Tuesday, January 21st

The Daily Report

So, yesterday was pretty good despite the tired. I got a good, strong finish for the chapter, though I'm going to be looking it over this afternoon because ideally every chapter should be revisited after I've had a chance to sleep on it.

Even with that, I'm ahead of the game, so I'll make the fandom an offer. If I get five new sponsors on Patreon before midnight tonight (Eastern Standard Time/GMT-5), I will post it shortly after midnight. If I get any new sponsors, I'll put it up first thing in the morning tomorrow instead of waiting until the evening.

For people who aren't comfortable with recurring payments, I'll make a similar offer. If I get $100 in reader tips before midnight, I'll post. If not and I get $50 before tomorrow morning, I'll post then.

It's been an expensive couple of months and my income's been at a recent low since around the time of the move, so I could use both an immediate boost for groceries and immediate needs (the direct contributions) and long-term income (Patreon).

The State of the Me

Woke up today to find out that we don't have heat. The furnace is out of oil. This apparently happened last month at about this time (when I was in Omaha). I don't know what the standing delivery arrangements are but apparently they've been insufficient for this winter. As I type this, it's less than 50 degrees in here. I can't tell you how cold it is because the thermostats don't go that far.

Apparently our landlords handled it pretty quickly last time, so we shouldn't be out of . Hopefully we won't have any more record-breaking cold days between now and spring. The cold keeps me sharp, but I don't need to be this sharp.

I've just checked and the heating oil people are on their way over to fill us up and restart the furnace. So, yay.

Plans For Today

I'm going to put a pin in this and revisit it once the heat is on and the house is warmed up a little, because how much I can get done is going to depend on how cold it is for how long.

Update

Well, it's almost 2:30 and the thermostat in my office is finally approaching 60 degrees. I think I might have the slowest room to heat, as it's large and has a lot of exposure. It transpires that today was the day that the heating oil was due to be delivered, but we ran out in the night and the furnace shut down and had to be restarted... so we almost made it. I guess it really is a case of those reeeally cold days taking an unexpected toll.

This leaves me with four hours. I'm still going to go over the chapter for tomorrow (which will still go up a little earlier than usual depending on how many new sponsors or tips I get), and I have a couple of addresses to add to the newsletter mailing list (yay!), and then I'm just going to brainstorm for the next chapter (and related future chapters).

(no subject)

Does anybody know the state of the D&D 4E online tools like the character generator, and if any plans for their continued availability have been announced?

Roll20 has me excited about D&D 4E again...

...but then I think about the logistical hurdles of getting other people into a game that is best enjoyed with either several hundred dollars' worth of books or a monthly subscription to a service that gives you access to the character generation options those books represent.

And then I think about all the places where 4E is needlessly opaque/unapproachable, the complicated steps towards simple goals, and the just missed opportunities and missed goals.

And it makes me want to come up with something better, something that does what I liked about 4E and what I wanted from 4E and what I expected from 4E, but does it simpler and cheaper.

"Isn't that AWW?" you ask. No, not really. AWW is what I wanted from D&D in general, but I still like the experience of D&D. One of my design goals early on in the process of making AWW was to make sure I wasn't just recreating D&D. But now that 4E is a dead edition and now that I can look back on its corpus and see its warts more clearly, I see more value in trying to do a streamlined version of what it did.

I'm not talking about pulling a Pathfinder and putting together a de facto 4.X edition. In the first place, the license that allowed Paizo to do that didn't exist in 4E, and in the second place I think part of what 4E did that made it too clunky is cleaving too closely to the skeleton of a system whose meat and organs it was rejecting.

Like, 4E used the familiar D&D attribute system... but attributes were almost meaningless. Oh, they were important, but in ways that were meaningless. The system was balanced around a very narrow set of assumptions of what your attributes were based on your class and build. I know so many DMs and players who just flat out declared that the numbers on paper didn't define a character for roleplaying purposes, they were just there to stake out your build.

So where AWW uses lots of attributes with the idea that they do define your character, a streamlined 4E replacement would use few or none, with few levels of gradation.

So, jettison the attributes. Jettison the underpinnings of the d20 system generally. Keep the idea that everybody should be awesome from level one and the really kind of off-the-wall characters it enabled. Keep the idea that every character should be able to participate in combat, but maybe focus more on the interactions between characters than "you do this thing, you do that thing".

I don't know if I'm going to do anything with this idea... I might just use it to homebrew a version of 4E for my personal use that deprecates attributes, which will make more hybrids/multiclass characters viable. I might develop it into a thing. Yes, I know, I don't need another roleplaying game project... but very few people seem interested at all in a 2D platform based RPG, and I could use something less ambitious in scope than AWW to actually bring to market.

For now, though, it's just something I'm thinking about.