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Well, I had a massive insomnia night. No sleep at all. This might end up being the day that my production schedule slips, though it won't affect the publishing schedule if it does.

About an hour ago, I gave up on lying down and got up. In the time since then, I've went and queued up the second story arc for the FPS employee blog. It will start on Friday, February 21st (the day after the first arc ends). It's about a third of the length of the first arc, but a lot more compressed in time. I'm still kicking around ideas for the next chapter, and I plan on starting it soon since the second one doesn't buy me as much time as the first one did.

I'm starting to feel sleepy, so I'm going to go try laying down for a few hours.

Wednesday, February 5th

The Daily Report

So, I'm awake again. I did get some more rest and at least an hour's sleep, but the rest of the day is very much up in the air. I was looking forward to celebrating being a full week ahead today, but I'm not going to stick a fork in the next chapter until it's actually done and I have a feeling that it's not going to be in satisfactory shape today. Today's chapter, on the other hand, is done and looking pretty good. What a time to be alive.

With two episodes of the FPS Employee Blog in the can and the site circulation starting to pick up, I'm thinking about my long-term plans for it. So far pretty much everyone who's reading or visiting the site is getting there from me, but in the near future I'd like to sneak my Patreon link into the sidebar in a way that doesn't break verisimilitude. Maybe a "support my favorite author" thing.

Actually, now that I've said that, I think that's how I'm going to be doing it. In fact, I'm going to do it now.

So far I've been hitting my targets on Patreon, but I feel like we're reaching the part where it's going to be pushing uphill. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. I need to get my income back up to where it was before the move, and then realistically I need to get it a bit higher than that. Right now, I just need it to be higher than it is.

The State of the Me

Feeling pretty good despite the rough night. That's the thing about being a lifetime insomniac: one night without sleep doesn't always feel terrible. I know from experience that my judgment's going to be slower/more impaired than it feels like, but I can deal with that.

Plans For Today

We'll say Block 1 was the FPS employee blog, since I've already done work on the website and story today.

Block 2 is going to be side writing, my writing blog, or working on gaming stuff. Basically, I'm going to see what I feel up to as I continue to wake up.

Block 3 is going to be an attempt at finishing the next-next chapter of Tales of MU, though I suspect I'll be revisiting it tomorrow even if I pull it off.

Adventure Song: Some plans.

So, I have the gameplay rules for Adventure Song written in a mostly finished state. They need some re-organizing and clarifying before I'm ready to share them, but they're all there. My next goal with the project is to have the level 1 character creation content for Humans, Elves, and Dwarves, and Fighters, Rogues, Clerics, and Wizards. At that point, the game will be ready to be played. These won't be the only options for characters (I intend to approximate all classes in both the 3E and 4E PHB 1), but they'll be enough to get on with.

The character classes are the thing that will take the most work. I have the basic schemes down for each class, but each one is going to have the equivalent of 5 or 6 choices for attack powers and double that many utility powers (except for Fighters, who will be the other way around). My take on utility powers is a little different from the system that inspired this effort. Fewer of them have a direct combat application (e.g., defense bonus, attack nullification, attack buff), you have more of them, and you have them from level 1. Basically, I'm taking the example of 4E's "skill powers" and treating powers as a more interesting way to handle skills.

A single combat powers in Adventure Song encapsulates an at-will, encounter, and daily power under 4E's power architecture, so in selecting 2 combat powers, you have the same number of at-will attacks and twice the options for encounter and daily ones... though the same number of special attacks per encounter and day, as there's a token/point system for that. You just won't be stuck using the same tricks all the time at level one.

I'm not copying any of the powers from the 4E PHB, but I am using them as guidelines for the sorts of things that a 4E-style Cleric or Rogue might have. My goal with having at least 5 power choices is to give a similar level of customization for these classes as the 4E PHB gave, before getting into the ways in which Adventure Song is more flexible.

I'm kind of splitting the difference with how 4E handled martial powers to begin with and how they were handled in Essentials. Fighting techniques mostly give a static bonus to certain attack types/situations, along the lines of a feat, but they also come with the equivalent of an encounter and daily special use. For instance, a Long Shot power would increase the range of archery attacks in general, and then have a sort of extended range power shot they can call on. The idea here is that characters who focus on mundane fighting skill get steadily better at fighting in general, mainly relying on the equivalent of basic attacks while still having interesting things to pull out.

Adventure Song: Core Character Concepts

I mentioned in a post earlier today the four classes I'm focusing on getting done for roadtesting Adventure Song. I have thoughts on other classes, but these are my most developed ones. I thought I'd talk about the concepts I'm going with for each of these classes in order to show why I'm "reinventing the wheel" instead of just playing a heavily house-ruled 4E campaign. The concepts behind these classes are influenced by and rooted in 4E (and to an extent, 3E), but I'm reinterpreting them from the ground up in ways that don't lend themselves to easy adaptation.

FIGHTER

One thing that baffled me at first brush with D&D 4E was that the Fighter was not the class you picked if you wanted to be the best at fighting; that class was the Ranger, followed by the Rogue.

To me, this is weird to the point of being wrong. It's right there in the name. The design decision that they made came out of their concept of strictly defined and protected combat roles, and (in my opinion) the idea that the four classic core classes should be used to embody those roles. So they focused on the Fighter as meat shield, added some tactical depth to the role of meat shield, and used it as the prototype for Defender.

While I respect what they did, I started from the standpoint that the Fighter should be the standout fighter of the bunch, that it should be a mistake to ignore the Fighter on the field not because they have game mechanic-heavy abilities that let them actively prevent characters from ignoring them but because a Fighter left alone will mess you up.

In place of the 4E Fighter's marking/combat challenge abilities, the Adventure Song Fighter has a special ability that improves their damage if they didn't have to defend themselves since their last turn, and a bonus to hit when attacking enemies who haven't attacked them since their the Fighter's last turn. These features do combine to make it so that it's dangerous to ignore a Fighter, but they require less foresight than the Defender mechanics.

And even without them, the Fighter is designed to be the most capable combatant in an average/all-things-being-equal situation. They don't have to create opportunities. They don't have to single out particular enemies. They don't have to reshape the battlefield. They just hit more often and hit harder than anyone else using weapons, while being capable of avoiding/withstanding more damage.

The Fighter includes builds that emulate the Slayer (straightforward damage dealing)and the defender-role fighters from 4E, as well as the PHB 1 Ranger builds... there's not a separate class for someone who fights really well with two weapons or fights really well with a bow, that's still the Fighter. The eventual separate Ranger class will essentially be a clone of the Fighter with some stuff traded away to get rangerly abilities.

Cleric

The Cleric class went through a bit of an identity crisis. Early on, I was trying to make it more "generic", come up with one class called Channeler that would represent Clerics, Warlocks, Elementalists... anyone who got spell-like abilities from an extraplanar power. The results were mixed, and also very much not what I was going for.

The big flaw in 4E's Cleric is the split in attribute dependency. You can be a "laser cleric" who needs Wisdom for ranged attacks or a "melee cleric" who needs Strength for weapon attacks. Because the two power sets use different attributes, your choice of build highly constrains your choice of powers. Trying to mix and match between them is going to require weakening some or all of your attacks.

Adventure Song does away with attribute dependency for attacks and makes hitting in combat easier in general, which right away solves that problem. Along the same line of mixing melee and ranged attacks, though, I've kept the Cleric's attack powers at a low to medium range, and made some of them flexible as either close or ranged attacks. Basically, the Cleric is a melee-to-medium-range character.

I've kept the idea that the Cleric should be a support character while not having to give up attacks, which means their attacks tend to have secondary effects that benefit allies or hamper enemies more so than directly harming enemies.

Clerics have a "Semi-Vancian" situation with regards to their utility powers. Each day, they can pray for two additional utility powers that can only be used once... or they can skip that and pray for one in the middle of the day, when they know what they need. These divine gifts must either be Rites (Cleric utility powers) or with some limitations Incantations (Wizard utility powers), but they're treated as a divine power either way.

They do have a healing ability similar to Healing Word, but with a secondary effect chosen at character generation, so you can tailor it to your Cleric's ethos.

Overall, the goal here is to make a character that plays like the D&D 4E Cleric, but with more flexibility/mix-and-match in how they fight and more out-of-combat "divine magic".

Rogue

Along the same line as being surprised by the extent to which Fighters were not defined by their fighting abilities, I was surprised by the extent to which Rogues were. Part of this was having missed the boat on 3E, I guess. I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with the idea that every member of a small group of people who constantly get into fights should be competent and capable in battle.

Part of streamlining the Rogue is redefining the stealth rules a little bit. 3E/4E make Rogues really dependent on being able to pull of a Sneak Attack, which requires you to either be hidden from sight or be flanking your target or have some specific ability that creates "combat advantage". Because being hidden from sight is pretty absolute in most cases, the majority of Sneak Attacks come from flanking or something similar, which makes Rogues less the clever characters who skulk the edge of the field and strike from darkness and more the really enthusiastic team player and results in situations like this one, where two Rogues repeatedly attempt to "sneak attack" each other while standing right in front of each other... and one prevents sneak attacks by turning her back on her opponent.

So, a different way of handling stealth operations than line of sight. This relies on the concept of "fog of war" as also used in AWW to explain why you don't have to establish some kind of explicit cover or hiding place to say you're using stealth in combat. When you use stealth in Adventure Song, you effectively become invisible to any character six squares away or more or who doesn't have an unobstructed line of sight to you. (Things that would be "partial cover" in D&D, including other people, count as obstruction for this purpose).

Rogues, being masters of stealth, have a shorter "hide range" of 4 squares or more and a few other miscellaneous advantages that make it easier to strike from cover. The focus on distance in stealth means that the Rogue will rarely stand toe-to-toe with enemies, moving around, darting in and out of the fray. Rogue combat powers (Tricks) will be geared towards this sort of strategy.

While Rogues will still have some improved damage-dealing capabilities, I see them as being a specialized version of the controller: the spoiler. The Rogue's attacks should hamper: distract, slow, daze, trip... more often than other classes, even when they miss. They should have abilities that disrupt the capabilities of others. They should be able to put a wrench in the works of the other side.

WIZARDS

There are basically two wizard character tropes in D&D: the wizard as artillery and the wizard as Batman (i.e., able to overcome anything as long as they prepared everything correctly). 4E pretty much jettisoned the latter while watering down the former in their attempt to cast wizards in the "controller" roll, while simultaneously defining "doing relatively small amounts of damage to multiple opponents" as a form of battlefield control in order to allow some of the old standards to make the cut.

In Adventure Song, wizards as a combat class are pretty much a mix of blaster and controller, with the specific mix being up to the individual player. Focus on damage powers or focus on control powers, or mix them up. Either way, they're still the party's "big gun" or "glass cannon"... wizards have more attack powers than the average starting character, and can go big with them more regularly. Which is sort of the opposite of the original vancian model, where wizards were useful in combat less often at lower levels.

But basically, the idea here is that going big is what wizards do. It's the defining characteristic of a wizard in combat. They have at-will versions of their attack spells so they never run out of Being A Wizard, but the reason they're there is because of the explosive fireballs and the forked lightning blasts.

While there's not a Vancian element in the sense of spells being expended/forgotten, I am keeping the idea that wizards have more spells in a spellbook than they can hold in their head at one time and choose their spells when they wake up in the morning, with the possibility of reassigning the spells in the middle of the day if they can take a study break... since there's no "used up" status to worry about.