Economicomics

Regarding this:


I worry a little bit that enough research has been done about this:

Storm could irrigate the crops of all the suffering farmers in the midwest and California when the droughts of summer are destroying their crops.

I don't follow X-Men religiously anymore, and they sneak things like Spidey's organic webbing past me, so this may have changed, but historically (i.e., in the 80's-90's) it was explicitly established that Storm moves humidity around, but doesn't create it. If she irrigates the midwest, she does it by exacerbating the drought in California. In fact, she was essentially doing this as a local rain goddess when Prof. X recruited her.

My geeky trivium aside, I think it's weird when people complain about an amusing theoretical like this as being tired, overdone, or silly. Superheroes are cartoons -- superhero economics is a cartoon of economics. Most of us aren't economists, and thinking through simplified illustrations (including their shortcomings) makes key concepts clearer. Also, it's fun.

Conversation

The title link is a recurring theme on the D&D blog.

There are distinct phases of gameplay. Some are obvious: combat, for example. Slightly less obvious are planning phases ("So, X casts Invisibility on Y, who sneaks around the enemy camp. After Y's in position, Z will summon..." "No, wait, how big is the camp again? Is the ogre still...?") and conversation phases.

Perhaps the most awkward moments of the game are at transitions between phases, but I think that might be a necessary tension in the game. Players always want more time to prepare before the fight starts, and DMs always have to keep the game moving to the next phase.

But the blog format impacts the conversation phase a lot, I think. (By conversation here, I mean specifically back-and-forth between PCs and NPCs.) The blog format necessarily encourages serial expositions, both from the players and from the DM (who has to do lots of expositions anyway.) I find my characters talking in soliloquys -- even when I want them to be taciturn. (Which admittedly, is playing hard against type.)

This post is driven by me not knowing what to have Mouth say, of course. But I think it's a recurrent theme. Well, yes, it's _also_ a recurrent theme that I don't know what to have my character say. But I MEANT the theme of an extensive description by an NPC, followed by a "Talk, talky people!" moment. It just _feels_ so much like the DM said everything they meant to say...what are we supposed to add?

Blog interface for D&D

So we've got a campaign rollin' over at dndblog, and it's all good. But I had a suggestion when I realized that for the third time in one encounter, I scrolled down the blog to find the initiative order. Wouldn't it be nice to have the initiative order sitting in a nice block on the sidebar, easy to find?

One advantage of the web interface is that this data is accessible anyway -- it would be more convenient to be in the sidebar, but it's not like it's a terrible burden to scroll down to find it. This is better than the DM having a list to consult and all the players continually asking who goes when. Although over at Paizo they've got a clever device to help you track what's happening.

But once the sidebar seed gets planted, I couldn't help but wonder if the snazzy stuff that GameMastery Combat Pad I linked to couldn't be included in a D&D web interface. Currently, that would be a lot of upkeep for the DM (who just happens to be superuser for the blog). He'd have to update the sidebar every time he posted a round's results -- potentially posting hit points, status, whatever. A blog generally doesn't have the character data integrated with the website (or at least, ours doesn't), but what if it did?

What if the character stats were stored in a database (separate from the database of blog posts, of course, but that just points out there's ALREADY a database the blog's pulling from, so this isn't a giant leap). The DM has some handy interface website where he/she can modify that data. As he does, the sidebar magically updates, and everyone can see not just the initiative order, but what just happened to them. The DM can also post a description of the round and its results, but I'm no longer required to sift through each of those descriptions for how many hp I've gained or lost, whether my opponent's dead or not, whether we've jointly remembered to update the various bonuses/spell effects/ammunition...

Couldn't this go still further -- couldn't each player have (possibly password protected) access to their own character sheet, visible on the same webpage as they were posting their actions? And instead of making two steps for the DM, what if he or she could post a round's results, interspersed with clever wiki-like codes to direct the character/initiative data to update, like "Craig guts the hapless vulture from stem to stern [Vulture1 hp-23] while Georg casts Bless [Party AB+1], bathing the group in a beneficent golden glow."