One thing that some people are doing is ‘speeding’ up game play. This has taken a slim variety of paths but it seems to fall into the allowing players to use their encounter powers more than once per encounter and their dailies more than once per day. Getting rid of or altering healing surges is another prime candidate for change or using them as currency to allow more frequent usage of their powers.
One thing that struck me as interesting is one group’s removing the long rest and instead make their powers ‘episodic’. You get what you get at the start of the gaming session and you don’t get more until the start of the next one. BUT they’re also doing average damage (end result is the same but it does remove a great source of low and high points to me) and they’re making Dailies once per encounter, Encounters at-will. Â They seem to be having fun with it but the DM admits his group is a bit on the power gamey side.
I think, now that I bother to think about it, that most of the people for whom ‘spamming the same two attacks at-will) is lame, lame, lame are the ones who’s idea of RPG’s are MMOG’s. Anyone brought up old school where every combat round was, except for the mage and to very lesser extent the cleric, *roll d20 and see if I hit* and just repeat that for however many attacks they got. The cleric was typically, roll a d20 to hit maybe, run around and cast Cure [blank] Wounds primarily. Â To us actually having two different attacks on top of the basic attack which is all anyone ever used to get triples our options. 
If you’re a fan of Zombies, computer games and first person shooters then Left 4 Dead can’t be recommended enough. And you can get it from Amazon right now for only $46 which is a small bargain with free shipping. Of course you could get it from Steam for $49 and not have to pay shipping either or taxes or wait for it to show up in the mail.
If you have a friend or two then I’d recommend getting your own dedicated server. They’re $12 a month most places and you’re gaurenteed low latency, availability and the like. Split that 4 ways and you’re only paying $3 a month each. Unless you have a horse of a machine and a lot of outbound bandwidth trying to run a listen server on your desktop while you play is going to suck for anyone trying to connect, not to mention going to the trouble of getting the right ports forwarded through your router and unblocked at your local firewall etc. Heck for $12 I’d rent my own personal server if we didn’t already have a group one.
I’ve been working on hacking L4D mapping out while we wait, impatiently, for the real mapping tools to be released and have working maps but they’re not quite ‘there’ yet. The navigation tools aren’t working so you can’t build your navigation areas quite properly.
Any maps/campaigns I do I’ll post here for your bemusement as well.
The car picture is an example of the 67 mustang I’ve got and working on restoring. It’s a slow process, I’m spreading out the expenses of parts over the long haul and the waterfall costs never seem to stop. To run a set of air tools and possibly repaint the car back to it’s original color is going to need a good sized air compressor. That’s going to require a 220 volt circuit in the garage. That’s going to require a new sub panel off the main panel and wire run from pretty much as far a point in the house as you can get. The panel is on the diagonally opposite side of the house from where the outlets would be needed. Â Of course a 220 would also be needed for a decent mig welder. So it’s always one thing after another.
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