Sunday, May 25, 2014

Life and Progress

So, I bought a house.  A foreclosed house at that, which took from december to may to finally close and now we are busting our butts to get it liveable.

Once all that is over and I am able to establish a routine work shall return on Dreamcatcher's second draft and revised rules.  It is good to have gotten everything else out of the way, and there is a new deadline of having to have this all done before I have to start studying for my licensing exam next year so progress should he rapid like the first draft.

Progress has not been entirely dead, brainstorming on how to revise not only rules, but theme is underway. Some areas of existing text need to be reconsidered and redesigned, a few terms or ways of thinking of the world need some massaging and I already have stories and ideas planned for areas of the world that are interesting but got little attention in the existing text.

I am confident that the revised rules are easier to play and understand and should reduce math on the go. I however need to write up some robust guidelines and help for the Dreamweaver (traditional storyteller/GM role) which will help make the role less intimidating for newer players. After all the biggest goal of Dreamcatcher is to make game mastering more accessible for a larger variety of personality types than traditional RPGs. 

I did want to thank those of you who tried a really rough pre-alpha one of my good friends decided to run this weekend at Momocon. It may have given a sample of some of the themes and ideas, though the revised rules have not been updated for all contracts and there were heavy revisions and simplifications that still need rebalancing. 

Long term goal is to make it a robust system for players that allows for any character idea to be fun to play and useful in a group setting without making decisions based on mechanics. If people feel the need to optimize or the system encourages it then I have not done my job as a designer correctly.  At the same time the options on the player side should be plenty, giving plenty of thematic options and tools to make very unique characters.

Thank you again for any interest those of you have who may have tried it out at Momocon and come here. I will be sharing changes and details as they come. Now back to removing paint from my hair.

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