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

I was done early enough last night that I was able to turn my attention to one of the other important tasks, and make a fair amount of headway. Working from a partial, I was able to complete a chapter of the forthcoming Multiversere second edition.

This chapter is not found in the original rules. That does not mean that it contains new rules. What it does is provide better organization for the rules as published, plus give some tools to referees to streamline play. The new second chapter of the rule book (unless some really major editing happens) is called Character Creation, and pulls together basic information about attributes, skills, and equipment, plus distinct approaches to creating player characters (the On the Fly Character Creation System available on our support site), bulk characters (on spreadsheet format similar to what I use for the forum game), and highly detailed special characters such as the “not-I” player character, the major villain, or the mysterious mentor (the old highly detailed character sheet approach).

I have an incentive for this. Years back when I was writing the novels, I was also reading them to my youngest son in nightly installments. This meant that I had to keep writing to stay ahead of him, so that I would have enough to read each night of the week. In something of the same way, I am posting the new edition of the rules in daily installments to a private list of Valdron insiders, to get editorial comment as I proceed. The reason for doing it this way is so that I don’t reach the end and have to wait for several other people to get through the entire book before giving feedback; it also should mean that everyone with a legitimate interest in contributing will be “on the same page” (quite literally) as the discussion progresses. Thus far comment has been minimal but not non-existent, and changes have been made.

Otherwise we had a bit of concern over a missing houseguest, and a boy who missed the bus whose school is not around here, each of which cost me some sleep. On the other hand, I made some progress editing my Romans notes while waiting in a car for someone who usually gets out an hour or two later than predicted.

Speaking of cars, there has been a development on the new car front that sounds very good to me; however, since a lot of these developments go up in smoke I’m not going to say more about this at this point.

I am going to do a spot of light shopping today, though. I just have not quite decided when.

–M. J. Young