Thursday, August 21st

The Daily Report

Increasingly, I think there's something Pavlovian about good writing habits. At several points during this trip I have been sure that this day in particular would be the one where it would all fall apart, where I would sit down and open my drafts folder and nothing would come, or I would spend an hour tortuously picking out one letter at a time until I had five hundred or so words that I'd have to call good.

But nope. Except for one day, a day that I spent mostly out and about in the heat and I also started out a day ahead on top of the planned ahead-of-schedule, every single time I've sat down to do my day's writing, I've banged out a thousand words like it was nothing and then finished somewhere north of two thousand.

This is my second to last work day in Florida. It will be interesting to see how this carries through when I go back to Maryland. The process had already begun and my progress carried over across the change of venue, but I'll have to be watching to see how things go with the shift back, and ready to correct/adjust if I'm suddenly hitting stumbling blocks that weren't there before.

The State of the Me

I only have two more nights here, and last night was my first really good night of sleep since I got here. Mostly it was that I traveled with different earphones than I use at home, and they're worse for sleeping with so I haven't kept them in all night, until last night.

Plans For Today

I'm basically going to keep doing what I've been doing.

Game Design: Where this has been heading...

So, I've been making these game design posts for the past couple weeks, mostly ruminating on how things might work in a game system very similar to D&D but not quite. It started as really truly random musings, but then I spent a day traveling to an airport, waiting around at an airport, and then flying on a plane between airports with very little to do and my brain kept turning things around and I realized how to relate my original post about an alternate spell system to Adventure Song, my D&D-successor game that I'd kind of stopped working on because it was getting too kludgy and much more mechanically complex than I'd wanted.

Fitting the two together kind of required taking a more traditional D&D approach to spells in place of the 4E-style "spells as just one example of a thing that can fill a slot all characters have for powers" model, but once I did that... a lot of the kludge fell away.

Embracing the simplicity of the traditional six attribute system over one that generalizes thematically linked things the way D&D's does also helped.

And of course, since my goal with Adventure Song is to make a game that is recognizably descended from D&D in a way that appeals to gamers who like or wanted to like or used to like D&D, using the same six attributes on more or less the same scale is probably a good idea.

During my spare downtime on this trip, I've been putting together a playtest version of the revised and simplified game. It only allows for human adventurers of the classic four core classes, though with some customization. And free multiclassing, but since there are only four classes to swap between and the alpha version is only going to go to level 4 initially, that's not much of a sell.

This is the proof-of-concept build, intended to make sure that the rules make sense and are playable. Usually when I work on something like this I get distracted by spinning out ideas that should come after that solid foundation has been laid and tested (other classes, higher level rules and content, et cetera), but I've been keeping a pretty strict focus on what you might call "the core and the floor".

Even though it won't be as strongly in focus for the initial test version, I'm excited by the multiclass scheme I've come up with, which is essentially the 3E "take a level in anything" approach but with an inherent layer of protection against combinations that will either break your character or break the game.