed to lose the papers where I had all cache information written down - I was quite dejected.

In the second day, though, lady luck smiled at me. First thing, I found out that the hotel I was staying in let us use their bicycles for free! That was a big relief, because the bike rental prices in Okinawa were quite above the rest of the country. Now on wheels, I could check more caches before having to head for the conference.

That morning I found two very interesting locations. The first was the Fukushu-en. It is an incredible Chinese garden, with a large waterfall, two ponds, and many environments. You could walk there for hours looking at each small detail. The cache (which I didn’t find), was located somewhere inside a series of artificial caves under the waterfall. Finding these kind of places is 90% of the fun of Geocaching for me The second interesting place I got to that morning was a cache on the top of a hill - the thing is, I had no map to get to the cache, just the GPS coordinates, so I had to try many small streets to find out the correct location, backtracking all the time. While doing that, I ran across an unkempt cemetery, an old church, and an abandoned shack! A true adventure in getting lost :-P.

But not as lost as I got at night. That night I decided to use my extra time to check some caches further away, near the famous Shuri Castle. One problem (or is it a feature?) of geocaching, though, is that by following the coordinates to your location, you take the most straight way to it, which is not necessarily the easiest way. In my case, I ended up crossing this giant hill in the middle of the island, which was also a huge cemetery, in the middle of the night, under light rain. Can you say spooky? At least the way down was this old, old, steep slope which was quite charming (even though It was so steep I couldn’t just ride my bike down). I ended up finding only two of the 4 caches I searched for that night, but the adventure was well worth it. When I got back to my hotel room, I fell asleep almost immediately.

Although not as successful as I hoped, caching in Okinawa was rather fun. It is interesting to note the differences between the caching styles of different areas. I was a bit disappointed by the number of “shop-caches” in Okinawa - caches that were located not in interesting places, but in front of shops. One of the caches was actually located INSIDE a bar, just under the cashier. Can you say monetization? Also, even in the caches you can feel the looming presence of the American Military in Okinawa - many cache containers were army supplies, and the geocoins featured lots of silly jingoist messages (”support our troops”, blablabla). I longed for the more family/geek friendly caches in Tokyo. It is funny how you can feel welcomed/un-welcomed through an inanimate object hidden behind a rock.

Of course, the trip was not all fun an games. In the next post I’ll report on the “research” side of the trip.

The group is currently Lv 7, formed by two defenders (Bigo the Shifter Warden and Solomon the Half Elf Fighter), two strikers (Midori the Eladrin Rogue and Adum the Dragonborn Barbarian), Sincearu the Gnome Bard and Charlie the Human Wizard. They are currently part of an treasure seeking expedition organized by Xor, a crazed explorer, to the forgotten island of Ludus. Ludus is currently inhabited by a number of savage tribes, but it is covered in the ruins of some Meso-American like civilization, which is claimed by each of the tribes to be their “precursors”.

Part 1 - of Love and Rust Monsters

In the last session, the group defeated the Snakemen tribe, which threatened the territory of the group allies, the Dragonborn tribe. Now they were exploring the nearest of two great ruined cities in the island. After exploring the surface of the city for a while, they found a secret passageway to the underground in what they presumed to be the ruins of the palace.

The passageway was blocked by a giant cockroach - the size of a large dog - which was resting atop a large pile of residuum and rust. It didn’t seem to show any reaction to the group, so they decided to charge the creature. A rust monster in 4E has few HP, so they were able to kill it before it managed to flee into the passageway, but not before it managed to rust the weapons of Adum and Bigus a little bit - panic insued, specially when the group noticed the rusted remains of a magic door in the passageway, and guessed that there would be a whole nest of these things down below.

They ventured forth, and found a very large room (25 squares across), with plataforms in the borders and dry pools in the middle, full of ruined statues, roots breaking from the roof, mushroom grooves, and debris piles. But what caught their eye that about a quarter of the room was partially blocked by large piles of rubble, resembling a giant nest of cockroaches… and behind that rubble, the largest pile of residuum the magic users of the group had ever seen before.

The fight happened in two parts. At first the closest rust monsters charged at the surprise metal meal - then they retreated when they realized that the walking meals were biting hard back at them! Their nest had many entrances and exits, so when the group came charging after them, they were able to attack them from two different directions. Inside the nest there was a Dweomer eater (lv 11), a young rust monster swarm (lv 9), and three regular rust monsters (lv 6). Flanking allowed both defenders to shine, Solomon tackling the regular monsters, and Bigus blocking the path of the Dweomer eater. There was a bunch of interactive objects in the scenario (the vines could be climbed, the mushrooms could be kicked for spores, etc), but most that happened was the warden activating one of the spore clouds by mistake, and the Dweomer eater bull rushing the warden into a pit so that it could get its paws into the bard’s juicy songblade (the only time where the monster’s “dissolve item” ability actually worked - they kept missing with this attack).

In spite of losing a magic item, the group was pretty happy in looting the Rust Monster nest - it had a full level’s worth of residuum. Sincearu put it to good use by “object reading” the big statue in the center of the room, and learning more about the former inhabitants of the abandoned city. They were dark skinned humanoids who built the city all at once using bestial labor. The statue represented some sort of living leader, and the last sentient being to come close to the statue was a murderer in yellow robes.

Part 2 - This is why you should clean up your temple, young man!

There were 6 corridors leaving from the big room. Three of them on the south wall looked the same, and three of them on the east wall had each different drawings around them. The group picked a corridor with holy symbols and symbols of gods and goddesses. They followed the corridor for quite a while, and arrived at another badly ruined room. They determined that this room was the interior of the pyramid they saw aboveground, and could not find the entrance before. The room had also the same collapsed tunnels they found on the surface, which Adum the native Dragonborn had previously identified as belonging to the dreaded “land shark”. Scared of a creature who could bore such large holes in stone, they proceeded with care.

In the center of the room there was an altar with uncontrolled arcane energies coming out of it. Charlie and Adum approached the altar while the rest of the group stood back. As she tried to manipulate the energies of the altar, its precarious equilibrium was upset, and a strong gravitational wave started sucking everything into the center of the room. This also attracted the Bullete, which was sleeping in one of the collapsed tunnels, to investigate.

The encounter was a Bullete (lv 9 elite) with a “Gravitational Hole” (trap) modified to shoot some weak lightning at the nearest target (players and monsters alike). The bullete’s ability to move underground made for a fun fight, as it burrowed right past the defenders into the soft, unprotected Midori in the back, scaring the hell out of her. The group eventually got its act together as they gathered in the center of the room, the Wizard, Rogue and Bard standing on top of the altar as the tanks circled them. As luck would have it, Solomon and Adum started rolling a series of criticals which finally dispatched the hard skinned monster. One of those critical hits activated Zharib Falcon, Solomon’s artifact weapon, making him see again the mysterious woman in white, beckoning to him from the corridor at the other end of the room.

Part 3 - Thinking with the other head.

Having defeated the beast, Sincearu set up again to use the “object reading” ritual, this time on the broken altar. They see images of priestess making some sort of ritual over a man in yellow robes with his hands and feet tied down, and the image of the bullete hitting the altar after the temple had been abandoned, and breaking its delicate magical balance. After that, they decide to follow down the corridor where Solomon had his visage. This leads to a bare earth underground passageway, which continues for 6 hours, with a few exits to the middle of the jungle aboveground in the way.

After resting and continuing down the tunnel, they arrive at another pyramid temple, many times bigger than the previous one. This one has a smaller pyramid inside, upon which a ray of sunlight hits. The mysterious woman in white is on the top of the smaller platform, and calls Solomon to her. When Solomon brings her the artifact, she reveals that she is a spirit trapped inside it, which was created by “the gods of the earth”, the entity that was born out of the world itself, and was not bound either to the Primordials or the Outer gods. She explained to Solomon that the mission of Zharib Falcon is to free the material planes from the influences of those not born from it, be it of divine or demonic origin. It warned Solomon that demons were preparing to invade the kingdom where they came from, and urged him to become a Paladin of the Earth. Solomon accepted, and changed his class (a move I had discussed with the player in advance).

After the pyrotechnic display was over, they left the giant pyramid and found themselves far to the north in the jungle, very near the mountains they only saw at a distance back in the Dragonborn village. The group decided to head into the mountains…

Conclusion

It was a very satisfying game. I put a lot of preparation in the adventure, and it paid off, even though the group skipped most of the underground dungeon I had made them, and headed straight to the exit. Well, those other 5 corridors will still be there when they decide to return from the mountains… if they return! (insert evil laugh here)

Things that worked:

• The players had genuine reactions to the bullete, because of the foreshadowing from previous session, and the rust monsters, because of the natural hatred of players to these creatures.
• I really liked how the bard player liberally used the “object reading” ritual - it is a interactive way for the players and the GM to decide what kind of expository info they want, and how much of it they want. It also allowed me to add some of the information that the players had skipped by going straight to the temple. Expect more “readable objects” in the future.
• The Warden player was missing during this session, but the wizard player managed to control both characters just fine - it gave me more confidence to run games with a player missing without having to worry about rebalancing everything.
• The encounters did not take too long, I think I really got my hand right with encounter balance this time. The flanking rust monsters were nice
• Solomon having his class change satisfied both the player who wanted to try a new character, and the GM who wanted to keep continuity in the story.
• I tried ChattyDM’s suggestion of preparing a “Game Synopsis” and asking the players for suggestions. Bigus’ and Solomon’s players jumped right into the idea, and I was able to mix their suggestions into the adventure.

Things that did not work so well:

• The players did not use all the toys that I left in the Rust Monster encounter. Maybe they were a bit out of the way and not so obvious?
• The Bullete encounter was a bit too easy, because I put the bullete too far away from the trap, and the players managed to disable the trap before facing the monster. Have to keep in mind movement rates next time I use hidden monsters.
• The Solomon Scene would have worked better if I made all players be able to see the phantasm girl inside the big temple. Or if I had decided to pull that player apart from the table for that scene, although I hate doing that.
• On the same line, I should have left the phantasm girl to appear only after the players had cleared out the dungeon, if they missed the temple passage, instead of the first time they got to the temple.

Also, In today’s meeting we had visitors from another laboratory which presented to us their research on DNA computing. DNA computing is a sort of wet computing where you use the chemical reactions between DNA strands as the processing units. They were explaining their work in developing an AND gate with DNA. To be honest, I was not very impressed. I had heard before of wet computing before (maybe chemical computing?), and in my mind the state of art in this was a bit more evolved. But in their presentation, one AND operation would take more than one hour to complete, and they would need to do the experiment from scratch to change the data inputs. I wasn’t very convinced (although the rain might have made me grumpier than usual). Either you try to emulate electro-mechanical computing, but do it faster, or you get some new operators to do different stuff (like quantum computing). Could someone enlighten me about what I’m missing here?

In other news, RPG game tomorrow, and I got a pretty neat series of encounters for my players. Report coming from Sunday on

The game is really similar to New Super Mario Bros DS - a revival of the first Super Mario Bros (the Nes one), with a bunch of technological enhancements. They have 5 extra “powers” - a Helicopter suit, which makes Mario jump high and float with a flick of the Wiimote, a Mini Mario suit, identical to the DS one (high jumps and running over water), an “Ice Flower”, which makes mario throws ice balls, which freezes enemies, a penguin suit, which throws ice balls, slides on enemies, and swims better, and good old Yoshi (which now is able to float a bit in the air when jumping). Mario can “stomp” while jumping, and he can also “triple jump” - if you press the jump button just as you finish your previous jump, the next one will be a bit higher.

With all these different powers, the game is not very difficult. I managed to get to World 8 in one night. I used the secret “world gates” found in worlds 1 and 5, but even those were not very difficult to find. The last stage of world 8, in particular the boss fight actually took me quite a few tries. This leads to another “innovation” of this game - if you fail a single stage more than 8 times in a row, the game will offer to show you how to beat that stage. It can clear the stage for you, if you wish, but a stage cleared like this isn’t counted towards game completion purposes. While clearing the game is not that hard (and I got a bit disappointed when I got to the end because of that) - COMPLETING the game is another story. The secret items and passages in some of the stage are very cleverly hidden - even if that is not apparent from the first world - my second “complete out” run of the game is going quite slower.

In terms of graphics and eye candy, I found the game to be full of nice touches. The enemies and creatures on the screen react to the music, jumping and dancing in tempo with the notes. The in-game minigames are fun, even if limited. You got the “memory game” for getting items, and a “hit the baloons” games for getting lifes. You can also be asked to replay some scenarios to save Toady, and get a few more item/lives out of it (you have to carry him with you, and thus can’t use specials/run through small places). I wish they had extra mini games, like New Super Mario Bros DS, but alas, it is not to be. In fact, as far as I can see this game does not use the internet for anything at all, which was a bit of a let down.

On the other hand, the main novelty of SMB Wii - up to 4 players simultaneous cooperative play - is really worth it. You can play with 2 to 4 people at the same time on each stage, just like in the normal game. If anyone dies, their player will be returned to the stage in a few seconds (unless they run out of lives) - the stage is only over if everyone dies at the same time. The players can get in each other’s way, jump on each other’s head to reach higher, or carry each other over their heads. With two players at the same time, the game actually gets easier (in spite of what Penny Arcade said), mainly because if one player dies at a tricky point of the stage, the other can wait until the previous player returns. However, with the full four players, everything changes. 4 Players is just TOO MUCH, and the game becomes a fast paced race to get away from whatever can kill you before the other players can kill you first, racing first to the end of the stage else you get too far on the back and get killed by the other players who darted far ahead. You can kill your buddies with impunity - if you manage to remember who are you in the middle of the madness on screen. Really, it is that hectic, and we went through 3 or four continues by the earlier half of world 1. The coordination required makes SMB with 4 people far more difficult than with 1 or 2 - specially for things like small platforms and sequences of jumps, that it got me curious to see team competitions of the game.

All in all it was well worth the trip to Akiba last week Now to get a few more controllers to be able to play Super Mario Madhouse whenever a lot of people gather at my place.

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.