Thursday, April 25th

The Daily Report

Today I realized that at some point (specifically, the point where I ran out of breakfast cereal), I just sorted of drifted from taking my morning pills when I wake up in the morning to taking them when I eat lunch because they need to be taken with food, and that after a few days of that it just became routine and I stopped thinking about it.

This could be a big part of why the huge level of productivity/focus I had when I first got back here has subsided so noticeably... I've still been getting stuff done overall, and I didn't expect to stay at that initial level forever, but I've been getting a little dispirited at how aimless a lot of my mornings have been.

So that's corrected now. This should get my brain kicked into gear a bit earlier in the day, and also space out my morning and afternoon doses. Today my not be a perfect test of the effectiveness of this, due to circumstances described in the next section.

The State of the Me

Last night I was awakened by a car alarm going off just as I was drifting into sleep and the jolt kept me up another few hours. This morning, I had to wake up really early in the morning to help make sure someone else got up when they needed to. I did get back to sleep afterwards, but I'm kind of expecting a crash sometime today.

Plans For Today

Due to the above circumstances, I'm going to focus on the MU chapter that's due today. I have a Wander update and a chapter of commentary to do to keep myself on schedule with those things, but I can do them in the evening in my spare time, when I would be working on A Wilder World.

AWW: State of the Wilder World

As of right now, if I were to put up the Basic Character Guide draft as it exists right now, you could make a character. All the steps are there. It needs some clean-up and a section on languages before I'm ready to post it, but you could create a complete character from start to finish, with the only hole being if you selected something that addresses languages.

(Other missing sections include anything having to do with advancement, companions, and magic gear, but they won't form a part of the first playtests.)

The character sheet is a very rough draft, with a lot of empty space. The reason for this is that beyond the basic stats, I would only be guessing at what information people would find useful to include where. That's one of the major things I'm going to be looking for feedback on, in particular once the game is being played.

One hang-up I'm having: because the Quality sheets make a point of listing exactly what each and every ability does in game terms, I keep feeling like something is missing if there's not space to not only list all your Details and Gear but also put in a one-line description of what it does/what benefits it provides. But people since time immemorial have simply been writing out their inventories, secondary skills/feats, etc.

I don't know. My favored approach is to have a nice big space right next to the attributes for "Notable Bonuses", where people can write down their total bonuses to certain tasks, so if you've got a set of fine lockpicks, a secondary skill in lockpicking, and bonuses from a Treasure Hunter ability to pick locks, you can just note your total bonus to pick locks rather than having them separated out on different part of the sheets and having to remember what all applies.

But I'll be welcoming feedback on that, up to and including asking people who design their own character sheets to send them to me, for possible inclusion with appropriate credit.

Anyway, I'll be doing the clean-up and stuff this weekend, so that sometime next week I can post a PDF of the alpha version of the Basic Character Guide. Alpha testing on it will consist of whoever wants to take a crack at it making characters with it, then sending feedback about it.

While that's going on, I'll be turning my attention to the test version of the player's guide (i.e., the rules of play). Actually codifying the character creation stuff in concrete form has led me to a few refinements I'll need to incorporate, but they're already substantially done. The combat rules need to be rewritten, but that's because I've never written them out in full before so the first attempt was bound to be messy.