Quick Tip: City of Heroes Monitor Window

CoH Tip of the Day: There is a way to make City of Heroes expose the "real numbers" for you in terms of your character's Defense, Resistance, Hit Chance and other stats, taking all buffs, debuffs, etc., into account (instead of having to rely solely on vague descriptives such as, "adds a moderate amount of to-hit chance", etc.), but it is not at all obvious/intuitive how to do this. Seeing these numbers is critically important for monitoring your performance in end-game content (at least for tanks-- maybe other classes don't depend on it as much, though they could probably benefit from it). At low levels it's not that big of a deal, but if you're doing Incarnate content, you may want to have the monitor window going.

And so, ever since CoH came back into my life last week I've been struggling to find/remember how I got the monitor window to show up before. Was it a custom UI mod? A window that had to be opened with the typed-out /window_show command? Something else? My first thought (after my googling proved unequal to the task) was to check my old Windows XP box that still has CoH installed on it and see if it had any kind of custom UI files, or if there was a user settings file that might say what the window was called. I checked and couldn't find anything.

Most of the old online CoH player guides have disappeared over the years-- so much for the theory that nothing ever disappears from the internet-- so what I ended up having to refer to was a complete list of all slash commands from one of the old CoH wikis, and trying out different commands that seemed like plausible candidates to be the monitor window. Eventually, I found it. It is /monitor_attribute

Type commands such as this...
/monitor_attribute Current Hit Points
/monitor_attribute Last Hit Chance
/monitor_attribute Smashing Resistance
...etc.

You should get something that looks a little like this (attribute monitor moved to the upper right)...

Just for fun, here's a screenshot of the monitor window in action from the live servers, circa 2011...

PSA: "Po" and "Te" Are Now Real Words

At some point recently, the words "po" and "te" were made into official Words With Friends words, in case there was any doubt as to whether WWF has been cribbing from the Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary (which added both of those with the publication of the OSPD5 back in 2014). Guess I will need to go back and edit my Scrabble/WWF guides.

I only found this out by accident when the computer allowed "te" in one of my Solo Challenge games. (So far as I know, WWF does not maintain an official, publicly searchable word list anywhere. Their initial stock is said to have came from the ENABLE list, but they long ago split off onto their own proprietary list). When I realized "te" was now legal, I immediately tried "po" and found it to be legal as well. These two words were, until recently, the only two two-letter words recognized by Scrabble that were not recognized by Words With Friends. When this change was made exactly is hard to say, but I would guess probably some time this year (I periodically check words that I think might be possible candidates for being made legal, but don't keep a log of this. Po and te have been near the top of my list for a long time, but I don't know when exactly I checked them last.)

If you are wondering what they mean, "po" is slang for "chamber-pot" in some benighted English dialect or other, and I believe "te" is an alternate spelling of "ti" (as in, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do).

Edited to add: in regards to plurals, "pos" is now a word also-- it was not before-- a rare instance of Words With Friends actually remembering to include the plural inflection when adding a new word. "Tes", however, is still not a word. I guess they forgot on that one.

Edited again to add further: as of this writing, PO and TE work only on the desktop version of Words With Friends, not mobile. (The fact that WWF has different word lists for desktop and mobile is a well-known bug that has existed for years. It seems to me that they tend to update the desktop word list first, and the mobile word list is updated weeks or months later, whenever they get around to it. That's just my own observation, of course; it might not work exactly that way. If you are playing a game on mobile and would like to play Po or Te but it won't let you, you can log into that game via Facebook and play it there. Yes, that is seriously messed up, but it does work.)

Edited again again to add even more: "Ja" is now accepted by Words With Friends as a word also. This word does not appear in OSPD6, TWL, or any other word-game word authority. I assume it is from German (where "ja" means "yes"), but is "ja" really used commonly enough in English to be considered an English word? It would seem so, according to some...

Happy National Napping Day!

Today is the best of all possible holidays: National Napping Day.

A quick tip for for those celebrating this auspicious day: according to Science, some caffeine right before you start the nap will make your nap more efficient. The basic idea is that the caffeine takes ~20 minutes before it affects you. Drink the coffee (or coke or whatever), nap for 20 minutes and wake up refreshed instead of craving more sleep.

https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/973253539098189826

Tip of the Day

Scrabble and WWF tip of the day: Easily remember all the three-letter *ae Scots dialect words by memorizing this sentence: "Wae tae him who'd nae gae tae hae sae mae kaes" (meaning "woe to him who'd not go to have some more Eurasian jackdaws.")

That sentence contains all the three-letter words that have the "ae" letter combination. Because the letters A and E are the two most frequently used letters in English, the two-letter word "ae" is seen quite a lot in Scrabble and Words. Knowing how to build off that AE, especially into three-letter words, is essential.

(On a side note, this relates to something else I am working on: a post listing and defining all the two-make-three words in Scrabble and WWF. It is quite a long project though; it will be a while before it's done.)

Two Powergaming Tips for Numenera and the Cypher System

It is no secret that the rules for Numenera and The Cypher System are simple, yet paradoxically they are also unintuitive (at least at first). Perhaps that is why there are certain advantageous wrinkles in the rules that are right there in plain sight for all to see, yet it seems very few know about and take advantage of them (kinda like the auction rule in Monopoly, I guess, haha).

Not everyone min-maxes, sure, and I in fact would argue that literal min-maxing of a Cypher System character (e.g. assigning zero discretionary points to, say, Intellect and max points to Might), actually makes that character less robust when it comes to general-purpose adventuring than spreading things around, to an extent. Everyone needs some Intellect (for Perception, if nothing else), some Speed (for Speed Defense, if nothing else), and some Might (which, if nothing else, is your de facto hitpoint pool). Being somewhat specialized, but not over-specialized, seems to be the way to go. Min-maxing is of limited usefulness at best-- one of the things I like about this system.

This post isn't about that, though. These are rules, that are not min-maxing, that you may not be aware of, that you can take advantage of to improve your Numenera/CS play experience.

(Yeah, yeah, I know... "it's role-playing, not roll-playing", but bear with me. I believe these rules are intended to be used this way, and do not cheapen the role-play experience at all. These are not, I emphasize, rules-lawyering loopholes, but, in my opinion, the actual intent and spirit of the rules, which for some reason are not widely known in their specific applications.)

"Modify" Your Abilities (On the Fly)

Page 326 of the new Discovery book says something interesting. The passage in question is "Optional Rule: Modifying Abilities". (This passage exists also, worded largely the same, in the Cypher System book and first-edition Numenera book. I assume The Strange has it as well.)

I think people may miss this one in the rules because of what it's called. "Modifying" an ability, to me, sounds like a permanent change. It sounds like customizing the abilities your character has during character creation or perhaps advancement. When I was going through the old Core Rules the first time, I saw "Modifying Abilities", assumed it was an advanced character creation option, and moved on without reading it. I did not notice what I'd missed until much later.

That may just be me, I dunno. But it seems to me a lot of people don't know about modifying your abilities.

Anyway, "modifying" abilities is not about permanently changing them, but adapting them on an ad hoc basis to deal with the situation at hand. The example in the rules is of using the Hover esotery, which is normally self-only, on someone else. Ok, show of hands: how many people out there knew you could use Hover to make your friend hover? Or that you could use the ability Walks Through Walls from the Exists Partially Out of Phase focus on a friend? Or use teleporting abilities like Far Step or Bolt Rider on friends?

It is a difficulty 4 task to "modify" an ability in this way, so long as it is "within the […] general idea of the [original] ability". And using self-only buffs on people who aren't your self evidently falls within that paradigm. Actually if making self-only buffs other-castable were all you could do with this rule it would still be huge. But you can modify your abilities to do anything within the general idea of the ability, limited only by your imagination.

And some abilities have a pretty darn broad "general idea" of what they do. Think about Hedge Magic.

Have you ever encountered a player who took Hedge Magic as an ability and tried to use it for everything under the sun? This rule is how you adjudicate that kind of thing. Hedge Magic as written is extremely broad in the kinds of things it can do: moving things around, mending items, temporarily changing appearances, and more. It is generally limited to targeting "small" things in its ability description, but "modifying" it per this rule greatly, greatly expands the scope of what can be manipulated with Hedge. If making a self-only power target others is within the general idea of the original, then so is targeting big things with a small-thing-targeting power.

Note: Modifying a non-attacking power to be an attack is always at least a Formidable (difficulty 7) task. And formidable only if what you're trying to do is otherwise somewhat related to the theme of the original ability; the example from the rules is using Hover to make an enemy fly up rapidly and bump its head on the ceiling. That is difficulty 7 for the modify, followed by the attack roll against the enemy's level. Modifying Hover to shoot fireballs is difficulty 10, aka "impossible", but in fact theoretically possible given enough effort and training.

That brings us to our next Cypher System life-hack.

Training in Specific Abilities

Another show of hands: how many of you knew nanos could become trained in attacks as a result of taking a trained skill for character advancement? "But Troy," I hear you saying, "the rules specifically say 'Choose one skill other than attacks or defense...'-- everyone knows only glaives can get training in attacks!" (Discovery page 128). Yes, yes, but on that same page, it also says, "if your character can make an Intellect roll to blast an enemy with mental force, you can become trained in using that ability, easing the task of using it."

So, you can't, as a nano, take training in "attacks" generally, or even "attacks with esoteries", but you CAN take training in Onslaught (specifically). Since 99% of nanos use Onslaught as their primary (or sole) attack ability, it amounts to having attack training.

This life-hack can be combined with the previous one too. If you have an ability that you're likely to want to modify frequently, like Hover, Walk Through Walls, Hedge Magic, or Far Step, taking training in that specific ability (easing the modifies) may be worth considering.

***

These are both important rules to know, but they are not as widely known as they should be.