Skip to main content

TTRPG Tuesday: How'd I Finish That Draft In A Time Like This?

Heyyyy it’s TTRPG Tuesday.  I should focus on knocking this out before I head out for a long weekend vacation, instead of the Twitter troll raising my blood pressure.  I wanted to do a short post today about the DOLLIE Extraction, as I got together a first draft of the scenario last week and got it submitted for review.  It had been kind of sitting on my To-Do list, and I wasn’t sure when I was going to get around to it.  That’s been the case with so much of my writing/game-making lately: A big slice of executive dysfunction, a paralysis wherein even broken-up tasks feel impossible, insurmountable.  Granted, I’ve felt like this at several points throughout my life, and I’ve developed various mechanisms at different times in order to adapt to and overcome that feeling.  Which is why this week, not only did I get the scenario draft together, I also got a full Fantasy GM Squared build onto Tabletop Simulator.  How’d I manage that?

My productivity last week had a couple of different factors.  For one, I took my on-paper deadline (EOM October) and identified my practical deadline (prior to my anniversary, as I wouldn’t want to be on deadline during that time).  It helped me to forego playing Hades or watching TV to remind myself that crunch time was at hand, not some nebulous can-kicked-to point down the road.  Another incentive: turning work early over to my collaborators.  In this instance, I was motivated to get the scenario in to Logan so that he wouldn’t have to review all his submissions at once, and my build of FGM^2 came at a good time to revisit that design process with the Ironrise guys.  Finally, I happened to have fairly charged emotional batteries, and I just made time to do it - dedicated time, not split or shared or stolen, but a solid chunk of time where I had nothing else pressing.

Now, as for what helped me over the finish line for this scenario draft itself: I knew from my checkin that the target word count was much smaller than I’d expected, and with it the scope of the Scenario.  So my job became to pare down and then fill in minutely, which I did my copying all the text I’d written so far, copying the section headers of the original sourcebook scenario, and chopping my text to fit into those sections, trimming away what wasn’t strictly necessary.  Some bits were able to be transplanted to fill in further gaps, and I was left with 80-90% of the work done and a short sprint to the finish line.  At that point, oddly, I decided to clean things up a little bit (I can never resist editing when I should be generating), but that gave me quick little blurbs of endorphins that helped me build momentum.  Getting the pistons firing on how to creatively present the information, had my brain in a good place to generate solutions for my last few remaining unknowns.  Chipping away at a bottle of rye as I chipped away at the draft didn’t hurt either.  In the end, I was done sooner than I expected, much to my delight.

Not sure there’s anything super repeatable as a takeaway here, but I hope that maybe these recent accomplishments will help me stay positive and maintain creative momentum as the nights grow longer and my batteries deplete once more.  We’ll fucking see I guess! Til next time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for ...

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the app...