Been a while since I posted.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not that I haven’t felt like writing, but that all my writing has been for game instead of about game.<\/p>\n
That aside, I’m curious about what the role of technology has been in other people’s games.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sold on character builders yet, but I really like text search in a PDF.\u00c2\u00a0 But I’m having some other problems that might be costing me more time than text search is saving.<\/p>\n
\nAnyway, I have a session to run on friday and a game to play in tomorrow.\u00c2\u00a0 I meant to do my writing last night and instead spent a couple hours tweaking my 4E stat block vim syntax highlighter and latex converter.\u00c2\u00a0 WotC’s been using a new format for their monster stat blocks and I didn’t want to be limited to old monsters.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m pretty happy with the results, as I was able to come up with a set of regexes that worked in either format and I didn’t need to try and detect which format was being used (although read ahead negation sucks and took half my time).\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not happy that tech stole an evening of game writing.<\/p>\n
Several sessions ago, more than one player showed up without a character sheet.\u00c2\u00a0 Okay, we can just run off some more.\u00c2\u00a0 Except that the character sheets were stored in the new online character builder, which depends on Silverlight.\u00c2\u00a0 None of the computers present had Silverlight already, so we decided to race.\u00c2\u00a0 The aging Windows laptop couldn’t install it for inexplicable reasons.\u00c2\u00a0 Nor could the speedy new Macbook.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d previously tried Moonlight in linux (which is the open source equivalent), but it didn’t support all the features WotC’s new builder needed.\u00c2\u00a0 I was prepared for that though and had already set up XP in a virtual machine, which promptly failed to install Silverlight.<\/p>\n
Turns out that Silverlight requires 2gb of hard drive space, which seems absurd for a browser plugin.\u00c2\u00a0 Disk space is cheap, but not when you’re using a tiny little virtual machine.\u00c2\u00a0 It also turns out that Silverlight doesn’t tell you when it doesn’t have room to install.\u00c2\u00a0 It just copies files until it can’t and then gives generic error messages.<\/p>\n
All told we lost about 90 minutes of game time to installing character builders before we gave up and told the player to use an older sheet we had left over.\u00c2\u00a0 After that I set up a new rule that printing and bringing your own character sheet was a prerequisite to gain a new level.\u00c2\u00a0 Failure to do so leaves you at the level of the most recent copy of your character we have available.<\/p>\n
And don’t get me started on iPhones at the game table.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m guilty of checking email when it’s not my turn too, but Angry Birds should be off limits.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I know I won’t remove electronics from gaming entirely.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been prepping for game during my lunch breaks at work and PDFs are invaluable for this.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t want to come across as a luddite, but I’m wondering if anyone else is finding tech gets in the way as often as it helps when it comes to tabletop gaming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Been a while since I posted.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not that I haven’t felt like writing, but that all my writing has been for game instead of about game. That aside, I’m curious about what the role of technology has been in other people’s games.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not sold on character builders yet, but I really like text […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-observations","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}