Dalamiir's page

I'm running a custom play-by-chat game on Sunday nights (7pm AEST) for some 3.5 beginners, if anyone's interested. There might be room for a couple more keen gamers.

Excerpts from "Shades of Gray", a self-written biography by Dalamiir Stormscribe.

My mother used to tell me that, as a child, I would look at people as though I could see through them and into their souls. Perhaps I could; certainly stranger things are possible, and it could help explain my knack for divination. Sometimes I think about that, and wonder what I saw when I looked at the citizens of Sasserine then, before Orren's witch hunt, before the Sea Princes came, before our lives were thrown into turmoil.

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I've never considered my small elven family to be noble, though my parents clearly had other ideas. We've lived in the noble district for most of my life, and while I've always been content with my studies, my mother and father had much greater ambitions. Their social status was almost assured for a time, but the rule of the Sea Princes hit my father's business hard and life became difficult for us all.
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It was my parents ambition that saved us then. Without their friends and associates, and the loans we received, we would never have survived. It was also their ambition that gradually turned everything around in the trailing decades of the Sea Princes' reign, when my father converted his humble book & magic shop into a front for something far more profitable.
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I was accepted into the House of the Dragon, and several years later began my arcane studies with the Witchwardens. People say that knowledge is power. If this is true, divination must surely be the most underestimated school of magic. Diviners are the masters of time and space. All the knowledge that ever was, is, and will be is within their reach. If only I had fully understood that sooner, I might have been able to foresee our impending tragedy.
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In truth, only my father's carelessness was to blame. The Sea Princes discovered he'd sold some legitimate sea charts to a ship captain and were merciless in their punishment. They killed him, looted his wares and burnt the shop to the ground. Three years later the Scarlet Brotherhood intervened and brought an end to their tyranny. Too little, too late for us.
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Mother took the loss the hardest and quickly fell into a deep state of depression. Kyriana, my elder sister, left shortly after. She said couldn't bare to watch our mother continue to destroy herself. I receive correspondence from her from time to time, laden with pleasantries but scarce on detail. Now it's just the two of us, mother trying desperately to numb her pain with drugs and alcohol, while I try desperately to salvage our rapidly deteriorating financial situation. However, so far my education and magical talents have yet to save us from inevitable bankruptcy - I don't need to be a diviner to see that coming.

...after freaking out the new guy with talk of cannibalism and orphanage-related arson.

As for Skype, I'd prefer to stay in chat mode. I find I have an easier time with staying in 1st person in chat than voice. Not to mention it's easier to type descriptive text and backspace out mistakes than to make mistakes while speaking.

I completely agree, though it's Clay that does the bulk of the typing, so even if he was the only one on a mic it could help to speed up the game.

Do you guys want to try an integrate Skype or some other kind of voice chat software to use ingame as well? Not quite sure how well it would work out, but sure would be cool to have the audio aspect as well. Whadda ya think?

That'll put an end to the message logs, but it could be fun to try.

It won't do much to speed up my responses, since I'm not very chatty anyway. I spend far more time typing than I do talking at home/work/university, so I'm used to it.

If you think it'll help move the game along though, then I'm all for the idea. The biggest problem for me would be trying to understand what you guys are saying with your kooky American accents. :p

Of course, having the line "Smith swings his mace" as a precursor to every attack and damage roll might get stale very quickly, so maybe we can still write that part ourselves.

I suppose another speedy solution to this would be to use a number of aliases for various types of attacks. So, to paraphrase your example-

/alias att1 /me bears down hard on the ${2} with his ${1}, attempting to bring pain to its ${3} existence.

After which, you could just type /att1 mace "orc warrior" piggish

When attacking, making a skill check, damage roll etc., please add the appropriate descriptive text for that check or action, then make your roll.

Something else that seems relevant to this are the macros in MapTool. I'm not sure how much you guys use them, but they're very handy for doing common rolls to speed things up. You could set up button 1, for example, to look like this-

Label: Initiative

Command: /r 1d20+2

If we upgrade, MapTool 1.2 also supports multi-line macros. So you can set buttons up to look something like...

Label: Greatsword

Command:
/me swings his greatsword.
/r 1d20+3
/r 2d6+3

In MapTool 1.2, you can have up to 100 different macros (they have a separate window). I keep macros for rolling a private d20 (/rme 1d20), initiative, various weapon attacks, spells, skill checks like spot and listen, and saving throws.

Of course, having the line "Smith swings his mace" as a precursor to every attack and damage roll might get stale very quickly, so maybe we can still write that part ourselves.

Hello everyone. I thought I'd drop by to say how wrapped I am to be invited to join this game and I'm really looking forward to adventuring with you guys.

Nerak the Numb wrote:

One thing I wanted to ask everyone in the group is: When do (Or do we) want to upgrade to use MapTool 1.2? It's out now.

Re: the map tool, I will leave it to the others' discretion. I'm of course okay with what we're using but have no means of comparison. If the new version is superior in some manner then maybe it should be used. If the differences are minimal in the opinions of the experienced players then it may not be worth the effort.

Personally I think MapTool 1.2 is a great improvement and I highly recommend it. I might be a bit biased, since I already have it installed and use it fairly regularly, but it's easy enough to upgrade. Of course, it's also easy enough for me to run 1.1, so I can go either way.