The Flenceburg Sorcerer (Attachment)

[Creamsteak]

I have been working on a guild write up for January 19th (my birthday) about a guild I use in my campaign world, and although that's not done yet, I came up with something else to do as well. I've been trying to create a "different" arcane spellcaster for my next venture as a character, something less powerful, but with a stronger story element.

Anyway, it's a 80kb pdf (Three short pages with one chart and a single picture), sweet and simple, on a new magic school/character class I've developed for my campaign world. Now, as your early present to me, I was wondering if you could help improve upon it. Please? Read the whole thing, or else your going to be lost as to what I've changed. There are a lot of small changes added to the big picture to make this as "different but the same" as possible.

 

[GoldenEagle]

I'd love to help, but I can't open the attachment.

GE

 

[tarchon]

I'd love to help, but I can't open the attachment.

GE

You have to unzip it and then use an Acrobat PDF file viewer on it.

Generally speaking, compressing single PDF files is pointless since Adobe's internal compression scheme is very efficient as it is. It is actually possible that compressing an already compressed format will even make it bigger, though in this case you do get a whopping 5% compression.

These days, the vast majority of application file formats already have compression in them (Word doc has had it since 97 I think, though it does leave some room for futher compression), so ZIP only makes a lot of sense with text and some of the verbose portability formats like RTF which use a lot of text tags (HTML, VRML, GEDCOM, etc). Another cute compression fact is that contemporary modem protocols build in compression algorithms (modems are so slow that contemporary processors can easily analyze and compress big chunks of data faster than the modem transmits), so over a slow phone connection where many people think it's most needed, file compression at the server really provides little benefit in transfer speed even if it is a compressible format.

In short, look before you ZIP.

The class looks OK on first glance. I was kind of curious why it was called "Learned Sorcerer" in the subject though.

 

[Creamsteak]

Or maybe I zipped it because you can't attach .pdf files to enworld messegeboards. Hrm... maybe all that knowledge and you missed the obvious?

 

[Destil]

I had one issue downloading: it had an extra .php extension on the file after I followed your link. Could be GoldenEagle's problem.

For the same concept in my own world (a sorcerer who has their natural abilities honed through wizard schooling) and for 'untrained' sorcerers I use the Monte Cook alternate sorc.

All in all it looks fairly good, to me.

Note: This should be in house rules, most likely.

 

[tarchon]

Or maybe I zipped it because you can't attach .pdf files to enworld messegeboards. Hrm... maybe all that knowledge and you missed the obvious?

Hmm... maybe I not only intended to point that out to you but also people the net over who think everything must be ZIPed?
So you're saying that it's obvious that someone would prevent attaching PDF files, despite what I just said? Irrational restrictions are not obvious. I don't attach files to the board myself though (since it must be a huge resource drain), so I've never encountered that pecularity. The most ironic thing of course is it allows bmp, txt, and rtf, which are some of the most common horribly inefficient file formats, the ones that usually need to be zipped when disk space on the server is tight.

But anyway, here's an obvious solution, Mr. Obvious:
Change the extention to zip and tell people to save it with ".pdf" in place of the ".zip" or to change the name to end with a ".pdf" afterward. Unless they're using an OS that handles the decompression transparently like Windows XP, it's less hassle for them. And if they've got to knock a .php off the end anyway, it's not any more work.

The reason some software .phps it, BTW, it that the file is incorrectly identified as being a PHP file in the MIME type. Some applications prefer to ID files by the extension and some prefer the MIME type. It looks to me like the bulletin board code really has some issues here, but hey I don't want to bum you out with like my knowledge and all.

 

[Piratecat]

But anyway, here's an obvious solution, Mr. Obvious:
Change the extention to zip and tell people to save it with ".pdf" in place of the ".zip" or to change the name to end with a ".pdf" afterward.

Please don't do this. If you do so, don't be surprised if you get your ability to post revoked! Many pdfs are huge, and we don't want them attached to posts for a reason. As a result, I can't imagine being very amused by someone who circumvents that restriction knowingly.

Thanks!