September Progress & Goals

Well, I did in fact actually have my best month ever for e-book sales last month. It was very close, and then on the 31st one person bought all the Omnibuses available in the Nook store, which made me glad I added more. One of the reasons I've been slow to put things up there is that so few of my sales come from there compared to Amazon... and I suspect that will always be true, as long as the market is fundamentally unchanged, but not putting things up makes that a self-fulfilling prophecy in the worst way.

It was my best month for Nook sales, and my best month for direct/indie sales, and right up there for the Kindle sales.

In terms of my August goals... I didn't quite hit the mark I set for e-books conversions. My goal had been one a week. I missed the two weeks I was in Florida. I hadn't actually counted on getting any done while I was there, but I had figured I'd be able to make it up easily enough. I suppose the lesson here is that if I set weekly goals, they need to be things I can actually accomplish each week.

So, moving on to September, I have the following goals:

One, finish Omnibus VI, which will be the final collection from Volume One.

Two, get Omnibus V and VI up in the Nook store.

Three, keep at least two weeks ahead in the MU drafts folder.

Four, start writing other things during weeks when the drafts folder is full.

So, I've been drawn into D&D Next/5E with (shrinking) reluctance over the past couple of weeks...

...and here are my impressions now that I've had a good look at the PHB.

First, I'm very surprised by how well they hit the mark for "unifying the editions"... with the caveat that I don't see much of 2nd Edition in there, aside from the stuff that's been in every edition. It's like someone took the good ideas from fourth edition, ported them back into third edition, and them streamlined it down to be as approachable and simple as Basic before running the whole thing back through third edition's "coherent/consistent engine" filter again.

(While also cribbing a few ideas from Pathfinder. But hey, what goes around comes around.)

Second, I'm kind of gratified at how many of their design decisions parallel my own take on a D&D-esque-but-better game. No numbers stacking to infinity, plus a multi-level training curve for character classes that both cushions things for newbies and protects against overpowered multiclass combos? Inexhaustible cantrips for everybody? Yeah, those are things I can definitely get behind.

Third, I'm really impressed by how seamlessly they geared the game towards abstract movement/positioning while leaving everything perfectly situated for tactical battle maps. If they wanted the game to be ambidextrous, I would have expected them to present the rules as if you're going to grid everything and then have the sidebar mentioning that you can dispense with the maps and just use approximate distances... i.e., what they did in 3E. I don't think it would have occurred to me in a million years how simple it is to reverse that, or how well it would work.

I was disappointed by the return of vancian magic, but really, on closer examination... spell-preparers have more flexibility in this version than they did in 4E.

The level of customization present at launch is pretty impressive. While I'm disappointed to see that the Warlord (my favorite new core class from 4E) has been relegated to a grow-into-it build of the fighter, I'm impressed that they got every other PHB1 class from 3E and 4E into the book as a primary class. And I like the idea of the Warlord and Swordmage essentially being specializations of the Fighter, with the arcane trickster similarly being a build of Rogue. It's a neat extension of 4E's idea of giving every class a spell-equivalent: literally every class in the book can (but does not have to) gain explicitly supernatural abilities, and I'm pretty sure every class except Barbarian can become at least a minor spellcaster without multiclassing.

And while I've got some worries about the pricing and marketing of the books themselves, I'm impressed with how newbie-friendly they've made everything, both by putting out a starter set and actually making PDF versions of a basic version of the game available for free.