Edinburgh Castle

Today we visited Edinburgh Castle; I visited all the public areas I could find except two. We then ate dinner at the Elephant House Cafe, where J.K. Rowling started writing the Harry Potter series.

Taxis, Trains, and Travel

Today was a travel day.

Museums

Today was our day for seeing museums. We managed two of the three.

Bishops and Barbicans

Today my feet were still sore from Friday's exploration of York, so I wasn't sure I'd be able to do much, but I managed to keep going.  We attended an ordination of deacons at Yorkminster Cathedral, had afternoon tea, took a bus tour of the city, and walked the segment of the old wall that we missed on Friday.

Moors and Dales

Yesterday we took a private car tour of the Yorkshire Dales, visiting several  of the sites associated with James Herriot, the author of several books with slightly fictionalized accounts of his life as a vet. Some were real locations, such as his actual home and surgery, and others were used in filming the All Creatures Great and Small TV series. The people making the series must have decided that a lot of the real places didn't look photogenic enough.

The Walled City of York

I've just started my first overseas trip in 22 years, and the first big vacation my wife and I have taken alone together since our honeymoon over 32 years ago. Wednesday/Thursday was something like 28 hours of travel with gaps waiting for the next mode of transportation, which I plan to forget about. Today was a wonderful walk around the old walled city of York.

Extraordinary skills for D&D 3.x

For quite a few years the only tabletop / play-by-post role playing game I've used is D&D 3.x (or the Pathfinder variant). As far as I can tell it's still fairly popular, despite the fact that D&D is up to a 5th edition, and various OSR (Old School Rules) have emerged. But it has always suffered from the problem that magical power is roughly quadratic with level, whereas everything else is linear or worse. My online gaming colleague Keith Davies has designed a whole new system, Echelon, in reaction to this, but Echelon is in flux and I'd rather not take quite so big a step away from the familiar just yet. So I've looked into some (as yet unplaytested) house rules that would beef up mundane classes, at least for a few levels more than at present.

This post is about some ideas for improving skills. If you think they ought to be totally mundane ("skillmonkeys can't have nice things"), this is not for you.