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Home brewing is, indeed, fairly easy. Indeed, even using a carboy for (a little) larger batch closed fermentation is quite cheap and easy if you just want to reuse a typical office water cooler bottle (the problem there is the potential for “infection” from using plastic, which can have scratches in the side where things you don’t want in the ferment can easily stick to, but you could use extra work to try to keep that potential to a minimum) but if it becomes a hobby you like a glass carboy really isn’t much of an investment and a rubber cork and some plastic tubing for it is super cheap.
The potential for “infection” is already fairly low with an open ferment, but it’s certainly higher than with a closed one and depending on how long you will be fermenting something there may be a somewhat increased risk. It’s still not high but it may make the difference between something very lovely to drink and something you simply have to throw out for being so nasty! So if you do it often enough I’d definitely recommend being thorough in your cleaning and going with a closed ferment. That being said you could certainly do an open ferment just to get the local yeast flying around in the air and brew something that way! You certainly have the risk of picking up enough bacteria to be a problem, but if you don’t mind having the potential of throwing out batches you can go even cheaper that way.
Also I would note if you are using honey you’re not making a beer at all, you’re making a style of mead, a style of wine! I’ve done plenty of those (mostly cysers, which is using apple juice with honey, also made a LOT back in the Middle Ages). Definitely be sure not to use any kind of sweetener that may have a preservative in it, though, as that will definitely cause some issues with letting your yeast get a nice foothold.
Otherwise yeast styles can impart flavors and a bread yeast (preferable not fast rising, as you noted) would give a more “bready” flavor to whatever you brew. Most beer or wine yeasts are more specialized and impart specific flavors, or “cleaner” flavors, or are specialized for, say, higher alcohol tolerance (and thus higher alcohol potential in the ferment). In all brewing really is pretty easy stuff and there are many great books out there on it. Most of the confusing stuff really just deals with more in-depth styles and otherwise preventing the potential for infection (as in keeping the bacteria out, most of the time to maintain flavor consistency, but in a few rarer cases to prevent the types that might cause a potential for sickness… so worth taking the time for that, IMHO).
I know this needs an update if anyone is using it, but I wanted to amend this with the fact that the required MoreCore ruleset is now available on the Forge at https://forge.fantasygrounds.com/shop/items/360/view, which means the ruleset doesn’t have to be manually installed or anything, just add it (it’s free) and it will be installed (and kept updated) as part of your FG install on your next update, so that will make things a little easier, at least.
Oh, I definitely fall with some regularity, usually when back-pedaling. I think I might have lost a sword once in tournament? But you might be right regarding attitude to the fight (although I try to maintain the same attitude in tournament because in my case if I don’t try to be relaxed and “play” with it I will do worse, which is almost the opposite for many others). But, yeah, 1 in 20 is pretty high. I’d probably say I MIGHT have something happen once in an entire practice (dropped sword, falling, catching a quillion on something… which was more common when wearing period clothes for me such as in back in my SCA days of rapier fighting, or the like). All of which I would certainly consider “fumbles” in the sense of they would each present an opportunity for my opponent to take advantage of (assuming they noticed it happening). Some of those (lost sword being the main) take longer to recover from, falling could be recovered quickly with a roll, but I don’t always trip in a way I can quickly roll out of it. Clothing catches are quite momentary, though. So certainly in the sense of the longest to recover from being true “fumbles” then, yeah, not THAT common.
Hans Hellinger asked:
Any preference on a setting for a setting book?
Sorry for the delayed response, in some ways I was really trying to mull this over. Honestly, though, I don’t know that I do have any preference there. In part I guess I think anything you might find in, say, an Osprey book might make a good setting book. Whether it’s a dive into, say, Renaissance Italy, Scandanavian countries in the age of the Vikings, France during the 100 years war, or delving into the age of Mongolian warriors, or Japan during the 1500s. Any of it could be interesting, and with the “default” setting being late Medieval in the Balkans you’ve already got a good place where characters from more than a few of those would meet (even moreso if you consider it a slightly fantastical world where the anachronism of, say, a Viking meeting a Renaissance courtier isn’t out of place despite the historical divide of timeframe). Just put your usual passion for history into the setting and I’ll be interested in it!
Well, yeah, although maybe if you add in when I fall down it starts to get closer! 😉 Still, if we think of it in terms of exchanges during a 6-second “round” (in common game terms) and that it’s not each individual exchange then maybe 1 in 20 for something like that isn’t too far off. I mean if you and I are fighting we’ll have several exchanges in 6 seconds then back out and spend maybe 6 or 12 more seconds rethinking strategy before closing again. So even fighting for a few minutes not all (or even most) of those rounds will be actually exchanging blows. So in that sense having some kind of “fumble” (dropped sword or falling over are really the two most common ones I can think of, although much more rarely maybe hitting yourself with, say, a quillion or, more commonly depending on the clothes worn, getting those caught in the “slashes” of your pantaloons!) may very well happen once every 20 of those 6 second rounds.
Not that I am saying it should happen that often in a game anyway, though, let alone for guys who lived in a time and place where learning to fight would have far more importance placed on it than I probably ever have. Recognizing that I may be a “decent” fighter by today’s standards (despite my age 😉 ) doesn’t mean I would have been anything more than a “poor” fighter by Medieval or Renaissance standards. Not as if I can hop into my time machine to really find out, after all.
Your chance of dropping a sword really isn’t one in twenty if you are paying attention to what you are doing. Especially if you are experienced.
Unless you’re me. 😀 I always feel like I lose that thing more often than I should!
Well, I don’t think that article is trying to cover the end cases at all (how often you critically succeed or fail). That’s a different argument than I think they even bother trying to touch on. I think all they are trying to cover is that if you set the right difficulty/target number for something then the statistical chance of achieving that outcome (the binary one of strictly success or failure, not one of where on the middle or the edges the numbers fall) would be the same. Well, ok, good to know as a game designer that you need to be aware of designing proper targets for outcomes, so that says to me you are then free to look at the type of rolls you want to use for other uses. If you ALSO want to be able to affect things outside of success/failure then using a pool like Codex does instead of a straight d20 definitely affects that, and uses that to the advantage of the system. Or more accurately, it allows the player the option to make that decision (since they can always choose to roll with just 1 d20 or multiples, after all).
From my reading of it what I think the premise is has nothing to do with bell curves and flat line probabilities and everything to do with outcomes in RPGs. I believe the primary conclusion they are making is that flat or curved probabilities makes no difference when the target numbers are appropriately set. In other words if you want a 50% change of success and set a TN around 11 with 3d6 or set it to 1-50 on a single d100 roll then you’ll get what you are looking for. I think the suggestion is that the whole bell-curve -v- flat probability ends up just being a red herring on how a roll comes up because if the final outcome ends up being the same based on how you set the target then it really doesn’t matter which method you use. Sure, if folks FEEL they need the bell curve for some reason, the that’s cool, go with that, but in the end it’s probably just a wash compared to what you are effectively looking for in the final outcome so long as that outcome is aimed to the roll type, so in that sense the “swinginess” ends up simply being irrelevant. Yes, 3d6 are less “swingy” than a straight percentile in the roll, but the roll is not the relevant part, it’s the outcome you are concerned with, after all.
That’s what it looked they were saying to me, anyway. (And I am definitely no math major, or anything).
I think my personal preference would be towards Monsterberg II, Setting Books, and then Magic expansion.
Based on how you say sales are going, though, it sounds like Setting Books might be the better balance between the history and the gaming crowd. After all the Osprey books weren’t gaming books (and had plenty of issues on their own, in some ways understandably since they sometimes took a rather broad time and place to try and make a succinct history book on, so it’s probably to be expected that you’ll lose a lot of nuance that way) but they were used by a lot of gamers I know to fill in flavor for games. So in a way a more focused setting book can do double duty as not just a game reference but an historical one as well… sort of like some of the GURPS setting books were for some folks I know (who also loved to use them for other game systems even if they didn’t like playing GURPS!) So in that sense you might be able to create books that appeal to both crowds.
Oh, no worries, Sunday was a bad day for me anyway with my nephew in town and I had a migraine that morning as well. Gaming night tonight, but tomorrow (the 14th) or the day after may work fine, if you like.
I understand, and maybe you are married to that view with the books as they are (in which case, why the poll?), I’m just suggesting that core rules and character generation (at least the basics, thereof) would in almost every other game system out there be the the actual “core rules” or what would be expected to find in a “Player’s Handbook”. As such it seems to me that both this and CM are a mix of what would really be a “Player’s Handbook” in that sense and you’d have to break them apart from what they are now to be what I think most players and GMs would actually expect if they wanted to buy something called a “Player’s Handbook”, or “Player’s Guide” in this case. If CM is meant to be that core then some of the stuff currently in this Player’s Guide really should be in CM, IMO, and then change the name from Player’s Guide to something else, like a companion, that then has appropriate things for a Companion, like, perhaps, the horse rules, and Serious Injuries (maybe leaving a simplified version on CM). Then CM is, essentially, the Player’s Guide (usually the first book a player or GM will pick up to check out a game system, if you ask me).
In other words both the name “Player’s Guide” might be a bit misleading here (since it is not the core rules) and what is in it could potentially be changed to better reflect the purpose of fleshing things out in the Codex Integrum rules world. Balitc and Adventum are all good as it, that wouldn’t affect that, and Ingenium is all about in-depth character creation so that’s fine to itself as well, IMHO. I just think you have a bit of a problem with naming, here, and what actually should be in your core rules book and what should be a companion to that. The extra stuff is all still there to both of those books, it sounds to me, for those wanting that more in-depth experience.
Personally I think “C” is closer to what I think gamers are used to. Look at the PHB for DnD or the Player’s Guide for Deadlands Reloaded. Those generally contain the core of everything you need to know to not only make a character (so your Martial Feats would need to be in it, for example), but also how to use those things.
If you think of CM as more of a GM’s guide then maybe the Beyond Combat sections, or at least those things that are more aimed towards running the game, the setting, etc. could potentially be a separate guide, along with Serious Injuries, Reaction tables, and the like, but I do think at the LEAST it would have be option A, but more likely it’s really Option C unless you have a good way to separate enough “How to run” content from the “Need to run” content. At least that is what I think most people will expect, especially if you use terms like “Player’s Guide” to break it out. It’s just what they would expect to find in most everything else.
