And another, with some commentary..
I really like how the tablet makes it easier to be creative with drawing - unlike with pen/paper, I'm not afraid to put more onto the paper with the knowledge that any mistake would require very careful editing out in GIMP. In some cases my pre-tablet comic has differences from the scanned paper copy, but I've kept that type of editing to a minimum. With the one comic I've done so far on the tablet, I was able to be far more adventurous, knowing that control-Z would cure anything.
My knowledge of GIMP is still very shallow - I need to learn more about layers, figure out how to use the buttons on the tablet, etc.
The tablet's config still needs work - the cursor vibrates when it's close enough to the right edge and I still need to use xrandr to turn off the laptop's main display if I want the stylus to work correctly on the screen. Despite not having as much screen real-estate though, I like looking at the smaller screen more than my laptop's ... sigh.
After playing it a bit (not as a DM, which I usually was back in my DnD days), I've come to the conclusion that D20 Modern (and likely the entire D20 genericised DnD setting) is both not much like DnD in the ways it is (was? I haven't seen 4th edition yet) and is lousy.
D20 leaves the essentials of combat mechanics alone, but alters two central aspects of DnD - character classes and character abilities. D20 modern, as I understand it, was designed to provide a framework under which a DM might choose to run a DnD-like campaign set in a world different enough from fantasy novels that many game mechanics would need to be redone. One in particular is character classes - of all the classes only the fighter carries well to the future (although a DM would need to work out mechanics for firearms and other modern weapons). The way they did this in D20 is to largely eliminate character classes, instead having a "class" for each attribute, these classes not being that different (hit dice still depend on class, but otherwise a class is a bundle of proficiency-boosts). They then tagged these classes with uninspiring, difficult-to-imagine names like "Brave Hero" or "Dedicated Hero". In essense, everyonme's a fighter. There being no real classes, fitting any interesting variation between character roles goes to feats and what used to be proficiencies, which is clumsy at best. Conclusion: They screwed up.
They also reworked proficiencies (now called skills), reducing the feeling of there being a huge number of them for people to customise to their heart's content down to there being a short-ish list that pretty much fits with checkboxes and levels on a character's sheet. They also decided that having both feats and proficincies was not enough, now there are special abilities too.
Being flexible isn't bad, but genericising classes doesn't really work well, and the proficiency reduction makes one feel that one's playing a videogame (with the usual comparatively-shallow-feeling-of-variati
