Obstacles in roleplaying games do not exist in order to prevent a PC from doing something. They exist in order to challenge the players to come up with an interesting way of doing it.

(This thought occurred to me as I was reading Flawless by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell in which they describe a diamond heist in ’76 in which the thieves tunneled into the vault from the sewer. They tested for the presence of a seismic alarm using an alarm clock and hauled away the excavated dirt in a Landrover they drove through the sewer tunnels. Then they welded the vault door shut from the inside and threw a Bastille Day looting party. That vault door didn’t exist to protect the jewels. It existed to make those thieves look cool.)

(Not to be confused with Alejandro.)

Alejandra: If you are still reading my blog, please call or e-mail me. None of the contact info I have for you is working any more, so I’m throwing this out into the cold void of the ‘net in the hope that you’ll see it.

Everybody else should feel free to ignore this. Or make Lady Gaga jokes in the comments. Whatever works for you.

My work on converting the archives of the Alexandrian over the past few days have been something of a trip down memory lane as I go digging through material I wrote up to half a decade ago. And occasionally stumbling across comments that I don’t think I ever saw because of the broken and disjointed commenting system on the old site.

One discovery that particularly caught my eye came in response  to the Keep on the Shadowfell: Analyzing the Design series I wrote as a precursor to my remix of the module in 2008. A couple people mentioned that the specific traps I had been talking about in 2008 had been “fixed to a large extent” when WotC revised the module for its release as a freebie PDF.

I was curious enough to check it out.

And discovered that they’d fixed almost nothing. The only two improvements I can identify are:

1. They allowed Arcana and Thievery checks to stack for the purposes of disabling the dragon statues. (A suggestion I’d made in my original remix notes.)

2. They made it clear when the arcane walls of the Whirlpool Trap would activate (“when a creature moves into the 4-square-by-4-square area between the statues”) and the location of the walls once they appear:

But there are two problems with this “solution”:

First, as I discussed in my original essay on the matter, you’ve designed the trap so that it can’t be affected by anyone outside of the trap. (In order to disable the trap, you have to destroy the cherubs. And you can’t attack the cherubs if they’re on the other side of the wall.) They’ve removed the explicit references in the module itself to characters doing the impossible, but that doesn’t remove the larger design concerns:

(a) It’s not fun. In general, this means you will have one character inside the trap who needs to make several attacks against the cherub vases while everyone else sits around and watches.

(b) What happens if the character trapped inside the whirlpool is killed? As far as I can tell, the arcane walls just remain in place for the rest of eternity. (They can’t come down until the cherubs are destroyed; and the cherubs can’t be destroyed by anyone who isn’t caught in the trap.) Not only does this mean there’s no way to retrieve your fallen comrade’s battered body, it also means that the only path for reaching the Big Bad Boss of Keep on the Shadowfell is now blocked by two permanent walls of arcane energy.

Second, the trap breaks the rules. The Quick-Start Rules included in the original Keep on the Shadowfell included “Barriers” as one of the types of Area of Effect:

Barrier: A barrier runs along the edge of a specified number of squares. A barrier must cross at least one edge of the origin square.

This was problematic because the core rulebooks didn’t include “Barriers” and instead included rules for “Walls”:

Wall: A wall fills a specified number of contiguous squares within range, starting from an origin square. Each square of the wall must share a side — not just a corner — with at least one other square of the wall, but a square can share no more than two sides with other squares in the wall (this limitation does apply when stacking squares on top of each other). You can shape the wall however you like within those limitations. A solid wall, such as a wall of ice, cannot be created in occupied squares.

The original version of the trap was problematic in any case because it used the keyword “wall” to describe the arcane cage, and one just had to kind of assume that it meant “barrier” if you were using the Quick-Start Rules. You’ll note, however, that the revised version of the module is clearly using the rules for a “barrier” in its diagram.

So… no problem, right? The Quick-Start rules describe “barriers” and this trap, designed to be used with the Quick-Start Rules, now clearly follows those rules.

Except (and this is my favorite bit) somebody noticed that the rules for “barriers” were outdated and should never have been published in the first place, and so the revised Quick-Start Rules designed to be used with the revised version of Keep on the Shadowfell… don’t include the rules for barriers. The entire section was cut.

(Did they bother to replace these rules with the rules for walls which were supposed to be there in the first place? Don’t be silly. Of course they didn’t.)

So you have a trap which explicitly creates walls, but they don’t follow the rules for walls… and it doesn’t really matter anyway, because the Quick-Start Rules didn’t bother including rules for walls.

So I watched the first few episodes of The Cape on Hulu. The show has some half decent pulp coolness going for it, but the scripts suck. A lot.

CHESS: “I’m going to frame you for being Chess and then kill you! The world will think Chess is dead and my public persona will take the credit for eliminating his threat!”

Clever plan. Explain to me why Chess immediately resumes the Chess identity?

Then we have the super-secretive Orwell who insists that no one can be allowed to see her face… and yet she is constantly going out into the field and having public chats with the Cape.

CAIN: “I am a member of a secret order of assassins so totally secret that it’s a really big deal that our existence has just now been confirmed with completely circumstantial evidence! Our modus operandi? Well, we have massive identifying tattoos on our forearms and we also leave calling cards at all of our assassinations.”

Winner of the Least Secretive Secret Society Award for three years running.

NEWS REPORTER: “Mr. Portman is the only city councilor willing to deny the Big Bad Evil Corporation control over the city’s prisons! The vote is tomorrow!”

Okay, well, I guess if he’s the only vote against it then ARC doesn’t have much to worry about… So why is ARC trying to assassinate him?

MR. PORTMAN: “I’ve just been told that Mr. Fleming is trying to kill me with poison. I think I’ll go have dinner with him… At the restaurant that he owns…”

Really? Really?

TEACHER: “Here’s a new student. His last name is Faraday.”

KIDS: “Faraday? That’s the same last name as a criminal who was killed several weeks ago! This must be his kid!”

Wow… That’s quite the leap of logic there. I mean, it’s true. But that doesn’t make it any more absurd for the kids to immediately make that association. It’s as if some kid in the Marvel universe had the last name “Richards” and everyone assumed he must be the fifth member of the Fantastic Four.

There’s quite a bit of low-level nonsense in the dialogue, too.

The Alexandrian, as it currently exists, is a glorious mess of amateur HTML and half-assed javascript. It’s difficult to maintain and impossible to renovate. Plus, I can’t actually schedule posts, which means that the site takes a vacation whenever I do and stands unnecessarily vacant on frequent occasions.

Oddly, what’s really prompting this post is the commenting system, which was originally built around HaloScan and has been completely borked ever since HaloScan got bought out (and then bought out again). Honestly, I’m not really clear on how it’s still working at all.

In any case, starting today the Alexandrian will be updating to a WordPress installation. Here’s what you need to know:

(1) The RSS feed will no longer be updated. If you want to access the new feed, click here. (In a few days I’ll be attempting an XML redirect from the old feed to the new feed, but this apparently doesn’t work with all feed readers. If you want to be sure to continue you subscription, subscribe to the new feed now.)

(2) The address https://www.thealexandrian.net will resolve automatically to the new site. Shortly after this post goes live, https://www.thealexandrian.net/index.html will be replaced with a redirect page. If that re-direct isn’t working for some reason (most likely because I screwed it up), simply navigate to https://www.thealexandrian.net and you should be good to go. Update bookmarks as necessary.

(3) All the other links on the old site will continue to work, but will no longer be maintained. If something stops working for some reason, I’m not going to worry about it. So while older links won’t generate a 404 error, if you want to link to the Alexandrian I recommend linking to the new site.

(4) I’m currently in the process of converting all of the old content over to the new site. This is an ongoing process and it’s proven to be a lot more time-consuming than I’d anticipated, so I’m not done yet. Right now I’ve converted all of January 2011, and everything up to May 2008. I’ll be continuing to fill in this gap as time permits, and you may see some weird artifacts cropping up here and there while the work continues. (For example, I intermittently forget to retro-date a post before hitting the “Publish” button — so you may occasionally see an old post appear on the homepage and then vanish again a little later when I realize I skipped a step. Sorry ’bout that.)

(5) I’m manually transferring an archive of all comments posted on the old site to the corresponding article(s) on the new site. I’ll continue doing that for awhile as new comments crop up on older posts, but at some point I’ll stop doing that. (Hopefully I’ll be able to decommission the old commenting system at the same time so that it can no longer be accessed.) I’m fairly certain that some older comments have already been lost due to the distinegrating HaloScan/Echo system, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to recover those. (EDIT: This has now been confirmed. For example, all of the original comments for my remix of Keep on the Shadowfell have disappeared. Makes me a little sad.)

For the most part, from your POV the new site will probably end up being largely indistinguishable from the old one. (At least, after a potential period of working-out-the-kinks.) If you’re reading this today on the new site, you should already see a few key improvements:

– A search function (currently at the top of the right sidebar).

– Integrated commenting so that you no longer have to try to guess to figure out where the article associated with a comment is located.

– New RSS feed includes the full text of all posts.

Things I’m hoping to implement in the future:

– Re-establishing permanent “content shrines” and the upper crossbar navigation panel (albeit in improved forms). For right now, you can still access the older versions of the Creations, Politics, and Reviews page. You can also access the old Bibliography page.

– Theme-switcher for those who miss the old white-on-black theme.

If there’s anything else you’d like to see on the site, leave a comment. (But you’ll have to go to the new site to do it.)

UPDATE: As of 6:40 PM, we’re having some migration problems. When you view an individual post’s page, both sidebars are appearing below the post. Everything appears to display correctly on the rest of the site. Debugging now.

UPDATE 2: As of 7:40 PM, the problem appears to have been fixed. In addition, you will no longer be required to log-in in order to post. If you run into any additional problems with the new site (broken links, weird formatting, etc.) please leave a comment on this post to let me know. Thanks!

UPDATE 3 (2011/02/02): Still tweaking the settings and filters for the commenting system. Trying to find the right balance between “I need to approve every single comment” and “website overrun with spam”. There’s likely to be some fluctuation over the next few days which you may or may not notice in terms of how quickly comments appear on the site. (The goal is to have legitimate comments appear immediately with a 0% incidence of spam. This is, of course, impossible. But it’s a nice goal.)

UPDATE 4 (2011/02/09): Archives are now complete through the end of 2008. 350+ posts. I have apparently written a lot of stuff for this website over the past 5+ years.