Tuesday, August 20th

The Daily Report

So, yesterday I looked at the forecast for the week and put my escape plan into action. My parents recently (back in spring) moved into a house that has a finished basement as a semi-autonomous guest suite. I've had a standing offer to come stay in it if the heat gets too bad, but after last year I was looking for multi-day stretches of triple digit temperatures to signal that. It took me a while to figure out that with the window A/C out the window (not literally), the 90s are also too hot, and even then it would usually be the middle of a two day stretch when I'd realize it.

Now we're in a week-long stretch where the daytime temperatures will either be above 90 or very close (depending a bit on rain, probably) and overnight lows are in the 70s. I like it colder when I sleep, but I'm not quite so delicate that I couldn't sleep at 70 to 73 degrees... but if it's 90 during the day, it's going to take a long time for the attic's temperature to come down to that even with fans in the window.

Anyway, though, I made the call (not literally) and got out of the house before the worst of the heat arrives. I'm now in an air conditioned basement, where I was asleep before midnight and up around 8:30. From a work standpoint, it's better than I expected. There's a folding table that I'm sitting at while I drink my morning tea and eat breakfast and I've staked out several comfortable other places I can sit and type at. I don't have to go upstairs to eat or get something to drink.

The cons are these (said Jim Dale): there are renovations going on in the kitchen upstairs, and a small dog. The dog is shut out of the basement, but there is occasional noise. I've gotten quite a bit better at dealing with noise over the years, but it's worth mentioning. Also, I only have my netbook and my phone for writing on.

Barring any changes, though, I'm a lot more confident that I'll be able to have a normal week for posting than I was before I arrived her and got set up. Getting going in a new place is always tricky, but the fact that my netbook is pretty much only good for writing means I'm going to be trying to do that today. Hopefully I'll be well settled into a groove by tomorrow afternoon.

The State of the Me

I slept great and am wide awake. Once I've posted this and finished my morning tea, I'm going to be taking a shower, which is something I haven't done since leaving Hagerstown... I want to take the bathtub with me when I move, but I'm looking forward to having showers regularly. Anyway, though the state of the me is doing good.

Plans For Today

See above.

Looking back.

I'm going to be doing a bit of blogging to get the habit of formulating thoughts and typing in an unfamiliar setup rolling. Depending on how things go, there might be a few more posts throughout the day as I alternate this with writing fiction. If I don't, it probably means I hit a groove on the fiction thing.

One thing I did a lot of the night before last when I couldn't sleep was going through and reading my older entries on my LJ/DW blog. I've been trawling my own archives a lot more lately, and it's been an interesting experience. It's helped me see the patterns of my life a bit more clearly, especially since my LJ period covers a number of years (2008 through 2010, basically) when I was living in a heavy fog and was having a lot of memory problems. Not that those have completely gone away.. I counted at least three posts where I was very excited to have just become aware of Cat Valente's Deathless for the first time.

It's kind of painful (in a way that's similar to re-reading older stories to comment on them) to look back at the highs and lows of my last half-decade... all the plans I had that lost momentum or otherwise fell apart. But I also found a lot of good advice that I gave myself or found elsewhere, some of which I've already incorporated into my life and some of which clearly never took but is worth re-examining.

One of the the posts in that category is this one, about a panel I have absolutely no memory of having attended at my first Wiscon. It sure sounds like a good one, though, and the takeaway I took away from it is something I should keep in mind. I've gotten better at spotting the waves as they come in and riding them for longer, and I've been re-arranging my life to minimize the frequency and impact of random external factors... but stuff still happens, and will continue to happen.

As painful as it is to see my enthusiasm for things that ultimately went nowhere, it's also helpful. I had a lot of plans for LitSnacks and Gift of the Bad Guy that didn't fail... the book launch was about as messy as you'd expect a first time effort to be, but the sales were decent and there was momentum. It was purely external events that got in the way of following through, and it's taken a long time for me to get anywhere near the same amount of enthusiasm about selling my own e-books. But now that the enthusiasm is building again...

Well, I'm obviously not in a position to do much about it at the moment. Between late summer heat and the upcoming move, I mean. But one side effect of the fundraiser is that by the time I'm done fulfilling perks I'll have everything that I've got on Amazon in every format, which is a huge step towards having my own fully fleshed out bookstore. And we'll be heading into the colder months, which I now understand are the productive high point of my calendar. Gift of the Bad Guy came out of the cool nights of February and March.

Anyway, that's about all I have to say on this subject that won't be rambling and repeating the same poitns, so I'm going to end this entry here.

AWW: Errors of Attribution

So, after simplifying the biggest part of character creation in terms of impact from "pick from one to three Character Qualities, assign them levels as follows, then designate ranked abilities like so." to "Pick two Character Qualities.", I'm turning that same sort of scalpel onto the biggest part of character creation in terms of number of decision points and math: attribute allocation.

Making Magic work the same on the front end as everything else was kind of phase one of this. Phase 2 is getting rid of the idea of separate pools for Combat Attributes and Everything Else Attributes.

I feel I have solid reasons for making the Fight Good stats separate from the Lift Good and Move Good stats. Tying how good a direct-damage-dealer you are to how strong you are has too many unintended side effects, and ends up pigeonholing characters.

I also feel like there are good reasons to encourage players to think about both in-combat and out-of-combat competencies, perhaps approaching a level where it's reasonable to structure the game so that everyone has both.

But at the end of the day, I'm not 100% convinced that the reasons really are compelling enough to add both an arbitrary restriction and additional complexity to the most complicated part of character creation, which having separate pools does.

So here's the new system I'm kicking around: you have twenty points. You can spend those points as you see fit, among any of the attributes. Attributes cost how many points you want to have in them, to a maximum of 6. Yes, this means there's no cost penalty to having an exceptional (higher than 3) attribute. PCs are exceptional. I don't need to enforce an artificial rarity on higher attributes in order to create some kind of curve.

You can still gain up to 4 additional points by taking attributes negative, to a floor of -2. These extra points can be spent raising attributes like normal, but they can also be cashed in for additional details. This extra wrinkle is here to solve a dilemma I have about how many details to give players to begin with. If you're trying to twink out your character (which is valid), you'll probably get more out of having more attribute points. If you're going for a more well-rounded approach, you probably want more details than the system provides by default.

I kept wanting to add additional complications that would prevent or discourage players from having four attributes of 6 and two -2s, but... meh. It would be unfortunate if every character turns out that way, but it seems like an acceptable spread to me. Such a character would be incredibly good at a very narrow range of things and catastrophically bad in others. It would be an extreme level of specialization but not entirely a one trick pony and no more gamebreakingly good than a character with two 6s would be.

I have some other changes in mind that will do more to knock down the wall between Combat Attributes and Not Combat Attributes, while preserving what is necessary about it. These changes will make it easier for non-combatants to survive and run interference, open up the field a little bit for where fighters' points go, and make more of a distinction between the physical defense options. Since I haven't ever published the previous combat rules, trying to explain everything that's changed in detail would be kind of weird, but suffice it to say that the new version will be a lot more satisfying in a lot of ways. Finesse (which confused a lot of players and was never the most satisfying bit of abstraction) is gone. Now, if you want to smack an opponent into a wall you'd use Strength and if you want to trip them into it you'd use Dexterity or Agility and if you want to trick them into running into it you'd use Deception... which gets into what I meant by non-combatants being able to do things.

(Clarifying Edit: Finesse, when it existed, was used strictly for "attacks for effect" rather than direct damage. This "pick your best stat and figure out how to use it" style I'm describing also only works for attacks for effect. In situations where straightforward fighting for damage is possible, that will still be the optimal strategy most of the time, so the fighting-centered stats aren't all being obsoleted.)

Between attack rolls becoming mostly just regular checks and this change, I think I come a lot closer to my goal of keeping "the combat game" and "the regular game" the same thing. You resolve it as an attack because the enemy's going to be defending, but picking up someone and throwing them around is a Strength Check, the same thing you'd do to pick up a crate and throw it.