Tue Nov 10 2020 21:21:15 MST from TheDave

 

 Tempus who watched orcs slaughter her family when she was 9.  All orcs are evil.  Non-evil orcs don't exist.  No I don't need to waste my time using my special ability to make sure.  They're orcs.

One of my players wrote me a two page essay about why that's racist and she should lose her powers for being evil.  I laughed him to scorn.  The God of War doesn't give a shit about racism.

Another player became concerned at my actions.  I was defending a wizard and we teleported to an area controlled by magic averse barbarians.  They wanted me to surrender the wizard to them for a trial.  I refused and told them that they could let us pass peacefully and live or they could attack us and die.  They chose to die, and the DM asked how many of the village I was willing to slaughter in defense of my charge.  I said "Every man woman and child that attacks us will die.  All they have to do to live is stand down."  Apparently they're unfamiliar with medieval knightly codes of conduct.  I was sworn to protect my charge with my life.  With every stroke I demanded that they yield.  None would.  They all fell.  Not my fault they're too proud and stupid to live.

Elidor never really saw any Orcs do anything bad to anyone until he started going into dungeons - but then all of the ones he saw were trying to kill him, and he had heard that is what they were going to do. Elidor is a Fireball first, ask questions later kind of wizard. 

 :) 

Mon Dec 16 2019 01:39:51 AM MST from TheDave

 

Wed Sep 04 2019 11:06:07 MST from ParanoidDelusions

 

Tue Sep 03 2019 22:05:25 MST from TheDave

I do have a folder on my computer that has every TSR D&D book published and most of the 3rd edition stuff.

I need Unearthed Arcana, Dieties and Demigods, and the Monster Manual. Lost them somewhere along the way. 

 

I'll see about getting those into my dropbox.  Remind me later.

I have all the Original, first edition, 2nd edition (and 2.5), 3rd edition, 4th edition, 5th edition printed material here is Sacramento CA.  I also have PDF files of all except the 4th and 5th editions.  I have not scanned all that material, or scrounged up PDF versions of all of that material yet.

Mon Nov 16 2020 17:36:47 MST from Otto Roboto

 

 

I have all the Original, first edition, 2nd edition (and 2.5), 3rd edition, 4th edition, 5th edition printed material here is Sacramento CA.  I also have PDF files of all except the 4th and 5th editions.  I have not scanned all that material, or scrounged up PDF versions of all of that material yet.

I've got most of the PDFs, too... but nothing really replaces the real thing. I want a 1st edition monster manual with the original blue wrap around cover. I wish I hadn't let my original books get away from me. They seemed so worthless at the time. 

I have not let mine go.  I did loan out 1 copy of my 3rd edition players handbook that did not get returned.  Thankfully, I had 2 more in inventory.

Won't make that mistake again.

Tue Nov 17 2020 12:27:44 MST from Otto Roboto

I have not let mine go.  I did loan out 1 copy of my 3rd edition players handbook that did not get returned.  Thankfully, I had 2 more in inventory.

Won't make that mistake again.

Yeah, they're too valuable to loan, especially when PDFs are readily available. That person sucks, whoever they were, by the way. 

Tue Nov 17 2020 04:02:12 PM MST from ParanoidDelusions

 

Tue Nov 17 2020 12:27:44 MST from Otto Roboto

I have not let mine go.  I did loan out 1 copy of my 3rd edition players handbook that did not get returned.  Thankfully, I had 2 more in inventory.

Won't make that mistake again.

Yeah, they're too valuable to loan, especially when PDFs are readily available. That person sucks, whoever they were, by the way. 

 

Well, this was back in 2004ish, and the PDFs were not as easy to come by back then.

Wed Nov 18 2020 18:45:25 MST from Otto Roboto

 

Well, this was back in 2004ish, and the PDFs were not as easy to come by back then.

Interesting thing is, I think I had PDF versions of them all back then. Not the highest quality. Clearly scans, some of them crooked, writing on some pages, in PDF format, with some layout errors. 

But ARRRR... tis always been that life for me, matey. ;) 

Somewhere along the line, I lost most of them - not like, I don't have copies... the files are buried in the 20ish years of data I have going all the way back to when I worked at MCI that now take up the better part of 12TB of storage on a NAS. I'm a data hoarder. I actually still have 5.25" floppies with the original Fastback backups of the Sanitarium from when I shut it down. Which means, I suppose, I could theoretically restore it and figure out when the very last message was posted. :) See... it is a good thing I kept those disks all these years. 

Hey, you should try to restore those.  Did you keep the source code and runtime for Asgard Citadels (80 and 86) (Or SacCit) available for download like many of the Sacramento Citadels?  I hear that the source code for the latest version has been lost.  Could be a fun project for you to try to recover some history...

Fri Nov 20 2020 22:42:51 MST from Otto Roboto

Hey, you should try to restore those.  Did you keep the source code and runtime for Asgard Citadels (80 and 86) (Or SacCit) available for download like many of the Sacramento Citadels?  I hear that the source code for the latest version has been lost.  Could be a fun project for you to try to recover some history...

I talked to Ian Justman (Now Holly Justman) about sending the archives to her to restore them. (I wouldn't deadname her, but I feel like maybe not everyone knows. Anyhow...) Evidently, she does this kind of thing quite a bit. But... inertia. I doubt Gary or Charles trusted me with the source code of Asgard-86 - And I think that is the last Sac Cit I standardized on. 

But the runtime is on there for sure, and I bet the .zips of them are in the files] section too. 

Maybe I should consider getting those disks to someone who cares who might be able to recover them. There are also a shit ton of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler spreads I scanned in with my Digiview Gold to trade for Amiga warez on there too, for sure. I wasn't ever a very good cracker, but at one point I was probably one of the premier generators of digitized Amiga porn on the West Coast. 

Which...  figures, I guess. 

"You've got a $4000 Amiga 2000 with 4mb of ram and a 40mb hard drive! The sky is the limit! What are you going to do with it?"

"Create porn to trade for fuzzy scans of print media porn?" 


"That will win you a job at the Byte Brokers, retailer of new and used computers!" 

Fri Nov 20 2020 11:42:23 PM MST from ParanoidDelusions

 

Fri Nov 20 2020 22:42:51 MST from Otto Roboto

Hey, you should try to restore those.  Did you keep the source code and runtime for Asgard Citadels (80 and 86) (Or SacCit) available for download like many of the Sacramento Citadels?  I hear that the source code for the latest version has been lost.  Could be a fun project for you to try to recover some history...

I talked to Ian Justman (Now Holly Justman) about sending the archives to her to restore them. (I wouldn't deadname her, but I feel like maybe not everyone knows. Anyhow...) Evidently, she does this kind of thing quite a bit. But... inertia. I doubt Gary or Charles trusted me with the source code of Asgard-86 - And I think that is the last Sac Cit I standardized on. 

 

But the runtime is on there for sure, and I bet the .zips of them are in the files] section too. 

Maybe I should consider getting those disks to someone who cares who might be able to recover them. There are also a shit ton of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler spreads I scanned in with my Digiview Gold to trade for Amiga warez on there too, for sure. I wasn't ever a very good cracker, but at one point I was probably one of the premier generators of digitized Amiga porn on the West Coast. 

Which...  figures, I guess. 

"You've got a $4000 Amiga 2000 with 4mb of ram and a 40mb hard drive! The sky is the limit! What are you going to do with it?"

 

"Create porn to trade for fuzzy scans of print media porn?" 


"That will win you a job at the Byte Brokers, retailer of new and used computers!" 

Holly was one of the people looing for the source code.  As for the runtime, there is an incomplete zip file on the internet for 1.49q that is missing most of the program.  So you could be contributing to Citadelphian history if you help recover any of that.

Sat Nov 21 2020 09:50:30 MST from Otto Roboto

 

 

Holly was one of the people looing for the source code.  As for the runtime, there is an incomplete zip file on the internet for 1.49q that is missing most of the program.  So you could be contributing to Citadelphian history if you help recover any of that.

This would all be so much easier if only I still lived in Sacramento. :) 

I'll see what I can do though. It might be an interesting project - and I'd love to help, if possible. 

Everything would be easier if we just lived in Sacramento in the eighties and nineties! Especially if we knew then, what we know now. I have a list of people to assassinate. If you're going there, I'll share. 😂

LOL. I don't think I could bring myself to liquidate a gimp. :D 

Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about Sacramento in the 80s and 90s. Must be a sign that we're getting old. 

Lately - It is more a *feeling* - like - you know how the quality of the light, the humidity of the air, the energy of the world *changes* with the seasons? Occasionally something about the *atmosphere* here in Phoenix will remind me of the same in Sacramento during specific periods of those decades.

Oddly enough, some days - it also reminds me of Liverpool, England. Wet days here, driving to work, I often feel reminded of being in Liverpool, or surrounding areas. There is something as you near Mesa on a wet day that feels distinctly "suburban new development outskirts of Liverpool." 

Which is the weirdest thing. 

Sat Jan 23 2021 00:24:29 MST from Jerry Moore Jr.

Everything would be easier if we just lived in Sacramento in the eighties and nineties! Especially if we knew then, what we know now. I have a list of people to assassinate. If you're going there, I'll share. 😂

I do miss the 80's and early 90's.  Technology just seemed more engaging and enjoyable back then.  At least as far as my memory tells me.  it also seemed that the community was more together than the fractured mess we have now.

The consolidation of corporations began in the 90s - and competition largely stopped, especially in technology. I'm playing around with the Vampire V4 right now. It is a hypothetical, "What if Motorola had continued to develop the 68k and come out with a 68080 that competed with Pentium class machines". I can tell you, it would have been awesome. Instead we got a world where Mac barely held on and the Intel PC became dominant and ultimately, predictably, consumers suffered and corporations profited. 

But I also think technology crossed a threshold where things became so incredibly complex that no single person could understand every part of a single system - and the experience became far more powerful, but less direct. You could kind of brute force the machines back then, copying files to where they needed to be, manually editing config files from the CLI, and moving stuff around - yet still get it working. Now the dependencies and libraries and linked portions are all so dependent on being installed correctly, in the correct place - that the system has to manage everything - if you try to tweak things manually - you'll just screw everything up. 

I'm also pretty sure all of society has shifted on the scale towards ignorance. Too many Appliance devices have given too many access to tools that they're not smart enough to really utilize correctly. Anyone who managed to figure out how to take a PC, get it booted, connect it to a modem, find a BBS number, and get their dialer to call it was *already* by default almost certainly in the top 20% of intellects. 

Now Comcast comes out, sets up your wireless router, you press a button on it and it finds your iPad and automatically connects and you're online. We lowered the bar way too far. 

Which is the good thing about a BBS like this - it raises the bar again. It is difficult for the dummies to find or figure it out. 

Sat Jan 23 2021 16:29:56 MST from Otto Roboto

I do miss the 80's and early 90's.  Technology just seemed more engaging and enjoyable back then.  At least as far as my memory tells me.  it also seemed that the community was more together than the fractured mess we have now.

Sat Jan 23 2021 20:27:09 MSTfrom ParanoidDelusions

Which is the good thing about a BBS like this - it raises the bar again. It is difficult for the dummies to find or figure it out. 

"There were networks before the internet and those networks had forums, it was similar to today's social media but more civilized and not as crowded. "

You know how you go to a nightclub, you stand in a line, bouncers stand at the front with a big red velvet rope, opening it up and letting two people in at a time, sometimes rejecting people for no apparent reason other than maybe they're not up to the club's standards on physical attractiveness? You get inside, the drinks are overpriced and weak, it is loud, you can't have a conversation - the toilets are a mess and full of people doing blow and having banal conversations. You are around thousands of people, but you feel isolated and cut off. Even though nobody can communicate, somehow people manage to get in fights. The bouncers rush in, and even though you saw the guy start it, they beat up the other guy and throw him out because they know the guy who started it? 

Facebook. 


Ever been to a small bar, not necessarily a dive bar - but more like an English "local"? You get to know the proprietor. He has been there for years. He is the bartender and the cook. He doesn't do fancy tricks with the bottles when he is pouring you a drink. There are a group of locals, they all know one another. Sometimes it gets crowded and loud and is very high energy, other times it is laid back and mellow and nearly deserted. It goes through cycles of this, and you learn when to expect either. The ambiance is comfortable and well worn. Things are fair. The drinks are strong and reasonably priced. It is a place where you can have a conversation - even a drunken rambling one that is barely coherent - and everybody understands it is just a conversation. Sometimes things get heated, but the next day everyone has at least agreed to disagree - mostly because the only other choice in town is that loud fucking impersonal nightclub full of glass mirrors, lightshows, and assholes. 

Your nearby Citadel BBS

Wed Jan 27 2021 08:07:42 MST from Google Bot

"There were networks before the internet and those networks had forums, it was similar to today's social media but more civilized and not as crowded. "

The kids and I had a great session the other night. They rescued this ancient castle from a black dragon and some frogmen a couple of years ago. (We play maybe three or four times a year.) Meanwhile the local dwarves want permission to mine under it. They're willing to split some of the proceeds, but the dwarves don't want to clear the mine of monsters. So this band of five adventurers is nervously exploring a mostly safe cave. They met a little rock person who was just digging for calcite (his food). The gnome character wanted to see what was at the end of a slippery slope, so he yelled Whee and surfed down it. He ended up in a pit full of water that they're all convinced has a Beholder at the bottom. +100xp for correctly role playing 5 WIS.

This is the best game. 

Sounds fun. I was watching the online system that TheDave uses for remote playing - and it was very interesting. I think the only way I'm going to commit and play is a live, in person group though. It takes so much time - and I've got so many projects. I'm not sure how you manage to fit a campaign into everything else you're balancing. 

Mon Mar 29 2021 16:25:31 MST from "Wangiss" <wangiss@wallofhate.com>

The kids and I had a great session the other night. They rescued this ancient castle from a black dragon and some frogmen a couple of years ago. (We play maybe three or four times a year.) Meanwhile the local dwarves want permission to mine under it. They're willing to split some of the proceeds, but the dwarves don't want to clear the mine of monsters. So this band of five adventurers is nervously exploring a mostly safe cave. They met a little rock person who was just digging for calcite (his food). The gnome character wanted to see what was at the end of a slippery slope, so he yelled Whee and surfed down it. He ended up in a pit full of water that they're all convinced has a Beholder at the bottom. +100xp for correctly role playing 5 WIS.

This is the best game.