I made progress on some of the same fronts as yesterday, getting through several pages of the Romans notes while waiting in the car in the parking lot in the middle of the night, but also making some headway on the next chapter of the second edition rules. This chapter, too, is new–not new material, but reorganized under a new heading, Resolution Mechanics. Somewhere people got the idea that the system was complicated because the book was long; it’s not really more material than several other games out there, and actually has only four resolution mechanisms. The rest is really resource and application. The hope is that explaining all four mechanisms in a single chapter will help referees see how simple it really is. Anyway, that is, as I say, the hope.

I also added a link to the Eric Ashley page of the Multiverser support site. He had posted McCallister’s quick world menu here, and I’d stared at it for a few days attempting to decide what to do with it. I confess that this is partly because I’ve never been a fan of random world generation, not when they tucked it in the back of the OAD&D DMG, not when E. R. Jones suggested rolling dice to determine biases, and not when I saw a die-driven menu of world descriptives. However, obviously people like them, among these Gary Gygax (can’t fault him too much), my partner, and Eric. Thus the other problem was how I included one item from someone I knew only by a surname, about whom I knew nothing, who had not even posted the work himself. The answer turned out to be, add it to Eric’s list. If McCallister, whoever he may be, comes up with more stuff sometime and posts it to a site somewhere himself, we’ll create a page for him.

I got a bit derailed tonight, which is why I am so late. I had just gotten back from church–I was even still pulling into the driveway–when my son visiting his brother in Delaware called to ask whether someone could bring him home tonight so he could be here for his brother’s birthday tomorrow and then take him back tomorrow night so he will be able to make it to orientation for his new job on Sunday. His mother is working through the night (which was an additional complication, as we are still a one-car family, so I had to get one of our houseguests to follow me over and bring me back tonight so that she would have the car early tomorrow morning), so it was up to me whether to bring him home; but I checked to confirm that she would be able to take him back tomorrow, and so put the two hour tour into motion. I still have work to do tonight, of course, but tomorrow is the day off, so that should work favorably.

–M. J. Young