The Inevitable “Yes, I’m Alive” Post
There’s several half-finished articles lurking about. A Magic Hat for 4e. A walkthrough of a delightful D&D heartbreaker called “Of Gods And Men”. The start of what I think will be a great general utility article, 99% systemless, for adding flavor text and descriptions to magic items. An assortment of editorials. There’s a few general impediments to productivity:
My current work assignments don’t include a lot of “run a test for an hour” tasks.I’m spending a full day, every day, single-stepping through a maze of twisty little Java classes, all alike, trying to inhale a program that spans literally thousands of classes without any documentation about how they interact and many of the programmers who worked on it no longer with the company.
I’m running a GURPS 4e game, and a lot of my creative efforts are focused on that, and I don’t like revealing stuff I’m working on to my players, and I don’t know if the imaginary readers I have even care about GURPS. Otherwise, I’d be posting some of that.
There’s a sad feeling of pointlessness in working on 4e stuff, especially since I’m no longer even running it. (My original plan was to get back to my old game when WOTC produced more support for epic-level games. Yeah. That’s going to happen. 4e is going to become a case study in how to cripple a good game with bad marketing, bad presentation, and desperate, rapid, shifts in product positioning and plans that leave your customers confused, distrustful, and inclined to support your biggest competitor, which understands the market and game you created better than you do.)
Worst of all, I sat down today to write up a bunch of monsters I’ve thought of for Earth Delta. The Tentacrab! The Psiclops! The Mentatic Overlords! I had a major computer disaster back in April, and needed to reinstall everything. I hadn’t gotten around to reinstalling Monster Builder. Turns out, WOTC no longer allows downloads of the old Adventure Tools. Well, no problem, I have my old hard disk with everything on it. Unfortunately, without a proper installation, it’s not working right; it only sees my custom monsters, and all it has from them is the names, the stat blocks are gibberish. So I need to either figure out how to dig around in the registry files stored on my old hard drive (tough to do, regedit wants to work with the ‘live’ registry only), power up my old laptop (it might not even work on that, there’s a rumor it self-destructs when it connects to the server now), or find some other way to make 4e monsters — an easier task than making 3e/PF monsters, true, but also harder to format well. (The online tool doesn’t save as RTF, so it’s utterly useless for ED.)
I’ve been doing professional game writing, and that tends to trump free game writing.
So, that’s why there’s been a paucity of posts. Sorry.
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