Almost to xp cap on this character, and any character. The big boost that really got me going were crystal cove last year, the new quests and 10% xp weekend, and gianthold slaying.

Not certain what I'm going to do for the last bit of xp. I'd do the gianthold flagging quests but those are hard to solo. I might try the vale.

Even if I cap xp, I might not level up right away, so I can help out others on lower level quests more. Mostly because I don't think epic quests are my cup of tea.

Establishing a kingdom

Last night we played Kingmaker, and the kingdom was founded, positions on the council were filled, the capitol city was established, and lots of xp was handed out.

 Actually, it wasn't a ton of xp, but enough to make it feel worthwhile for an evening without much combat or roleplaying.

So there was xp for:

• Establish a kingdom
• Build a capitol city
• Grow kingdom to size 5
• fill a city block with 4 buildings
• completing a quest (no spoilers)
• killing some things (no spoilers)

Buildings include: Castle, dump, house and shop.

Right now building points are at a premium but it is currently hard to fail an economy check so they should be getting build points every turn, enough to continue growing their kingdom.

SSD is nice, but...

Surprisingly, after putting an SSD in my 2006 MacBook Pro, most things sped up considerably. Boot times, application load times, even DDO, it was quite speedy.

But the bug about changing zones or characters several times is exacerbated in wine. So for short amounts of time it works great.

I would boot camp into xp if it had good SSD support, and I would boot camp into vista or 7 if it supported 'overclocking' the underclocked ATI X1600 in my particular model of Mac (way to go Apple, first put on a metric ton of thermal paste and then underclock the video chip, and then make fans run too slowly for gaming)

In DDO news, haven't really been playing, just running around with my wizard in slaying areas. Currently in Gianthold.

Catching up on a few things

1 - Played Kingmaker last night. Finished up the first module, and started planning the kingdom for book 2.

2 - Finally got around to uploading this picture of the mini I was working on. The hair is a separate pieces that I glued on. I ended up not using a join, but I did have to use my hand drill to make the connection stick. Also cut off the base and glued her feet directly to the provided base.

3 - No number 3 for now.

Holiday Upgrades

Well, there was finally a hard drive on sale right after Christmas that was within my budget so I should be getting sometime next week a 32GB SSD for the Mac whose hard drive has been dead for awhile. Depending on how it performs, my wife may claim it as her primary computer again, letting me have her Toshiba Satellite. The Mac has better specs, but having to run Wine and an underclocked video chip hampers it severely in the gaming department, so the swap may be a good thing.

In the meanwhile, I've been playing DDO on the netbook, which is aggravating at times, but the frame rate can usually stay around 20 to 25 in a quest, so it's not bad.

If hard drive prices come down I may be able to build a desktop sooner, but it's looking like maybe sometime around April that I'll be able to do that.

Random Encounters

Kingmaker continues at a good pace. Played last Sunday, with much more exploring.

No spoilers, but I did run a 4 boar encounter which the group didn't seem to have too much problem with. A good bit of xp there.For the most part, random encounters are few and far between though, which makes them a bit more manageable.

Also, they decided to buy food rather than forage as that takes less time, and time is money and food is cheap.

I've got to read up a little bit for the next part and get my ducks in a row, but I don't forsee any problems.

We continued our kingmaker adventure path yesterday, finally having random encounters. Unfortunately the random encounters we're a bit over the top but I ran with them and I think it turned out okay.