The Gaming Den

I'm behind the curve a bit here... but why don't we just ask Frank or K for a monthly "Approve/Disapprove" session?

I've been reading this a lot and I realize there's some editing that needs to be done because... well I imagine its because they wrote this at different times.

I DON'T think it should be anything goes. . . oh and this:

"The tomes need some regulation so that they have a semblance of balance to them and there's no obvious bullshit.

...

Really, I'd like the Tome to be something that I can suggest someone use without having to tell them in advance that part isn't usable."
Amen.
Whats up Uber.
M_v

Midnight_v wrote:I'm behind the curve a bit here... but why don't we just ask Frank or K for a monthly "Approve/Disapprove" session?

Simply put, Frank and K are busy people. K is at law school, Frank is living in the Czech Dictatorship and going to med school, while he's not designing like six games or so, and most importantly, the Tomes were essentially a thesis on how to fix DnD, which didn't begin as a unified project at all. Therefore, I'm not sure that they'd be up for such an idea, particularly since Frank said he was actually happy that people were taking it and making it their own.

Damn... I was afraid it'd be something like too busy but the rest of it... thats just throwed. The way you put it... it like "Lets free Frank from the Iron Curtain" but... I'm sure thats not the case.

That sucks I had a lot of questions about the tomes too. I noticed that a portion of the begining changes weren't inline with the end ones but I guess I'd always thought it was a unified project also. *sigh* work work work....

Midnight_v wrote:That sucks I had a lot of questions about the tomes too.

You're still free to ask them.

Midnight_v wrote:I noticed that a portion of the begining changes weren't inline with the end ones but I guess I'd always thought it was a unified project also.

Each 'tome' is intended to be usable alone. As a result, some of the material in one can be made obsolete by others. The tomes were written in an order, and the difficulty of the issues they tackle is roughly increasing. This necessitated that later tomes contain more radical changes to the rules. So although there are prestige classes that require Power Attack to enter in the Necronomicon, it doesn't even exist as a feat in Races of War.

The Tome of Awesome project is partially there to get all the parts working together again.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:The Tome of Awesome project is partially there to get all the parts working together again.

ToA!?! Is this a consolidation project?

RobbyPants wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:The Tome of Awesome project is partially there to get all the parts working together again.

ToA!?! Is this a consolidation project?

Something like it, yes. Aktariel's been the one minding it for a while now.

The ToA is a consolidation project, yes, variously known as ToA and TGDT (The Gaming Den Tomes).

The Tome of Awesome is unfortunately doing less awesome these days, but I am trying to bring it together.

It's hard because I have to find the balance between making everything fit together and keeping backwards compatibility.

Do I say "No we do not require Power Attack as a feat because it's now a combat option" and "No we do not have two versions of the Boneblade Reaper because the first version used the original sucktastic monk which never existed."

or do I just leave it alone? Is one of these fine? The other not? What about Necromantic Materials, for fuck's sake? It goes on.


Side note: the download link to 0.6.1 has been hit 59 times as of this writing, and the link to the beta of 0.7 which I never posted anywhere, has been hit 75 times.

What is going on here? It's a freaking beta. It sucks. Don't use it.

On a side note, the "Individual" branch of the source tree (which doesn't have "download" links yet) is meant to house LaTeX code and PDFs for the original Tomes, and for something resembling individual documents for the things still being developed. Not sure if anything will come of it, but hey.

Yeah, I dunno. It's a nice idea but I'm not sure why you think it's necessary (which is an invitation to share why, not a challenge).

Also, last commit was 16 days ago - but then, I've been busy too.

Really, what we need are people to write interesting flavor text for the bare bones mechanics out of the SRD. Races, D20 system, Combat, Spellcasting..

Aktariel wrote:The ToA is a consolidation project, yes, variously known as ToA and TGDT (The Gaming Den Tomes).

The Tome of Awesome is unfortunately doing less awesome these days, but I am trying to bring it together.

It's hard because I have to find the balance between making everything fit together and keeping backwards compatibility.

Do I say "No we do not require Power Attack as a feat because it's now a combat option" and "No we do not have two versions of the Boneblade Reaper because the first version used the original sucktastic monk which never existed."

or do I just leave it alone? Is one of these fine? The other not? What about Necromantic Materials, for fuck's sake? It goes on.


Side note: the download link to 0.6.1 has been hit 59 times as of this writing, and the link to the beta of 0.7 which I never posted anywhere, has been hit 75 times.

What is going on here? It's a freaking beta. It sucks. Don't use it.

I'll be here from now on and I'd be willing to help out as much as possible.

Great. Do you know LaTeX and Subversion?

actually, I finished the unifying the srd combat rules and the Tome combat rules. I mentiond it in the changelog. Its the CombatI and CombatII files if I recall. The only thing thats really missing is natural attacks, which is with monsters in the srd which is why i forgot it.

Just throwing this out there after reading Catharz'z summation on how the Tomes were written. I know this may just get rejected right out the gate, but how about, for now until all of the different Tome subject areas (gears, trees, virtue, whatever) are done you allow each one to remain mutually exclusive. I'm not sure if you're in a particular hurry or not but I honestly believe that if you can get people with free time and the where withal to do it you can get this done in a few months (optimistically). I'm thinking you should not only get people into individual teams, but get them to churn out at the very least a frame work for each of the Tome subject matters and have them post it here and on the Wiki. I'm sure once people start actually glancing over works in progress they'll leave a criticism here and there that will get it evolving. Admittedly I'd like to see and read the finished projects sooner than in a few years despite th unlikelihood of me ever running Tomes.

The thing is, MGuy, we don't actually have 'teams'. People's interests here are pretty broad, and as a result, we basically do whatever catches our attention. This means some things get over-done (c.f. ranger) and some things never get done (c.f. metamagic feats).

Mutual exclusivity of the Tomes would be a bit strange, in my opinion. It's meant to be a unitary fix, and shouldn't really be broken apart like that.

Ahh but a man can dream...

Aktariel wrote:Yeah, I dunno. It's a nice idea but I'm not sure why you think it's necessary (which is an invitation to share why, not a challenge).

Also, last commit was 16 days ago - but then, I've been busy too.

Mostly, it's the idea that each of the Tomes has central themes, and I think breaking things up into the individual books would help with remembering things more easily than things like "giant list of all the feats!". As a supplement to the composite entity of everything anyway.

Tome of Awesome

And I shall never have the know how to even contribute to this. Freakin' damnit.

God_of_Awesome wrote:

Tome of Awesome

And I shall never have the know how to even contribute to this. Freakin' damnit.

Not true at all - you should have seen where I started!

Aktariel wrote:Great. Do you know LaTeX and Subversion?

No. I have no idea what you mean by that. . . thus I suppose I can be no real help. Damn.

He's asking if you're kinky

---

They are free text editors for compiling "professionally looking" documents

I think he's either asking if you're kinky, or if you understand/have access to software for a specific document format (similar to PDFs).

...or maybe both???

Midnight_v wrote:

Aktariel wrote:Great. Do you know LaTeX and Subversion?

No. I have no idea what you mean by that. . . thus I suppose I can be no real help. Damn.

Do you know HTML? Scrap that, you know BBCode. LaTeX is kind of like that, except vastly more powerful. If you have any markup language experience it is at worst intimidating for a day, weird for a couple more days, then it's all good. As long as you are working on existing material that is.

Subversion is a version control system. Again, as long as you are just collaborating on an existing project it shouldn't be too bad. Your workflow just becomes get-current-version, add-changes, push-changes. After a while someone will have pushed changes while you were still working. At this point you panic, then get the current version again, check it for where it says stuff was changed, mark which changes should be kept and push again.

Short version: Unless technology scares you, you should be able to get set up and learn the basics within a weekend.

Yeah, I learned... well, I'm still learning, but I got a workable knowledge of LaTeX after just a few days of trying to do stuff and referring to guides for a few hours. Now I can make tables! And Chapters! And... other... stuff. But it looks nice when you get done.

No, I never said you couldn't be of help if you don;t know these things (and they're easy to learn if you're even moderately willing).

I'm an editor and a proofreader and typesetter, not a writer (at least not for this). If you're a writer, good on you. We can use you.

Utterfail wrote:actually, I finished the unifying the srd combat rules and the Tome combat rules.

Where can I get a copy of this, and do you mind if I incorporate it into my house rules?

Game on,
fbmf