How to Get Started

I still haven’t started so you can take this with a grain of salt, but from my observations it looks like you don’t really need much. The guys on the podcast seem to be using dice (4, 6, 12, 20-sided stuff), player’s manual, monster’s manual, a sheet of paper to mark the character’s location, and little figurines from their own collection… like old toys. I think the KEY is whomever you choose to be the dungeon master (DM). The DM seems to really keep the game going from one adventure to the next and keeps everyone in line with his/her knowledge of the monsters, races, classes, environments, weapons, spells, etc.

So; really it looks like KNOWLEDGE is the only real tool a player needs to participate in D&D. Get the players manual and create a character. Find a local hobby shop or join a meetup group in your area.

My scenario might be a little different because of my existing responsibilities (wife, kids, work, etc), but I’ll keep you posted. I’m really excited about finally getting to understand this game. The PODCAST is the biggest help to me right now. I put some useful links below.

Resources

• Critical Hit [rss] [web] – Podcast from Major Spoilers.
• Wizards of the Coast – Official D&D web site.
• The Atlanta Dungeons & Dragons Meetup Group – local meetup group in Atlanta.

As I grow into my adult clothes, I some times find it a little embarrassing to introduce myself as the all mighty and feared “FergatROn” hailing from the great planet of Cybertron. Well, it really depends on what circle I’m doing it with. Since the dawn of my online adventures, I’ve always had a cool user handle. Don’t get me wrong, I love my /nick, but I’m doing more and more online business nowadays and telling a possible business partner that my Twitter or Identica account is “@FergatROn” is starting to get a little awkward.

In the Beginning

I’ll drag out this post by sharing with you my user handles from my earliest memory. I’ll have to say that America Online (AOL) was my first platform to create a sharable username. I was still in high school so you can imagine the crazy names I came up with. I do recall one – “DutiDred”. I’m Jamaican, but not a dred, DutiDred was also the name of a character I used to draw. I had countless others, but since they were all juvenile crap, I don’t remember any of them.

I believe my next major handle was in the Yahoo realm. It was my first year of college and Yahoo Games was a pretty decent platform. I believe I was working for Sears at the time thus I came up with the name “Paperboy_507″. If you can tell the name was a combination of the video game “Paperboy” and “Levi 507 Jeans”. Yup, that’s just how creative I was back-in-the-days.

The Mighty Hunter

The next evolution in my handle was related to my first major massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, Starsiege. I was a proud member of the 69th Penetration Assault Wing, aka 69 PAW. We had a web site and everything, I believe it was http://paw.cbj.net [nonworking link]. I think our fearless leader went by “Cybrid Lee [69 PAW]“.

I found that information with some intuitive Google searches. There’s no way I would have remembered that from my worn-out memory cells.

For some reason, though, I’ll never forget the person that recruited me. It’s funny because he’ll probably never remember me. I wasn’t anything special. Just another mech warrior trying to make his way around the galactic system. The person that recruited me was named “Mouse” and my glorious name was “NiMrOd”.

I think this was the first time I actually put some thought into my handle and wanted it to really mean something. I don’t know how I looked it up, but “Nimrod” was an Old Testiment hunter. Me, being the warrior that I am, thought this would be a great fit. Ironically; it wasn’t until much later that I realized that people don’t think of the “hunter”, but the other meaning of “nimrod”. Boy did I feel like a nimrod!

Linux

Handles are a major part of the open source community. Most folks (unless I’m in the dark) don’t go by their real name. Look on the IRC channels and the forums and you’ll see an array of interesting handles.

Funny; on my desktop I really don’t use a fancy handle for my login. I guess it’s because there’s no one else on my computer. Don’t worry, I’ve got a ace up my sleeve. My network id is “fergatron.deceptacons”. Yah; so even though I’m not using a cool handle to log into my computer… my computer has a handle and he’s also a kickass Deceptacon! Oh and if you’re wondering.. my wireless SSID, is “Cybertron”, with more than WEP as its encryption! I just blew your mind… didn’t I!?

Evolution

Because I think this post is going too long, I’ll wrap it up. So; over time my handles have evoled as I have as a person. My Star Wars handle is “Marfe Jokin”, I’ve created many names in World of Warcarft and other MMOs, but the name that trumps them all is “FergatROn”. It’s a mix between my last name, “Ferguson”, Transformers’ renowned Megatron/Galvatron, and an MMO I used to play alot – Ragnarok Online.

The cool thing I like about “FergatROn”, is I’ve been able to kind of trademark it through online services. Meaning, I’ve signed up for so many web sites (Twitter, Identica, MySpace, etc) using FergatROn that if you Google it, most- if not, all the results are belong to me! (No that wasn’t horrible grammer… it’s a play on “All your base are belong to us.”)

So; since I’ve opened up a part of my soul with you strangers… I’d love to see what your handles used to be or what you’re currently using. Come on- I’d be fun!

I wanted to make it known to the world, that I have officially given in to the “World of Responsibility” and no longer into the World of Warcraft.   Yes, sad to say – my three young kids (ages 3, 2, and newborn), wife, full-time job, and Internet consulting business has caught up with me – backing me into a corner and yelling into my face saying, “WE TAKE PRECEDENCE OVER VIDEO GAMES AND YOU WILL NO LONGER RUN YOURSELF INTO THE GROUND TO PLAY!”  This is the milestone in my life when I have completely converted from a hardcore video game player to a casual gamer (aka Old Man).

The only games I play now are Xbox (original) games with my son, on the weekends, and stupid Facebook applications.  I still have WoW installed, but it’s realmlist has been changed to a private server.  So whenever I do have some free time (like never) I can jump on with no commitment to a guild or to my wallet and kill about an hour or so.  IM me if you want to know which private server I’m on.

The only technological thing left in my life is Linux… oh sweet Linux.  I’ve been running Fedora for almost a full year now and it’s been a glorious-open-source-tech ride.  There are games there, like Urban Terror (it’s an FPS), and a lot of other casual games like: Chess, BlackJack, Mines, Tali, etc.

What’s Your Story?

I know I’m not the only guy to go through this transition in his life.  Share your story with me, post a comment and let me know how hard it’s been for you to finally, or forcefully, to be removed from the realm of gaming!  And now the only game you play, is The Game of Life.

Oh my friggin’ Hare Krishna!  I’m in the 3rd day of my 14-day trial with Stars Wars Galaxy (SWG) and I just saw some footage of the new Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG from BioWare and LucasArts.  I’m a Star Wars fanatic (with certain restraints, of course) and this new MMO looks like it will be the next biggest SCI-FI game to come.  SWG looks way outdated and the only reason why I’m playing is to get my “fix” of the Star Wars universe.  I normally play World of Warcraft, but if I can only (responsibily) pay for one MMO per month, it will certainly be SWTOR.

I really wanted to love the SWG game, but with all the things Sony is doing wrong – I can’t consciously put any more time into this dying game.  So; once my trial is up, I’ll go back to WoW and eagerly wait for The Old Republic to launch.

To my surprise the SWTOR forums are filled with people and they have already opened recruiting for guilds… the game didn’t even come out yet!?  I’ll comb it from time to time and join their Facebook group too.   Look for “Marfe Jokin” in the forums! The game looks beautiful… my mindset is even if the game sucks as bad as SWG, I’ll still play it because being in a Star Wars universe that looks this good – is worth it.

What does my blog title mean!?  How can the awesome GNU/LINUX be associated with that dirty dirty word, “proprietary”!?  Well you’ve heard the terms “cutting edge” and “early adopters” before – it usually means having the latest and greatest, but knowing that it’s not perfect.  I experienced that recently and the experience was a bit sobering.  My adventure involves two of the most major components of the Internet!  Well the two most important components for viewing the Internet – Firefox and Flash Player.

I’m running Fedora 9.  This RPM-based linux distribution is known as the “personal” version of Red Hat, nothing corporate about this distro.  So; on  one end it’s a great distro because it has developers that work on Red Hat feeding it patches of code.  For those that may not know, Red Hat is really popular in the business realm.  You’ll see a lot of enterprises running Red Hat.  Ubuntu recently came out their server version, but overall Red Hat has the complete package.

So; Fedora is bleeding edge when it comes to packages – F9 shipped with Firefox 3 beta (or was it release candidate 1) and Flash 9.  Since then Firefox 3.0.2 has been available in their repositories.  It took me a while to figure out this repo thing.  Why did it take so long before the latest version of a package, such as OpenOffice 3.0, would show up in the repo.  Well it’s because once it’s in the repository – you know you have a stable version that works well and good with the distro.

No Cake for Single-thread Sound Processes

I believe the audio package that’s most promising for linux is PulseAudio.  I noticed that whenever I had my music player open (Banshee), I was unable to hear audio on a web site using Flash (ex: YouTube).  It was the same case when I played World of Warcraft (thru Wine).  I came to the conclusion that my audio package is single threaded!  Single threaded!?  That is so Windows 95!  So; I began to make some inquiries on the #fedora chat room on FreeNode.  Someone suggested that I install “libflashsupport.i386″.  Well; I don’t know what it is, but guessing on the file name it looks like a library that helps other packages support Flash.  I installed it and it was gold!  I had my Banshee going and I had YouTube at the same time, I thought all my problems where gone.

After playing some YouTube files I then went to another web site and surprisingly my browser froze!  I thought to myself, “OK; this isn’t a big deal, it’s probably the first time libflashsupport is running so it probably needs to write a preference file somewhere and it’ll all be good the next go around.”  Yah!  At that point every time I went to a site that had Flash on it, no matter how complex or insignificant it was, my browser would freeze.  I have Firefox, Swiftfox, and Flock web browsers.  I tried each browser and at some point they would all crash.

So; the logical thing to do would be to remove the last component I installed – I removed “libflashsupport.i386″, but the problem still happened.  That library seemed to have fudge things up for me.  I ended up manually installing Flash 10, poking around in my package manager for anything that had the word “flash” in it.  Nothing worked.  For about two weeks or so I had so surf the web without Flash support.  At one point I realized that I can’t enjoy the web or some web sites because they use Flash in some kind of way.  We’ve become very dependent on Flash for presentation.

Factory Defaults

My last option was to revert the “factory settings” and see if that does anything.  I removed “firefox” and “flash” using my package manager and then installed them again.  That action put me back at status quo.  I’m running Flash 10 (at some point it made it into the repo) and Firefox 3.0.4.  I learned that I don’t have to have the latest and greatest.  There’s  a reason why I should wait until it’s released in the repo.  All-in-all, the repo is the “proprietary” component to a linux distribution… and I guess I can live with that.

I borrowed my brother’s Xbox to entertain both me and Alex (3-year-old son) last night.  I let him play “Cars” and I patiently waited for him to go to bed so I can play “Forza” – by falling alseep on the floor – genius!  After vigorously playing my campaign mode, acquiring three new cars, levelling to 10, and decaling the mess out of two cars I realized that I should not be going to bed some time after 3:30am.  I have too many things to do, in the morning, and video games is NOT one of them.  I must have played a straight 4-5 hour session and didn’t realize it.  Sure my fingers hurt, but it wasn’t an indication that I’ve been playing too long… just that I needed to not put so much pressure on the buttons.

Well; a couple thoughts went through my head and one of them was I may be getting too old for video games (currently 29 years old).  My life is laced with responsibilities and it’s hard for me to switch up routines.  For example, my wife said, “Yah, it looks like you have time to play video games in the morning, on the weekends.”  What!?  On the weekends – that sounds like I’m in school or something.  But she may be right.  I work a full-time job (that’s very stressful), I run an Internet consulting company and I have two small kids.  That’s enough to take up ALL my time.

Stress Level

Plus I realized that I was still a little stressed after playing because of the amount of concentration I need to run the courses.  For my stress-level I need get-along games like World of Warcraft to play and not intense-driven games.  I’ll find a balance…isn’t that what stress-level is all about, finding the balance!?

So; that brings me to my other thought and it’s me getting into the gaming industry.  The plan was to start making my attempts once my wife went back to work.  It’s too risky to switch careers now, but I thought if my life just isn’t going in that direction anymore.  Hmm, me without video games – what a concept!?  I’ll just wait it out and see what unfolds.

You like my mathematical equation for dead playtime with World of Warcraft on a linuxbox?  When I first installed Fedora 8, I ran Wine 0.9[something] with nVidia’s proprietary drivers.  I had no problem playing World of Warcraft.  I did notice something though – that every time there was a kernel update – when I restarted my Xserver that things would be kind of haywire.  I would normally have to reinstall the video driver and then I’ll be back to status quo.  So; now I’m a bit more seasoned with linux and open source or non-proprietary software means a little more to me than before – and getting that to work with WoW has proved to be quite difficult.

The Free-be Process

First I’m going to talk about the natural progression of a user migrating from the “Windows/Mac” world into this vast ocean of the “linux” world.  I heard on a podcast that most folks come into the linux world for various reasons, but the consistent reason is for the FREE software.  It’s awesome NOT having to pay anything anymore.  As for me, I’ve been used to not paying for software for a very long time… I’m a digital pirate.  There; I’ve come out of the closet (on that issue, I’m really a heterosexual).  I haven’t paid for software in over 10+ years.  But over the past couple years my conscience has gotten the best of me and my escape from the underground is linux.

So; the natural progress is people want free software, later on when they become familiar with all this software – they are exposed to GNU and the fight between proprietary and non-proprietary software.  And that is where I am, my friend.  I wish to run linux with no proprietary software – well except for the NEEDED ones like Flash, etc.  If you’re running open source/non-proprietary software – you will have less complications as the kernel and operating system progresses and improves.

Getting WoW Installed

Ok; back to my dilemma at hand.  I installed Fedora 9 (F9) and I was stoked to see that Wine released their stable version, which is “one point oh” (1.0).  It’s a great milestone to release a 1.0 version and Wine has been in works for years.  I was happy to see that F9 had this in their repos.  I installed it and immediately installed World of Warcraft.  I had no problems with it.  I also installed the kmod-livna drivers for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  It worked because I was able to apply “Desktop Effects” and get the whole cube and wobbly windows effect.  But when I try to run WoW nothing would happen.  So; I ran the command in my terminal to see what the error messages were and it seemed to have not registered something with the Wine/Windows Registry.

I’m not certain which component is the culprit, but so far I can’t install any of my games using Wine 1.0.  GTA: San Andreas, Battlefield 2, etc.  I always get some freaky error and I usually just move on to other things I have to do.  So; I’ll try and keep a log of what happens, but this is my situation at the time.  I’ve done some Google searches and WIne forum searches, but no luck yet.

As the title suggests, I’m pretty beat down by my life.  It is wall-to-wall filled with responsibilty and mayhem.  Just today I had to make a hard decision of cancelling my World of Warcraft account.  I haven’t played in weeks because I’ve just been so busy.  It really doesn’t make sence paying a monthly subscription right now.

Work is a mad house!  The uppers don’t understand what my workload is and they keep giving me their tasks as priority.  Things are just piling up two tasks at a time and I’m up in my ears with people being frustrated with me.  Honestly; I’m truly learning about project management – but it’s very tough thing to put into practice.  I scheduled myself to “project manage” 2 hours a day – 1 hour when I get into work, and the last hour of the day (away from my computer).  Do you think I’ve stuck to the plan – no!  When I get in I have so many things to do that “wasting” time project managing doesn’t seem viable.  In reality I need to do it.  It’s wierd.

At home isn’t even better.  Right now Leeanne is sick and not eatting.  She’s, visablly, getting skinner and Katina talks about it every day.  Alex is getting really mouthy and testing/pushing ALL our buttons.  He must like getting spankings!?  Well, after my wild day at the office, I have to deal with the kids – my wife is too prego to continue on her day so she’s knocked out on the couch or wherever.

I need to spend less time on the computer.  I’ve noticed that my eyes are getting dim.  Yah, that’s the last thing I need – bad eyesight.  I make my livelyhood on the computer.  That would really make things difficult.  But I’m more or less caught between a rock and a hard place.  I need to take a break from the computer, but I have either personal research to do or work for my struggling consulting company, Digital Alias.  Work needs to be done and I can’t use the excuse that “I’m tired”, or “my eyes need a rest”  Clients don’t want to hear that.

Well; I think that’s enough sharing for me.  This actually helped a bit.  I realize that regardless of how things get at work – I need to project manage.  At home… ah nothing learned yet… just trying to survive from day to day.

I saw a video posted on WoW Insider and I thought it was very cool. Wide screen is something new you don’t see with online videos. I don’t know what Vimeo is, but so far I love their video player and widescreen.

Since I have tons of financial responsibilities, I cannot buy a next-gen console. I’m itchin’ for GTA IV, Grand Turismo 5, etc… I did get a chance to play GTA IV at my neighbor’s house the other day and I fell in love with it. Aw, it’s sool cool and he has a big screen TV too so it looked really nice. With touching GTA, it’s hard to go back home and NOT play it. I downloaded GTA San Andreas for my linuxbox and everything ran without a hitch via Wine.

I played some World of Warcraft last night (dinged to 46 on my priest) and was pretty tired – so I said my “gnite” to the guild members and intended to go to bed, but I found myself double-clicking on the San Andreas icon and to my surprise – I was up till 2:00 AM – AGAIN!!!?!?!?! It’s funny playing the game on my PC. I certainly had to get comfortable with the controls – it really handles different than the PS2 controller, but I did notice that I took my time with everything. I actually got more emersed into the world than I did when I played it on my console.

There are a couple of reasons why I think that I’m having so much fun with the game on my PC. First I have a 22inch wide screen, the details in the game seem much different than on console – as well as the loading time. Sitting in my chair, directly in front of my monitor is way different than sitting on my couch playing it on my little bitty TV screen. Overall; I really like the game on my PC. I’ve actually taken the time to “gang-up” with my local posse and it’s also making the ride more fun.