Icons

I spent today hunting for icons that I could use to label sections of the character sheet and, possibly, section headers for the text. All the half decent icons cost $45+ for a commercial license. I'm not willing to drop that kind of money on something that isn't a perfect fit. I saw plenty of things that gave me ideas of what I would like to see in an ideal icon, so I might have to make my own.

I'm kind of stumped on what to use for the three Passions: anger, fear, and heroic. I considered several themes. Elemental (fire for anger, ice for fear, and sun/star for nobility and self sacrificing heroism); animals (snake or spider for fear, lion for heroic, and bear our honey badger or something for anger); emoticons (angry, scared, and determined faces). Still not sure what way to go, but leaning toward some variation of the elemental set.

Any suggestions?

Designing from the sheet

I've heard people say that the character sheet is one of the first things they look at in a new game. I agree with that sentiment. When I first started playing RPGs back in 19*cough*, there weren't any character sheets. My friends and I spent a lot of time trying different arrangements of information on notebook paper. Some tried for thoroughness and completeness of information. Some tried to be succinct. I liked the big complicated sheets in theory, but found them confusing in practice. I still distinctly remember trying to fit an AD&D character with all the gear and powers on a 3x5 inch index card. I managed it for my thief, but not a wizard. (Looking back on it, this may be why I rarely played wizards: too many things to track.)

In my recent revisions of the skills list, I decided to redesign the character sheet I had thrown together. I want everything on the sheet to be meaningful but easy to see and understand without a lot of calculating. It occurred to me that I should clean up the character sheet as a tool to aid me in cleaning up the system. I think the best way to explain the system to new players is to show them a good character sheet and tell them what all the parts are and how they are used.

When I'm reading a new game, I usually find myself flipping back to the sheet as I read anyway, so I might as well build the explanation around the sheet. I remember how easy the Call of Cthulhu game (don't recall which edition we used but it was after the 1st) made character creation. The double page spread explaining the steps of character creation in relation to the parts of the sheet really made it simple to understand. A picture is worth a thousand words and I'm hoping the sheet will help me trim a few thousand words of explanatory text.

It should also help me tighten up the game in general. I have a tendency to start simple and then add bloat fairly quickly, which I have to trim out later. I'll have a cool idea and toss it in and later I'll take it out when it doesn't fit. Arranging the elements on the sheet should help me realize what is important to keep and what I can toss out. Focusing on what the finished sheet should look like and be used in actual play is a good easy to keep the development focused. Once I get things sorted out, I'll make a nice looking version in Inkscape and post it for comment.

(In blogging news, it seems that blogspot is blocked here again. I can see my dashboard and visitor traffic, but not the actual posts. That's why I haven't posted in the past few days. Once again, I'm posting from my phone so kindly overlook any bizarre phrases that may result from auto correction.)

Pay attention! See what I did there?

(I'm posting this from the new Blogger app I just installed on my phone. If I say something really bizarre like "purple monkey dishwasher", just chalk it up to predictive text gone awry.)

I spent some time revisiting the Attributes and Skills section today. I think I'm going to cut "Notice" as a skill. In my experience, perception skills have always been an automatic choice for players because a character with higher perception skills is always better. Of course, I'm not counting all the times that jerk GMs pulled the "you fail because you succeeded" trick (e.g. "congratulations, you can clearly make out the details of the sanity blasting abomination and lose extra sanity points" or "you successfully spotted the beady eyes of the cockatrice spying on you from the bushes, so you turn to stone").

When I think back to all the campaigns I've been in, it seems that perception skills were called for by the GM more than any other skills. In D&D 3, it was considered madness not to take max ranks in Listen and Spot if you had access to them as class skills. In other games, I list count of how many times I've heard "roll perception" in response to a player's question. I've come to realize that I don't like this for several reasons.

1. Taking the Notice skill or not doesn't make characters different; it just makes a character better or worse than another. Choosing between "awesome" and "awful" is not a meaningful choice.

2. Why should someone trained to recognize forged documents by looking at the minutiae of handwriting be better able to spot an ambush than a grizzled veteran of numerous military campaigns against the goblins and their irregular hit-and-run skirmishing tactics?

3. When the GM constantly defaults to "roll perception" in response to player questions about a scene, item, or situation, it cheapens all the more interesting (and more character-defining) skills that the PCs have.

I once made a character for a Star Wars D6 game who had "tactics" because it fit his background as a former lieutenant in the imperial army. He never used it. In situations where it might have been useful, perception was called for instead. Could I see how the squad of stormtroopers is deploying and identify their most likely next move? Sure. Forget about all that knowledge of tactics and imperial military doctrine: just roll perception to see if you can spot their positions and make out their movement clearly.

4. When players have access to a "spot something important" skill, it's too tempting to just default to it instead of thinking of things from the character's perspective and trying to use more specific skills. Why use your piloting skill to see of that ship has inconsistent registration numbers? Why use your mechanical expertise to look for signs of recent damage or modification? Why use "bureaucracy" to chat up the customs officer for clues about who was on that ship? Just "roll perception" and hope for random clues to spray from the GM like candy from a pinata!

I don't think Notice is needed as a skill. Noticing things can be done with a relevant skill. Is that swordsman really favouring one leg our is he faking it? Roll Fighting to gauge his stance. How many shots did he fire from his revolver and could he reasonably hit us at this range? Roll Shooting. Are we walking into an ambush? Make a check with your tactical or stealth skills (or even Shooting to recognize the best lanes for sniper fire).

Cutting the bland Notice skill will leave more points to spend on things that give a character more flavour without sacrificing the functionality the character would have gained from the Notice skill. For keen-eyed, paranoid scouts and twitchy lookouts who spot everything, there are Talents that can grant them a bonus to spotting things in their signature roles: +1D to perception checks "while taking point" or "while searching for traps", etc.

Spent the day fighting with websites that wouldn't load properly because the Google API server has been down. Most of my Blogger dashboard isn't working yet, so this is just a quick post to say that I'm still working. I'll try to do a real post tomorrow about what I did today in between hitting the "reload" button on my web browser.

Cleaning up some loose notes

I use Linux for my computer (specifically, a Gnome 3 desktop environment on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for those who are interested). Linux has a nice little note-taking program called Tomboy that makes it easy to cross-reference notes because it automatically creates hyperlinks to other notes when you mention them. For example, I have a note called "layout" where I put all my ideas for page layouts; when I type "layout" in another note, the word "layout" automatically becomes a link to the "layout" note. I stopped using it because the Ubuntu One cloud service (similar to Dropbox) stopped supporting Tomboy's online syncing. In addition, the only app for my phone that could sync with Tomboy would only allow reading notes and not editing/creating them. I found that to be only slightly better than useless.

I started using Evernote instead. Evernote doesn't automatically link your notes together like Tomboy, but it does have some other useful features. It's available as a desktop app (which I have installed on my Windows 7 partition for when I need to boot into Windows for something) and as a web application (which I have pinned in a Chrome tab so it's always at hand). It allows the use of tags to make it easy to categorize notes and sort them later. And it has a very neat browser extension that allows you to select part or all of a webpage and save it as a note. I've clipped a lot of interesting snippets with this feature: online articles, forum posts, pictures, or other things that sparked an idea.

I didn't have a lot of time to work on the game this evening, but I did try to do something useful to keep my promise. I exported my Tomboy notes to .HTML and put them into my cloud folders for safe keeping. Then I opened them in Chrome and clipped their contents to Evernote. My next project will be to use the Evernote app on my phone to sort through and upload scans of my loose paper notes and tattered notebooks. This will let me put everything in one place to more easily sort it out and put things together.

In the past, I always wanted to have hard copies because I've lost files in the past to hard drive failures or lost USB drives. Using paper notebooks felt safer to me, but now I'm satisfied that I have enough redundancy to go completely digital. I've got all my files backed up in several places at once (Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Ubuntu One, Google Drive, and--on the rare occasions I boot into Windows 7--everything gets backed up to Skydrive too). I've even got a portable 1TB hard drive for back ups too, so I'm not really worried about losing my files anymore.

Back on track

I've been making some minor progress on collecting some more art. Here and there, I've been compiling a list of small tweaks (minor additions or clarifications) and big changes (eliminating or combining major sections that might be kind of redundant). I've also wasted a couple of weekends being unproductive or just distracted by other things, so I'm going to try a new productivity technique called "Don't break the chain". Hopefully, that will help me get things done a little more quickly. The basic idea is that I'll do something useful every day and post it here. If I miss a day, I'll "break the chain" and... uh. I'll wear a scarlet P for Procrastination on my chest or something. (I'm still not sure about the penalty, but keep an eye on this space for daily updates.)