All the stories never written
Thank god for friday. This week was good. Very good, in fact. Lots of recognition for the work we’ve done and forward motion polishing things off.
Decided to spend the morning today caffeine poisoning myself – so I’m kinda thbfft this evening.
Prado introduced me to Crayon Physics, which is an entertaining waste of half an hour or so. go play.
Sleepy. so sleepy.
Still climbing down the 4E rabbithole in my spare moments. Erich has suggested I take a more thorough look at the non-combat rules before judging them – fair, my previous judgement was based on the PHB and the real estate non-combat bits took up on the character sheet. I’m still researching, but they are a _bit_ more well-considered than I initially believed. It’s not Exalted social combat, but it’s at least viable.
I also determined that my initial run at part one of Expedition to Undermountain was interesting as an experiment, but too close to verbatim to be useful – I need to reimagine the encounters to make them appropriate to 4E. Early encounters in 3.5 tend to be solo creatures rather than a variety; in 4E, solos should be the exception rather than the rule, and be built to make the party shit themselves with fear.
Work is satisfying, of the moment. I’m tired, but we’re finally hitting production with a lot of stuff I’ve been working on for ages, and even the trivialities seem to be for good cause. I’m starting to be able to mock Walking Tall to his face now, which is a good sign – shows I think I know the right boundaries. Doesn’t mean I like him, though.
I’m tired and loopy, but I need to remember what the hell I’m doing for Scion, since I’m running it tomorrow night for the first time in a month or more.
Snagged 4th Ed on Friday – I’ve spent a fair number of hours since then poking and prodding at it for good or ill. It’s perfectly clear to me that the game is now designed specifically for the dungeon crawl, and that it’ll work nicely so long as you let the PCs enjoy their combat powers, since they cover 90% of the character sheet.
I have a few of the Expedition campaign guides – 3.5 conversions of 2nd ed campaigns. I started converting Expedition to Undermountain in order to get a good grip on the critters. It’s interesting, certainly. Designing good encounters is half the challenge – the other half is converting all the custom 3.5 critters to 4th, given a bit of numberhackery’s required.
Anycase, it looks like they’ve made an interesting tabletop successor to WoW, and something that I can enjoy tinkering with for a while. We’ll see how things go.
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