chacadwa.com

Technical blog and writings by Micah Webner.

Blogrimage 2014 Day 20: Running Out of Time

For the first time since I started this blogrimage, I'm feeling like I'm running out of time to prepare for our Pathfinder RPG game session on Saturday. I was working on it last night, but the power went out three times, and that's tough when you're trying to research things on the computer.

Speaking of researching on the computer, since purchasing the PDF version of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook the other night, I decided I needed a better way to read the manual on my iPhone or iPad. I've been using Dropbox to share files between desktop computers and my devices, but it relies on an Internet connection (yes, even sometimes when you star a file) and I wanted to just store files for offline reading, especially on the iPad, which is wi-fi only.

It turns out I must not have been paying attention, because it turns out you can store PDFs on iOS devices pretty easily with iBooks. iBooks is the free book reader from Apple. You can copy PDFs to iBooks using iTunes, or email them to yourself as an attachment. I was also able to select Open in iBooks from the Dropbox app, and that saved the file locally on the device, too.

So tonight I had to scramble to finish planning Saturday's session, since I won't be home until late tomorrow night. I'm still not quite done with some details, but I got the hard parts done. (Even after simplifying my map, I ended up with more rooms than ideas.)

At least in my rummaging around I stumbled onto the rules from one unanswered question from last week's session. It turns out you can use a torch as a one-handed improvised weapon. If you do, you take a -4 on your attack roll, and hits do equivalent bludgeoning damage as a gauntlet, plus 1 for fire damage. I'll bet you always wanted to know that, too.