Since I’m a gigantic douche, I failed to mention on here that my Mutants and Masterminds game ended over a year ago.  It just got way too out of hand.  It was to the point that no matter how bad-ass of a bad guy I threw at the party, they could just axe it.  It was so bad that people would have to roll natural 1′s to miss, and natural 1′s to die.  Super uber bad guy? Dead.  So to end the game, the bad guys agreed to join the good guys, and the entire game faded to black and credits rolled.  Yeah, I’m lame.

Then Dax decided to run a Pathfinder Adventure Path using D&D 3.5 rules (vs Pathfinder v3.9 rules).  I’m playing the most BROKEN MONK EVER.  This wont make sense to any of you unless you play D&D, but revel in my brokenness:

This is a Human Monk, with Vow of Poverty and Saint template (Out of Book of Exalted Deeds).  Its a copy/paste of the character archive thats present on our internal RPG wiki (because if you aren’t tabletopping with a wiki and forums, you’re in the dark ages) so the formatting might be a bit shitty.  That being said, bask in the brokenness!

Backround Information

• Name: Twofist Seagle
• Player: Frank Precissi
• Class/Level: Exalted Monk 9 (Saint 2)
• Race: Human (Shoanti)
• Alignment: LG
• Diety: Sun Totem
• Size: M
• Age: 25
• Gender: M
• Height: 5’10″
• Weight: 148
• Campaign: Pathfinder Rise of the RuneLords (Dax’s)

Racial Traits/Abilities

• +1 skill point/level
• All saves against special attacks +2 diff
• +1d6 against evil creatures / +1d8 against evil outsiders & undead
  • Any creature that attacks with natural weapons takes this damage
• DR 10/evil
• Fast healing 1/2 HD/round (Max 10)
• Immune to acid/cold/electricity/petrification attacks
• Low light vision + Darkvision 60′
• Free action 20′ nimbus of light (Magic Circle against evil & Lesser Globe of Invun)

Class Features/Abilities

• Flurry of Blows
• Unarmed Strike
• Evasion
• Fast Movement
• Still Mind
  • +2 on saves vs Enchantment
• Ki Strike (lawful) (Fists act as magical weapons)
• Slow Fall 30ft
• Purity of body (Immune to non-magical diseases)
• Wholeness of Body (Heal Lvl x 2 HP/day)
• Improved Evasion

Exalted Abilities

• Endure Elements
  • Immune to Cold (-40F) or Hot (140F) environments
• Exalted Strike (good) (+2 to hit/damage, fists act as magical weapons)
• Sustenance (Removes need to eat or drink)
• Mind Shielding (Immune to disern thoughts/lies/detect alignment)
• DR 5/magic (does not stack with DR from Saint)

Abilities

• Str: 12 (+1)
• Dex: 16 (+3)
• Con: 16 (+3)
• Int: 10
• Wis: 21 (+5)
• Cha: 12 (+1)

Speed

• Speed: 60

AC

• Total: 29
  • 10+
  • Dex: 3
  • Wis (Monk): 5
  • Bonus Monk: 2
  • Vow of Poverty (Exalted): 7
  • Vow of Poverty (Natural): 1
  • Vow of Poverty (Deflection): 1
• Touch: 26
• Flat Footed: 26

Hit Points

• Total HP: 67

Initative

• Total: 3
  • Dex Mod: 3

Saving Throws

• Fortitude: 11
  • Base: 7
  • Con Mod: 3
  • Exalted Mod: 1
    • +4 against Poisons/Drugs
    • +4 against Poison (Saint)
• Reflex: 12
  • Base: 7
  • Dex Mod: 3
  • Regional Feat Totem Spirit (Sklar-Quah): 1
  • Exalted mod: 1
• Will: 13
  • Base: 7
  • Wis Mod: 5
  • Exalted Mod: 1
    • +2 against Fear/Dispair
    • +2 against Enchantment

Attacking/Weapons

• Base Attack Bonus: +14/+9 (+7/+2 (Monk BAB) + 5 (Exalted Feat Intuitive Attack) + 2 (Exalted Strike))
• Fist-O-Death
  • Damage: 1d10 + 3 (good) = (Exalted Strike + 2) + (Strength + 1)
• Flurry Fist-O-Death
  • Attack Bonus (+7/+7/+2) (+Intuitive Attack & Exalted Strike = +14/+14/+9)
  • Damage: 1d10 + 3 (good) = (Exalted Strike + 2) + (Strength + 1)
• Additional Damage of 1d6+1 against Evil / 1d4 + 1d8 against Evil Outsiders/Undead (Feat + Saint ability)

Grapple

• Total Grapple: 7
  • Base Attack Bonus: 6
  • Strength Mod: 1

Skills

• Total Skill Points:
  • Initial (Lev 1 Skill Points):
  • Per Level Skill Points: (4+Int+1) = 5

Skill List

• (Total = Ability + Ranks + Misc)
  • Balance: 7 = 3 + 4 + 0
  • Climb: 6 = 1 + 5 + 0
  • Diplomacy: 13 = 1 + 10 + 2
  • Escape Artist: 13 = 3 + 10 + 0
  • Hide: 8 = 3 + 5 + 0
  • Knowledge Arcana: 2 = 0 + 2 + 0
  • Knowledge Religion: 2 = 0 + 2 + 0
  • Listen: 7 = 3 + 4 + 0
  • Move Silently 8 = 3 + 5 + 0
  • Sense Motive: 8 = 4 + 4 + 0
  • Spot: 8 = 4 + 4 + 0
  • Tumble: 15 = 3 + 10 + 2

Feats

• Stunning Fist (PHB)
  • Monk level 1 class feat
• Improved Unarmed Strike (PHB)
  • Monk level 1 class feat
• Totem Spirit (Sklar-Quah) (Pathfinder Intro Text)
  • +1 Reflex Save / +2 Tumble
  • Free regional feat
• Sacred Vow (BED)
  • Prerequisite for Vow of Poverty: (BED: 40)
  • Level 1 Feat
• Vow of Poverty (BED)
  • See Book of Exalted Deeds page 35
  • Human bonus Feat
• Touch of Golden Ice (BED)
  • Unarmed attacks against evil creatures must make a Contact Fort Save DC 14. Initial is 1d6 Dex damage, Secondary is 2d6 Dex damage
  • Level 1 Vow of Poverty bonus feat
• Deflect Arrows (PHB)
  • Monk level 2 bonus feat
• Intuitive Attack (BED)
  • Add Wisdom modifier to unarmed attack rolls
  • Level 2 Vow of Poverty bonus feat
• Blind-Fighting
  • Reroll missed chance due to concealment, no AC penalty when attacked by invisible foe.
• Gift of Faith
  • +2 to saves against Fear/Despair
  • Level 4 Vow of Poverty bonus Feat
• Dodge
  • +1 AC against selected target
  • Level 6 feat
• Mobility
  • +4 AC against certain attacks of Op
  • Level 6 bonus monk feat
• Vow of Abstinence
  • +4 Fort save against drugs/poison
  • Level 6 Exalted Feat
• Sanctify Natural Attack
  • +1 Dmg against evil or +1d4 against evil undead/outsider
• Spring Attack
• Consecrate Spell-Like Ability (Saint Protective Aura)
  • Makes spells have the good descriptor

My TOR exit node is no more.

The ISP shut it down.  All that is left is the relay that I’ve been running forever.  This ISP was on the “Tor Friendly” list (which I altered the wiki and noted it accordingly) and allowed IRC servers.  The reason for shutting it down? One php script probe (see previous post).  One.  The boilerplate emails stating what tor was, and how nothing is logged, blah blah blah, weren’t an acceptable reason for the probe (WTF?).  I guess I am responsible for /all/ traffic that goes in and out of my box per their AUP.. Which is IRC friendly….. Yeah…  So I cancelled my service, and are looking elsewhere.

Now riddle me this.  Why would an ISP enjoy common-carrier liability protection from say, usenet or IRC, but not a tor exit node?  It doesn’t make sense to me.  I set this exit node up 100% with the guidelines setup by the tor-project (short of forming an LLC for liability protection) with regard to dns entries with webpages, a dedicated email for abuse complaints, the whole 9 yards.  Still, it was shut down.

Yeah, you may say to just run another relay, but heres the problem with tor.  Unless you’re going to a hidden node within TOR, the entire project is only as fast as the combined speed as its exit nodes.  Sure, you can hop onto tor at 400MB/sec, but the net worth of the entire network is how fast you can get OUT.  I can bounce around servers until I’m blue in the face, does me no good if I cant get to where I need to go because the exit nodes are all swamped.

The whole situation is shitty.  Its been down for a week to let my self cool off rather than right an angry post naming the ISP in question.  Oh, the tor exit node’s DNS WAS tor-exit-readme.virtual-adept.net, just in case you were curious..

All this happening when the tor project could really use a 10 mb/sec exit node for Egypt.

You may or may not know, but I’ve been a fan of tor (http://www.torproject.org) for quite a while.  In fact, i’ve turned on a bunch of people into using tor such as this:

Friend of mine and I were in starbucks enjoying overpriced coffee and using their way too slow free (unencrypted) wireless network.  I was checking my email (via SSL-IMAP) and surfing the internet through tor.  It was a little slow, but thats life.  My friend asked me why I was using tor since all I was doing was checking my email and surfing slashdot and other mindless webpages.

I put my laptop’s wifi into promisc mode and ran tcpdump.  Some idiot was using some filesharing program that I was too lazy to look up the port, another idiot was checking his gmail, another idiot was surfing youtube.  Few people were on facebook, etc.  I told him that I didn’t care to have people here know that I run a mail server, where my mail server is, or what I do on it.  I dont want people to know what im surfing.  Its none of their business.  ALL of my traffic does is hit a tor entrance and disappear (to them).  He understood, i wish more people understood.

So I decided to man-up and run a tor exit node.  Figure I use tor everywhere where there is a public wireless network, its the least I can do to give back.  I’ve ran a relay for years without any problems, so I figure that as long as I follow the documentation on properly running an exit node, use a stripped down ExitPolicy, and bookmark the boilerplate abuse templates I should be fine.  Day 2 of running an exit-node I get my first abuse complaint.

Massive hack?  Stolen credit card?  Letter from the FBI? Something tasty and awesome?

No, some “admin” saying his “IDS system caught” one request to /foo/fjl93rjs9fj/xploitable.php and decides to write this massive abuse email on how this server is trying to “hack” his website.  Really? Fucking really?  In this day of age of nothing but bots and zombies you are going to waste both my and my ISP’s time with something as stupid as this? My webserver gets hundreds of these a day, and I have NEVER EVER sent off an email to an ISP about it.  Its called running a public webserver on the internet.  Don’t like it? Unplug your server and save us all your leet admin IDS skillz.

What makes things even better, is that the IP address that he’s bitching about is mapped to tor-exit-readme.virtual-adept.net.  If you go to that URL, is a webpage saying that this is a tor exit node, what tor is, and how its just a traffic relay.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to write 1000 abuse emails for every invalid URL request that came into my server this week.

This had me stumped for a while while installing vpopmail5.4.32 (currently at time of writing is the stable version) on a fresh amd_64 debian lenny machine.

Random segfaults with vdelivermail that look like this:

vdelivermail[3675]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f4164e470b0 sp 00007fff1a370528 error 4 in libc-2.7.so[7f4164dcc000+14a000]

Solution:

In ~vdelivermail/etc:

vusaged.conf

Log:
Level = 1;
Socket:
Filename = /tmp/vusaged.sock;
UID = vpopmail;
GID = vchkpw;
Client timeout = 5;
Poll timeout = 1;
Detect client timeout = 4;
Queue:
Workers = 10;
Max queue size = 1000;
Polling:
Use Maildir++ format = True;
Directory minimum poll time = 120;
Count directory entry size = False;
Age Factor = 1;

vusagec.conf

Global:
Disable = 1;
Server:
Filename = /tmp/vusaged.sock;
Timeout = 1;

Restart vusaged and your problems should be fixed, at least it worked for me.  Why this bug managed to get into a stable version I have no idea, but hopefully this will save you some headaches should this be a production machine.

So, I decided to give this site a little bit of a makeover since the new version of wordpress came out.  I decided to import all of my LJ posts into here.  The importer is nice and easy, and does all the work for you.

Except if you’re a dumbass like me and forget to turn off the Twitter/LiveJournal/DeadJournal crossposting plugins.

So my twitter/facebook got spammed.  My journal on LJ has duplicates for all of my entries, and my DJ now has all of my public LJ entries in it as well.

Ah well.   I only post here now.

I haven’t really said much here about D&D 4th edition or what my feelings were about it.  I really wanted to get my hand on a book, and actually play a game before I blasted on how much it sucks like most of the other D&D players on the internet.  So have just gotten back from my first game, here is my $0.02.

• Character Creation
  • Coming from 2nd edition with zany math, and having that simplified to the 3.5ed rules, making a 4th ed character was quite a shock.  I got the feeling that I was making a computer-game character with “Here are your 2 choices for a Warlord”.  The skills have been cut down so far that you can’t have a rouge that is good as forgery, disguise, and spying; It’s all been lumped together into “thievery”.  You can’t have a character that cant spot anything in front of his face but find a needle in a haystack if he/she is putting his mind to it.  Major skills are all lumped together into these broad reaching categories that really kills it for me.
  • The powers.  You have your at-will powers, your daily powers, your encounter powers, and utility powers.  In fact, WotC makes these cute little cards you can /buy/ so you can have all of your powers right at your fingertips.  Thats right, your choices now short of movement and basic attack have resorted down to little cards.  Let me peg you into little holes now.  Oh, did I mention that no matter what character class you are, everyone follows the exact same progression as to how many at-will, daily, encounter and utility powers you get? Wizards get cantrips, and certain classes get a few speciality powers, but the majority of everything is flat across the board and level dependant.
  • 1/2 your level bullshit.  Most all saves and AC have a positive modifier of 1/2 your level.  Thats right, the wizard, rogue, and cleric all get the same bonus based upon 1/2 of their level.  Long gone are the days of the Cleric actually having a better Reflex save when they are flat footed (and denied their Dex bonus of -3 from full plate) than when they see it coming.  Everyone gets treated equally.
• Saving throws
  • I dislike this so much that it gets its own section
  • In the 3.5 days, you would get a collection of modifiers to your Fort/Reflex/Will saves.  They come from your ability scores, feats, armor, etc.  When someone casted a spell on you; you would roll a d20, add your modifiers, and if the resulting number was higher than the DC of the power being used on you then it had little to no effect.
  • In the 4.0 days, you have a number that is like 10 + 1/2 your level + ability modifier.  The attacker now rolls and determines if he/she succeeds.  Saving throws in 4th ed are like attack rolls in 3.5.  You have a set number that you cant change, you cant roll a 20 to resist, you cant have that uber-god roll a 1 and fail.
  • The whole 1/2 level flat-across-the-board really bugs me.  Before the bonuses to your saving throw was 100% dependant on your class, not just what level you are.  A level 20 rogue should not have the same bonuses to his will or fort save that a level 20 cleric does, and a level 20 wizard should have a reflex save even close to what a rogue has.  4th ed obviously thinks differently.
• Healing Surges
  • Mechanically I have no idea where they got the idea where characters can just spontaneously heal when the conditions are right.  Every character has these ‘healing surges’ where they recover 1/4 of their hitpoints when conditions are met.  Clerics don’t really have any “Healing Powers” anymore per se, they just allow people to use up their healing surges.  Paladins use their healing surges to heal others with ‘lay on hands’, warlords can command people to use their healing surges.  So really why do we have clerics when every other class out there seems to have a power that allows characters to spend /their/ own healing surges on themselves?   Don’t really care for that.  How can a fighter just spontaneously heal after a Warlord gives him a pep-talk?  Why do healing potions just allow you to use a healing surge instead of actually healing you.  If you drink a healing potion and you have used up your healing surges between rests, then you just wasted a potion!  Its a hackish way of getting around the age old problem of not being able to heal unless you had a Cleric, Paladin, or a Bard in your party (uh, boo hoo? Make someone play a Cleric!  You wouldn’t march into melee with a rogue and a wizard would you?)
• Its so easy any idiot can play!
  • This is what I have a big issue with.  Back in the 2nd ed and 3/3.5 days, playing D&D wasn’t the “cool” thing to do.  You were nerds, you got made fun of when you broke out your source book and leveled up your character between classes.  Now all of a sudden since WoW became famous everyone wants to play D&D.  We have our little nerd club, and because you got a level 80 computer game character you want to be a part of it? I’m sorry, it doesn’t work that way.   I’m one of those “walked up hill both ways, while calculating THAC0, and wondering why a save vs wand was different than a staff/stave.”
  • WotC made 4th ed so dumbed down that any idiot can play.  Just look on the internet how many people refuse to buy the 4th ed books, look at how many people are angry just like I am at how they have fed the rules lead-paint until they drool.
  • Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition obviously has a few extra chromosomes in its genome.
• No OGL
  • One of the huge awesome things about 3.5 was the Open Gaming License.  This Open Sourcing of the core d20 rules allowed other people who make rule books that were 100% compatible with D&D (or new games that used the exact same rules).  There were a TON of 3.5 books that were published by 3rd parties that were perfectly compatible with D&D 3.5 (The Book of Erotic Fantasy was a big seller. Yes, someone wrote rules to incorporate all the wierd sexual fetishes in your D&D campaign).  All the book needed was to just have the OGL printed somewhere in the book, and not use any proprietory D&D stuff (like inital character generation, so you had to buy the D&D main book, understandable)
  • 4th ed has no OGL.  It has some free/low-cost licensing but who knows if WotC is going to renig on that.  Its not open source one big, and Paizo refuses to publish anything under the 4th ed ruleset just for that reason.

Now what I do like about D&D 4th ed, is that the books seem to be colorful. and nicely laid out.  Uh, it allows me to hang out with my friends (some of which who do like D&D 4th ed).  Some of the new classes are kinda neat.

Dax said it best.  The system is solid, and would be a winner if they wouldn’t have put the D&D name on it.

This weeks Mutants and Masterminds game was.. Interesting..

First off, we had 10 (!!) players show up to game.  I know all of the ST’s out there are are thinking to themselves “Wow, that’s a ton”.  It is a ton, an unplanned for ton.  Unfortunately in order to keep order I had to act like an asshole, understandable if you wish to get anything accomplished with only about 4 people playing in the game and the remaining 6 goofing off or having outside conversations.

An interesting tidbit of experience that I have gleaned, is that when you throw a few players a tidbit of information, they are more than likely going to make a whole bunch of assumptions, take those assumptions as complete word-of-God fact, then run with them.  Usually this okay, but sometimes it can invoke a bunch of arguing and drama (especially when it starts to get really late and tempers/patients grow shaky due to fatigue).  I can handle in-game drama to a point, but arguing over rules and semantics get to me (especially when I’m tired as well).  I guess when you have more ST-time under your belt you can see these things coming and prepare for them.

Game otherwise is going great.  The players got through the first part of my plot and are on now to diabolical plot number 2.

My current challenges:

• Player count has gotten way too high.  Need to send the word out that we are no longer accepting new players.
• Need to find out a method of increasing the difficulty of the game to compensate for a few players having some broken powers without making the plot unbeatable (when the burly players are not there) or party-wiping everyone.

So I havent wrote about the M&M game much over the past weeks.  Here is a recap:

I had the players go into this time-warp alternate-reality where the world (as they saw it) had been destroyed by an alien force.  They wake up without powers.  I wrote this awesome script to take everyone’s powers, randomize them, then assign them back to the players, so as time progressed, “random” powers started to manifest.  My original intent was to make them realize that sometimes throwing powers at a problem was not the only way to solve a problem.  Plus I was curious to see how the players would cope with not having the safety blanket of their powers at their immediate disposal.

Well, party morale seemed to drop considerably after that happened.  So this last game they did some events that allowed them to regain their powers again.  It was an interesting experiment, however I think my delivery was sub-par and really ruined (or didn’t get the message across) the experience.  Oh well, live and learn.

This last game however things started slow, but towards the end we ended up running past the allotted time of midnight to get to an ending point.  I think that the party could of ran for another hour or two but I had to cut it short due to myself having to work in the morning.  There was an obvious morale improvement as the powers were regained which made me happy.

As random things happen for random times, as I was at Starbucks with a player who is home on summer break (and thereby an active player yet again), we met a starbucks employee who is a UOP grad and what seems to be a die-hard tabletopper.  I shot him an email to see if he wants to jump into the M&M fun, so we’ll see how that turns out.  He recently graduated UOP with a degree in physics, so it would be a welcome addition to get another hard-science major in the gaming group vs all of the fruity soft-science (yes, that means you Brandon) majors that we have.

So the second game was this last Sunday.

From the general concensus, everyone had a really good time.  We were missing a few players, and there was one that I was really disappointed didn’t show up (school studying, understandable), but the night went on well.

The players haven’t gotten certain things to me yet, and I’m trying out a new DEMERIT system for the people who like to goof off during game and be a distraction.  They are moving along in the story quite nicely, but the acid test will be this coming week when the plot starts to get thrown at them from every angle.

Last Sunday (yeah, I’m a slacker), was my first game as the Mutants and Masterminds storyteller.

I must say, it went rather well.

There is one aspect that I got a taste of when I ran Shadowrun that I really see now.  No matter how concrete you think your story outline is.  No matter how much you have prepared for the game thinking of all of the possible sidetracking your players will go on, they will always think of something that you didn’t.  We spent most of the game ignoring the fact that all of the superheros of the world went missing (except the ones in Stockton) instead on trying to balance the budget of California so the Stockton Arena wouldn’t get shut down.

Yeah.  My players wanted to move the prision system to another dimension to save California money.  Yeah, I’m at a loss too.  It wasn’t until I made something very dear to them go missing did they get back on track.  Wow, screwing over the rest of the world to save the Stockton Arena and California.  Never saw that coming.

Other than that, keeping my fingers crossed for another good game.