Monday, August 5th

The Daily Report

Just as a heads-up to anyone who still wanted to help with the move: the moving fundraiser ends Friday night, at 11:59 PM (Pacific Time, apparently). The moment the clock in San Dimas rolls around to midnight Saturday morning, the fundraiser closes. I can't keep it open or extend it any more than I'm able to close it ahead of time. So if you want to claim perks or just want to know you contributed to the moving/household fund, this is the last week. I meant to do a big "One Week Left!" post last Friday, but then weather and human frailty happened.

(Link: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-moving-plea/x/466204)

Any money is helpful. I'm past the goal, but I'm honestly not 100% sure that the move is yet fully covered (I've never done this before, and people keep telling me it will be more expensive than I think), and even if it is, there are definite things I could use the money for in setting myself up in the new place.

The State of the Me

...it's kind of up and down, honestly. Friday I ended up zonking out in the attic for a few hours due to the heat, which wasn't a good idea because the attic is where the heat lives. After I woke up from that and realized I wasn't getting anything else done, I moved down the living room where it was quiet and cool and fell asleep on the couch. That ended up messing up my back and neck for a lot of Saturday and Sunday.

So, this weekend I caught up on sleep and tried to give my spine a nice rest. The soreness is now gone and I'm pretty well rested. My sleep schedule is a bit off, though.

It was fairly cool over the weekend (they kept saying the sun would come out in the afternoon and it kept not doing it), but today is projected to peak at or near 90. I'm hoping it will do the "stay cloudy all day" thing again, since it's fairly gray and cool right now, and the projected high has already drifted down a little bit.

Tuesday's forecast looks a lot like today's, but after that there's supposed to be a sharp drop as a cold front moves in. I feel weird that so much of my life revolves around weather reports, but that's just the reality on the ground right now.

Plans For Today

...not much. The bonus story threshold for the week wasn't met, which isn't surprising since I usually make the push for that with Friday's story. If I felt awesome and today cool, I'd go ahead and say I'm going to finish Friday's story and post it today so the site isn't fallow for a whole week. But I don't think that's in the cards.

If I don't make today a posting day, then today and tomorrow--again, the two days projected to be in the high 80s/low 90s--are days when I can take a relaxed pace, work on being ready for Wednesday.

It's not something I do lightly, but Friday wasn't a "this chapter isn't quite ready, needs more thought" day, I basically don't have anything to show for it and rushing through a chapter today isn't going to be much better.

So what I'm going to do is split the kind of work I'd be doing on Tuesday (mostly work on the next Omnibus and cleaning up the next Tales of MU e-book for this weekend) between today and tomorrow, and I'll get a head start on the next chapters, in a light duty sort of way. The readers and the website will survive the gap in the schedule... anyway, this is why I'm getting out of the attic before next summer.

AWW: Serious "Hallelujah" moment happened a minute ago.

So... my fist full of dice combat system works.

It solves most of the problems of the previous combat system, most of the time.

Eliminating most straight attack bonuses and defense bonuses makes it a little less complicated.

But it's still not simple.

It's not elegant.

It doesn't jibe with the rest of the game, a lot of the charm of which (in my opinion) relies on using the same 1d6 mechanism for darn near everything.

The reason I don't use the 1d6 mechanism for combat is that it resulted in battles between equals mostly being impasses won by attrition, which is boring, and mismatched battles being absolute curb stomps, because of the way higher attributes skew the curve and because I didn't have separate damage rolls so how badly you beat an opponent by equaled how badly you beat them, so if I have a Prowess of 6 and I get a roll of 17 and you have a Reflexes of 0 and you get a 4, I just did 13 damage to you, and that kind of spread is well within the realm of possibility without any modifiers.

Now, there are two reasons I didn't have separate damage rolls. One is that I wanted damage to be based more on skill than what weapon you have in your hands, and damage rolls are usually tied to charts listing how much damage weapons do. That's not ironclad, but it's, you know, a thing.

The more pressing reason was that I thought resolving every attack with two die rolls (attack roll and defense roll) was simpler than introducing a third die roll (damage roll).

And yeah it is.

But then I go and change the "two die rolls" into multiple die rolls, with stopping to add up successes, and remembering what your success range is, and so on. There could easily be 16 dice involved in an exchange of blows between level one characters specialized for offense and defense. And there are games that go like that, there are people who love games like that, but... this is a game where you resolve everything by rolling one six sided die. 16 six sided dice are like the elemental opposite of one six sided die.

So to make a loooooooong story short, after my interminable struggle with various combat systems, I've decided: scrap it. Want to make a close physical attack? Prowess Check. Want to dodge that attack? Reflexes Check. There's an additional mechanism that comes into play when a check is a combat check that makes sure your chance of being hit is never lower than 1 in 36 no matter how good you are, but, basically... there are going to be utterly mismatched opponents. There are going to be people who roll a 17 to hit against a defense of 4.

And that's fine. The reason the game has so many different stats in the first place is because not everybody will have the same strategy. If you can only muster a Reflexes Check of 4 against a Prowess Check of 17, you win by not being in a position where you have to dodge swords.

But you also won't take 13 damage when you get caught in a position where you have to dodge swords. The sword will basically do the same amount of damage to you as it would do if it hit anyone else. There's still going to be a skill element in that if you hit by say 2 or less it'll be a glancing hit and do less damage, and of course some parts of skill with a weapon will be represented by damage bonuses, but, yeah. You won't take 13 points of damage, you'll take one die of damage.

And this fixes everything. Attack Check, Defense Check... if Attack Check wins, then damage roll. And the Attack Check and Defense Check are just checks. Same rules as the rest of the game.

Of course I figured this out after converting the Basic Character Guide to the "fistful o' dice" system. But that took almost no time to do. And this time, I'm going to actually write out the attack rules in full before I adapt the BCG to the new system, so I can make sure that I actually like them. My perpetual inability to actually finish the suckers mostly stems from the fact that the problems stare me in the face as I try to write them out.