Friday, January 31st

The Daily Report

Well, today I'm on day 1 of the production cycle for the chapter that's due on February 12th. I've been working ahead almost since I started this schedule, but now I'm approaching the point where I actually have a buffer of finished chapters. The decision to do a weekly schedule

My decision to modestly publicize the FPS Employee Blog yesterday yielded pretty good results... I went from ~30 hits a day to over 450, and I've already exceeded the highest previous day today. An impressive number of those hits are people staying and reading.

My D&Desque roleplaying game project--still tentatively titled Adventure Song, though I'm having to resist the temptation to name it "Dandeeee" (i.e., D&D 4E)--grew by leaps yesterday and last night.

Part of this, of course, is that the rules are simple. The actual gameplay mechanics of D&D 4E are largely confined to chapters 8 and 9 of the PHB, covering about 40 pages, and one of my goals here is to cut down on the bloat. It also helps that I have a model. I'm not trying to literally recreate 4E, of course. I'm trying to arrive at a similar destination by simpler and more satisfying routes, leaving out some of the worst aspects and strengthening the best.

I'll probably make another lunchtime post about it. My disappointment that Trouble In Star Kingdom failed to spark many people's interest is fast giving way to excitement about the prospect of having a cheaper, faster, more flexible alternative to 4E.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. Sleep was fragmented, but sufficient. As evidenced by the fact that I'm posting this around 9, I'm feeling pretty good.

Plans For Today

Block 1 is going to be gaming stuff. I woke up with that on my mind and if I don't do something about it, I won't be able to focus.

Block 2, I'm going to be doing newsletter maintenance. I think today's the day for sending out renewal notices.

Block 3 is going to be planning out the next-next chapter of MU.

Adventure Song: Damage types.

One of the things that I'm doing different from 4E has to do with damage types. Fire damage, acid damage, cold damage... it's really all damage, unless the target is vulnerable or resistant to one type, and 4E deprecates these things to avoid player characters having to carry rock-paper-scissors arsenals or dying because they randomly ran into something they couldn't hurt.

I don't disagree with any of that logic, but I still like the idea of elemental attacks having some flavor.

A lot of elemental themed builds get things like special effects on critical hits. So my thought is, build that into the system. Critical electrical attacks stun, critical acid attacks degrade armor, critical ice attacks slow, and so on.

Another thing I'm doing is diversifying. 4E got a lot of flack for moving away from the classic four elements as a foundation. On one level, it makes some sense. I mean, "water damage" and "earth damage" are just blunt impact in most cases. But if you're looking for ways to bring more elemental flavor in, then water and earth attacks could absolutely be different from just hitting someone with a mace.

I've created a list of 20 forces that can be added to a physical attack. It's actually 10 pairs of opposites. I avoided the usual thing of pairing the classic elements off against each other, with the idea that they exist in balance with each other rather than opposition. Also, the way opposing forces work, it would be hard to make a non-specialist elementalist character. Fire and ice are opposites rather than fire and water. Fire (heat) and water can coexist, but heat and cold cannot. Air and void are opposites rather than air and earth, for similar reasons.

The opposing forces play into something else I've concocted. I've completely thrown out the classic D&D concept of alignment, as this is another example of something where 4E erred by not making a clean break. In the absence of that, the words "aligned" and "alignment" are freed up for something else. If a character is marked as being aligned with a particular force, they have a bonus with attacks using it, a bonus to attacks against opposite-aligned characters, and a penalty to defend against attacks using the opposite.

(This means fights between opposite-aligned characters are pretty brutal, since they'll both have attack bonuses and defense penalties. The general rule that hits are more common than misses gets ramped up when opposites attack.)

Note that this is not at all the same as the D&D concept of alignment. When you make a character, you don't decide that they're fire-aligned. Fire elementals are fire-aligned. Flame devils are fire and infernal aligned. Undead are death-aligned.

The Cleric class, in choosing the equivalent of a domain, chooses one greater force (chosen from the pairs Celestial/Infernal, Chaos/Order, or Primal/Corruption) and one lesser force (the other 14 physical forces). They're aligned with these forces, but that's because they are the supernaturally invested servitors of a greater power. Liking fire a lot or even using fire magic isn't being fire-aligned. Being aligned with the cosmic principle of Chaos has nothing to do with liking wide open spaces, quirky randomness, or a desire to play Robin Hood. You can add an alignment to your character with the equivalent of a feat* at level 1, but it's not a routine part of mortal existence or character creation.

*Also, I've been racking my brain since forever to come up with a better name for "feats", which made perfect sense when they were basically all combat techniques but makes less sense when it's "literally any distinguishing feature about your character". But of course, there's the answer: feature. It's not only perfectly descriptive, it's related to the previous term.

Newsletter renewal notices have been deferred for one day...

...because tomorrow's when I'm changing my Patreon terms to monthly, and so with the choice between pointing people towards a page and saying "today it says this but tomorrow or by the time you read this it might say" and just simply explaining the simple terms, I'd prefer to do the latter.

But I have them drafted and ready to go, at least.