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6/24/2008 - Text Comic - The Sword's Hardness Reaches 0

6/24/2008 - Text Comic - The Sword
Artist: ArtMonkey
Colorist: RichardM
Writer: RichardM
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Friday, June 27, 2008

richardm

Forums Slow
So I hadn't backed up the databases in about 5 months.  The log files grew so large that I no longer had the ability to back it up within any reasonable amount of time.  The data files for dndorks are about 2 gigs, the log files were about 4 gigs.  I did a lot of work to restart the log file and get it to a few meg, as well as get rid of years of data (not content, just data the site tracks) until I got the data file down to 1 gig.  There is probably about 200-300 mb of additional data that communityserver is going to rebuild but at least I have everyone's posts and such backed up now. 

Unfortunately, community server is working so hard parsing all the forum data that its bogging the server down.  In addition, delete procedures take "forever" because of how all the data is interconnected so I can't even delete old unused forum posts in any reasonable manner. 

so....in the short term, I'm looking into applying sql sp2 cumulative update 8 to fix a particularly long bug that CS is choking on.  The next step after that is I'm looking to switching the forums over to CS2008, I'm hoping that the revised data structures are easier to maintain and will help get rid of any old junk in the forums.

So please be patient everyone, I'm well aware of the slowness and I'm working on it. :)
Thanks


Tuesday, June 24, 2008

richardm

OMG What am I doing?
So today's comic is...not really a comic.  Sorry about that everyone, we've been busy with different projects and I decided the story has to move on regardless.  There is one more comic like this but I don't think it'll be a very regular thing, unless for some reason people like it, in which case it could be a regular side thing I do when I just have more words than can fit in a 4 panel comic..

Thanks those of you still checking out the site regularly and thanks all of you new visitors. :)


Monday, June 23, 2008

richardm

4th edition 4th edition game Last Sunday
I posted this on my livejournal, but thought I'd post it here too.  No comic update today, hopefully soon. :)
So yesterday our first real 4th edition D&D campaign started.  I'd been prepping my character for a few weeks and was a little worried the campaign wouldn't live up to my expectations.  Happily, the game turned out better than I had thought.  

My character, more or less, is here: http://dndorks.com/4e/jondolarsulvak.xps  its in Microsoft format because the pdf version only worked for people using non-adobe products (I use nitro pdf to create my pdfs forms and foxit to read my pdfs: http://www.nitropdf.com/index.asp).  Last minute before I showed up to game I decided to replace Alertness with Action Surge or whatever, I decided the alertness was a little too passive. 

My character is Jondolar Sulvak, human wizard.  Jondolar is the last scion of the Sulvak, his parents having been killed by the head servant m Klackus, and given to an old mage to have as an "apprentice" (ie servant).  Luckily Jondolar turned out to have a better aptitude for magic than Klackus could have predicted and the old man was more fair and reasonable than one could hope for.  

The adventure begins with Jondolar's master dying of old age (I guess he never hit lvl 30) and Jondolar finding out that Klackus has claimed the family's name for himself from some fictional grandmother.  Of course Jondolar, now brimming with arcane might, can't allow this to happen.  Jondolar also inherited the old man's items of power, but has to go pick them up from some small town to the north.  Jondolar has dreams of great powerful artifacts with which he'll be able to smite Klackus down with, though the reality is that it'll probably be a ring of protection +1 or some similar junk. ;)

With him, Jondolar travels with a halfling troublemaker, Aleta (my gf Anna) and has recently met up with a regular circus of freaks...er heroes, 2 demonic tieflings (a warlock and a paladin), a dwarf cleric of the raven god, and a half-elf ranger.  One of the tieflings is the son of my family's blacksmiths and has a reason to want vengeance on Klackus as well.  

The dwarf is on some mission to discover the dwarven equivelent of Atlantis or some such thing, something I could care less about, though the cleric has hinted I can get access to some dwarven items of power so I'm definitely intrigued.  

Finally, where we met, at a crossroads of merchants, we got attacked by an alliance of undead and goblins, so before we go off on our epic journeys we're going to go try to rid the world of this undead menace (and hopefully build up our power ;).

There were 2 combats and the rest roleplaying in a bit less than 4 hours.  I think it was probably 40% combat to 60% RP, a lot of the RP was between characters and dealing with our backstories, which, to me, is a good sign.  

Overall the game felt cool, with people seemingly more willing to do things they "thought" of doing rather than what the game said they "could" do.  The fact that many skills are merged into larger meta-skills helps a lot because its much more likely the players will have a decent modifier to the roll when they decide to try and do something.   No true skill challenges yet, and the combats were fairly linear, but its going to take the DM a while to fully get into the "spirit" of 4E, I know I don't have it quite down yet.  

As an ending note, I "love" the new wizard cantrips.  Being able to do them at will as often as I want is pretty cool.  At one point as a bit of humor I made a wounded goblin smell like roasted meat and pointed a glowing red arrow at it when we left it to distract some wolves who were starting to threaten us.  It amused me anyways... ;)


Wizards.com - Dungeons & Dragons
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