Open Mass Combat System Mongoose Publishing introduced the OMCS in Seas of Blood (2001), then expanded upon it in Quintessential Fighter (2002). Of all the mass combat systems I've come across for D20, this one is the easiest to convert a creature stat block into its corresponding mass combat statistics. Unit Hit Points (UHP) are equal to the total number of hit dice for all members of a unit, adjusted by Constitution modifier (and possibly by Toughness feat). Cavalry units receive a 50% bonus to account for their mounts. Particularly large or small units receive a modifier to damage from their ranged attacks. And then you're basically done. You roll a single to-hit roll for the entire unit, which is just the ordinary to-hit modifier for a single member of the unit, adjusted by the relative size of the unit and its target (eg. if a unit attacks another unit half its size, it receives +1 to hit and a x2 damage multiplier. Conversely, it's opponent is at -1 to hit). You...
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The 11th Australasian World Wide Web Conference 2nd to 6th July, 2005 @ Royal Pines Resort, Gold Coast, Australia There were 3 papers in my session, with 4 presenters, the session chair and an audience of about 20 people. Mine was the second paper, I was up there for about 18 minutes or so going through my slides and demonstrating the template editor and FO output plugins. After all 3 papers, there was a general Q&A forum where all of the presenters fielded questions. One issue raised was why we had used Java so heavily rather than a pure XSLT system (XHTML and OfficeML). Someone else asked “what does the Oracle database do?” There was also some speculation about how well the Excel output would handle 3rd party XML, formatted using a custom FO template. I explained that we did not yet have a XSL 1.0 compliant implementation, and to the extent that we had not implemented all of the FO elements there would be visual discrepancies between the ideal (PDF) output and its spreadsheet equ...
In the morning we had a much smaller breakfast, bloated as we were from the curry the night before. We walked over to the cinema, and watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (an absurd and hilarious movie which Aileen sort-of enjoyed, or at least tolerated). Afterwards we had lunch at Cairns Central shopping centre before heading to the boardwalk, kicking off our shoes, and sitting in the shade reading our books. We went back to the Tradewinds and collected our luggage from the concierge, who ordered a taxi for us. An uneventful flight back to Brisbane, to discover that Amie had missed us more than Natalie! Dinner at McDonalds, then home to fall asleep exhausted in our own bed.