MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6th

THE DAILY REPORT

So, I've been thinking about how the end/beginning-of-month newsletter has drifted to being almost a week into the month this week and then I started thinking about why it was at the end/beginning of the month in the first place. And the answer to that is that when I was trying to do them monthly, I wanted to give myself as much time as possible to produce one when I announced "Okay, yes, definitely putting out a newsletter this month."

But that contributed to the situation of the end/beginning of the month being crowded, and that itself is the only problem I encounter with getting a newsletter made and sent out every couple of weeks now.

So I'm still going to go with the general idea that the exact day doesn't matter as much because it goes straight to people's inboxes anyway, but I'm moving the targets to around the 7th and around the 21st. That makes my months nice and evenly spaced from start to finish.

So, newsletter subscribers: expect it tomorrow.

I'm traveling a little bit next month to see my folks, which is one of the reasons I have been working on getting things done not just on schedule but ahead of schedule. I don't think I have ever yet succeeded in falling behind while traveling. I did a pretty good job of keeping MU updated last time I was in Hagerstown, but I couldn't hold to the schedule completely and I did at the expense of everything else. I feel that with the techniques I've been cultivating I could do a lot better. This shorter trip will serve as a bit of a test run for that theory.

STATE OF THE ME

Doing pretty good.

DREAMS FROM LAST NIGHT

Kind of a distressing one. It started out with me working in an office that processed some kind of large volume of financial transactions involving precious metals... it actually kind of reminded me of what things might look behind the scenes in a large financial services company in the MUniverse, all paper/electronic (not that it would be electronic in the MUniverse) transactions involving gold and silver and platinum.

I was an auditor and I discovered some irregularities in a coworker's batches and realized he was skimming off gold receipts somehow, skipping the silver ones, something that would be automatically discovered when his batches were checked at the end of the week, which made me think he was siphoning as much money in a week as he could and then he was going to disappear, so I alerted the authorities. Only by this point in the dream the co-worker's identity had shifted to one of my brothers, and our father was in on it. So they ended up being placed under investigation while our family went about a series of ordinary social interactions like having dinner and going to the symphony and some sort of holiday get-together, but with them knowing I'd turned them over to the authorities.

This dream was probably the result of re-reading the Moist von Lipwig books this weekend, the ever-present MU influences in my brain, and the fact that I am getting ready for a visit to my parents' place. All awesome things, but combined in a way that left me feeling kind of shaky when I woke up.

PLANS FOR TODAY

I've had the 6th down as the day for the first OT story of the month but I can't think if I've ever actually made that. That's my main goal for today... I have a somewhat specific Vera III story in mind. I've shown how she acts around her husband and her best friend, but nothing that really speaks to her role as Empress.

As usual I'll be writing other things, too, but the house is a little busy today so this might be a comparatively light productivity day.

EOD.

2,500 words today. Man, that used to be what I'd consider to be average and now it's... well, if this is not the worst full writing day I've had since near the beginning of January, it's close. And because I have some very reassuring readers out there, I want to be clear: I don't feel bad about this. I had a "bad" day in terms of word flow but that's a respectable output by anyone's measurement.

At a little bit after 6, I saw myself as being within striking distance of the finish line on the Other Tales story I was writing, but I wasn't fully satisfied with it. It lacks the pop and sparkle of a lot of recent chapters, and even though it's got a fan favorite character (or at least Vera seems to be emerging in that direction) and I'm sure people would enjoy it as written I don't want to slide by on what I can get away with, quality-wise. As much as I'm dedicated to a predictable and steady schedule, I'd rather "get away" with transgressions in that area.

The thing that most of the recent updates have in common is that the actual writing was done in two days, but mostly in one day... I write the bulk of them, and then on a later day I go back over them and then post them. And I think that's part of why they've been so strong.

One thing about writing is that you can only get so far with a plan. Some times you need to take a step back and look at where things have been heading and what's been emerging, and figure out what needs trimming and what needs polishing and what needs a little more sunlight and room to grow. Even when this is only the difference between decent and good rather than terrible and good or decent and great, it's still a difference.

D&D 5E

So, I haven't had a lot to say about the new edition of D&D that's under development. That's because there's not a lot of information about it yet, but really, I'm just not that interested. The grand concept behind it is to produce a game that "unites the editions"... in other words, they want to make everybody happy. That's the shortest route to making nobody happy.

Look at how much the 4E player base was fractured at just the idea that Essentials was going to be catering to fans of earlier editions... and nobody could even quite agree on whether it was aimed at bringing in the 3rd Edition fans or the old school grognards or what. Almost everybody who liked the current edition feared that the things they didn't like about previous editions would supplant or dilute what they liked.

The people who are still playing BECMA or either edition of AD&D or 3.X/Pathfinder are doing so because those are their favorite editions. Some of that might be partisanship or nostalgia but some of it is an honest matter of taste. You could maybe sell an AD&D 2nd Edition group some more refined material for their favorite editions but you're not going to sell them on a whole new edition unless it seems like a legitimate continuation of their game in a way that 3rd Edition wasn't, and the same is true about people who went over to Pathfinder... if they didn't buy 4th edition, you need to sell them 3.5.2, not 5.

Wizards of the Coast will keep putting out new editions because they keep needing new products to sell. That's the reality of what happens when a hobby becomes a corporate concern... lest we forget, one of the first big edition splits happened in large part because it allowed TSR to get out of paying royalties to one of the game's original creators. But every time they do that they're going to be leaving whole groups of players behind. It's just the nature of the beast.

This is a big part of why I'm interested in developing my own humble little indie game. I think at its core roleplaying is always going to work better as a hobby than an industry. I think that's why it seems so hard to make money at it. It's not like video games... everybody is the person who can keep playing the same game over and over again for years, because the game product is not the game that is played. Everybody's a modder, everybody's a designer. There are still people playing games that were rebooted and relaunched two or three time since, there are people producing material for editions of games where the intellectual property has changed hands multiple times or vanished completely.

I don't think it's impossible for a corporation to make a business model around roleplaying games that really works a lot better than the ones they've been using, but I think the corporate culture is going to get in the way. The focus on "brand identity" that keeps them from even passively supporting older material is a big sticking point, for instance, as is the fear of piracy that keeps them from utilizing the easier ways of capitalizing on out of print books.