You know what grinds my gears?

It really grinds my gears when ... I'm at work, and I call someone in response to an e-mail I received just minutes after receiving it and then have a conversation with them answering all their questions... and then I get another e-mail from them just a few minutes later, asking the questions again but now with multiple punctuation, as if I've been ignoring them. That really grinds my gears.

The Toil of Creativity

I may write more on this topic later, but for now I'd like to simply observe how much toil and (some might say) drudgery goes into finishing a creative endeavor. You get this great idea, you work on it and are driven by your intensity and then, suddenly, the creative part grinds to a halt. It is at this point that refinement, editing and finishing kicks in. Once all the creative processes are complete, you still have (in my case) spell lists to write out and format and re-format, summaries to write, indexes to assemble, tables to assemble and read through's for editing spelling, grammar and consistency. It's not a complaint, not really, but there's a lot of hard work that goes into finishing a creative project, whether you're doing it all yourself or working as part of a larger team within an established company.

Progress Update

I've been working on finishing all the miscellaneous bits of Renaissance that were still floating around, waiting to coalesce into legitimate mechanics and have recently moved on to the final editing process. I'm still missing an Index, Table of Contents, Art and Bestiary, however, these are all superficial things at this point. All of those will be necessary for a final print, but prior to public play-testing they are superfluous. I'm currently on page 217 out of about 290 in my final edit so progress has been made surprisingly quickly all things considered. There are a few things I will need to go back and change due to other changes I've made in the editing process but for the most part the 217/290 assessment is a fairly accurate progress bar.

The End of an Era. Maybe.

I've been reading "The Dungeon Master Experience" article's by Chris Perkins for about 6 months now. He's been writing them longer than that but I came to the show late and frenzied my way through the archives pretty quick. These are some fantastic articles he's written and are well worth the read. As of this last Thursday though, 03/21/2013, his 4th edition campaign is over and so may also be his articles on this topic. There is still the possibility he'll return when his D&DNext campaign gets underway with new Dungeon Master Experience articles, but I would be surprised if he did so. I wouldn't be surprised to see him return with a new series of articles though.

In the meantime, I highly recommend visiting their archives, sorting by Category and reading every one of "The Dungeon Master Experience" articles available. There's lots of good advice and general entertainment, ranging from designing balanced encounters (and whether or not you even should) to how to create a game world that feels truly alive.

'til later...

Don't Blink

I was thinking about what a game with Weeping Angels in it would be like, which led me to wondering what mechanic to use to see how long a character could keep their eyes open without blinking. In Renaissance, a round is only 3 seconds. After a little experimentation I guesstimated that a character, in Renaissance, could keep their eyes open for a number of rounds equal to their Con score before they would need to start making Con rolls. In terms of other game systems, which use 6 seconds (D&D 3.0 and 3.5, Pathfinder and 4e too I think), you would need to limit that to half the character's Con in rounds. Regardless of which system I use, I can't wait for my next Halloween game!

Have you ever played in or run a game with Weeping Angels in it? If so, tell us about it in the comments below, I'd love to hear your stories!

Chaos Summoner

I've been cogitating on a Stormbringer inspired summoning class for Pathfinder recently and finally hit some inspiration last night and threw this together this morning. It's not quite done, there are some durations to work out, I need to build an Aspects list and their effects and, of course, do some testing but I thought I'd put it up here today for your perusal and preview.

The Sandbox Campaign

I've been doing a lot of reading recently, re-learning how to GM and prepare adventures. Over the years I got into the habit of having no preparation beyond a general idea of the plan and a book from which to pull names. Thoughts and plans are beginning to coalesce and today I've been pondering Campaigns.