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This post is in response to the comments Alexis left on my half-baked post from a few months ago.
My item #1 was not about point buy; it was about having an attackable pool of points associated with each ability score which were separate from HP. E.g. if you have 15 CON then you also start with 15 "CON HP". I don't think it would be good for anything at the moment; it was just the seed of an idea.
This evening, I worked on D&D economy recipes. I have fixed the ludicrous clothing weights by learning more about yarn thicknesses, and adjusting my terrible estimates for how thick average yarn is. My original wild guess was more than EIGHT times thicker than it should have been. Now the ordinary yarn recipes are set at a reasonable unit of 2250 feet per lb, with a thickness of 16 wraps per inch.
While learning about clothing design to adjust the square footage of cloth required for each item, I stumbled across the fascinating blog of Angela Clayton, a self-taught New York seamstress and costume designer who has made many historical and contemporary projects. The project which led me to her blog was her recreation of a dress based on a painting of a 15th-century Holy Roman Empress.
Today I added trade table recipes for:
It seems that different preparations of rennet or different amounts of labor in the cheesemaking process can produce different types of cheeses. Such factors would be easy to add in for a little variety.
I'm tidying up notes from around my desk. This turns out to be my 50th post!
1.
Costs associated with getting your way. Spend points from (a pool based on ability)?
No. Very story-gamey. But, losing points from a pool which is based on your ability scores *is* fine, so that idea could be used for something. Suppose that if you have a Int/Con/other ability core of 15 that you also have a pool of 15 points which can sustain damage, similarly to HP.
(well actually that's very finicky. Revisiting this one a day later: I don't think I like it, but it's fod for thought.)
The recipe presented in the last post is of a small size. Many recipes require much more calculation than soap does (though recall that the definitions for the other recipes that go into it also required their own calculations.)
In this post I'll included screenshots of all of the calculations for the "hull, faering" recipe. I believe this is the largest recipe so far, both in terms of calculation and in number of sub-components.
A faering is a type of rowboat. Since this recipe only calculates the hull, the boat is not complete: there are no seats, no oarlocks, and no oars. Still, there's quite a lot to see, and I'm restricting myself to only those items which are directly being used in the faering hull. I'll show rivets, for example, which are made of copper, but I won't then go and show the copper recipe.
Previous posts have addressed the establishment of references to raw materials ("mats") and to various types of artisan, craftsman, and laborer ("services") in the game world; the manner by which importing is done from city to city so that each one ends up with at least a little bit of everything, both mats and services; and how an increased distance from a source for a mat or service X lowers its availability and thus increases its price directly (mat) or increases the price of all goods which are created by a given type of worker (service.)
What we are still missing, however, are the components of the economy system which take us from the finished import step (where the relative availability of mats and services is known for each city) to the price tables which I have posted here (for the most recent version, see this page.)
As part of his latest post, Alexis challenges DMs to estimate how long they have spent working to become a DM. Below I do the calculations to estimate for myself how long I've spent actively DMing and working on the game.
I ran a bit on and off from 13 to 15 but none of it really stuck, so I won't count all that.
I'll start from 16 and my first group of serious players. At first I was running a group of 8 to 12, often one session Saturday and one Sunday with some players attending both games. I'll say each running was 5 hours, that's 10 hours per weekend for ... about 4 months, so 160 hours. Let's say prep work took half that amount of time spread out of the rest of the week, so multiply by 1.5 and we get 240 hours.
Forgive me for the lack of updates in the last two months. I've been preoccupied with finding work, my game has been on hiatus since June or so, and furthermore, because I was feeling a lack of direction in my projects, I gave myself permission to stop thinking about D&D entirely for as long as I needed to get my groove back.
A week or so ago, after a break of about forty days, I started working on D&D projects again. As my game will be starting up again soon, with a party partially or entirely composed of all-new players, I decided it was finally time to set my game in the real world.
Today I upgraded the graphics of the GIMP image which I use as a combat map for D&D. Instead of the previous colored dots, I made blobby little avatars to represent the characters, and I drew depictions of all the weapons used by the current party and their hirelings, including dagger, shortsword, longsword, greatsword, bow, mace, and quarterstaff. I gave weapons to the characters whose weapon choices I know off the top of my head.
I also drew a hex-border with a blue and orange gradient. This is the casting indicator, to show that a character is casting a spell. That way, when someone announces they are casting, I can just flip the indicator's GIMP layer from hidden to shown. When they're done I hide it again.
I'm noting that a mage could want to recreate all their X-level spells at their max possible spell power. For example, a 1st level mage would create a 1000 SP Magic Missile spell, with 3 Missiles from the beginning. Even if the wizard is higher level, it can be a boon for one's apprentice, and would very soon replace the Magic Missile spell.
The above is excerpted from Vlad Malkav's comment on my post about spellpower.
As usual, Vlad, you're asking good questions. You've raised an excellent criticism here.
Let's get one thing clear above all else: once spellpower and spell-creation rules are firmly in place, spell creation would absolutely not be available to first-level mages, as you indicate. Think of spell modification and creation as authority- or expert-tier abilities in Alexis's sage system. Maybe even sage-tier for spell creation: it's a big damn deal.
Today I spent several happy hours working away on adding tattoos to my economic system. Last session my players, having arrived in a port city, were excited (among many other things) about the possibility of finding a sailor who could give them some. Since I recently programmed the recipes needed to produce paper, I was already mentally ready to spend time work researching ink, so a lot of the time today was spent looking into pigments, binders, dyes, and mordants, and looking for historical information on the production of same. A good chunk of that time was spent looking in vain for some example ratios of pigment, binder, and water for pigment-based inks; in the end, for the red/yellow (both ochre) and blue inks, I had to guess.
One of the projects I plan to undertake -- though not at this time -- is to establish a method for quantifying spell effects (by number of targets affected, duration, magnitude of damage or other effect, range at which spell can be cast, and so on) and apply this method to the existing spells. I want to do this so I can compare the relative strength of spells currently considered to be the same spell level. Let's call this quantified spell strength "spellpower."
Once I can perform such a comparison, I can set quantities of spellpower which mark the border between first- and second-level spells, second- and third-level spells, and so on.
The question of digital character sheets is kicking my ass. Modeling a character as a chunk of data: sure, no problem, I can do that in any language I care to use. The GUI part is all-new to me, but I have at least a stopgap solution for use with Python, the language I am currently coding in.
But the live-update part? That's trickier. I have an idea formulated which I'll code up soon, maybe later today, but for now it remains larval.
In the mean time, I can talk about what I did work on today. I fixed some issues with the pricing of alcoholic goods (so far: beer, ale, and rum) in my recipe system.
The project I am currently planning can be broken down into several iterations on the same theme. I'll try and break it down here, noting that this is not a finalized roadmap, just my current headspace. There's bound to be some overlap and messiness as I sort these concepts out.
Player characters are represented in a digital format. I do generate character background with a program which takes the six ability scores, sex, and character class as input; however, the generated info is then printed onto paper and used as a supplement to the character sheet, so it doesn't remain digital. Note that for this stage I am only talking about a computational object which represents the character.
After a year of work, I am happy to say that this week I successfully defended my thesis. In my research I was primarily concerned with gathering empirical data regarding a particular question construction in Mandarin Chinese, and the results of my collections show the necessity of expanding current syntactic theories regarding this type of question.
My friend Alexis has convinced me to use his system of sage skills while running my game.
In light of that, and in preparation for Sunday's session, I am posting the sage skills appropriate for each character in the campaign.
Obediah: https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Assassin_Sage_Abilities
Volker: https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Druid_Sage_Abilities
Lloyd: https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Cleric_Sage_Abilities
Arvak: https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Illusionist_Sage_Abilities
Please find a little time before Sunday night to look at the page appropriate to your character class, browse the fields and studies there, and think about what sounds good.
A "field" is a grouping of studies: for example, the druid has the fields of Animal Life, Earth & Sky, and Plant Life. A "study" is an area of knowledge containing multiple different skills, which can be gained one by one as the character gains knowledge points. For example, the druid field of Animal Life contains the studies Amphibians and Reptiles, Birds, Bugs and Spiders, Golems, Mammals, Sea Life, and Slime Molds.
I was sitting at a hundred and ninety-something recipes in the trade program for a week or two until this week, when I hunkered down and added some things which I'd had to make up ad-hoc weights for last time. Now I am past 200 items inside the table's workings, which is the milestone I set myself for making this post.
So: here is the current trade table, for the market town nearest to the party. (I've also attached screenshots of the version at the bottom of this post.)
Alexis has a new venture: comics. This one perfectly captures what players like to do with their time in the game world.
Goat took your pouch? Burn it. Hireling fucked up? Fire him. Those guys shot at me? Shoot back!
When the party is wronged, they like to punish people! They'll want to get those fuckers!
When in doubt, the DM can always make a fight personal, and then capitalize on that emotion of indignance. It will drive players to jump into action.
Just be careful not to stir it up all the time. Any emotion will get stale if it's overused.
I'm finishing up adding a wooden ladder to my price table. Sounds simple, right? Have a look at my thought process below, to see what I think about when I add something to the table.
I'm modeling each rung as a carved cylinder of diameter 1.5 inch and length 1 foot.
This is just a plain old straight ladder, so the side pieces are two long planks. I've got them here as 17 feet long each, with width and depth both 2 inches. Distance between rungs is 1.5 feet, so that's ten rungs plus a foot of extra at the top and bottom.
As of last session I have finally gotten the hang of drawing a map on the computer during play. I've resolved to continue doing this as it's much cleaner and quicker than using pencil and paper, and makes it easy to move things around or copy them when needed.