Our weekly game

As it happens, d12 and I have been fortunate enough to play in a weekly dnd 3.5 game run by a talented dm for over a year now. One feature that we were discussing that we wished we had incorporated was a post game commentary. Just a tongue and cheek look at a dnd game in the over top way that sports shows do.

We had considered not doing this because, well the game is nearly over, with only a few weeks worth of games left and a lot of cool stuff (like airship battles and pirates riding dinosaurs) has already passed. But hey, screw that. SO today I will introduce you to the game.

Background: A well meaning group of heroes uncovered a plot to uncover a giant obelisk that drove the workers insane and warped their bodies into strange aberrant forms. The heroes saved the town and discovered that the person behind the even knew of the artifacts powers. They se tout to find this dastardly fellow.

As time wore on they uncovered that the head professor of divination, named Ravian, from the worlds most renowned school of magic was behind the event and that there were multiple obelisks. If all of these obelisks were brought together, it would shift the world into a terrible aberrant dimension.

The master diviner somehow always managed to be a step ahead of our heroes and is believed to currently possess all of the obelisks, however he revealed in an evil monologue that his plan was not to destroy the world, but to harness the power of the obelisks to gain ultimate magic power. In fact he claimed that with the proper knowledge he could apply any and all metamagic to any spell he cast. However, if he made a mistake it would, you know, end the world.

The heroes have had many odd side adventures in this time including fighting dinosaur riding pirates, accidently raising the worlds most feared assassin as a terrifying undead creature and meeting a really swell necromancer who just didn’t get why all those palladins kept trying to storm his castle.

As we join our heroes: They have just finished killing an evil cleric trying to raise a dark god in return for the location of Ravian.

They now face choices. They know that they may need a special metal called “phasanite” for a master crafter to build them a teleporting ship and that this metal is being wielded in the form of a sword by a vampire. They also have collected all but one piece of an ancient set of artifacts, a broadsword, forged by dwarves that when brought together and worn by one person are said to have incredible powers.

Finally, they now know of Ravian’s location and can go after him.

Current cast: Heroes have come and gone over time (rip Gward!) but this is the current line up. Average party level is 14 and 15.

Angros Furion Ragenstein (played by Dude WTF) – a very very angry half-orc barbarian whose magic loincloth allows him to grow one size larger.

Gimpy "Kaboom" Hobblestomp (played by d12) – A Halfling graduate student of magical studies currently attempting to find the thaum, a warmage.

Kestrel – a ninja and recent initiate into the arts of the cat-speaker (dm created prestige class) a group of people who understand the abberant truth behind cats and learn some of their ways.

See Ya – A human monk who recently joined the team after stepping in to help some of the groups hirelings.

Brenner – A human wizard, master conjurer, arch mage. He may not be able to evoke, but you really don’t want to mess with his glitterdust. No really.

Search engines

In the past month, a few more search engines have come online, and Google has a new toy as well. WolframAlpha and Microsoft's Bing are new ones on the scene, and Google Labs is working on something called Google Squared.

Now, it's worth noting that these are not equivalent. WolframAlpha is a "Computational Knowledge Engine." What does this mean, exactly? Well, it depends on what you're asking it. If it's something it knows about, it'll tell you all sorts of information. It has a lot of data in various scientific fields -- sociology, physics, chemistry, computer science, and of course math. It does well on integrals etc, when posed in a suitable way. It does slightly better on physical constants. For example, giving google:

(electron charge)^2 / (bohr radius * electron mass)

makes it very sad, since it doesn't know what a Bohr radius is. Wolfram seems to have done a good job with the physical constants, and it does a nice job of comparing units. For example,

coulomb constant * (electron charge)^2/ (bohr radius)

will tell me that it is an energy, and give the answer in joules, therms, electronvolts, BTUs, hartrees, rydbergs, and for some reason watts per hertz.
Aside from math, it'll tell you things like the top visited websites, the average death rate due to herpes per country, a list of US presidents, etc.

Note that I haven't included Bing in the above science-y stuff. That's because it doesn't do anything like that. It searches the web, and limits itself to that. Google's search results look very similar to Bing's, and it's mainly an interface difference. What I like about Bing is the ability to preview the website it found for you, right within Bing. It shows a small excerpt when you mouse-over the right side of the result. Whether this is useful or not depends on the site. It's not all that useful when searching for restaurants, which isn't Bing's fault, but that of the websites it returns.

Finally, there's Google Squared, which is hidden in the Google Labs section. It is similar to Wolfram Alpha in that it tries to compile your search results into a table with relevant data. Sometimes this is great, but most of the time it's limited by the website return.

Finally, for some fun, note that Bing spells "But It's Not Google"
When you're done playing with Wolfram Alpha's examples, ask it if it's Skynet.