Thursday, August 15th

The Daily Report

Today's Round 2 on the perk fulfillment contacting people extravaganza. On Tuesday I had the advantage of being up bright and early in the morning and bursting with motivation so I made it through half the list easily. I think it might be more of an uphill battle today, but I don't have anything else that needs to be done, and my household working conditions are a lot better.


The State of the Me

The weather this week has been even cooler than projected. I'm noticing a pattern, though: I keep waking up through the night until I get to around the time (anywhere between 3 and 5) that I was going to sleep during the overnight heat waves, and then sleeping until about 11:30. So I'm gettting eight hours of solid sleep, just at an inconvenient time. I've been trying to go to bed around 10, 10:30 in order to get back onto a more sensible schedule. Maybe I need to compromise and go sometime in the middle. I might also try doing melatonin to jump-start the reset.

Plans For Today

See above. I might do some random AWW posts in between emailing bursts, in case I need a palette cleanser. I noticed on Tuesday that breaking it up helped me catch a few of the errors (like checking off the wrong name) that creep in from staring at the same things for too long.

AWW: The more I think about it...

...the more I'm sure that Folk Quality + 2 Character Qualities is the way to go.

The choices are just so much more meaningful when you have to limit yourself to 2 than when you can take 3. You can't just ask, "Well, what's good for a ____________?" You have to ask, "What's most important for a ____________?"

With 3 CQs to build a character, there's no reason for every armed close combat fighter to not take Weapon Expert for their chosen weapon. If you want to be a big barbarian fighter with a big barbarian club: Warrior, Brute, WE: Bludgeon. Things like Weapon Expert become easy add-ons, automatic afterthoughts. With only 2 CQs, though, you have to be more deliberate about those things, which makes them more special. Not everybody who fights with a bludgeon will be an expert in them, only characters for whom that expertise is central.

You can still do a no-brainer by stacking a wizard specialization on top of Battlemage or Magic-User, but you can't do all three... and if you want something besides magic, you've got to give up the specialist CQ or the generalist one. And if you're a Magic-slinging fighter or rogue, you might not have any Magic CQs at all. Which doesn't stop you from doing Magic, it just makes it more of a clear sideline.

This also gives characters more room to grow. Your barbarian with a club might not be an expert in its use at level 1, just proficient, but maybe you become an expert through experience. Maybe you don't start out fully specializing in pyromancy, you just like fire spells and in the beginning you have the spell focus and maybe implement to prove it, until you "graduate" to full Pyromancer.

Before, if I wanted to make a highly mobile fighter, I'd take Skirmisher, Acrobat, and then an offensive CQ like Warrior, Fencer, Archer, or WE:WE (Weapon Expertise: Whatever). Now, there's a dilemma: give up some mobility by giving up Skirmisher or Acrobat, or rely on stats for fighting ability. Which is an option! The stat system is pretty robust. But with CQs to spare, almost no one would ever have to fight with their raw stats. Now the person who spends the resources on Warrior will have a clear advantage to show for it, though they'll have to make a trade-off to get it.

So while this reduces the number of character combinations (albeit from over a hundred thousand to mere tens of thousands), I think it will ultimately make each character more unique. Because even if you've got a whole party of "rogues" or "thieves", the chances of having someone repeating is going to be lower, and because different people when faced with a choice among the same three or four CQs that strongly match a concept will make a different determination about what they need.