Robotech_Master's page

Even in the D&D Classic Rules Cyclopedia, polymorph seems oddly out of balance. With fourth-level spells, you can either polymorph self, for a limited time but not getting any of the special abilities of the creature in question--or you can polymorph other, which is permanent and does grant the special abilities.

Even the ninth-level spell "shapechange," which is a polymorph self WITH special abilities, only lasts for one turn per level of the caster.

So you can't turn YOURSELF into a fire-breathing dragon (unless you're super-high-level and even then it won't last very long)--but you can turn your buddy into one forever. How much sense does that make?

One thing is quite obvious, though. Drunken beer drinkers are way more aggressive than drunken wine drinkers...

You know, I read a funny story in the book <i>Beer, for Pete's Sake</i> by "Wicked" Pete Slosberg. He notes that British beers are taxed by alcohol percentage, meaning that British brewers are given incentive to make the weakest beers they possibly can so they get to keep more of the money.

But in Belgium, they make their beers as strong as ever&mdash;so that a typical Belgian beer can be up to four times stronger than the beer Britishers are accustomed to drinking. But most Britishers aren't aware of this, so when they go over to Belgium for soccer matches, they drink their "usual" number of glasses of beer, get much more intoxicated than they think they are, and get into riots.

I just find that so funny...

I'm fond of doppelbocks, such as Salvator or the seasonal doppel at my local brewpub. Mmmnummy.

Apart from that, though, I'm not generally fond of lagers, being more of an ale and stout person. Lately I've been enjoying a nice, mellow drinkable black ale called 1554, made by New Belgium (the Fat Tire people). Their Trippel isn't bad either. But generally I'll at least try whatever's on sale at the Brown Derby as long as it's at least $1 per bottle.

Pete's Wicked Ale isn't bad, though it was better before Pete left the company and they immediately changed the formula.

Whatever I get, though, I make sure that it's in brown bottles, in a sealed box, or both. (The only time I drink Newcastle is when I can get it in those boxed 24-packs.) A pox on whoever invented the clear and green bottles for putting beer in!

Something I've noticed, going through my Rules Cyclopedia PDF that I bought the other day, is that the text is, well, rather blurry compared to some of the other PDF versions of it</a> that are floating around. I don't regret buying it, but I could wish the text was sharper.

For an example of what I mean, see http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=5556

Given that the only color elements in the book were backgrounds on some charts, and the leaves along the top and bottom, is it really necessary that it be in color as a color scan? It's a little hard to read and would probably be costly to print out.

Well, no, I really <i>did</i> think getting a copy commercially would be faster, given that commercial sites have a monetary stake in being able to provide what you pay for quickly and efficiently.

Anyway, I <i>did</i> purchase the file, so Wizards got their money for my consuming a Cyclopedia PDF regardless of where I might get it.

I just bought and am trying to download the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, and I find that even when I do so from a system directly connected to a university's trunk line, I'm only getting 1K per second download rates, or less. For an 80 megabyte file, that means it's going to take me more than a whole day to get it!

And to think I thought that buying it legitimately would be faster than getting a copy off of peer to peer... :(