Dry December

It's been a fairly dry December here in the Bay Area and, more broadly, in California. I was thinking about that today as I recalled how we've only had a few, light rain showers in the past month. Indeed, the numbers bear out my anecdotal observation: figures compiled by Golden Gate Weather Services (retrieved 28 Dec 2020) show San Jose has gotten 1" of rain so far this season compared to an average of 5" by this time. Most areas in the state are under 1/3 season-to-date averages and some, particularly in Southern California, are below 10% of normal.

Why it Matters: Mediterranean Climate

California has beautiful, dry summers. The flip side of this is that we have wet winters. Pretty much all our rainfall comes in a period between November and March.

California is not unique in this regard. It's part of a weather pattern called Mediterranean Climate (Wikipedia link) or dry summer climate. This map from Wikipedia shows where in the world it occurs:



Obviously the name comes from this being the climate pattern around the edges of the Mediterranean Sea. It also holds for most of the west coast of the US— including the metro areas of Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle— and a variety of other regions around the world. As I said, pretty much all our rainfall comes in a period between November and March. Thus when it's late December and there's barely been any rain the past two months it's time to be concerned... about drought.

Is it time to press the panic button about drought?

Is it time to press the panic button?

Not really. ...Well, not yet, anyway. Just because the rain season has gotten off to a slow start doesn't mean we won't catch up later. Years of living in California have shown me that "normal" is a statistical average, not a month-by-month plan one can count on. For example, the first winter I lived in California there was a deluge of rain in December and January, then practically nothing the rest of the season. Other years we've had a dry month in the middle of winter and then rain into the Spring.

All that said, getting off to a dry start this winter is concerning news. It increases the chance of this being another not-enough-rain season. As we've gotten less than average annual rainfall I think, what, 6 of the last 8 years? Drought isn't just a threat, it's already a reality. We need more rain to push the danger away.

UPDATE: The 2020-2021 rain season turned out to be another dry one, not just in California but across much of the American West. Rivers and reservoirs are drying up. Consider the panic button pushed.

D&D versions. Taking (up) the 5th?

I've written before that I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for a long time. I started with the first Dungeons & Dragons Basic rules, aka the "blue box", in the early 1980s; then bought the Second Basic D&D, aka "magenta box" rules, which expanded with Expert, Companion, and Master sets; then graduated to Advanced D&D. From there I followed along to AD&D Second Edition, then (name change) D&D 3rd Edition, then D&D 3.5.

Why so many versions? Well, understand that the companies behind D&D are book publishers. They make money by selling books. What better way to drive book sales than by putting out whole new versions of the rules every 5-7 years? And that's exactly what they've done. Devoted D&D players buy new books all over again every cycle. Except I hopped off the corporate America treadmill after 3.5. I decided I'd had enough.

Partly my choice to stick with 3.5 was frustration with purchasing and absorbing ever more new systems. Partly it's because 3.5 didn't have anything majorly broken with it that I wanted to fix (at the time). And partly it was because the next version, 4th Edition, frankly sucked. It broke with too much of what had made D&D, well, D&D for 3 decades and introduced rules seemingly more tuned to short-attention-span adolescents weaned on computer games.

Fourth Edition wasn't the end of the line. Now there's 5th Edition. Friends tell me it's a lot closer to the style of D&D 3.x than 4. So I'm trying it out.

Hawk and I bought two of the D&D 5e manuals recently. Our impetus was joining a game with younger players. You see, 3.5e was released in 2003. Seventeen years ago. That means there's an entire generation of D&D players for whom 3.5 has always been old. If we want to expand our gaming circle beyond old-school middle-age players we've got to join up with the present day.

D&D 5th Edition is interesting. It's closer to the 3.5 rules than 4th edition was. It fixes one main problem of 3.5: the system of advancement that makes higher level characters basically untouchable by NPCs and monsters more than a handful of levels lower than them.

I see this in my long term game, where we use 3.5 rules. It's particularly a challenge as the characters have risen to high levels (15-20). Their increasing wealth affords them access to magic items which, when combined with their level based bonuses, make it so that even upper-mid level foes can only hit them on a "natural 20" (a 5% chance of success).

This power imbalance casts the game into a particular style. High level PCs are basically superheroes. Attacks from anyone or anything that's not also a "super" just bounce off. That's not wrong in any absolute sense, it's just a particular theme of play— a theme that may not fit with the way the setting and storylines were conceived at lower levels.

How does 5E do it differently? Two things. First, level based bonuses do not ramp up as quickly. Second, magic items have smaller "pluses", and even the lower pluses are more expensive. Together these changes keep higher level characters from being able simply to ignore lower level foes.

I don't foresee migrating to 5E in my long term game. The move from 2E to 3.0 years ago disrupted things in my game that I didn't originally anticipate. I won't repeat that level of disruption with all the years of development invested into that game. But for new games, particularly with younger players, I could see choosing 5th Edition.

At the same time I'm reluctant even to start a new game with D&D 5. It's several years old at this point, having first been published in 2014. One thing we've learned from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro/Whomever Owns It Now is publishers gonna publish. There's a whole never version of the rules every few years to spur sales of a whole new set of rulebooks. I'm reluctant to get too deeply invested— financially or mentally— in 5E. My Spidey Corporate Profiteering Sense warns me there'll be yet-another all-new rules set published soon.