Coding and Roleplaying - Is There a Connection? 417
TossCobble asks: "With table-top roleplaying giant Wizards of the Coast (makers of Dungeons & Dragons, for those not in the know) broadcasting an open call for adventure designers and developers (including an entertaining developer test to gauge your own game-design talent and knowledge), I found myself once again considering the odd appeal of gaming for us programming types. It's interesting that something so free-form-ishly creative, socially dynamic, and utterly fantastical be fun for folks so grounded in logical programming. Of course, my theory is that gaming and programming actually have more in common than we might think. Tabletop roleplaying involves coming up with creative solutions to problems set in a clearly-defined ruleset, involve constant data-tracking and minor mathematical equations, and involve working together with small groups of people toward like-minded goals. Conversely, love of roleplaying can illustrate how important creativity is to good programming. What do you think?"
A connection? Yes... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A connection? Yes... (Score:3, Informative)
Take it as you may.
We women *do* play D&D too.
Re:A connection? Yes... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm glad someone does.
I must not have a DnD gene. I had clients by the time I graduated from high school twenty-five years ago, earned a paycheck in nearly two dozen languages, worked on any number of platforms & OSes, and DnD holds absolutely no interest. I used to watch friends waste countless hours with pencil & graph paper. I'd almost rather spend the time pulling out my own short & curlies, one by one, with a pair of tweezers.
I've suggested to the PC-specific game magazines (PC Gamer
roleplaying? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:roleplaying? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:roleplaying? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Why do I have such a big penis? Does everyone else have a big penis or am I alone in having such a great big penis?"
Re:roleplaying? (Score:3, Funny)
I too have a great big penis, and my wife assures me that people like you and I are in the vast minority. So I say, enjoy your great big penis, and share it with all who are safely willing.
-Rick
Re:roleplaying? (Score:3, Funny)
Phaw. One penis is so last year.
Re:roleplaying? (Score:3, Funny)
"Why do I have such a big penis? Does everyone else have a big penis or am I alone in having such a great big penis?"
This from "CaptainCucumber" ?
What do I think? (Score:5, Insightful)
TWW
mod parent up... (Score:5, Interesting)
Gamers have several reasons to be less-than-satisfied with WoTC, compared to TSR, including:
- "Updating" the ruleset (ie. version 3.5) to the point that half the "current" DnD books are using incompatible rules which require serious work by the DM in order for their material to work with the 3.5 rule-system.
I could go on... but I think I've proven my point: WoTC hasn't always shown consideration to its customers. The parent was perfectly justified for voicing dissatisfaction with WoTC. Mod him up.Re:mod parent up... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:mod parent up... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pencil-and-paper RPG's are (and always have been) nothing more than a vehicle for nerds to gather with nerd friends to eat dorito chips and pizza while chatting about Joss Whedon shows & anime, and repeating old Monty Python jokes they've all heard a million times.
And there's nothing wr
Roll your own distro (Score:3, Funny)
Re:mod parent up... (Score:5, Informative)
What? Are we thinking the same TSR? The TSR that put itself into bankruptcy by alienating itself from its customers - threatening any who dared post a module they made themselves with legal action citing the module as a derivative product of their IP?
Is this how one pleases one's customers?
Re:What do I think? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What do I think? (Score:4, Insightful)
(And the stuff that sticks around between editions is the stuff that *defines* D&D-without it, it would be like a GUI without the graphical part. During the really major revision that was 3e, a lot of thought went into this-for the history of all this, see the 3 years of Dragon immediately preceding 3e's release.)
Re:What do I think? (Score:4, Interesting)
Umm, poor people skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad but true, and we know it.
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:5, Funny)
I ban you away from my wow tower! Begone!
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've known people to prefer a MUD PK war to a date with a beautiful woman; a game of capture the flag to sex; Word of Warcraft to their loving SOs. There's something about the gamer/coder personality type that is more than a function of
1. Being good at analytical thinking
2. Poor performance in social situations.
It's more of an attraction to certain modes of thinking and systems of reward than failing at the "real world". In some people, at least.
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
You really have something there. Alot of geeks are conditioned to compare themselves to the popular crowd. They put themselves up against standards which they're not designed to meet, like an apple becoming depressed because it's not orange. They become 'losers', so they sink into this gaming world where they can win. On WoW for instance, there are so many people playing, that the field is very average. Any dedication will make you 'better' that alot of the other people you compete against. It's a huge ego boost to take out someone else in one-on-one combat. It's a well defined world, where winning is easy, much much easier than competing in the real world.
And I'm not talking about gaming for fun, it's the people who game for survival. The sad thing is that these reculsive geeks do have the tools to compete in the real world, they are just afraid to try.
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:3, Funny)
Speak for yourself. (Score:2)
Geeks on slashdot tend to band together, but to claim a monopoly on Intelegence betrays a lack analytical thinking skills more then anything.
Plus, most slashdot types aren't even that smart. Being able to whip up a Perl script isn't the same thing as being smart.
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, there's something about the mindset. (Score:2)
Way back before real network connectivity started appearing in RP games (Muds, etc.), there were similar games that you played solo. "adventure" is the classic one which comes to mind. It was quite popular, and still can be found in the BSD releases. This game was one of the first, if not the first, of the exploring-a-fantasy-world times of games. It was also mentioned in the boo
Its about the personality, not the problem-solving (Score:3, Interesting)
Its not about the problem solving. Its about using my imagination to shape things. Coding is the same. I build upon the world, and the structures that I make please me.
A lot of the entertainment in role playing is in the fact that doing so is easy. I can code a behaviour I envision in perhaps a few hours or a few days, but I can create a character in a few minutes - and act him out with much greater detail.
I think that the reason behind this i
You don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
If you think that making notes on a sheet is creating a character, then you're probably not a very good RPGer. Doing something and creating are one thing, just as writing a program and writing a program that does something are one.
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is blindingly obvious to everyone except themselves; like the
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:2)
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I don't get it. Yeah, I have fun fixing computer problems but my social standing in relation to my co-workers or neighbors isn't that important to me. Actually, now that I think about it, my social standing in relation to my friends and family isn't that important to me either. In fact, I don't really want to have anything to do with the outside world, other than online. Wo
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:2)
Agreed, but "hobbies" are not created equal, so it's not entirely fair to over generalise. If the poster is looking for associations between creativity and programming, I'd suggest he'd be more likely to find it in the study of music [menc.org] and stop
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:4, Interesting)
Resorting to ad hominem attacks like that really doesn't help your point.
I'll agree that some people use roleplaying (or anime, novels, what have you) as a form of escapism. But I'll bet there are a lot more who use them simply as a form of entertainment, as they are designed to be. Not all of us have this urge to rip on anything that's not a true literary work of art; what is fun, is fun, and doesn't need justification beyond that.
Re:Umm, poor people skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what kind of science fiction you read. But, I don't think most can be described as pleasant.
I also find it interesting that you leap to these conclusions. Would you say the same of people that do needle point? They should just stop deluding themselves and get more social and "adult"?
How about gardening, reading, golf, long distance running - or any other mostly solitary activity that people enjoy. What all these people need to do is just go to more parties and be more social?
Gaming is, in fact, more social than these activities, yet no calls you socially inept if you happen to be an ultra-marathon runner - even though as one you spend much more time away from people. What makes gaming such that you assume gamers are socially inept? Might it merely be a prejudice on your part? I've known people to make these comments because they don't find gaming useful - whereas running, gardening, needle point are considered useful in our society.
Further, it is okay for people not to like social situations. I've found that most people are fairly interesting alone. Turn something into a social situation where people do not know one another, and they immediately make themselve less interesting. I've wasted enough time talking about the weather with people and I'm extremely anxious that someone will take up more of my life wanting to talk about this inane topic. You know what I mean?
Umm, no? (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, creating a fantasy world in a computer game is an incredibly collaborative effort these days. The days of some lone geek sitting in his garage making a game is long over. Even small casual games have teams of at least 3 people. You need a minimum amount of people skills if you're going to create a fantasy world in the medium I'm most familiar with.
Now, let me give you some real insight: a book doesn't have to be set in a "magical fairy realm" or "deep space" or "an alien planet" to be escapist. Hell, most "mainstream literature" is escapist; why do you think people read books like The Hunt for Red October or Patriot Games? Because they're fascinated by Russian sub or missile technology? No, because they want some adventure and excitement in their lives. They live vicariously through the spies, CIA operatives, and other characters as much as the person reading A Game of Thrones lives through the knights, schemers, nobles, and other characters in that book. Of course, that book isn't all "pleasant", and hopefully you didn't identify too closely with the character that gets beheaded or died of a seemingly minor wound....
So, stop with the tired "lolz @ teh dorks!" attitude already. Everyone engages in a bit of escapism once in a while. And sometimes people read a book because it's genuinely a good story, whether it's fantasy, science fiction, or "mainstream".
Here's my own definition of a dork, then (Score:5, Interesting)
I know society as a whole is judgmental, relatively self-centred and "us vs them", but (like many other activities and social rituals they don't understand) nerds take this to an extreme it was never supposed to be taken to. It's like noticing that people use salt and vinegar in their soup, and deciding to make your soup out of _only_ salt and vinegar.
The social "us vs them" theme is supposed to find some common ground for the "us" part in that gossip. It's real purpose, conscious or not, is to find some common grounds to backpat each other in that "us" group. E.g., yeah, we might have other differences of opinion, but we're both fans of the same football club, so we're great. Not to become an "Me vs the rest of you losers" extreme.
Basically you know you're a nerd when your world is made of one Mr Perfect prototype, yourself, and sad losers who fail to measure up to that. And every single tiny difference of interests or difference of opinion is put on a pedestal, as definitive proof that everyone else is an idiot. And hey, it was said by Mr Perfect himself, so it _must_ be true.
Basically you know you're a nerd when you find yourself passing such broad sweeping judgments, like:
- did you study, say, law or medicine while I was learning to optimize assembly? Bah, what a sad loser. I bet you can't even code your own kernel drivers. Is that sad or what?
- ok, so you studied CS too, but do you use the same OS, language or editor that I do? You use another one, huh? (E.g., so we're both on Linux, but you code in C++ while I do Java, or viceversa, and use vi instead of emacs, or viceversa. Or worse yet, you use an IDE.) Ah-ha! I knew it. Idiot. It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
- and how long is your uptime anyway? Only two weeks? Hah. Loser.
- what hobbies do you have anyway? Is it books or movies while I prefer gaming, or viceversa? What a sad loser you are, then. You're in denial. Grow up, get a life, get the One True Hobby.
- Ok, so if it's the same hobby, what flavour of it is it? E.g., do you prefer SF/fantasy books movies while I prefer murder mysteries, or viceversa? Haha, I knew it, it sucks to be you. You only read those because you don't have a life and are in denial. Or if it's games, do you like story-driven games while I like Mario-style jump puzzles, or viceversa? You guessed, you're a loser again for failing to measure up to my perfection.
Etc, etc, etc.
It's a sort of a sieve that really doesn't let anything through. There is no "us" in a nerd's "us vs them", it's one big case of Mr Perfect vs 7 billion sad losers who fail to measure up.
It's common response... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cut down on your caffeine intake. (Score:2)
Other hobbies (Score:5, Insightful)
Home brewing, too.
--saint
Re:Other hobbies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Other hobbies (Score:3, Insightful)
+1 Insightful to that. Speaking as somebody who has just taken the time to whip up a batch of cheese and bacon scones, I have always thought that programming and cooking where very similar pursuits. The same goes for music and gaming - there are rules, the satisfaction comes from using the rules (and knowing when you can break
I... (Score:5, Funny)
It's Independant Thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
If you contrast table gaming with no rules for the players versus console gaming in which you must do x to get to y you will alwasy have more creative solutions in the table gaming. This doesn't mean a standard solution will not work or will not be better, but you can't change the boundaries of a console game for a unique solution to a problem so you never challenge the creative juices of a player and reinforce creative ideas; just the opposite you reinforce finding a solution only within the rules. Is this what you are talking about?
Re:It's Independant Thinking (Score:2)
The REAL connection: (Score:3, Insightful)
(the sound you just heard is the myraid slashdotters modding this into oblivion)
Virtual worlds (Score:2, Interesting)
I think us programmer types are drawn to the appeal of being able to create our own virtual worlds, within which we define the laws of "physics" based on elegance and usefulness in the problem/game domain. The real world is too arbitrary and chaotic to be able to understand all the interactions in any given system properly. Programs and RPG worlds don't have that problem.
So does working at McDonalds. (Score:5, Insightful)
That applies just as much to the workers at McDonalds and to farmers as it does to basically any other job that requires an ounce of skill. Before the 1960s such tasks were often called "common capabilities". That is, they were the basic tasks that pretty much anyone and everyone was expected to be able to do. It's only now, with declining education systems in many western nations, that we consider mastery of such menial tasks to be an accomplishment.
Re:So does working at McDonalds. (Score:2)
Re:So does working at McDonalds. (Score:2)
Re:So does working at McDonalds. (Score:2)
Re:So does working at McDonalds. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, talk about oversimplification. Reality is significantly more complex.
German engineers played a role, but there was a whole lot more to putting man in space (and eventually on the moon) than straight rocketry, which is what most of the German engineers were specialists in. Indeed, a significant number of engineers on th
Creativity? (Score:2)
There's a well-defined ruleset, well enough defined that no thought is usually required. This also removes the need for cooperation--I don't call it that when one finite automaton passes an item to another for further processing, just as I don't call it cooperation when an application uses GTK libraries.
Minor math may be required sometimes. On the other hand, some of the cash registers these days require no more than counting skills.
Face it, if the har
Re:So does working at McDonalds. (Score:2)
I gather that your comment has more to do with the criticism of the submitter's choice of words rather than the subject of whet
Re: Left Wing Education == Declining Education (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me reiterate something that I said in another post earlier today. Left-right is an economic scale that ranges from communism/socialism (far left) to pure laissez-faire capitalism (far right). Right wing has nothing to do with "intelligent design," knowing factiods of every war, and other similar issues.
Political correctness and the push for "intelligent design" in schools and knowledge of every little factoid of war history (slanted, of course) is a symptom of authoritarianism (even though the left a
Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason some people look down on it , is because they don't have the courage to do it for fear of looking silly.
Re:Of course (Score:2)
What do you think engineering is? What do you think architecture is? What do you think carpentry is? What do you think artistry is? What do you think music is? What do you think making a fucking McDonalds hamburger is? It's turning an idea into reality. Nothing special there.
Re:Of course (Score:2)
Engineers are also included in this , after all many programers are software engineers .
Never played a game with a football player though (Probably some do though ).
Re:Of course (Score:2)
Re:Of course (Score:3, Funny)
Except for this one.
Re:Of course (Score:2)
This is me on a humble vent . Seriously though...
You need to develop a thick skin sometimes
It's a guilty little pleasure for many many people , still has a great deal of stigma attached to it
One of those things that when you walk into a news agents to buy your weekly RPG magazines , you hide it inside a copy of horny babes or big hooters
Is there a connection? (Score:4, Funny)
Or am I missing some non-obvious shared characteristic?
What I Think (Score:2)
Well... (Score:2)
Tabletop roleplaying involves coming up with creative solutions to problems set in a clearly-defined ruleset, involve constant data-tracking and minor mathematical equations, and involve working together with small groups of people toward like-minded goals. Conversely, love of roleplaying can illustrate how important creativity is to good programming. What do you think?
You could say the same about football and roleplaying or coding, but there happe
Different types of problems. (Score:2)
Programming well requires careful pondering; programming poorly usually uses more reflexive or instinctual decisions. So roleplaying situations which involve algorithmic puzzles or other such problems would likely be more suited to most programmers.
Though culture
future conditional thought processes (Score:5, Insightful)
Thinking abstractly about "what-if" is key to creating code that does what you want and expect it to do. Thinking about what-if is fantasy, by definition.
Re:future conditional thought processes (Score:2)
Coding is more like painting or sculpting - you have the finished product in your minds eye, and you have to do the bit in the middle to go from A (your main() funct
Re:future conditional thought processes (Score:2)
It's cultural (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's cultural (Score:2)
It's not about culture. It's about fucking drunk chicks.
that's everybody, man (Score:2)
i thought kegs were part of geek culture too?
beer is pretty universally cultural... football players, geeks, coder, gamers, accountants, scientists... granted, the people i know who've worked for nasa and the hard-core gamers seem to be more likely to order fruity drinks in huge vases with multiple straws when out for an evening... but *everybody* likes a keg
Re:that's everybody, man (Score:2)
Building with your mind (Score:5, Insightful)
I think people who are attracted by programming's allure of creating programs just by thinking are also attracted by a FRP that lets you create a world with your own imagination.
-Peter
True (Score:2)
Maybe "systems" is the common thread? (Score:5, Insightful)
The combination of various skills, languages (another reason a lot of geeks like Tolkien), lands to explore -- and above all, magic -- comprise a field day for the geek intellect.
Either that, or it's the improbably skimpy leather armor those amazons are wearing...
Roleplaying boring...! (Score:3, Interesting)
Somehow (this is not meant as an offense) I feel that those roleplayers like to detach themselves from the real world in their games and that this is their primary motivation to do this.
Maybe some people are fascinated by detached fantasies and others are fascinated by the real world around them and maybe extrapolations (how the world could be changed).
Re:Roleplaying boring...! (Score:2)
I like to explore both reality and the worlds of our minds . Naturally I do like to fantasise about how the world could be
All role-players like to detach themselves fro
Is it due to enjoying intellectual challenges? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hence the correlation with RPGs. My initial thought would be that that correlation (ie take someone off the street[*] who likes RPGs, and they are relatively likely to like programming) is probably stronger than say enjoyment of computer games (ie take people off the street who like playing FPS games, there would probably be a lower percentage who like to program, but still a higher percentage than, say, that of random football fans. Because RPGs usually require more abstract visualisation than FPSs)
I expect you would find a similar correlation with things such as chess and puzzles, and traditionally geekly pursuits such as astronomy, rock/stamp/dinosaur collections, etc. (ie things where the attraction tends to be cerebral rather than visceral.)
The fun thing I found when I took up fencing long ago was that there was also a strong correlation between fencers and RPGs - wannabe hack'n'slashers, I assume. :-)
The above of course is highly generalised, but it's something I had previously wondered about.
fn *: Although in my experience most RPGers spend too little time outdoors to be accosted, even for the the purposes of idle thought experiments.
Re:Is it due to enjoying intellectual challenges? (Score:2)
Why do I not like RPGs? I prefer action and do not like a lot of background story or reading. I do not get excited about some made up world with hard to pro
socially dynamic? quite the opposite, in a way (Score:5, Insightful)
there are less unknowns, less uncertainties - and this is what is usually a problem for the socially inept - lack of confidence because of lack of certainty, which is what comes across as nerdishness.
add into this the familiarity with the subject matter through books, films, and more recently computer RPG games, and the (to the mainstream) hurdle of a fantasy world is a non-event. the other aspect, which certainly will appeal to the mathematically design minded (not to mention the neurotic obsessive-compulsive detail freaks) is the range of stats, rules - *formal* descriptors of how the world interacts. if someone chucks a baseball at you, it's not down to something an unsporty nerd has little practice/familiarity with (ie catching it with his hands), but rather something quantifiable and determinate, stats, modifiers and a dice roll.
this may sound harsh, particularly as i'm a programmer and have been a roleplayer quite extensively myself, but in our heads we're all great actors, witty people, conversationalists, sometimes we just need to find the right outlet for it to come out in.
Mmmm, no (Score:5, Insightful)
A succesful programmer is one that can sucessfully characterize and identify a problem. Far too often, I've seen people jump right into solving what they think the problem is (often during a meeting with a client), without first doing the (admittedly boring) legwork of ensuring that you understand the domain of the problem and the specific things that require solutions.
Unless, of course, you're talking in the realm of 133t h4x0r programmers. But there, the concern is being the hot coding stud, not in delivering a workable, maintainable, stable software product.
Not in my experience (Score:2, Interesting)
However, I can imagine game programming talent might benefit from RP playing.
Some time ago there was a paper... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
WotC wtf? (Score:2, Informative)
The culture of geeks... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sick of staring at a monitor all day long (Score:4, Interesting)
Short Answer: "Yes" with an "If,"... (Score:4, Interesting)
Role Playing Games encompass a lot. One big part of role playing games is designing logical systems for determining the outcome of events. Example: You are Jay D'Canton, a Paladin, you are wearing chain mail and carrying a mace. You enter a room with four Orcs. Three of the Orcs are armed with wooden clubs and wearing thick animal furs, the fourth has a short sword and studded leather armor. How does the battle go?
Well, figuring out whether the Orcs get Jay's head for their pointy stick, or whether Jay makes short work of them depend on a lot of factors. Is Jay fresh out of Paladin school, or has he been at this for a while? How much protection does his armor give? Are the furs the Orcs are wearing purely decorative or do they offer cushioning versus Jay's mace?
So, varous systems are created, if Jay has killed x number of Orcs, he'll become a "level two" Paladin who is better at fighting and avoiding attacks. The Orcs will get a damage and "to hit" penalty based on Jay's armor, which will also be represented by a number called an armor class. So too will every aspect be determined, with each step be given a logical number value and with the steps relating logically. You should be able to take a list of numbers, including numbers created by die rolls, run them through your system, and figure out the outcome.
Ah, the systems... the beautiful beautiful systems. Everything from systems for determining the weather to a system determining the random effects of the Wand of Wonder.
This all works until those horrible Players come along and mess up your beautiful system. "I don't think the Orcs should be able to hurt me with wooden clubs. Oh, and," quick edit to Jay's character sheet, "turns out my mace is a magical mace +5 versus Orcs."
Meanwhile, you have some people across the street dressed up as Vampires, but they aren't rolling dice at all. They are treating the game as improvisational Theatre. They may have a system, too, but they seems to see things in terms of "roll playing" versus "Role Playing." (I really don't know much about them, though I have one of their game books, for the collection of course. Still... I got a distinct impression from reading White Wolf magazine while looking for Call of Cthuhlu articles.)
Personally, I prefer board games in the popular genre's to their role playing equivalents. They have a nice, rigid sense of order. Of course, you don't get to create your own systems, or build a big "Dungeon" or "Module" system out of the smaller systems provided in the books. However, what does it matter when your fellow players would rather ignore the rules or shoot the breeze.
Besides, I more likely to get a "non-gamer" to play a game of Dungeon! or Black Morn Manor with me than a game of Dungeons and Dragons (and believe me I've tried!)
Of course, my brother (call him "Inu Yasha"), who is deathly afraid of computers loves getting together with the guys for an evening of pizza and D&D. I think it is more for the comaradery than enjoying of watching a rigid system designed to determine the effects of an undead invasion in a small medieval hamlet. Trust me, the guy just started using Email, and when he sees some of the things I do with my computer, he's like, "That's horrible, that's like the inventions of that guy from Gremlins. I'll be happy using a DVD player to watch movies rather than that complicated set-up." Actually, he may have said The Goonies, but I think Gremlins is a cooler movie...
What was my point again?
crap. (Score:3, Funny)
On coding, roleplay, and Jack Chick (Score:5, Funny)
Which means that computer programs generated from said satanic code are satanic.
Which means that, if there's a correlation, and Chick comes to this conclusion, his website will be off the net pretty soon.
MUD RPG:s are great escapes (Score:3, Interesting)
Did I see the crash comming? Yes. Did I do anything about it? No. Instead I spent time in the world of RP ending up as a wizard writing my own part of the world. That was mush easier than trying to work with the real world and make it work for me and the people around me. After the crash of my life I haven't spent anywhere near the amount of time in the world of MUD:s again.
It's all about where you can get in control. For me it was clearily programming and RP in combination. Today I am a dormant mudoholic.
Re:My opinion (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wizards of the Coast? (Score:2)
Check out the 'history' http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnDArchives_History.asp [wizards.com]
Re:Wizards of the Coast? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:C'mon folks, we all know... (Score:2)
Re:C'mon folks, we all know... (Score:2)
Also, you would need a comma after the literal in each of the print lines, before A$ (or before A, allowing for a correction of the first error.)
You could also throw in a quick heuristic analyser to help you profile the character stats based on the stengths and weaknesses of the rolled stats, taking into consideration racial bonuses and the primary stats for a
You're both wrong (Score:4, Funny)
INT() doesn't round, it truncates.
So let's say the 6*RND does return 1.6, 2.4 and 3.3... You're right in that his function would return 2.6 + 3.4 + 4.3 = 10.3... truncated to 10.
Now yours:
INT((6 * RND(0)) + INT(6 * RND(0)) + INT(6 * RND(0) + 3 )
But your function is just as wrong. Suppose RND*6 returns
It should be simply written as this...
INT((6 * RND(0) + 1) + INT(6 * RND(0) + 1) + INT(6 * RND(0) + 1)
Or if you were a master at BASIC, you would do something like this, knowing that this is a routine that you will use over and over again:
DEF FN D(D%) =INT(D% * RND(0) +1)
Then write your line:
D(6) + D(6) + D(6)
I think this is a lesson in, always break things down to their simplest components, and then just do that. Don't try to be fancy and shortcut steps... it makes your code harder to read, as well as potentionally introduces bugs.
Re:Coding vs roleplaying (Score:3, Funny)
Although I'm a geek, I'm not gay [urbanup.com], so please refrain from making generalizing statements like that.
Thanks for the info that jocks are fairies, though. One more reason to stay away from them.
Re:Coding vs roleplaying (Score:4, Funny)