Jon J Haire's page

I thought of the core idea about a month before the competition and wrote it up a few days before.

Other things you can do is go into the Word Options and the spelling and grammar sub sections and check out the various check boxes to turn on or off various metrics as appropriate. One I often check is to treat all capitals as an abbreviation - that way spelling checker ignore CMD etc type of abbreviations.

I hope that helps.

I found it! Really cool. My version of Word at work was NOT configured to do this. Thanks!

I also saw options for commas, quotes, and the space between sentences. I would love to have a screen shot of the settings used by Paizo.

Hey all

A new review is posted!

This one has something about bonus awards in it that you may find of interest and is something to consider in your next pieces of work.

Enjoy.

21 / 32 now done

For those I haven't reached yet, I will continue and complete you all.

However, the rate may slow down somewhat over the next few days... my good start to the year continues unabated as I received a phone call this morning informing me that the mother of my oldest and dearest friend had passed away. I will therefore be helping him over the next few days. I am sure you all understand that under the circumstances I may not get online much for a day or so.

Please bear with me, I will get you done as soon as I can.

Template Fu talks about writing analysis tools and mentions they are standard on many word processing programs. I checked my Microsoft Word 2010 here at work and did not see them except for the generic spelling/grammar and word count tool. Could you shed some more light on the tools? I'm all about using them since I am used to writing for engineers. Our documents are typically extremely boring.

Here's hoping that you have exhausted all the bad mojo in January.

So.... I woke up a few minutes ago, misread the clock and started to get ready for work. My work begins in 4.5 hours. Awesome. The good news is that I thought of an interesting way to do the PBP if possible. I really don't know much about PBP.

Is it possible to have 36 (32 + 4 alt) different threads that can only be seen by the individual players? Can the threads be combined and separated as needed? If so, then I may have a fun scenario. I might need someone to help with combat. I also need to go over the archetypes a few more times.

And now.... I'll try to get back to sleep.... yeah right.

I voted for this item a few times. I thought this was a clever idea and that is what gives this item mojo.

BTW, could this be used as weapon to prevent a creature from teleporting away?

I remember voting for this item a few times. The idea of converting alchemical compounds to elemental resistance is smart and gives this item mojo.

Steven Helt wrote:

Now: on to the important stuff. Who's running the archerype game, how many of us are in, and what level do we start at? I'll bring pizza and Dew!

Prefer to play that one, count me in, 20th (capstones or bust!), and Swedish Fish.

I'm in. Never tried PBP but I am involved in a Skype Kingmaker campaign.

Are you feeling lucky? :)

Not at all. I would prefer to work on the next round rather than dwell on something I have no control over.

The main thing I like about this entry is that I never would have thought of it. Anytime you can surprise the reader, then your entry has mojo.

Round 3: Contestants must design a subspecies of flumph.

That's funny. I've been doing monster research and I ran across the flumph in Bestiary 3. I have to admit I didn't know it was there. It gave me a little chuckle to see it after all this time.

Well..I was kidding about teaching the whole book. The curriculum tends to favor topical study over expository study, so we're redaing excerpts from Psalms and talking more generally about the book. The lessons really just have the purpose of illustrating tbe Jesus story in the Old Testament.

If I could get on the photosynthesis plan, I'd probably lose a lot of weight. Can I get sunlight that tastes like Mt. Dew?

Psalms would take a long time if you went through every verse. I guarantee you had more fun than I did picking up kids for an inner city church today.

I don't know about you dudes, but I am jonesing for some monster rules. Sunday School lesson is ready...I worked productively at the office today..and now it's time to design ideas until I get sleepy.

Staring down the barrel at the location/encounter/map, I better be drawing some basic ideas for that. Last year's round 4 was the hardest thing I've seen in RPG Superstar.

Yeah, I feel the same way. I'm doing monster research to make sure my ideas for next round haven't been done already.

Step 4: Flesh out the details. (continued)

What happens if there is more than one type of swarm in range? What if there are two swarms of the same type in range?

I decided to allow the swarm slurper to only affect one type of swarm when activated. So if you were being attacked by wasps, ants, and amoebas then it would only slurp up one of the three types. It would, however, be able to slurp up more than one swarm of the same type subject to the hit point limit.

What happens to the swarm after 10 minutes?

The swarm is expelled from the extra-dimensional space ready to do whatever the swarm wants to do. I added a command word option so someone could toss it in a room and open it up on their enemies.

(In retrospect, it would have been better to describe the release process as the swarm slurper belching out the captured swarm.)

What is this thing going to cost?

Originally, the mouth would have stayed open for 13 rounds which is the duration of the grasping hand spell. I cut that down to 5 rounds to bring the cost down. Instead of calculating the cost of a 7th level at a caster level of 13, I calculated the cost of a 7th level spell at a caster level of 5. After some creative accounting, I came up with a value that was slightly more than 8,000gp, so I just rounded down to the nearest thousand.

If anyone wants the gory details, I'll oblige.

I've seen three champion voters.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I wasn't trying to imply you thought they were bad. I was just trying to make the point that unique consumables are different than scrolls and potions.

That said--I have liked what you are suggesting when it has been implemented in other games--I guess some days I'm too much of a traditionalist. What can I say? I like the broad scope of wondrous items.

Yeah, I'm not trying to pick a fight either. As I vote, I tend to organize these items into categories and I find myself comparing them to existing items.

I'm seeing things in the contest that are weapons, armor, spell-completion devices, etc... Makes the voting harder.

Jon J Haire wrote:

You will eventually see your item. I have only seen mine four times and I have voted.... a lot.

"Only?"

I saw it once early in the morning and three times late at night. If you have not seen your item yet, then I would recommend voting at different times.

I'm sure I have seen over 500 items. I've also seen some items more than 20 times. I seem to get more unique items early in the morning or really late at night. It may be that more people are voting during the day and many of those people may be hitting the neither/both button. Don't worry, I'm still ranking every pairing.

If I kept statistics, I would probably have to stop voting. After you have seen the same bad items enough times it stops becoming fun. It is fun seeing ANY new items, even if they are bad.

You will eventually see your item. I have only seen mine four times and I have voted.... a lot.