User:Dmilewski/Blog

--Dmilewski 20:26, 25 March 2009 (MDT)

It's been almost a year since I've written anything here.

The Endhaven novella has expanded into a novel. I'm in my fourth draft. The bastard us up to 32k words. I should wind it down at 50k words, unless it has more surprises for me. For the fourth draft, I threw out almost everything except for the first chapter. I moved the events to Jura city. After that, the novel started to FRAKKIN WORK. By work, I mean, "Do you know a good agent?"

Other than that, I have a two-year-old keeping me busy.

--Dmilewski 09:21, 23 April 2008 (MDT)

The novella has slowed down a bit. As I gather my thoughts, because I just can't figure out the ending yet. Even this far in, my ideas are changing, and that game of whack-a-mole that is writing continues.

I am getting back into Endhaven and finding many ideas that have been upgraded or altered because of the novella. There's lots of updates to do. I also need to just fill in some stuff for the various locations that are stubs, even if the work is a little lax. I need to start somewhere.

I reformatted the Lorechaser. I now need to reformat the Intercessor.

I have an article in the works for the next Stygian. I need to do edits.

I'm wrapping up my home game.

--Dmilewski 07:02, 11 April 2008 (MDT)

I've been quieter lately. After that big rush of adding in WotC items, I need a bit of a break.

My big change was renaming my setting from Wikiworld to Endhaven. The simple reason for this was that there are multiple Wikiworld projects out there already. Over the last few months, I tried out various names and did web searches. There were no projects out there using Endhaven, so Endhaven won.

I've also been quieter lately as my main project is writing an Endhaven novella. I've been stuck with Endhaven, so I am using this to generate ideas. The results have been good so far. Expect to see information trickling out for Endhaven.

800 CE is also in a lull. What I need to do now is sit down and read about legends of Charlemagne.

I look forward to hacking 4e when it comes out. The system looks very susceptible to kit-bashing. So far, most class ideas that I have come up with can be simulated by rewriting the flavor text of existing classes.

--Dmilewski 07:18, 13 February 2007 (MST)

After a bit of talking, we decided to move the SRD into its own namespace. The goal is to allow dedicated rules searching of the SRD and the MSRD. We're going through a bumpy place. We've also noticed some issues with Categories, so we need to go through and clarify categories. "Evil" as an alignment is different from the "Evil" spell descriptor and different from the "Evil" subtype. To make it more complicated, a creature can have the evil alignment, but not the evil subtype, which makes it very difficult to search for creatures of the evil subtype. We'll be a while straightening that mess. The good news is that the Categories become far more human readable.

--Dmilewski 17:48, 7 January 2007 (MST)

I've ported the D20 Modern System Reference document. It went much faster than I was expecting. It looked like a great deal of work, but in the end, was far smaller than the d20 SRD. I liked working with that document. It was formatted well, so the conversions came out fairly clean. This made posting both fast and easy.

--Dmilewski 18:24, 30 November 2006 (MST)

Phew! Done the 2nd pass on the SRD. I'm already into the 3rd pass. So much work to do.

--Dmilewski 09:02, 18 November 2006 (MST)

My little villain system is developing nicely. I'm getting villains that look like villains. Some of the abilities are beginning to look quite pulpy. That's good. The little system even has first level villains working with 8 zombie cohorts. Is that cool or what? As I develop my example villains, I find more room for improvement. The system becomes increasingly generic. After I get through blatantly stealing from the SRD character classes, I will condense abilities down a bit. No reason to be too granular. Granularity is for characters. Villains aren't really characters. They are cardboard cutouts designed to be shot to pieces by the characters.

-- Dmilewski 21:39, 10 November 2006 (MST)

I have been playing around with NPC classes over the last few months. I believe that I have finally sussed the problem with the NPC classes as encounters. They are designed to work as classes, not as encounters. An NPC class should really be designed as an encounter generation mechanism. Once it operates on ECL (rather than CL) and CR, everything falls into place. Each villainous NPC class then becomes its own type of genre encounter, complete with cliches. That's fun.

-- Dmilewski 21:23, 8 November 2006 (MST)

I have just finished my initial pass on the divine section. I can not tell you how mis-designed this section is. What dink designed this? Did you really need to note all the fine details of all the gods in granular detail? In order to sell a full books, I guess that they did. I don't think that this work helped the game at all. For the most part, I think that most divine rules could have been condensed down to a few pages, along with a few pages to handle minions, possession, half-gods, and avatars. As it stands, this work takes the focus away from the characters and to the gods. In my mind, it turns the gods into statistic and takes them away from their prime role, which is that they are plot devices. In my mind, the correct focus is the inherent relationship of the PCs to the gods, both those they serve and those that they strive against, and the adventures that this relationship brings.