Extra Padding

No, I am not talking about my waistline. I picked up a copy of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook on Saturday, a useful purchase considering that I am currently DM for two Pathfinder games. Among other subtle changes between 3.5 and Pathfinder, I noticed that death occurs at negative hit points equal to the character's Constitution score (e.g. -16 for a Constitution 16 character) rather than -10.

During the last game session of the Three Kingdoms campaign, Kheshef the "half-orc" Barbarian was brought to -7 by a troll. I actually did enough damage to bring Kheshef to -10 and "fudged" the roll because I felt it created a more interesting situation; the dying Kheshef was tossed into the river and the party needed to react immediately to save him from drowning or bleeding out, versus watching his lifeless, eviscerated corpse wash downstream. If we had been using the correct Pathfinder rule, rather than the 3.5 rule, Kheshef would still have had a few rounds to live at -10.

I like the change because it gives front line characters some extra time to be saved by comrades. In contrast, 4th edition gives all characters an enormous positive and negative health pool. A 3rd level Barbarian with attributes similar to Kheshef's would have something like 24 negative hit points, a 10th level Warden can easily hit -50. It's interesting that in 3.x, negative hit point pools are a scarce resource while 4th edition made them inconsequential (all healing begins at 0, effectively negating actions that target characters below 0 hit points that do not deal a killing blow). It feels like, once again, Pathfinder struck an excellent balance between 3.5 and 4.

Incentives

I was sent an article on business intelligence, which I think Sean might find interesting given his new running habit. For me, it outlines a thought process I share with both the author and the speaker he quotes, Frank Buytendijk: people will perform better when fueled by their own interests. A philosophy I've tried to incorporate into the CRM I've built, and one that led me to its creation. If only I could find more incentives for writing?

Tagging "Saving the World Through Game Design" so I can watch it with sound at home. You'll note from the timestamp that I am happily avoiding the documentation of change requests.

Alter

Attention to detail is not a strength of mine; the opposite by all accounts. I try to change, but most of my efforts meet with failure. My last attempt was a small, black Moleskine in which I still occasionally write. I have never successfully kept a regular journal (or blog, for that matter). Five months is my best attempt to date, excluding a LiveJournal, which was basically a misguided and whiny return to adolescence in my last year of college.

Regardless of any history, my current focus is the details of my profession. Despite having worked in the industry for four years I feel unskilled when compared to many of my peers. My roles and environments have changed several times over that short period, so specialization at work has been impossible. It is left to me to choose a focus on personal time.

I've always shied away from game design. I shouldn't. I very much enjoy all aspects of it, from story development and pacing to programming. It's challenging and math intensive, but those have never been deterrents; I'm not sure what put me off in the past.

My programming adventure of the week was unrelated, though. I set up IIS, PHP and MySQL on my development machine. I know purists will blanch at the idea of PHP and MySQL on a Windows machine, but I'm saving the full LAMP experiment for my next old computer. My previous experience with MySQL was limited to interfacing with it through PHP scripts and PHPMySQLAdmin. Needless to say, I hated it. Having access to the command prompt has completely changed my mind.

With my newfound love for MySQL and a D&D campaign starting next Wednesday, I'm creating a database and corresponding pages that will allow me to better manage character information during the game session. It'll be nice to have their character sheets available on my laptop in an interactive form instead of scribbled notes in my notebook or reading a converted PDF. The opportunity to expand my knowledge of database administration and design is a good one, too. I issued my first create database and alter database commands; I relied on the Windows-provided GUI until yesterday.