[Lurker Above]

Originally posted by Loser:
Did you know they are killing off the enitre World of Darkness?

Yeah, they got tired of the complications and they're pulling the End of the World. I think God did that in the book from which Dave got my avatar.

I think that book is "Job: A comedy of Justice" by Robert. A. Heinlein. Not sure, though.

Also, some good places in the Vancouver/Greater Vancouver area to buy D&D stuff: Pastime Games in Langly (I'm not sure of the address), and i know that the Coles bookstore in Willowbrook mall has the D&D starter kit thing, as well as several rulebooks (The 3.5 core ones, Book of Vile Darkness, Book of Exhalted Deeds, and Dragonlance Campaign Setting, Last I checked). You might also want to check any massive book store, I think the chapters in Metrotown (is there still a chapters in metrotown?) had most of them. Other than that... well, let's just say a friend and I once drove around vancouver from 9 AM to 6 PM looking for gaming stores, and found nothing but Warhammer.

Also, good Groups can be hard to find. A good idea is to find a bunch of internet friends, and use AIM (yeah, yeah, AOL's horrid, but they know how to make a messenger.), since its chat room has a dice roller. A good program to help with that stuff so that you don't have to keep the stats on a UBB is DMGenie (DMgenie.com) and Player Genie. Or, you could have players e-mail your sheets to the DM, who keeps them in a word processor (and players keep everything of theirs on their computers, too), and then the DM can e-mail out experiance point rewards, treasure hauls, and the like (assuming you have a good DM (who's willing to do that), that works well. as a mediocre (at best) DM, I usually just tell the PCs their rewards in the chat. ). Try and schedual your games for a certain time each week, though. I've tried both unschedualed and schedualed, and I don't think an unschedualed game has survived more than a month.

Finally, the two weapon fighting chart (for 3.0, at least) goes:

Circumstances Primary hand/Off Hand
Normal Penalties: -6/-10
Off-hand weapon is light: -4/-8
Ambidexterity feat: -6/-6
Two weapon Fighting feat: -4/-8
Off hand weapon is light and ambidexterity feat: -4/-4
Off-hand weapon is light and two-weapon fighting feat: -2/-6
Both Feats: -4/-4
Off-hand weapon is light and both feats: -2/-2

sorry if the above is confusing (or formatted weirdly).

So, assuming your ranger is medium sized (the PHB races that are are Human, Elf, Half-Orc, Half-Elf, and Dwarf), then, with his longsword and short sword, he gets -2/-2 (short sword is light). of course, that's in addition to base attack bonus, strength bonus, etc, but your full attack bonus, as a ranger, should be +1/+1 (your strength negates the 2 weapon penalty).

...er. Hope I helped.